I’d discounted Violet, even though when I started drawing her in middle school, she had my dark hair and strong jaw and deep-set eyes. She’d changed during my senior year of high school, post-JJ, when I invented Violence. I’d turned Violet Super Pretty, evolving her from Hilary Swank’s less glamorous third cousin into a willowy blonde with big eyes and bigger boobs. She got so sweet that I hurt my own teeth drawing her, like an old-school superhero girlfriend. TSTL, in the vernacular: “too stupid to live.” Violet skips with oblivious cheer down that first dark alley, and her near-constant state of jeopardy allows for a lot of sly feminist humor in the first half of the story. By the end it’s not funny anymore, as she and the world become wreckage. Maybe I’d made her less like me so that it was easier to ruin her.
Violet begins to break in an abandoned warehouse where she and her boyfriend have been taken by a drug lord. It’s a huge, dark space, filled with pallets of crates and stacked boxes, and thugs are stationed at the edges and entrances. The cartel guy wants to know what happened to his crew. The boys from the alley. As Violet cries and swears she doesn’t know, the rabbits and sweet-faced mice and puffy birds begin to gather around her. Their pleading expressions match her own.
The animals are a tell; rabbits and robins are present only when Violet is seen through Violence’s eyes. In the black-and-gray shadows near the frames, bits of her appear: a jag of hair, the edge of one boot, a sharp-nailed hand. Every distance shot shows one less thug guarding the perimeter, more viscous liquid pooled in corners and running down walls.
The cartel guy loses patience right after the last thug’s feet disappear near the top of the frame. He steps close, and above him Violence’s deep purple silhouette glows faint near the ceiling. She’s clinging like a spider with the corpses of the henchmen draped and hanging in the pipes around her.
He pulls a pistol from his waistband and puts five bullets in the boyfriend.
“Last chance,” he says to Violet, and brings his gun to bear.
That’s when Violence drops between them, so lightly that the snick of her knives unsheathing is writ larger than her landing. There is a moment of surprise, some prefight banter, and then Violence is pretty much eating him.
The panels zoom in on Violet. Her face is in her hands, but she’s peeking through her fingers. Her eyes are filled with tears, but her lips . . . she might be smiling. Her palms are pressed hard into her cheeks, though, so it might be the pressure of her hands pulling the corners of her mouth up.
It’s hard to tell, until you notice the rabbits. While the mice and birds work tenderly, comforting Violet and drawing a corner of her skirt over the dead boy’s face like a shroud, the rabbits are watching Violence. They stand up on their haunches, and their white pelts are splashed with gaudy blood. They witness this murderer get eaten up alive, and the rabbits kind of like it. They have begun to change.
Maybe that was why the graphic novel went viral in the first place; Violet’s story happened to everyone. All of us, every innocent babe born on this planet, gets broken eventually. We could all reach back in time with certain fingers to touch those places: Someone you love died, you watched your mom or dad walk out the door, you had sex for the first time and learned exactly how expendable you were. Or you peeled back the lid on an old trunk.
I hadn’t looked at Birchie since she’d closed it again for me. My eyes didn’t want to turn that way. What would I see? Guilt? Defiance? Pure fury at my ham-fisted insistence? My grandmother, who made me icebox pie and called me “sugar,” had human bones hidden up in her attic. Who was this woman? I didn’t want to look at Wattie either, not now that I’d let sunshine touch this thing that should have stayed in darkness. This thing that never, ever should have been.
But when I looked, I saw only my grandma and her bosom friend, small and frail and dear to me. Wattie was looking back, and the compassion in her large, round eyes almost undid me. Forgiveness, even, and under her gaze I knew I’d marched us all to this dark moment.
Once I’d hired the estate-sale folks to help sort out the attic, Wattie had to move that sea trunk. I’d given her no choice. And Wattie had tried to warn me. She’d told me on my first night back to leave things lie. She had begged me not to open the chest. I’d known her my whole life, but it had never once occurred to me to trust her. I hadn’t thought, If Wattie is stealing a car, then she must have good reason. Maybe I should let her take that trunk and go.
Birchie herself looked stricken. Her lips moved, muttering or maybe praying. She stepped back from the closed trunk, and Wattie took her arm again, rejoining them at hip and elbow.
“Oh, sweet Lord! Who is that? Who did you kill?” Martina Mack screeched from the sidelines.
I lurched to my feet, saying, “Shut up, Martina.”
It didn’t matter whose bones they were or how they came to be there. Birchie and Wattie were standing right by human remains, but as I looked at them, I could not believe that they were murderers or evil things of any stripe. I didn’t understand the bones, but I understood these women. I trusted them. I didn’t need to know this origin story, or Birchie would have told it to me years ago.
I only wished I had let Wattie steal my car, let her drive that chest away and hide it elsewhere. Hide it better and forever. When I saw her backing down the drive, I should have grabbed two giant cinnamon rolls and gotten me and Digby drunk on sugar. I should’ve sat down with Lavender and said, What’s so dern interesting on my computer? Thirteen’s secrets would be innocent and fresh, sweeter than this box of bad history on the lawn.
“Is that . . . Was that a person?” Lisbeth Barley called. “Was that bones of a person?”
“I’m calling Cody,” Martina Mack announced.
God help us. Birchville had five full-time policemen, and one of them was Martina’s grandson. “Jackass” did not skip any generations, at least not in the Mack family. Cody was the last thing I needed in our yard right now.
“Miss Wattie, you and Miss Birchie go inside,” Frank said quietly.
Birchie leaned in with worried eyebrows. “I need to put my trunk away,” she said, one hand reaching for it. Wattie held her fast, kept her from touching it. “I need—”
I cut her off, saying, “Go on inside. It’s okay.”
I was scared of what she might say next. She’d just publicly claimed ownership of a box of human bones. I would not let the Lewy bodies convict her of God only knew what else on the lawn in front of the Barleys and Martina Mack.
Martina was already barking into her cell phone, “Naw, naw, Cody, I’m saying! You get your butt over to the Birch house, right away!”
“Come on, now,” Wattie said. “Leia and Frank will handle this.”
I nodded, reassuring, though I had no idea what “this” was. Once they were moving in the right direction, I turned back to Frank. “Should we take the trunk inside, too?”
“Don’t you move that,” Martina called. She was off the phone now and pointing at the sea chest with one quavering old finger. “That right there’s a crime scene!”
Lavender and both boys watched, big-eyed and quiet. Hugh loomed over her, protective. Jeffrey had only a couple of inches on Lav, but he was doing his best to loom protectively over her other side. My bare feet were cold in the dew-wet grass. Down the road I could see the blue-clad teardrop shape of Cody Mack, already speed-walking up from the square. His officious gait set his Maglite swinging.