She wouldn’t look at me. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her. “Because the baby won’t have a dad. He won’t have one at all, even to start.”
“Oh, honey, that’s the last thing you need to be worrying about,” I said. Of course my kid’s fatherless state was going to resonate with these kids. The last time Lav had seen her own father, he’d been charging out the door with a Whole Foods bag full of underpants and oxfords. Hugh’s family was in equal disarray.
“Was the baby’s dad . . . Did he seem like a mean person?” Lavender asked.
“I don’t know. Do you think this might be more about your own dad and not the baby?” She shrugged, inscrutable. Thirteen was so much harder to read than simple, sugar-hearted twelve. “Have you talked to your dad at all? Maybe texted him?”
“Mom told me not to,” Lavender said, waving the question away. “Aunt Leia, just answer me. What if I have to go to the airport in like five seconds? I need to know—when you met the baby’s father, did he seem like he was nice?”
I took a deep breath and resigned myself to the conversation. Thirteen was urgent, and it came with tunnel vision. This mattered to Lavender so much that she was talking about Digby’s dad instead of human bones or her own parents. I had to take it seriously, but I wasn’t sure I had an honest answer. By the time I’d started drinking with the Batman, I’d been emotionally shipwrecked. I wasn’t in any state to assess the character of my not-yet-existent-baby’s father. I’d been bitch-slapped almost twenty years into my past.
A shame, because the day had started out so wonderfully. I’d packed a five-hundred-seat auditorium at FanCon. They’d had to turn people away because of fire codes. At the end, when Dark Horse announced that a V in V prequel was in the works, that whole host of glorious nerds had risen to their feet to give me a standing ovation, foot stomping and hollering.
After, as I walked around the show floor, people kept sidling up and shyly asking for my autograph. I saw at least twenty women and two men who had come dressed up as Violence. It was surreal, passing cosplay version after version of the killer I’d invented, each one with a pulse and purple hair. Short and tall, fat and thin, young and old, all toting pretend knives and rocking thigh boots. My favorite one had smeared deep rust red around her mouth, and when she grinned at me, I saw the same color in the creases of her pointy prosthetic teeth. I even saw a Violet in a sweetsy yellow sundress with a taxidermied songbird clipped to her shoulder.
This kind of thing only happened at cons. Nerd fame wasn’t like real famous. I never got recognized at Harris Teeter, and non-nerds lost interest in my job the second they realized I wasn’t in tight with Robert Downey Jr. or the Batfleck. My own family didn’t subscribe to the series I penciled and inked; Mom liked cozy mysteries and books with Chicken Soup in the title. She found Violence frankly disturbing, and Keith read only nonfiction. Rachel had never so much as cracked the cover of my graphic novel. She told her East Beach friends I was “a working artist,” leaving out the embarrassing comic-books part. But at FanCon I was a rock star, and it felt pretty good.
The booths were starting to close, and I stepped out of the convention hall to get a Starbucks in my hotel lobby. That was when I saw him. Derek, my ex-boyfriend from my art-school days. He was by the exit, passing out pale pink cake pops from a bouquet. To his family. His wife and his children.
The wife looked like me, short and thick, pale skin, dark hair. Well, she looked like me if I were ten pounds heavier, I thought, and regretted it immediately. I didn’t want to be that brand of bitchy. She was holding a little baby dressed up as Hulk, laughing, trying to eat her cake pop with the baby reaching for it. He ignored the one clutched in his own fat starfish hand. They had two tweeny-looking girls as well, one dressed as Scarlet Witch, one as some anime-style princess thing I didn’t know. The girls were gabbling in tandem to Derek about some nerdgasm-worthy something they had seen at the con.
Fourteen years ago Derek had offered me this life, this exact one I was seeing.
Or he had tried to. I hadn’t let him get the ring box out of his pocket. Hadn’t let him ask the question.
He didn’t know that earlier that week I’d gotten a long, ecstatic call from Rachel, asking me to be her maid of honor. Telling me about her ring. Jake, my former best friend, who had once called all games “sportsball,” had used the Jumbotron at Pitt Field to ask her.
I’d looked at Derek, the ring box a tattling lump in the pocket of his ill-fitting suit coat. We were twenty-one years old, and he’d been flushed with the pride of legally ordering champagne that he could not afford.
Before he could get the box out, I had told him, “I think we should call it, yeah? Graduation’s right around the corner, and I’m moving back to Norfolk. I mean, we always knew this thing had a timer on it, didn’t we?”
I went to a friend’s place while he got his stuff out of my apartment, leaving him to divide up our shared comic books. He snarfled all the Doom Patrol, which I took as proof that I’d been right to break it off. He knew exactly how much Robotman meant to me.
Now, looking at his life with a lobby and a crowd of milling nerds and the gulf of many years between us, I was sick. I was purely sick and reeling with an understanding that was way too late. He was a nice guy. He had loved me. I had maybe loved him, too, and I had walked. I had walked away from Derek, and later on from Jonathan, and from Kev, and finally, three years ago, from Jax. I’d had no good reason, just the broken and untrusting piece that JJ had created in my center.
I put my skinny vanilla latte in the trash and walked across the lobby and into the hotel bar. There I had myself some tequila. And some Batman.
The Batman had approached me, actually.
“Excuse the fan-boy freak-out, but you’re Leia Birch. I love your stuff,” the Batman said, a world of admiration in the words. “Can I buy you a drink?”
I liked his wide smile and the glint of his dark eyes inside the mask. I wanted to drink enough to stop thinking that I lived alone with eighty-seven mint-in-package Wonder Women and a cat named Sergeant Stripes. I wouldn’t even let him in the house. I hadn’t cared whether the Batman was nice or not. In the moment Batman was being nice to me. It was not enough, but it was something.
I had no idea how to explain this to Lavender, or even how much I should explain.
“I didn’t ask him for any references,” I said at last. “I’m not sure what you’re looking for here, kid.”