“If you say so,” Rachel said. She lifted the Vogue to eye level, until it was a literal wall between us. But she couldn’t leave it. She spoke behind the shield of the emaciated teenager on the cover. “I’m just saying. Dad built that dollhouse right after I was born, long before you ever moved in. Before Dad and I knew you existed. I had it my whole life, and the baby was always named Lavender.”
Then I finally clued in. This wasn’t about dolls. This was about our parents. Somehow we were preschoolers again, and this was about who owned Keith. Had I chosen the color purple to stake a claim on something that she thought of as hers? It was territorial and weird; purple, in all its shades, belonged to anyone with eyes and color vision. It belonged to both of us. So did Keith, to some extent.
“It wasn’t conscious,” I said. She said nothing, eyes steady on her magazine. “What do you want me to say? What will fix this?” I asked. When she still didn’t answer, I went right into the meat of the matter. “If we were both on fire, Keith would put you out first. We both know it. It’s fine.”
Which was not to say that Keith didn’t love me. He did. He just loved Rachel more. He was the first man that Rachel and I had both belonged to, but she was his in ways I wasn’t.
Rachel looked up, finally, and said, “Well, your mom would put you out first if you were on fire. That’s just biology.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” I said, and I wasn’t. “Mom would probably try to put us both out and catch fire, and we’d all three burn up together.”
“Oh, so Mom is so much better than my dad?” she snapped.
“That’s not what I meant at—” I began, but she talked over me.
“Why are we discussing this? What’s wrong with your brain? We are not on fire. We will never be simultaneously set on fire in our parents’ living room, so that they have to pick exactly who to put out in what order.”
Well, we’re both on fire now, and neither one of us will tell them, I thought, and out loud I told her, “I call him Keith, you call her Mom. You do the math.”
“And whose choice was that?” she said.
I boggled at her. “Yours!” I said. “You bit me!”
“I’m sure that I did no such thing,” she said, and she was serious.
“Rachel!” I said. She shrugged, shaking her head faintly, as if I’d just assured her that she’d once picked up Thor’s hammer. “I did try calling him Dad, and you bit me.”
We were talking about her now, and she didn’t like it. She forced her lips into a wry smile, and her eyes cooled. It was as though she’d flipped off her fury switch. Just like that, her wall was all the way up again. All the way up, and fortified. Maybe there were pots of oil, ready and already boiling, all around the top, but I wouldn’t know. Not from where I sat. I was far away, outside them.
“If you say so. We’re in your house now, and Lavender and I have no place else to go. You’re Sun and I’m Sky here. So have it your way,” she said.
It took me off my guard. Were we fighting because Rachel was out of her home territory? Worse, her home territory had a For Sale sign on the lawn, and her husband was MIA. She wasn’t ready to tell Mom and Keith how bad things were at her place—maybe because she wasn’t ready to believe it yet. Or she wasn’t braced for the pity and the worry, and with that I could empathize. She’d come to me because I already knew. I was the only one who already knew.
“I hope you know you’re welcome here,” I said, but it came out stilted and way too formal.
“Thanks,” she said, so short it was a mere snip of a word.
Before I could say anything else, Birchie materialized with a home-knit afghan and a cup of rose-hip tea. She went right to Rachel and wrapped the afghan around her. Rachel set her magazine aside to snuggle in. She even took the tea, smiling up at Birchie. She was usually impatient with coddling, but now she looked inclined to sink down into it and bask. So she would take sympathy, as long as it was not from me. Fine.
I snatched my sketchbook and stalked upstairs to my room, and it took a lot to keep me from slamming the door with such a righteous bang it would wake up Lavender. Hell, wake up the rest of the town, even. I wanted to bang it so hard that Martina Mack would sit bolt upright, clutching the covers, thinking Satan had come for her at last.
But it wasn’t my room anymore. Not mine alone. Rachel might be mad, but she was not mad enough to leave. Her suitcases lay open on the floor by mine, loaded with silky tank tops and lacy underthings and pairs of summer shoes.
In the bottom of my own suitcase, I had a paper copy of Violence in Violet. I’d brought it for reference as I wrote the prequel. Now I dug it out.
I perched on the edge of the bed and flipped through it, hunting images of Violet that caught her at different angles.
Looking at the early chapters, I had to admit there was a resemblance. Violet was blond and tall and slim, with big eyes and a ski-slope nose, so yeah, she looked like Rachel. A little. She also looked like every other anchor on Fox News.
As the story went on, the resemblance faded anyway. She looked less and less like Rachel because she looked less and less human after the warehouse scene.
Her murdered boyfriend was the son of a diplomat. His death sparks an international incident, and Violet weaves herself into the center of ever-intensifying scenes of mortal peril. She’s figured out that Violence will save her. She’s seen that Violence’s solutions are vicious and permanent, but she doesn’t care. Her heart is broken. Maybe she’s trying to cause so much carnage that Violence will fail and they will both die, but Violence doesn’t fail. Violence wins with ever-higher stakes, with greater collateral damage, even as Violet’s robins trade themselves for ravens and her butterflies grow ragged and soot-winged. Her pretty body moves from slim to gaunt, the sundress hanging off her skeletal frame.
In the final chapter, Violet squats in a bomb shelter, staring at a television. Her face is practically a skull—jutting cheekbones, lips pulled back in a grimace over prominent teeth. Violence is there. She must be, because Violet has a blackbird on one shoulder, vermin gamboling around her bare feet. The little mice are now rats with long, fleshy tails. The avid, watching rabbits have grown fangs, and there is no light left in them to hold Violence close.
In other bunkers, all over the world, fingers are mashing at red buttons. Bombs are arcing back and forth over the ocean.