Good-bye, Violence thinks. It’s the last word in the book. She leaves Violet in the shelter, and she goes out into it. She’s delighted to be out in it. She grins her wolfish grin, standing in the spot where the first bomb will drop. Her boots are firmly planted, arms spread wide, spine bending, head thrown back in a rictus of joy as she welcomes the bomb. It’s a very phallic missile, actually, and a part of me wanted to go find Rachel, point this out. Lesbians, my ass. Do you not get art?
Then Violence is a purple shadow in the center of a blaze, like the wick of a candle flame. The view recedes, backing up in stages. Huge, sooty mushrooms spring up all over North America. The earth is a blue ball, hanging in space, and all the continents sprout with this same, world-ending fungus. The mushrooms dissipate into a dark fog that hangs in shreds and drifts, shrouding the planet, and all of Violet’s ruined animals are hidden in its curls and purple shadows. And that’s the end. There is no next.
I closed the book, thinking, Well, sometimes there isn’t.
Did I steal Rachel’s face? Her baby name? Maybe. I didn’t remember it that way, but she didn’t remember biting me. Maybe a dark and daddy-hungry corner of my heart drew Violet to look like her on purpose, to sting her, and it had.
The thing with JJ hadn’t helped us. He had loved the idea of her, the hope of her, more than the actual, human me, who had taken him in at his lowest moment. Did I blame her somehow? Because she’d captured JJ with her superpower when we were all still children? She hadn’t even tried. She hadn’t even wanted him back then, and when she did choose him, she’d ended up wrecked herself.
Still, this is how our story always ended. She took her sorrows to the laundry closet, I waited outside. When I was ruined, she barged in and helped, because it made her feel so good to be the hero and pull me out of whatever mud I’d mired in.
Sun and Sky, we had started with a crack in us. If we had been born sisters, if my dad hadn’t died, if her mom hadn’t pulled a fade, if JJ wasn’t such a jackass. If, if, if. This much I knew: Our sisterhood had come pre-broken. Letting her stay here, her brief moment of feeling vulnerable, couldn’t fix us.
When things began so badly, with a war or a loss or a rift or five shots of tequila, they stumbled along a fractured road that slanted, steeply, down. They could only degenerate, get worse and worse, until you were standing in ruins. When you got to an apocalypse, there was no next.
As if in answer, the bomb in my back pocket trembled and chimed, contrary.
I yanked it out of my pocket, heart rate jacking. I had a text from an unknown number, but I knew who it was.
Been a while. Coming back to ATL? I’d like to see you again.
11
That night Rachel climbed into bed on the side I liked to sleep on, her face shining with moisturizer, and announced she’d already taken an Ambien. She fluffed her pillow and pulled a sleep mask over her eyes, arranging her limbs like it was the most natural thing in the world. She conked out almost instantly. I teetered on the edge on the wrong side, feeling out of sorts and wide-eyed as a bush baby.
Every time I got comfortable, she’d flail a foot into my shin or jab me with a pointy elbow. When we were kids, I’d been the restless one, bothering her with my sleep muttering and humming. Child Rachel had slept the same way she’d done everything—beautifully, with a surface so placid she might as well have been in a glass box with a chunk of apple in her throat, lips preset for an inevitable kissing. Not tonight. It was like sleeping with a bag of upset cats. When she flung out a hand and smacked me in the face, I got up and stomped downstairs to the sofa in Birchie’s sewing room. I took my suitcase with me, but even with the racket I made wheeling it away, Rachel didn’t wake up.
I envied her that. If it hadn’t been for Digby, I’d have dug down into her suitcase and snarfled up an Ambien myself.
She apologized at the breakfast table the next morning.
“I’m sleeping so poorly these days,” she said while Wattie slid pancakes and an extra slice of bacon onto her plate. “I’ll sleep on the sofa tonight.”
Wattie answered her before I could, saying, “Nonsense!”
Birchie chimed in right behind her. “No, no, my dear, that won’t do. You’re company!”
After breakfast Birchie and Wattie unpacked what looked to me like Rachel’s whole wardrobe and hung it in the closet in the room I thought of—rightfully—as mine. Another night passed, and another. Rachel stayed cool to me, and she let them both take care of her. She didn’t do much of anything. It was as if she were on a rest cure circa 1800. She dozed and sat and stared at books and magazines. Her phone was always right beside her, and I realized she was waiting. Waiting for Jake to call with his decision. To tell her if he was going to be a man or Lowly Worm.
Then I felt sorry for her again, because I knew from experience that when JJ was done, he was done. He was going to Lowly Worm it off into the sunset.
Day five of Jake Watch, I went and sat beside her on one of the love seats.
“Can I do anything to help?” I asked, even though I knew better.
She looked at me, blinking as if her vision had gone fuzzy, and then her eyes found their focus, lasering in on me.
“Do you want to bring me tweezers?” she asked. “You’ve gained a little weight. I could reshape your eyebrows for your fuller face.”
I shook my head no, smiling close-lipped to keep in the nineteen angry things that I had traffic-jammed in my throat, all trying to get out at once. After that I left her be, because she wasn’t going to let me help her. Unless I wanted to count “fleeing my own room” as some kind of assistance.
It turned out to be a good thing. Ever since the bones were found, the whole house had felt out of balance. It was as if that sea chest had held a thousand pounds of weight and the old foundation had sighed and tilted us all a half inch to the left as soon as they’d been taken from the attic. The sewing room was at the very back of the house, past the office, down a long hall. It shared a wall with the kitchen, but there was no pass-through. Since Birchie wasn’t sewing much these days, I had it to myself. When I was there, door closed, my newly too-tight bra off, Pandora playing the Smiths for me, I had the most privacy possible in a house this full of relatives from both sides of my family. I even left my phone plugged in here, not wanting the tattletale buzz of multiple messages landing to announce that I was trading secret texts with men. Four of ’em.
The first was only our old friend Frank Darian, keeping me apprised as the justice system ground around in our family business. Our county prosecutor, Regina Tackrey, was a pit bull of a woman. And this was an election year. Frank deposed Dr. Pettery, though, and given Birchie’s illness and the bones’ unknown provenance or age, he’d blocked any police interrogation. For now. Tackrey had to show that a crime had been committed before anything else could happen to my grandmother. To that end, Tackrey had sent the bones to a forensic anthropologist in Montgomery.