Wattie moved to the window, drawing the heavy damask drapes against the lingering summer sun. Now almost all the light came from the soft-light bulb on Birchie’s bedside lamp. She sank down into the chair beside the window with a sigh that told me exactly how tired she was, and from there she talked me through Birchie’s bedtime routine.
First I rubbed Birchie’s feet and calves and hands with her rose petal–scented lotion. I took her bun down, putting her hairpins in the glass bowl on the dresser, and I brushed her long hair. It gleamed moon-colored in the lamplight. The pink of her scalp shone through the thin strands as I braided it for sleeping, letting it hang in a slender tail over one shoulder.
When that was done, Birchie stood and put her hands up like a toddler so I could lift her dress over her head. She wore an old-fashioned full slip, with lace at the top and bottom. I peeled that off her, too. It was so strange to see my grandmother in her large, plain bra and the kind of panties named for her. I was wearing granny panties myself these days, baggy, all cotton, and baby blue in honor of Digby. Birchie’s were seashell pink. I unhooked her bra and helped her out of it.
Birchie looked like a dumpling in her dresses, small and smooth and rounded. Naked, she was made of folds and creases. Her breasts sat low on her chest, deflated, streaked with stretch marks. Her soft lady belly hung down inside her drawers. Her thighs looked like a baby’s thighs, creased and folded, but sadder somehow. The scallops of her legs were not bursting with that good, new milk fat. They were mostly skin, creped and hanging.
I felt such a well of tenderness for this dear old body. Every piece of it proclaimed how tired it was, but it was lovely, too. Her history was written in it, in the stretch marks left by my father, in the surgery scar on her abdomen and the puckered burn scar on the inside of her left arm, in the simple toll of ninety years of fighting gravity. Inside me Digby spun, and my Birchie stood near naked before me, yawning like a child.
She held her arms up again, and I lifted her long, rose-sprigged nightie over her head. Then I took her to use the bathroom, to remove and clean her bridges, and to take her nighttime medication. It was already sorted into a little cup by the sink, and two more pills had joined the ones I knew. There was a yellow-and-orange capsule, garish as a candy corn, and a little blue pill that looked like a bead.
“She didn’t have a baby aspirin,” I told Wattie as we made our slow way back to the bed.
“She takes that in the morning,” Wattie said, peeling the bedding down.
She’d moved the shams to the velvet bench already. I looked at her with new respect, and with apology.
“You do this every night?” I asked. She’d spent the last hour sitting in the window chair, but she still looked flat exhausted. She nodded. “Jesus, Wattie. You should have let me . . .” I trailed off. Hire someone? I’d tried that. Birchie had put a stop to it. Help? I hadn’t known she needed this much help.
Wattie said, “If it was me going first, she’d do the same. Don’t you doubt that.”
I didn’t. Wattie was a small, smooth dumpling in her own loose dress, but the artist in me could see under it. I knew there would be history written deep on her body as well. History I would never know. Birchie knew it, though. They had taken care of each other all their lives, through their girlhoods and marriages and babies and illnesses and losses and secrets.
“I need my airplane socks,” Birchie said, lisping a little with her teeth out.
I looked to Wattie. “In her bedside drawer.”
I opened it and found fleecy socks in a multitude of cheerful colors. None of them had airplanes on them, and Birchie called flying “so much nonsense.” Neither she nor Wattie had ever once gotten on a plane, not in their whole, long lives.
“You brought her a pair like this from the airport once,” Wattie said. I vaguely remembered that. “She loved them. Frank helped us order more off of the Internet.”
I knelt and put the socks on, and then it was time to tuck her between her cool, clean, lemon-colored sheets. I didn’t, though. I stayed kneeling, looking up at her.
Frank had told me not to ask. Maybe it was better not to know, but I was going to know soon anyway. Science was going to tell me. I’d rather hear it from this mouth I loved. Whatever truth she told me would change nothing.
“Birchie,” I said. “Birchie, is it Ellis? Is it your father in that trunk?”
She looked at me, her eyes bird bright and so, so blue. One soft hand came out to pat my cheek. “Yes, honey,” she said, almost like she was sorry for me.
“Leia,” Wattie said, a warning bell that I ignored.
“Did you put him in there, Birchie?” I asked her.
“I surely did.”
From this angle she looked like an apple-head doll, her lips sinking into her face because her bridges were out. Then she smiled at me, and it was a baby’s smile, gummy and wide, sprinkled with teeth.
“Did you . . . ?” This I could not ask, but she answered anyway.
She raised her hand, her arm bent at the elbow. Her hand fisted around an imaginary handle. She brought her hand down, once, in a definitive swing.
“Lord, Lord,” she said. “I’ll never forget that sound. That bone noise. It was like stepping on ground seashells.”
That jabbed the breath right out of me. It was so specific. It sounded true.
“But it had to be self-defense,” I said with surety. In Birchville her father’s name was linked to words like “hard” and “proud.” He knew his worth, and he made sure everybody else knew it, too, Myra Rhodes would chime in when Ellis Birch was mentioned in her presence. He’d been “Mr. Birch” to every human in the town, except his daughter. To her he’d been “Daddy.” Even so, he must have caused her to do it. But when I tried to say it, it came out like a question. “You didn’t have a choice?”
Birchie’s gaze on me didn’t waver. “I had a choice. I made it,” she said, but that could mean anything. That could mean she’d had a choice to live or die, or a choice to save someone in danger. I wanted it to be a choice that put her squarely in the right, but she kept on talking. “He was sitting in his chair, reading the paper. I came up behind him.”
She made that gesture again, and in an awful way it reminded me of Rachel. Virginia didn’t have a baseball team, so Rachel was a Braves fan. The Tomahawk Chop, she and Jake called it, when they put on their red shirts and had their sportsball friends come over.
“That’s Lewy bodies talking. That’s not true,” I told Birchie, but I did not believe me.
Her nostrils flared, and I saw a sharpness come into her eyes. I was irritating Birchie, the real Birchie, the one who was alive in morning hours and afternoon moments and nighttime sparks like this one.