I retreated to my nest in the sewing room, even though I was so jazzed up that there was no way I was going to fall asleep. I’d walked home half expecting to find Cody Mack here, waiting for me in his cop car. Maybe he hadn’t been on duty, or maybe he was smart enough to know that firing a gun at children trumped toilet paper on a pine tree. Of course, the night wasn’t over. He could still ring the doorbell and arrest me for vandalism.
My sketchbook sat on the Singer table, open to the picture that had upset Rachel. I sat down and looked at my version of the ruined town square. On the right, Violet cuddled the apocalyptic Batkitten. She was in the world as Violence had left it, a place that had no next, and I had a sudden impulse to put some hope in it. To put a kid in it. What I wanted to do now was draw in Digby.
I picked up the pencil, and I plopped my boy right down in the middle of Violence’s world. I didn’t draw him as a fetus or even a new baby. Babies all looked the same to me, like cute potatoes. I drew Digby as he might look in five years or so, when the swaybacked potbelly shape of toddlerhood elongated into straight, thin lines. By age five Digby would have his own distinctive face.
I gave him my high cheekbones, my straight, serious brow line, and my deep-set eyes. I let him have the Batman’s lush lashes—you’re welcome, kid—and his straight, wide nose. I added a dark stubble of close-shorn little-boy hair. I was working in pencil now, but when I drew him in color, he’d have warm brown skin that seemed lit from inside, like good bourbon. I could see it.
Digby took shape on the scant surviving grass, wearing miniature work boots and khaki shorts, his bare legs thin as strings, each with a knotty knee in the middle. He had a confident stance, with a touch of swagger in it. His hands were tucked into his pockets, and the set of his shoulders was easy, maybe even brave. He was in a scary place, but he was smiling anyway, because the pencil was in my hand and I willed it to be so. I looked at this bright, confident boy, standing on the largest patch of grass that I could make for him in Violet’s ruined park.
Digby in the Second South, I thought.
Through the wall I could hear faint voices and the clink of pans in the kitchen. While I was working, Lavender and her father had come in. They were talking quietly, making eggs or cocoa.
I went back to my drawing. Digby’s jawline wasn’t right. It was too round. I wanted it to be shaped more like the Batman’s. Softer, younger, but still similar.
I turned to my laptop and navigated to Batman’s profile page. His privacy settings were so lax, I could have gone through his whole photo album. That felt stalkery, so I opened up his profile pics instead. I’d likely find close-ups of his face there, and I only needed a couple of good angles to get Digby’s jawline right.
I began flipping through. Here he was, my baby’s father, captured in moments that had happened in his real, full, life. Batman smiling, then Batman serious. Inside on a sofa, then outside by a lake, then in a ski hat with some snowy hills behind him.
He didn’t change his profile picture often, because one more click brought me to a shot of his family’s Christmas tree from three years back. He’d told me about it while we were playing Words with Friends. That year, he and his dad had conspired with all the older grandkids to scandalize his deeply religious mom. They’d turned her tree into a scene straight out of Star Wars.
They’d picked out the darkest dark green Douglas fir they could find, then dotted it with twinkling white lights for stars and large colored balls for planets. All over the tree, they’d hung TIE fighter ornaments flying in formation against X-wings. Carefully arranged sprays of tinsel acted as laser blasts, and they’d twisted red and orange and yellow tissue paper into flames, strategically gluing them onto damaged ships. His dad had even found a Millennium Falcon tree topper, displacing the angel.
I sat staring at my screen for several endless minutes. I couldn’t take my eyes away. It was not because of the tree. Well, the tree was hella cool, no doubt about it, and it was right in the middle of the frame. Even so, it was not really a picture of a tree.
It was a family. A whole family. His parents and him and all the kids who’d helped, clustered around this enormous Star Wars tree.
I was having trouble swallowing. Batman’s mother was tall and elegant, a very dark-skinned woman with a crown of graying braids, glaring at the tree with comical mock horror. His father, skinny and bespectacled, had an enormous Adam’s apple and high-waisted grampa pants. He was the biggest dork that I’d ever seen in a picture, except for maybe my own dad. In a dorkcathlon there would be no clear winner, but the two of them would both make the Olympic team. He’d given Batman his big eyes and those ridiculous long lashes.
Batman was there, one arm around his dad, the other holding an adorable round-bellied toddler. His dad cradled a very new baby. All the older kids were clustered around, the three biggest kneeling in front and making ta-da jazz hands at the tree. There were seven of them all told, and they came in a rainbow of shades that ranged from tan to Cyprus umber. No matter how he came out, Digby was going to fit onto their spectrum.
I wasn’t looking at a tree; I was looking at a treasure chest. A mawmaw and a poppy, as his sister’s children called them. Aunts and uncles, not pictured, but no doubt close by, one of them holding the camera that had snapped this shot. Seven cousins—no, eight soon. His youngest sister was due in a few weeks, he’d said. Cousins who ranged from Digby’s own age to Lavender’s. Cousins who looked like Digby’s father. Cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents who knew what it was like to grow up in America with brown skin. They were spread across Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina, a host of relatives who didn’t have to shift their gaze to know when they’d crossed into the Second South. Relatives who always knew.
Digby deserved to have them, these smiling human beings clustered tight together. Poppy cradled the littlest baby with wise hands that looked like they’d cradled umpty babies before her. Those hands deserved the opportunity to hold Digby, and Digby deserved to be held in them.
Most of all Digby deserved a father. I could vet Batman forever if I wanted. I would eventually see past his shiny second-date persona to his flaws, whatever they might be. Maybe he’d turn out to be a bit of a jackass, but there was a righteous jackass in my Birchie’s kitchen right now, and he was fixing necessary cocoa for his kid.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, a prayer more than a blasphemy, and my voice had gone all funny—breathy and thick. I had to tell him. I had to tell him now, while I was wonky and punchy and exhausted enough to do it. If I waited, I would find a thousand reasons not to. I would coward my way out of it and pretend that it was logic.
I got my phone and opened our long string of texts, then navigated to his number. I pressed it, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my eyeballs, in my throat, in my shaking hands.