Walking home, Rachel lagged behind in a way that felt purposeful, making significant eyebrows at me. All I could think was, What now? This morning had felt like a patch of sweet, clear air I’d stumbled into, untainted by my troubles. I wanted to stay there and go on breathing it. When Rachel plucked at my sleeve to keep me with her, an image popped into my head: a misty-blue-sky picture that kept showing up in my Facebook feed. That meme had a cloudy-white font, and it burbled something about how God never gave a person more than they could handle. I had a sudden, irrational urge to ask Rachel to excuse me for a sec. Just long enough for me to find every friend who had ever shared that thing and smack them right upside their smug heads.
I resigned myself to her pace, though, and Rachel slowed even more. She really had to work to drop back behind Birchie and Wattie. They walked arm in arm, pacing themselves as they toddled slowly home. Jake and Hugh were in front, their lead hampered because they were carrying Frank Darian’s long ladder at either end. Lav had gone ahead to walk at the very front with her dad, not even pretending to help carry the ladder, chatting Jake’s ear off.
I matched Rachel’s snail pace, and when we were so far back that we were definitely out of earshot, she finally spoke.
“Jake told us that you called him.” Her gaze was down, and her cheeks went faintly pink. “I wanted to say thank you.” It wasn’t what I’d expected. I had meddled, Rachel style, in her sacrosanct, closed life. I’d hoped Jake wouldn’t tell her and Lav, because I didn’t need Rachel’s flared nostrils and an icy invitation to step out of their business. “He wants us to go to counseling. So we’ll see. We’re going home tomorrow to start sorting through the paper part of the mess at least.” Not just a thank-you, but actual information about her life. The downside of her life. I’d always been first on her call list when Jake surprised her with a cruise or Lav made the honor roll, but she kept her sadness to herself. Maybe this was her good news, though, the best bright side she had available. Even so, the slow pace of our walk felt newly companionable. She snuck a peek at my face and said, “There’s already an offer on the house, so that’s good. Not surprising. It’s waterfront. We have to decide what to do next. You mentioned before that we could stay at your place for a little. . . .”
“Of course,” I said. “Just promise me you won’t reorganize my closets.”
Rachel chuckled and linked her arm with mine. “I’ll try not to.”
She was a head taller than me, and it pulled us both off balance. Still, I kept her arm as we made our way out of the neighborhood, walking back toward the square. For the first time in our long near sisterhood, we felt strangely even. Rachel wasn’t lofting her least-fucked-up trophy and smiling down at me, offering succor. I wasn’t holding it either. Neither of us was even making a grab for it.
I was under no illusions that this would last. Rachel would get her life on track, spearheading economic and emotional counseling for her family. She’d go back to work and be amazing; she’d been a hellishly efficient wedding planner in her pre-Lavender years. If anything, she’d honed that skill set after she went full-time wife and mother. I hoped her marriage would survive, for Lavender’s sake, but if Rachel divorced Jake, it would be so perfectly done it would make Gwyneth Paltrow’s conscious uncoupling look like a bar brawl. I had no doubt that Rachel: The Comeback would be an epic, sweeping story, with multiple morals and endless opportunities for her to explain them to me, but I didn’t think it would bother me quite as much post-Birchville.
We were coming up on the park on the back side of the square. Jake and Hugh turned left, to go around on the side that would put them closer to the Darian house. Birchie and Wattie turned right, and Lavender dropped back to join them. Rachel and I were still behind, and now I was the one who kept our pace overslow. I wanted, in this rare moment of Rachel being vulnerable, to make some amends of my own.
“Rachel? I’m sorry Violet looks like you,” I said. “She’s not based on you, but”—and this was hard for me to say—“I wanted her to be pretty. You’re what pretty looks like in my head.”
That did make her smile, but not the irritating one that seemed to beam down on me from Olympus. She squeezed my arm a little tighter.
“Really? That’s sweet. I thought you drew her like that to make fun of me,” she said. “She’s so stupid. What girl goes skipping down an alley that looks like that?”
“It’s a metaphor,” I said. “But apparently I do, because she’s actually kinda based on me.”
We walked on, turning right to follow Birchie, Wattie, and Lav back to the house, and Rachel asked, “Do you think they’re lovers?”
“No, I really don’t,” I said, though it was a popular theory on the Violence in Violet forums.
Ship-nerds who wanted them to be in love argued bitterly with the Jekyll-and-Hyde dorks who thought Violet turned into Violence when threatened. There was a third faction who thought Violence wasn’t real, just an extension of Violet’s will. A smaller set still thought Violet wasn’t real. That was a huge stretch, but they’d written reams and reams “proving” Violence had invented her to have an excuse for blowing the planet to smithereens.
I got asked about these theories all the time at cons and on my fan page, but I always said people had to make their own decisions. In my head, though? Violence was real, and Violet had to be separate because I really did see myself in Violet. I wanted Violence, who ate people and eventually destroyed Earth, to be separate from me.
But now I’d stood in the balcony of First Baptist, looking down at Birchie and Wattie. I’d felt myself capable of so much ugly. In that moment I’d have pulled the roof down on the right half of the church if I’d had superstrength. I’d gladly have eaten up Martina Mack in two brittle, bony bites. Turned out I had ferocious in me. One day, sixty years back, there’d been ferocious in my grandmother, too.
It was the Violence in me that had blown up every relationship that might have become something real. I’d realized it when I accepted the weak-ass apology Jake had divvied up between me and Lavender and maybe God. When I took my share, I’d felt it as the easing of a hurt so old that I’d grown used to it. So used to it I hadn’t noticed its pulse and presence even as I’d destroyed all of my own possible futures, wrecking every family I could have had into a wasteland.