His gaze on me was frank and curious. He leaned on the car.
“I’m not saying anyone should prosecute your grandma. But speaking philosophically? There’s always a next.”
“Speaking philosophically, not if you die,” I said, so over-the-top dour that he laughed. I was happy to change the subject to something less tangible than human remains and the prosecutions of my dear old ladies.
“Even if you die,” he countered, interested. Maybe he’d forgotten to be nervous, because right now he wasn’t stuttering at all. “You don’t see it, but next happens anyway and always. With or without you.”
“No, I know, but—” I began, but then I stopped, because that phrase, “next happens anyway and always,” those words, in that order, clicked with some buried something in my own brain. “Do you really believe that?”
“Yeah. At least until the world ends,” he said, but maybe he was righter than he knew. Maybe there was a next even then, I thought, and then my brain did that irritating artist thing, where I stopped being in the road, or even in my body. All at once I was in Violet’s world, and Violence’s. A ruined place, with no next. When I came out again, I had a question.
“Nerd Test,” I said. “This is for the big money. Are you ready?”
He nodded, mock solemn, and I asked him Rachel’s question. “Violence and Violet, are they lovers?”
“Nah,” he said, sure and immediate. Like it was obvious. “Violet is Violence. She just doesn’t know it.” I’d been leaning that way, but when I heard him say it out loud, the artist in me knew that it was true. “In the warehouse scene? Violet has her hands over her eyes, and most of her little birds and animals hide, too, but the rabbits give it away. They watch Violence eat that drug lord, and you hid those little shadow rabbits in Violence’s hair. I missed it on my first read. You’re pretty slick. But once I saw them, it’s obvious. They’re reflections.”
He was right. I’d hidden all kinds of things in that book, Easter eggs and references and visual jokes, often in Violence’s hair and in the shadows around her. In that panel the watching rabbits were reflected, one to one. They were pieces of Violet, and they saw themselves when they looked at Violence. I’d drawn them that way, so I must have always known, way down in my subconscious, that they were one and the same, and both alive in me.
I had to call Dark Horse and get out of this contract. Change it. I couldn’t write the origin story they wanted, because there was no going backward. I’d left Violet and Violence in a world that was a wasteland of their—her—own making, but now I knew that a few things had survived. I’d drawn them already. Cats, in some form, and those spindle-limbed, toothy, slouchy Lewy bodies. Those personified Lewy bodies could be what remained of the human race, mutated into monsters. There might be little pockets of real human survivors, too, frail and vulnerable. There might be a few with other, interesting mutations. Supermutants. They would all be trying to survive with very limited resources. . . .
Images were unfolding in my head, the start of a story. I could see it. I could see the world, and V and V had to find a way to live in it. To live with it, with what they had done. There was a next, even after an apocalypse.
I don’t know how long I stood there, lost in my own mind, but when I came back into my body, he was waiting for me.
“You’re right. They’re the same,” I told him. “Flashing lights and bells and prizes. What would you like?”
“Yuh-you. Vuh-vvv-visiting Atlanta,” he said, shy again but saying it anyway. “Soon.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
“I better guh-get on the road,” he said, but neither of us moved.
“Yeah, you should,” I said, and still we stood there.
“Mm-hm,” he said.
You hang up first. No, you.
“Go on,” I told him. I wanted to kiss him, but Lord, the eyes on us. Instead I told him, “There’s a next here, too,” and he smiled. I wasn’t an optimist, but even I knew this was true.
He got into his car, and I watched him drive off into the sunset. Literally. He headed west up Main Street, a dark silhouette against the spectacular sinking orange ball. But only literally, because I would go to Atlanta. Sooner rather than later. Sel Martin and I had together made a big mess and a baby, and there was a next coming for all three of us. The difference was, I wasn’t scared of this one. I’d always walked away from possibility, but I didn’t think that I would again, if it came down to it. Something had been put to rest when I confronted Jake, wringing that shoddy, shared apology out of him. Some new bravery had started, when the Fetus Formerly Known as Digby had quickened at my core. Together these things felt like a sea change. There would be a next, and in a place where half my relatives and a third of a small town weren’t peering out windows at us.
I turned back to Birchie’s house, and immediately the drapes twitched and folded, people backstepping in a hurry. The weakest piece of me wished I’d gotten into the Batmobile and ridden off into the sunset with Sel.
Instead I started walking back to the house. There was a next inside, too, and I had to be there for it. Next was Regina Tackrey, armed with swabs and science, coming to scrape some truth out of my Birchie’s frail body.
22
This early in the morning, the attic was a dry and dusty kind of pre-hot. I could feel almost-sweat prickle my skin as I clambered around the piles of junk. Frank Darian and his boys had dug quite a hole in the back room to unearth Birchie’s trunk. They had stacked decaying furniture and boxes and chests in and among the more familiar front-room landscape. Rachel and I had been searching for that pair of ship paintings Birchie liked for nearly half an hour.
I had to find them, because Cody Mack, of all damn people, was coming to the house at 9:00 a.m. to collect the sample of Birchie’s DNA. Birchie’s sacrosanct routine had been dipped into hell and hauled back kicking over the last few days; we needed to keep her quiet and in places where she felt comfortable and calm. Dragging her off to an unfamiliar lab where a stranger would poke around in her mouth seemed like the short road to another fork stabbing. Tackrey had agreed to collect the sample at our house but insisted on sending Cody. It was a savvy choice; Birchie had donated everything from trauma kits to body armor to the Birchville police force, and Cody was the only officer in town whose Birch bias ran against us instead of for us.
I didn’t want Cody to see that picture of Ellis Birch with his eyes scratched out, like broad hints in the world’s worst game of Clue: Miss Birchie in the dining room with a dirty breakfast fork. Miss Birchie in the parlor with a hammer.