Last night I’d pulled the portraits down and stored them in the attic’s back room, wrapping Ethan but not bothering with ruined Ellis. I’d stacked them on a dresser, Ellis on top, faceup, blind eyes pointed at the vent fan.
Unfortunately, taking down the portraits had left tattle-tale rectangles of brighter wallpaper in the dining room. As Birchie would say, it would not do.
Searching the attic was slow work, both because we had to be careful not to cause a junk landslide and because I felt so antsy. I didn’t really think there were more long-dead relations packed away up here, but at the same time I got a spine shiver every time I peeled a trunk lid open.
Rachel and I were on our own. Jake had rolled out at 7:00 a.m. sharp, wanting to get an early start on the ten-hour drive to Norfolk. Lav went with him. I thought she was scared her dad might poof again if she let him out of her sight.
Rachel pulled a rolled-up area rug off a row of very large, promising boxes. She was doing all the heavy lifting—a pregnancy perk—and she worked much faster than I did, eager to get on the road. Every minute put her farther behind her family, and Lavender wasn’t the only one who didn’t trust Jake left unsupervised.
As I knelt to open the first box, she said, “So I had an idea last night.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. These were dangerous words.
“No, it was a good idea. I think I should tell Dad and Mom about the baby,” she said, dragging the heavy rolled-up carpet back out of the way. “When I get home.”
I looked up from the first box’s jumble of old clothes and weird kitchen gadgets from the 1970s. “My baby? Why on earth!”
“Because you know what’s going to happen,” Rachel said, blowing a strand of hair off her face. “Mom will freak out, worrying about what people will think, and Dad will bluster around trying to solve everything instead of letting her talk.” She propped the rug up against a wardrobe we’d already searched, then came and knelt by me to open the next box. “They’ll fight, and then she’ll cry, and then he’ll stomp off and do fifty hours of penitent yard work. In the end it will be fine. This is their grandbaby, after all. Why should you stress through the fussy bits? You have enough going on.”
I did, actually. I’d had trouble sleeping last night, thinking about the DNA test. All I could do was stand by Birchie’s side. I felt helpless, like I was twiddling my thumbs and watching a huge rock coming at her, fast, to roll over her and ruin her. Then I’d twiddle more and watch the splash damage ruin Wattie.
I couldn’t take one more thing, so I shook my head at Rachel in an emphatic no, saying, “They’ll freak out. They’ll leap right into their car and come straight here.” Why not? Everybody else had.
“No they won’t,” Rachel said. “I’ll say I’m only breaking your confidence because you’re worried about how they’ll react. I’ll make them swear not to mention it until you tell them. See how that works?”
It took me a second to process her idea, but once I did, I saw that it was genius. Evil genius, but still. It gave Mom and Keith time to plan their reaction, and it took a big chunk of worry off me. It was manipulative, and a very Rachel-specific kind of awful, and God, so very tempting. I hesitated, arms buried in heaps of Easter-colored polyester, and she pressed on.
“By the time you get home, they’ll be past panic and deep into supportive.”
“It does sound like the easy way out,” I admitted, but there was no way I could sign off on it. It was Rachel’s style, not mine.
“Good. Because I already did it,” Rachel said. “I called Dad last night.”
I plunked onto my butt, surprised that I was surprised, because of course she had. That was also Rachel’s style. “Damn it, Rachel—” I started, but she interrupted me, pointing.
“Is that the ships?” From our low position, we could see a couple of tarp-wrapped rectangles leaning on the wall behind a coffee table.
“I think so,” I said, because there was nothing else to say. Mom and Keith knew. Done was done, Rachel was Rachel, and truthfully, it was a relief. Maybe I should give Margot Phan a call and enlist her to spill the news to our Tuesday gamers and my church friends in the same way. They could all chew it over together without me. I’d come home to a not-in-the-least-surprising surprise shower, and my Diaper Genie/onesie problem would have solved itself. “I know you meant well, Rachel, but please talk to me first next time, okay?”
Those exact words had come out of my mouth so often that I ought to have a pull string that would trigger them by now.
Fruitless, too, because even as we carried the paintings down, Rachel was saying, “Since I’m staying at your house, I should start getting your nursery set up. I’m at least going to paint. You can’t be around the fumes.”
I saw my imagined Superman-blue walls disappearing in a wash of Modern Dove Gray or Mint Wisp Green.
“Thanks. That’s nice of you. But Sel may want to help pick out the color and the theme.”
I said it purely as a defense, then realized that it might be true. He’d cared about the name, but did men care about baby bedding? He was a Dark Knight guy, so he probably thought Supe was a prig. Maybe the nursery’s theme should be John Henry Irons? His alter ego, Steel, wore Superman’s colors and shared his ideals, and he looked more like Digby might.
“Oh, of course!” Rachel said, backing off. She looked almost sheepish, and that was such a new look on her face that it had no set, faint lines. She peeked at me from under her lashes and said, “You guys pick, and I’ll paint, if that works? I wouldn’t want to get in the way of . . . whatever’s happening there. With you two.”
It wasn’t quite a question, but I answered anyway.
“Something is. I’m keeping it separate. Like, in my head I’m kinda dating Batman, and that could go any number of ways. Sel Martin, though? He’s in our lives forever. I have to stay on good terms with him, no matter what happens with his alter ego. Does that make sense?” I asked.
“Actually, it does,” she said, which surprised me. Very few sentences that had “Batman” or “alter ego” in them made any kind of sense to Rachel. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs, and her voice was very stiff, very prim as she added, “I’m having similar feelings about my husband.”
I stopped, too, shocked. Rachel was confiding in me. A little. Eight words, given in the wake of her latest maneuver with my baby news. But still, it was a whole sentence that was vulnerable and reciprocal.
I’d felt guilty for stepping in and calling Jake, but ever since then she’d been more open with me than she’d been in our whole lives. For Rachel, to meddle was to love. Maybe, by interfering, I had finally told her I loved her back in her own language. On impulse I leaned my ship picture against the wall and hugged her, painting and all.
“Oh, goodness!” she said, hugging me back as best she could with her arms full.
“Thanks, Rachel,” I told her, and this time I said it with no qualifiers.