I had my answer. Fast was worse.
Frank was walking Cody out now, leaving with him, mouthing polite things. Birchie and Wattie stayed glued to the love seat, both dead silent for different reasons.
I closed the front door behind the men. Turned and leaned against it because my legs were weak and shaking now, made of rubber bands and putty.
“Let’s go plant pumpkins,” Birchie said, cheery, as if all the unpleasantness were done now.
I didn’t answer. Wattie and I both cocked our heads, listening to the voices and the clomp of big man feet down the stairs until we couldn’t hear them anymore. Then Wattie stood so fast it was like she’d borrowed better knees. She was across the parlor and over to me in a flash, grabbing my arm in a grip so tight it hurt.
“Girl, what have you done?”
“I don’t know, I’m sorry, I don’t know!” I said, clutching the tops of her arms.
“What happened?” Birchie asked from the sofa, still sitting, unalarmed.
“You are going to be sharing a cell right down the hall from us. Your fingerprints must be all over that plastic bag,” Wattie said, in a state, trying hard not to flat-out yell into my face.
“Why would they fingerprint that bag? They won’t know. Maybe it’s a good thing. If they can’t identify the body, how can they proceed? With no working theory?” I was trying to convince myself as much as her. “The case will never be solved, and one day people will talk about the bones the same way they talk about the Pig Man in the Holler, or the giant alligator gar down in Lake Martin—the mysterious remains found in the Birch house.”
Wattie rolled her eyes to heaven, calmer now, but not by much. “Are you stupid? You gave them my genes, child! My genes! Lord help you. Lord help your baby—do you think that I am black here like a paint upon my skin? Do you think he will be, too?”
I didn’t understand her for a moment. “You mean they can tell from that swab that you’re black?” That didn’t seem right. In fact, it seemed a little racist, for genes to know that. For genes to tell that. I wanted us all to be the same, under.
“Of course they can! Lord help your baby,” Wattie repeated, throwing her hands up. Then she fisted them in her short curls, walking away from me, back into the parlor. I trailed after. “We have to call Willard Dalton. Now. Get him to swap them back.”
I shook my head. “We can’t. Tackrey doesn’t trust him. Cody is going to take that box straight to her or to the lab. It’s not going to stay in Birchville.”
“What did you do?” said Birchie, and she was alarmed now. Wattie’s distress had penetrated whatever fog had gathered around her, and she was sitting up as tall as she could.
“She swapped the tests out. Yours and mine,” Wattie said, pacing, frantic, hands still fisted in her hair. “She gave them my cells.”
Birchie put a hand to her heart, her eyebrows rising.
I was still talking to Wattie. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t look to see if the genes are from a black person or a white person. Not on a paternity test.” I spoke with all the authority of a person who had once been trapped in a dentist’s waiting room with no book and a trashy daytime talk show on the TV. They’d been doing a thing the smarmy host called “father reveals,” where the guy who thought he was the daddy never was and they told him so on TV. “They only look at those markers. Specific ones. I think. I’m pretty sure.” I wanted to go ask Google, but I didn’t want that particular search in my browser history. I needed to go to a library. A big one with a lot of anonymous computers. Far away.
“You switched them? My cells and Wattie’s?” Birchie asked me. She stood up, hand still pressed to her heart.
I nodded, surprised she understood that much.
“I’m so sorry,” Birchie said. To Wattie. Not to me.
Wattie’s nostrils flared, hands pulling at her hair, and she said, “Don’t.”
“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Birchie told her. She came across the room, already reaching for her.
“We don’t know,” Wattie said, stiff and unmoving in her arms. “You do not know.”
They were having a conversation that I was not having.
Birchie said, “I do know, and you do, too,” and Wattie crumpled. She burst into sound, hands still pulling her hair. It was an awful noise, long and rising, a shuddering howl. Her hands finally unfisted from her hair, moving to cover her face. The sound broke, becoming sobs so deep and racking that they shivered her foundation. She shook so violently that without Birchie’s arms around her I thought her body might come apart. Her hands pressed so hard against her face it must be hurting her.
“What’s happening?” I said, but to them I wasn’t even in the room. I was as unpresent as one of Birchie’s rabbits, practically imaginary. Birchie rocked her back and forth while Wattie wept.
“You do know,” Birchie said. “I am so sorry.”
Wattie shook in her arms, saying something I could not understand.
“What’s happening?” I said again.
Birchie met my eyes over Wattie’s shoulder, and now her words seemed made for both of us.
“That test is going to come back positive. Doesn’t matter that you swapped them. The answer will come back the same,” she said.
“No,” I said, a red bolt of negation.
That could not be so. But my artist’s eyes were looking for it now, without permission. Once it was said, my eyes could not help seeing it.
Not in their faces. Birchie had small eyes, close set. Wattie’s were large and round and spaced wide. They had different noses, different mouths, and they were made of such different color palettes.
The truth was written in their bodies. As they held each other, Wattie racked with weeping, Birchie’s arms around a sorrow that was larger than the room, I could see it in the shapes of them. The downslope of their meeting shoulders, the rounding of their hips and bellies, the curve of their equivalent short calves. They had broad foreheads and small pointed chins, so that their disparate features were set in matching hearts. Their bodies told my future, and my body spoke their past; they had looked at me, and each had known that I was pregnant. They’d known because they both recognized their shape in me.
“Jesus,” I said. “Jesus, Jesus.”
I could not unsee, so I stood witness. I didn’t know how else to be in the presence of such ugly pain.
Wattie finally looked up, eyes streaming.
“Hear me,” she said, clear as day. “My daddy was Earl John Weathers, and that’s all.”
“I know. I know he was,” Birchie said, and tears were spilling down her cheeks as well. “And Vina Weathers was the only mother that I ever knew. Whether she bore me or not.”