“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said. I opened my e-mail, and the first versions of the day’s events were already landing. Rachel and I read in tandem. I was too horrified to be relieved that Birchie hadn’t broken a hip; this was somehow worse. She had survived so much, been so essentially and willfully herself. She was bull-minded, chock-full of strong opinions that often belied her genteel-bastion-of-the-Old-South looks. But now the texts were saying that with Wattie’s help she had apparently snuck her way down deep into senile dementia or Alzheimer’s. “I have to get there, I have to go!”
My hands were now the shaking ones, and I couldn’t get the phone to do right. Birchie had refused to leave her town, much less her house, and before Wattie had moved in, she’d driven off a string of in-home nurses. She’d thrown her Life Alert away, saying that only dogs wore collars, and she rarely remembered to charge the cell phone I had bought her. Her sole support system was Wattie, who was almost as old as she was.
“Breathe, sweetie. We can’t even be sure what we’re up against until you go and see. I can book your travel while you’re packing,” Rachel said.
I loved her for that inclusive pronoun. What we’re up against—the casual, unconscious declaration that she owned a share in my troubles.
“But you have things going on here, too, with J—Jake,” I said. I wanted a share in hers as well. “I don’t want to—”
“Shhh, we’ll fix me later,” Rachel lied.
I let her. My dear old Birchie, far away and failing, trumped whatever Jake was doing with his penis.
I kept flipping through the e-mails, and the more versions I read, the more I found that I was also furious. Those two devious old ladies had put one over on the whole town for God only knew how long, smiling and tatting antimacassars and showing up for church bake sales. They didn’t want their lives to change, so they had deliberately hidden truths—oh, I was so angry! Going back to read the latest texts only made me angrier.
So many of our family friends assumed I knew. They were asking what her doctors said, how long it had been going on, and what I planned to do. Only Martina Mack assumed I’d been in the dark. Her latest Facebook message called me “irresponsible and either blind or very stupid” for abandoning a “poor old crazy lady” to “the slapdash care of an ancient, colored maid.” I wasn’t sure which of the three descriptions made me maddest, and then I was sure.
The first one. The one aimed at me. Because it was the only charge that was remotely accurate. I was irresponsible. I had been both blind and stupid.
This wasn’t on the town, or even on my duplicitous old darlings. I should have noticed. I should have seen. I was Birchie’s closest. Birchie’s only. I was the one who shouldn’t have been fooled. Who knew what damage had happened on my watch?
“I should have moved her here, by me, where I could help her,” I said, and instantly regretted it when Rachel’s eyes met mine.
She had a thousand I-told-you-so’s she could rightfully say in response to this; she had long thought my grandmother had no business living in a town she called “a pimple-size backwater with nothing but a Walgreens doc-in-the-box and an equine vet.” I could see her trying to choose the words that would best express how very right she’d been all along, as always, and in that pause we heard it. A soft snuffling sound, coming from somewhere above us.
We looked up, and there was Lavender. She sat hunched into a teeny folded packet on the balcony above the vaulted foyer. She stared through the white bars of the railing, her hands fisted around two of them like a girl in a delicately spindled lady jail. When Lavender turned thirteen, Rachel had taken her to the Clinique counter to learn makeup and skin care; now her eyes were ringed just like her mother’s, with soft brown starter mascara.
The superior, wise thing Rachel had been about to say to me died in her mouth. She exhaled its ghost in a small, sharp gasp.
“Olivia wasn’t home,” Lavender said.
“Oh, no,” Rachel said quietly, bereft.
I learned then that I already had mother hands. They moved of their own volition to my belly, two steps ahead of thinking, shielding Digby from any bad thing that might hurt him one day, later, when he was out of me and being his own self. Rachel’s hands moved at the same time, rising toward Lavender. I could see in her reaching hands the need to hold her baby, hide her eyes, form cups over her open ears.
Too late. Whatever awfulness had happened between JJ and Rachel, my niece had been a witness. Unshielded. Lavender was witness to it all.
4
It begins with Violence.
No cause, no reason, no explanation. She just is: The Bad I Am.
Back in college I drew the first page as a single panel: Violence leaping over a grayscale city roofline in her sex-monster superhero outfit, a gaudy splash of color in the darkness. Her purple-black leotard was French-cut, with a deep, deep V-neck outlined in silver to suggest the letter. It was like Superman’s S, but with boobs spilling out of it. Long, wicked knives were strapped to her naked thighs, above her boot tops. Her crazy purple hair blew behind her, becoming jagged strands of black lightning where it overlapped the big, round moon. Her grin showed teeth that were oh-so-faintly pointy.
I saw my style emerging in that opener. It was in the way the light bounced, the frenzied female body over a static background, the use of a limited color palette to pull the gaze right where I wanted it.
Once I’d left the airport and gotten out of Birmingham, I spun that image of Violence in my head. I could do this drive to Birchville on autopilot, because I’d been down this route at least twice a year since I was six months old and Mom moved me to Virginia. Birchie had paid for the move, and for Mom to go to Old Dominion University. It was the last thing Birchie wanted—to move the only grandchild she would ever have farther away—but Mom wasn’t from Birchville. She’d grown up in nearby Jackson’s Gap. She’d met my dad at a Dairy Queen right after high school, in the first summer of their lives when labels like “cheerleader” and “nerd” had lost their power. They fell in love and married fast and young, the way small-town people often did. After he died, Mom wanted a fresh start; Birchie made it happen, so Mom and I gave her all my childhood summers and my Thanksgivings in perpetuity.
I usually liked this drive. It was a low-traffic four-lane that shot through Nowhere, Alabama, on the way to my specific piece of it. I could drive it in a state of mind that was a little like twilight sleep, where the pictures formed and shifted.
I wanted to think about anything but Birchie’s health. I was so angry with myself, so worried, and I wouldn’t know how bad it truly was until I got there. I kept my mind’s eye fixed on that first image of Violence, trying to see how she had come to be so I could write this prequel. The one I hadn’t started yet.
I was used to working creatively to deadline, but in collaboration, as part of a team. Plus, my teams had access to deep histories and intricate worlds that had been invented by other teams of people, years ago.