Cody picked up the swabbing stick and unwrapped it. “I’m going to put this here stick in her mouth,” he said, and then, to Birchie directly, “It goes in kinda off to the side, so don’t worry about gagging or nothing. Then I’ll scrape at your cheek on the inside. This takes a little time, because I got to collect cells on it. I have tried this on my own self, so I know it isn’t uncomfortable at all. And that’s it. Your part is done. Okay?”
He was on his best behavior, and I thought Tackrey must have put the fear of God into him. Tackrey herself couldn’t be present, or she risked becoming a witness in her own case.
Birchie finally looked up from her hands. She gave him her most polite, bad-company smile, the dangerous one. The one with frost and steel behind it.
“I think . . . not,” Birchie said to him.
Cody turned his face toward Frank, then to me. No help either place. Wattie was still in demure mode, though it fit her face about as well as sheepish had fit Rachel’s.
I tried to keep my breathing slow and steady, for the baby’s sake. The way these first four months had gone, my child was going to come out either tough as nails or thoroughly neurotic. I needed to take up yoga or Zen meditation, stat. That pulsing, purple urge to act went through me again, pushed hard by my heart and carried in my blood. It zinged through my limbs, and it had no place to go except back to my center, where my relentless heart sent it rushing back through me again.
Cody tried once more. “Now, Miss Birchie, you don’t get to think not. You don’t get to think at all, because we got a court order. I can show it to you if you want. I already showed it to ol’ Frank here. You don’t have a choice on this.”
Frank finally stepped in. “Let’s get this done, okay, Miss Birchie?”
“Thank you, no,” Birchie said, politely, and closed her mouth.
Really closed it. She had always had a rosebud, too small for her face, and age had further thinned her lips. Now she pursed it into a teeny, puckered star. Her eyes sparked frosty fire at Cody Mack, who was frustrated enough to pull off his mirrored cop sunglasses and glare around at all four of us in turn. He ended on Frank.
“You need to get your client to comply,” Cody said, swaying those hips again. Forward, back, like the standing-still version of a swagger. He turned to me and Wattie. “Or you do. Only reason y’all’re here is to get this woman to cooperate.”
“Miss Birchie, this is not optional,” Frank told her. “This is the law.”
Birchie was listening, but not to him. Her eyes flicked to a spot behind Cody, toward the dining room, and her head tilted. Birchie was listening to rabbits. Or something worse.
“Can we do this another day?” I asked, trying to sound sweet. I didn’t want it done at all, but later was better. Never was best. “She’s very off.”
“Naw, we cannot,” Cody said to me. “We are bending ass-backward for you Birches already, having me do this here. Now, if you want it to get ugly, we can get ugly. If she refuses, I got the right to yoink some hairs. That’ll be more invasive-like, because I need the root.”
Cody said “root” so it rhymed with, “mutt,” and for a second I didn’t understand what he was saying. Then I did, and I said, incredulous, “Are you actually threatening to pull hairs out of Birchie’s head?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cody said. “And if she fights me on it, I might have to use a little force, restraining her.”
I had a vision of how well that was going to go. She’d fight. I had no doubts. No one who had seen her yesterday could doubt it, and she was frail and so small. She’d fight, and she’d get hurt.
Wattie started whispering in Birchie’s ear. I could catch words here and there. She was trying to get Birchie on board. Peacefully. Forklessly.
Birchie patted at her knee and said, “Now, you know that won’t do, Wattie. It will not do at all,” and I despaired.
I just wanted to stop this, but thinking of the damage Cody’s rough hands on her could do, I said, “Birchie, please. Let’s get this over with.”
“It’s nasty.” Birchie peeped at me through her pinhole.
She screwed her mouth shut even tighter, and this was getting ridiculous. It was like I was watching three human adults trying to get one sweet-toothed baby to eat spinach. Any moment Cody Mack would be swishing the stick toward her, saying, Here comes the airplane, zoom, zoom! But this sweet-tooth baby had Violence inside her, and her bones were as brittle as starfish. My eyes went around the room, cataloging all the things Birchie could use as a weapon. The fireplace poker, the heavy scented candle in its mason jar, her own coral-tipped nails. She could hurt him, if she got the element of surprise. Cody, with his barrel chest and meaty arms, would then crush her old bones into powder trying to protect himself.
“It isn’t nasty!” Cody said with a pissy-sounding edge. He leaned in toward her with the stick, waving it in her face. “I took it right out of a sterile wrapper. You all saw me do it. Now, last chance, open your dang mouth.”
Birchie was losing her temper back. I could see it in the firm set of her chin.
I stood up, and it felt good to stand, even though I was acting against everything I wanted. “Give me the stick, Cody.”
“No, ma’am. I got to collect it. Chain of evidence.”
“Well, you have two more kits there. Let me show her what you’re doing,” I was trying for sweet and rational, but my words got away from me. “Maybe we can finish this up without bloodshed, and before the rest of us turn ninety, too. I’m sure you have a long list of old, sick ladies to torment today.”
He shrugged and made a little sarcastic bow, then passed the stick to me.
I leaned toward Birchie. “I’m just going to show you,” I told her. “Can you please open your mouth?”
If anything, she managed to squinch it shut even tighter.
“Great job!” Cody Mack said, enjoying my failure. That jackass.
“Show her on me,” Wattie said, and opened her mouth, leaning forward.
It was a good idea. I moved down a step, Birchie’s overbright eyes tracking my every move from underneath her sparse, suspicious brows.
Cody said, “Put it in the side. Then scrape it up and down on the inside, like brushing her teeth. Except on her cheek.”
“I heard you explain it not three minutes ago,” I told him. I did what he said, inserting the stick and scrubbing it up and down with some pressure. “How long?”
“Forty-five seconds, and I got a timer going on my watch,” he said. I kept scraping, and Wattie made affirmative-sounding noises, side-eyeing Birchie encouragingly with her mouth stretched wide into the most plastic smile I’d ever seen. I realized she was boiling with it, too, this deep purple desire to make it all stop. Yet here we both were, helpless to stop helping. After what felt like twenty years, Cody said, “That’d about do it.”
“There, now, that was nothing,” Wattie said as I took the stick out and showed it to Birchie. It was bloodless and not in the least upsetting. It was only a wet looking stick.