The Almost Sisters(26)
A rustling thump from above woke me, way too early. I scrubbed at my eyes and checked the clock. Six-thirty in the morning, God help me. Just over my head, pattery footsteps ran across the ceiling, quick and light. So Lavender was actually rooting about in the attic. She’d spent the last couple of days roaming the town with the Darian boys or playing on my old laptop, but this morning was her last chance. It sounded to me like she was taking it.
I’d found the attic irresistible when I was a little kid. I’d spent the earlier, cooler hours of my long summer days trying on feathered hats and the old lace wedding dress or digging in the sewing table with its box of a thousand unsorted buttons. I’d jumbled things about as I played, dumping a shoulder-padded forties suit into a sea of whalebone corsets, mixing ledgers from the 1890s in with sweater vests and sci-fi paperbacks from my father’s childhood. Knowing Lav, she was probably re-sorting everything by time period or color. At least she was exploring while she could. At 10:00 a.m., the estate-sale company I’d hired from Montgomery would be here to begin the assessment.
I groaned and pulled the pillow over my head. Sorting through the attic was a job for Hercules, and even he might have to call in the rest of the Avengers. Lav and I couldn’t do it alone if we had three months and a backhoe. The main section took up most of a whole floor, tight aisles winding like a maze through mishmash piles of junk and heirloomworthy prizes. The narrow back room under the eaves was worse. In it, boxes and chests and wardrobes had been piled six deep with no aisles at all, packed literally to the roof with clothes and papers and furniture and books. I’d always been told to stay clear of that back area lest I pull out the wrong piece of keepsake Jenga and topple everything down and smash myself.
I’d disobeyed enough to know that there was a full set of Jane Austen in the crates right by the door. Persuasion held the powdery remains of pressed flowers, a remembrance of love gone wrong or right. Either way, they’d been dry bones when I found them and were probably dust now. I’d put Persuasion back; the flower’s oils had wrecked the print, so on the pages where they had been laid to rest, the story was unreadable.
I’d hired the estate team to help sort trash from treasure and to let Birchie claim the things that mattered most to her personally while she still remembered. It was also a message, telegraphing change, like the assisted-living brochures I had printed out for them, like the speakerphone calls with Wattie’s sons. Oh, but it was going to be an ugly day.
My little old ladies were not going gently into that good nursing home. Wattie fought me every living minute and Birchie on and off as she was able. Today would be the same, but squared. No, cubed. They had a lot of weapons in their crafty arsenal: innuendo, barbed asides, appeals to reason or pity or nostalgia. Birchie especially excelled at “soft reproach,” looking wounded and yet so forgiving at the same time. When she was on point, that look landed on my chest and pushed in, a long skewer of sorry feeling that ran me all the way through.
It hadn’t changed my mind, though. I’d had a lengthy talk with Dr. Pettery, and he backed my decisions. He’d been concerned for quite some time, but HIPAA and Miss Wattie had kept his hands pretty well tied.
Rachel had e-mailed me a list of Norfolk facilities with spotless reputations and memory-care units. I’d held off booking travel until Wattie and her sons decided if she’d be touring the facilities with us. Sam wanted her to move to Houston, near his family, but Stephen insisted it was Wattie’s choice. I thought that in the end Miss Wattie would want to stay with Birchie, though so far she had only reiterated that neither of them was going anyplace, thanks muchly. The role reversal, setting rules for women who had half raised me, made me so sad and uncomfortable that I’d spent a lot of time hiding in my room, saying I was working. Which I was, as long as we could agree that “working” meant doodling endless Violences on scratch paper and not having any ideas for the prequel.
I curled up tighter underneath the covers. Closing down the house itself would be easy, when we came to that point. In the 1870s houses had been built to last, and, in this one, entropy had never been allowed to gain a toehold. It was so tidy I could pretty much throw out the milk and eggs, cover the furniture, and call it closed. Updated double storm windows gleamed clean behind crisp sheers. The furniture was old-fashioned but not actually old. Anything that began to sag or wither was banished—usually to the attic. And therein lay the problem. I was even now snuggled up under the stacked, unsorted weight of a hundred and forty-odd years’ worth of Birch family history.
I was loathe to get up and begin this day, but Digby had no such hang-up. He was already being busy. I put my hand over the place on my belly where I felt his cheery fizz and jiggle. I pressed down, but at seventeen weeks, I could still only feel him moving from the inside.
I heard the familiar creak of the door between my room and Lavender’s. This room had once been my father’s—his glow-in-the-dark star decals were still all over the ceiling—and the tower room had been his playroom. I made my gummy eyes open and pointed them at the doorway. Lavender froze mid-tiptoe, my laptop in her hands.
“Good morning,” I said, surprised to find her back downstairs and already playing on the computer.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said. She came all the way in and put it on the desk.
“I was up,” I said.
Her eyes cut away. She walked over to the fireplace and picked up the glass shepherdess who was perched, dustless and gleaming, on the mantel. My room, like every other one here, was like a cozy surgical theater—spick, span, and homey. Lavender, whose house was in a constant state of readiness for a Restoration Hardware photo shoot, had seemed right at home. But not just now. She studied the shepherdess with elaborate overinterest, as if Bo Peep were trending on Twitter.