The Almost Sisters(27)

Had she been e-mailing a Darian boy? Or maybe she’d been in Messenger with Rachel, telling her about Digby. Girls told their mothers things, even when they promised not to. I made a mental note to check the browser history later, because the kid was definitely up to something. God, please let her just be sneak-watching R-rated anime on my Netflix. I had too much on my plate already.

An enormous crash shook the ceiling; something heavy had fallen and hit the floor above us. Lavender jumped, and I was so startled I sat bolt upright as a landslide of smaller crashes tumbled in the wake of that first boom.

“What the . . . ? Wasn’t that you up in the attic earlier?” I asked, kicking at the bedclothes wound around me.

“No,” she said, and ran to see.

I got free of the duvet and hurried after her down the hallway toward the attic stairs in my yummy sushi pajamas. I had visions of Birchie, confused and broken, lying under a chest of drawers or a pile of heavy boxes.

Lavender threw open the door to the stairs as I caught up, and the attic’s heat rolled out and over me, thick and wet, salted with dust. I sprinted up the long, steep flight ahead of her now, calling, “Birchie? Birchie, is that you?”

“It’s okay! We’re okay!” a male voice said, and I halted halfway up. Frank Darian came to the railing and stood looking down at me, mopping his red face with a bandanna. The strings of his beginner’s comb-over were scraggled, and he looked like he had aged a good ten years since I saw him last Thanksgiving. “Hey, Leia, sorry. A stack of book crates bit it, but we’re all fine.”

“You all? Who’s with you?” I demanded. My heart still felt like it was Hulking out inside my chest, swelling and banging, trying to brute-force its way out of the prison of my rib cage. “Is Birchie up there?”

“Of course not,” Frank said, and both his boys appeared beside him, their sweaty faces streaked with attic dust.

“Hey, Miss Leia,” Jeffrey said, which made me feel about a thousand years old.

“Hey, Lavender,” Hugh said, overly casual, cocking his hip like Elvis. He looked the way Frank had looked at fifteen, tall and lanky with a mop of sandy curls and a confident smile.

I became suddenly conscious that my niece was wearing tiny cotton shorts and a camisole top. Thirteen woke up dewy and kitten-eyed and thoroughly adorable, and sashaying up the stairs had set her hips asway. I started back down, turning Lavender and herding her before me.

“Go get dressed,” I whispered to her as we reached the hall. It was a palpable relief to step out into the air conditioning.

“I’m wearing shor—”

“More clothes,” I hissed, and gave her a little push toward her room.

She rolled her eyes, calling “Be right back” to one boy or another. Maybe both of them. They were following their dad down the stairs, but they both paused to watch her twinkle along the hallway.

I shook my head and backed up, giving the Darians plenty of room at the bottom of the stairs. Thirty-eight and pregnant did not wake up so fresh and fair. I had bed head and no bra. My mouth was coated with morning goo and probably smelled like Swamp Thing.

“What were you guys doing?” I asked.

Hugh, down last, mercifully closed the door on the heat.

“We dug your trunk out and took it down, and then we were repacking that back room,” Frank said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world for me to wake up to an attic full of Darians landsliding books around at the ass crack of dawn on a Friday morning.

“My trunk?” I asked. “What?”

“You wanted a sea trunk, out of the back room?” I shook my head no, and Frank said, “Well, Birchie called last night and said you did. Do you think she was . . .” He paused, searching for words. “Maybe she was confused. We all know that Birchie is . . .” He paused again, looking down at his feet. “Not herself.” It was a kind finish, considering. I couldn’t think of a worse way to learn of your wife’s infidelity than having it publicly announced to your family, friends, and clients in the middle of a church social. I had a sudden urge to go find Jeannie Anne and smack her one. She’d been one of my summer friends, though by high school I was tired of her endless drama. She’d acted like she was on a mission to enact every plot from All My Children before graduation.

“I didn’t have a choice. I had to do what my heart told me,” she’d say, trading one boyfriend for another with a lot of overlap and sneaking. Twenty years of marriage and two kids later, it turned out she was still that girl. This time her heart had told her to get with Pastor Campbell in the choir room. By now she should’ve figured out that her heart was shitty, maybe told it to shut up.

Frank looked like hell. His eyes were puffed small with purple shadows underneath. The lines around his mouth and on his forehead looked like they had been scored double deep.

I felt swamped with empathy, though Frank might find that word presumptuous. Jeannie Anne had torched close to twenty years of shared life; on the scale of douchery, she deserved a higher score than JJ. But even so, Frank and I were two people standing in a hallway who knew what betrayal felt like.

“No, Birchie’s not herself, Frank,” I said, an indirect apology.

“She sounded good on the phone, though,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

“What time did she call?” I asked, changing the subtext if not the subject, to give him some relief.