The Almost Sisters(30)

“Is everyone okay?” Lavender called.

Wattie clambered out of the car, too, silent and stoic, her face unreadable.

“Get the trunk out of that backseat,” I said to Frank, and that got her attention.

“You leave that be,” Wattie said, but I spoke over her.

“Right now, Frank. I am not kidding.”

“Frank, you need to mind me,” Wattie said.

He paused, looking back and forth between us, and his gaze finally settled on Birchie. She was still blinking at the bumper. “Miss Birchie?” Frank said.

She peered at him. “Goodness. Did we crash the car?”

I put my arm around her and stood as tall as I could. It wasn’t very tall, granted, plus I was wearing pink pajamas with cartoon California rolls and unagi sprinkled all over them, but I was still a Birch in Birchville. Maybe not the Birch, but my grandmother didn’t seem up to the job this morning.

“Get the trunk, Frank.”

Frank shook his head, almost an apology at Wattie, and then he did what I said. Hugh came down from the porch and helped him without being asked. Jeffrey and Lav trailed after, curious.

Wattie glared warning daggers at us all. Mostly me. We all stood in a cluster in the center of the lawn watching Frank and Hugh wrestle the trunk out of the backseat. Wattie stepped to Birchie and took her place beside her. They linked arms, clicking together as perfectly as Lego pieces. On Birchie’s other side, I felt suddenly extraneous.

Frank and Hugh set the trunk on the grass. It was an old brown sea chest, the edges bound in rust-speckled metal.

“It’s locked,” Hugh said.

Sure enough, there was an old padlock with a keyhole, rusted but still in service, on the clasp.

Martina Mack had reached the lawn. “What’s happening?” she demanded in her scratchy old-lady voice.

“Don’t you dare trample my grass, Martina Mack!” Birchie ordered. “We have enough grass tramplers here already.”

When the rest of us ignored her, she went to join the Barleys, whispering at the edge of the yard.

“What’s in there?” Lavender asked Wattie. The boys flanked her, both their bodies angled toward her.

“Nothing,” Wattie said.

“Bull,” I said. Wattie had left the driver’s-side door open. I went to the car, leaned in, and popped the trunk.

“The chest itself is pretty light,” Hugh reported. “It’s not books or anything.”

“Were you running away?” I asked Birchie as I went around to the back of the car to dig out the tire iron. That was all I could imagine, that it was an escape trunk, packed full of orthopedic shoes and cotton drawers and nice housedresses, hidden in the attic in case I kept insisting Birchie had to come to Norfolk.

“Is that my hope chest?” Birchie asked, as if noticing the trunk for the first time. Mornings were usually her best time, but the crash had rattled her.

“It’s like Pandora’s box,” I heard Lav say softly to Hugh and Jeffrey. “I don’t think they should open it.”

“It’s not your hope chest,” Wattie said to Birchie. She glanced at Lavender, then me. “There’s no hope in it.”

I turned away, lifted the tire iron.

“Don’t you do it,” Wattie warned me.

I smashed down on the old lock. The chest shivered, but it held.

“Want me to try?” said Jeffrey, with a teenage boy’s enthusiasm for whacking things with sticks.

Birchie said, “It’s my wedding dress. It’s my married-lady linens.”

I brought the tire iron down again, hard as I could. The lock held, but the clasp itself broke, falling down to seesaw on one of its hinges. The Barleys and Martina Mack crept a little closer, crossing the invisible border onto our property. The kids all three leaned in, and Lavender reached out to grab both boys by their arms. I dropped the tire iron. Put my hands on the rough wood of the lid.

There was a breathless pause as I swung it open.

I saw something pale, maybe white, wrapped loose in plastic sheeting gone so old it had yellowed. I peeled the top layer of sheeting back.

Lavender gasped, clutching the boys in closer. Frank said a very bad word under his breath. I could hear Wattie panting behind me.

“What is that?” Martina Mack said, bustling across the yard, aggrieved. “We can’t see! You’re block—” Her voice cut out abruptly as she came up behind me.

“Why, that’s not my wedding dress,” Birchie said. “You’ll need to look again, Frank. My hope chest must be farther back.”

I couldn’t move, was barely breathing.

Birchie reached past me and gently, mercifully shut the trunk, covering the pile of bones and loose teeth littering the bottom. Covering the human skull resting beside its own detached jawbone, its crown decorated with a deep, unnatural cracking high up at the back. The trunk had the only lid left to close over the black pits of the eye sockets as they stared up from the depths, old and dark and empty of everything.





7




It begins with Violet.

She’s not on the first page, but she’s the light that calls my antiheroine. Makes her say hello.

So far I’d thought only about Violence, endlessly sketching her without finding her origin. The past few days, I’d even wished for a little more Violence in my makeup. Not the cannibaly parts, but as Wattie and Birchie fought me on a thousand tiny fronts, I’d longed for a scoop of her single-minded will. Violence was so certain.