The Almost Sisters(39)

“Holy shit. Batman,” I said, like a potty-mouth version of Robin. I stood up, and the throw pillow I’d hugged to Digby fell onto the floor. My gaze flew from Batman’s profile picture to Lav’s face. “Please, please, tell me you didn’t let him know about the baby?”

“No! God no,” Lavender said, and I could breathe again. For almost a full half second. Right up until she added, “We only messaged him once. And then I realized that I should have asked you first if he was nice. Aunt Leia? Was he nice?”

“What did you say?” I asked her, my voice so raw and angry that she flinched. “What did your message say?”

“Just hello,” she told me, defensive. “All we said was hello.”

I took two steps closer. On the screen I could see that an icon at the bottom of my Facebook page was blinking.

The Batman had already messaged back.





9




I dreamed my abdomen was made out of curved glass, like half of a huge fishbowl jutting out in front of me. Rachel wanted to see the baby, so I lifted my shirt and we peered in. Digby looked like those cartoon sea monkeys from the old ads in the backs of my childhood comic books. He was cute and smiling, with three deely boppers on his head and flippery feet. He waved his tail fin at us in a friendly hello. I waved back, but Rachel said, “That’s Aquaman’s! How did you forget which Super Friend you fu—”

I woke up with a start. It was dark in the room, but a faint light at the window told me it was close to dawn. I sat up, scrubbing at my face, Rachel’s oh-so-disapproving dream voice echoing stupidly around in my head—as if my stepsister had any clue who was in Super Friends!

I wrapped my arms around my real, much smaller, opaque belly. Digby was awake and whirring around, half mine, half mystery. I didn’t need a psychologist to puzzle out the meaning of my dream. Had someone told me yesterday that anything could push the bones sideways in my subconscious? Well, I would have laughed. But Lavender had managed, and it had sparked the worst fight we’d ever had. I’d been appalled; she’d been truculent and unapologetic. I’d told her to pack her clothes and stay off my technology on pain of death, but her dabbling could not be undone.

Digby had been my secret. My accidental family. Mine. His father had been unfindable, an accepted absence. He was the end, Digby the beginning. There was no next for Batman. I’d told myself so, over and over, every time he’d crossed my mind. Now a pair of teenagers had found him almost instantly. It hadn’t even been that hard.

If I’d wanted to find the Batman, then I would have. It was that simple. I hadn’t tried, and that was pretty damning. I wondered if it was partly, even a little, because Batman was black. Had I bought into the stereotypes about black men and fatherhood and assumed he wouldn’t mind not knowing? I didn’t think so. God, I hoped not. But maybe, on a subconscious level, it was there. The thought made me extra guilty that I still hadn’t read his message.

Lavender had contacted him through my public page, thank God, so he still knew me only as Leia Birch, artist, and he wasn’t showing up in my Messenger or Facebook apps. They were only connected to my private account. My laptop was currently hidden down in Birchie’s sewing room, but only to keep Lav off it. It wasn’t like that was where they kept the Facebook. I could log in to my public page from my phone’s browser or my Cintiq Companion, a monstrously expensive touch-screen tablet with a better processor than most computers. It ran all of my drawing software. I hadn’t doodled myself into a real idea yet, so I hadn’t unpacked it.

I needed to pick a machine and go read his response. He could not be unfound, after all. But when I thought about reopening that window, looking through it into his world, I couldn’t picture it. He would have a whole, full, real life, and when I tried to imagine myself entering it, even virtually, my usually color-filled head filled up with blank, white space.

I got my sketch pad and took it over to the desk by the window, thinking I would draw some Violences. I knew from long experience that hand sketching was more than a good way to jump-start work. It was an inroad to my subconscious. My head didn’t know how to deal with Batman, but my hands might. And if I accidentally drew my way into the V in V prequel I was supposed to be writing in the process? Even better.

I began with a dingy row of storefronts running up one side of the paper, but as they took shape, I realized they were more than a little run-down. They were ruined. I was drawing a postapocalyptic strip mall. This was the world as Violence had left it at the end of V in V. An odd choice, because that world had no next. I’d been hired to write the origin story, not draw the wreckage.

I darkened the sky above the roofline, hanging a few shredded jags of black cloud, and I put the edge of a crumbled concrete bench beside a small blighted tree on the corner. Now the buildings faced a park.

They looked a lot like the attached shops on the square right here in Birchville. I recognized the silhouette. I went back to add details until the faded lettering and broken goods scattered on the sidewalk had turned them into the ruins of the Knittery, Cupcake Heaven, and Pinky Fingers Nail Salon.

In the shading around the shattered windows and dark, listing doorways, I saw the amorphous shapes of the personified Lewy bodies I’d sketched earlier taking shape. I had four of them lurking in the shadows before I realized that each of their misshapen faces and their eye lumps was aimed at a central empty space.