The Almost Sisters(41)

“Tell that to the dead guy in your attic,” she said.

Touché.

“You sure did pack a lot,” I said in that same overly hearty voice, opening the front door.

“I thought Lavender and I might take a road trip. Maybe head down to Disney World. I told Mom and Dad that’s where we were going. We. Like me and Jake were coming down here to get Lavender together. So maybe I should take her? I could stand to see the Happiest Place on Earth,” she said.

“Oh. Disney sounds nice,” I told her, even though it sounded crazy. I pictured Lavender, alternately texting and sulking her way through It’s a Small World while this fraught version of Rachel wept and wiped her nose into her feral ponytail. Even so? It seemed less crazy than having an unraveling Rachel here, now spinning slowly in the middle of the foyer, looking up the stairs and down the hall and into the living room beyond. “Where is everyone?”

“In bed,” I said. “Don’t you think you should tell Mom and Keith what’s going on?”

“God, no, not until I have some kind of plan,” she said, and I was way too secret-pregnant to push her on it. She finished her turn, coming back around to face me, and now she looked almost forlorn. “Where is everything?”

“Rachel, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I thought . . .” She plopped down onto her suitcase like Anne of Green Gables abandoned at the train station. “I thought there would be people, and a chalk outline. And tape and dogs. Techs in jumpsuits. Where is everything?” It was rhetorical, and she didn’t give me a pause in which to answer anyway. “What am I doing, Leia? I’m so tired.” Her eyes filled up with tears. “I drove all night to get here. And now look at this place. There’s little birds singing outside. It’s so clean. The whole town is so clean, and in here? I could serve food on that banister. It’s like I came down here on an emergency rescue mission to pull my kid out of Mayberry.”

“I tried to tell you on the phone,” I said, glad that she was missing the undercurrent. I could feel how deeply the town was disturbed, whether she could or not. Even now, with the world asleep around us, there was an electric buzz of pent-up stress, like a cloud around First Baptist’s steeple. Birchville had taken it in the teeth recently, what with public announcements of adulterous liaisons in the choir room, the subsequent firing of the associate pastor, the revelation of the One True Birch’s illness, and now, worst of all, the bones. The bones trumpeted to us that our recent troubles were inevitable, and maybe even just; there had been something rotten at this town’s sweet and sleepy heart for years and years.

“Look at that Tiffany lamp. What bad things could happen in a room with that lamp?” Rachel asked, sniffling. To her, an urban outsider, Birchville in a state of greatest frenzy looked as placid as an untroubled lake. “What am I doing here?”

“Running from Jake?”

At the mention of his name, she stood, instantly prickly, as remote and closed as a human Fortress of Solitude. But she’d driven overnight to plop herself uninvited down in the middle of my mess. It was as close to permission to jam my nose into hers as I was ever going to get.

“Rach, just tell me. Is Jake cheating on you?”

“Ugh, of course not!” she said, affronted.

“Okay,” I said. I wasn’t perfectly convinced. She hadn’t really known Jake back when he was JJ. She’d thought of him as my creepy little friend, if she thought of him at all. She’d been shocked when Mom told her that the charmer who showed up at our Christmas party was the fat kid who used to practically live in the basement with me.

“Was he ever, like, your boyfriend?” she’d asked, overly casual, as we were helping Mom clean up post-party. Before I could answer, she was hurrying to add, “Because he asked me out, and of course I wouldn’t date your ex.”

“He was never my boyfriend,” I said, because it was true, and also because I could see how badly she wanted me to say it. It came out terse, but Rachel didn’t notice. Her shining smile in response made it clear that she wanted very much not to notice.

When she went to take the trash out, Mom said quietly, “Leia, if you’re not okay with this, you should tell her.”

“He never was my boyfriend,” I repeated, although I had felt us start. I had held his body in my body, and I had seen a future.

“I could tell her,” Mom said, but I could hear reluctance in the offer.

We both knew from long experience how much it hurt Rachel when Mom backed me in a way that seemed against her. I shook my head. It wasn’t worth it. JJ wasn’t worth it, and anyway, I thought, there was no way she’d get serious about him.

I never told Rachel about those seven sad, slick minutes in the basement, and I was pretty sure JJ hadn’t either. Not that it mattered now. Surely sex had an expiration date; every human secret must eventually get too old to matter, disintegrating all the way past bones to nothing. But I thought a man who kept that kind of secret from his wife might well keep others.

“If he’s not cheating . . . what? Is he drinking too much? Addicted to something? Porn or drugs or gambling?” Rachel glanced reflexively up the stairs, making sure no Lavenders were peering down through the banister. We were alone, but she still didn’t answer. “Is it something weirder? Is he obsessed with World of Warcraft or those videos of women in high-heeled shoes stepping on roaches?”