The Almost Sisters(48)
In the bottom of my own suitcase, I had a paper copy of Violence in Violet. I’d brought it for reference as I wrote the prequel. Now I dug it out.
I perched on the edge of the bed and flipped through it, hunting images of Violet that caught her at different angles.
Looking at the early chapters, I had to admit there was a resemblance. Violet was blond and tall and slim, with big eyes and a ski-slope nose, so yeah, she looked like Rachel. A little. She also looked like every other anchor on Fox News.
As the story went on, the resemblance faded anyway. She looked less and less like Rachel because she looked less and less human after the warehouse scene.
Her murdered boyfriend was the son of a diplomat. His death sparks an international incident, and Violet weaves herself into the center of ever-intensifying scenes of mortal peril. She’s figured out that Violence will save her. She’s seen that Violence’s solutions are vicious and permanent, but she doesn’t care. Her heart is broken. Maybe she’s trying to cause so much carnage that Violence will fail and they will both die, but Violence doesn’t fail. Violence wins with ever-higher stakes, with greater collateral damage, even as Violet’s robins trade themselves for ravens and her butterflies grow ragged and soot-winged. Her pretty body moves from slim to gaunt, the sundress hanging off her skeletal frame.
In the final chapter, Violet squats in a bomb shelter, staring at a television. Her face is practically a skull—jutting cheekbones, lips pulled back in a grimace over prominent teeth. Violence is there. She must be, because Violet has a blackbird on one shoulder, vermin gamboling around her bare feet. The little mice are now rats with long, fleshy tails. The avid, watching rabbits have grown fangs, and there is no light left in them to hold Violence close.
In other bunkers, all over the world, fingers are mashing at red buttons. Bombs are arcing back and forth over the ocean.
Good-bye, Violence thinks. It’s the last word in the book. She leaves Violet in the shelter, and she goes out into it. She’s delighted to be out in it. She grins her wolfish grin, standing in the spot where the first bomb will drop. Her boots are firmly planted, arms spread wide, spine bending, head thrown back in a rictus of joy as she welcomes the bomb. It’s a very phallic missile, actually, and a part of me wanted to go find Rachel, point this out. Lesbians, my ass. Do you not get art?
Then Violence is a purple shadow in the center of a blaze, like the wick of a candle flame. The view recedes, backing up in stages. Huge, sooty mushrooms spring up all over North America. The earth is a blue ball, hanging in space, and all the continents sprout with this same, world-ending fungus. The mushrooms dissipate into a dark fog that hangs in shreds and drifts, shrouding the planet, and all of Violet’s ruined animals are hidden in its curls and purple shadows. And that’s the end. There is no next.
I closed the book, thinking, Well, sometimes there isn’t.
Did I steal Rachel’s face? Her baby name? Maybe. I didn’t remember it that way, but she didn’t remember biting me. Maybe a dark and daddy-hungry corner of my heart drew Violet to look like her on purpose, to sting her, and it had.
The thing with JJ hadn’t helped us. He had loved the idea of her, the hope of her, more than the actual, human me, who had taken him in at his lowest moment. Did I blame her somehow? Because she’d captured JJ with her superpower when we were all still children? She hadn’t even tried. She hadn’t even wanted him back then, and when she did choose him, she’d ended up wrecked herself.
Still, this is how our story always ended. She took her sorrows to the laundry closet, I waited outside. When I was ruined, she barged in and helped, because it made her feel so good to be the hero and pull me out of whatever mud I’d mired in.
Sun and Sky, we had started with a crack in us. If we had been born sisters, if my dad hadn’t died, if her mom hadn’t pulled a fade, if JJ wasn’t such a jackass. If, if, if. This much I knew: Our sisterhood had come pre-broken. Letting her stay here, her brief moment of feeling vulnerable, couldn’t fix us.
When things began so badly, with a war or a loss or a rift or five shots of tequila, they stumbled along a fractured road that slanted, steeply, down. They could only degenerate, get worse and worse, until you were standing in ruins. When you got to an apocalypse, there was no next.
As if in answer, the bomb in my back pocket trembled and chimed, contrary.
I yanked it out of my pocket, heart rate jacking. I had a text from an unknown number, but I knew who it was.
Been a while. Coming back to ATL? I’d like to see you again.
11
That night Rachel climbed into bed on the side I liked to sleep on, her face shining with moisturizer, and announced she’d already taken an Ambien. She fluffed her pillow and pulled a sleep mask over her eyes, arranging her limbs like it was the most natural thing in the world. She conked out almost instantly. I teetered on the edge on the wrong side, feeling out of sorts and wide-eyed as a bush baby.
Every time I got comfortable, she’d flail a foot into my shin or jab me with a pointy elbow. When we were kids, I’d been the restless one, bothering her with my sleep muttering and humming. Child Rachel had slept the same way she’d done everything—beautifully, with a surface so placid she might as well have been in a glass box with a chunk of apple in her throat, lips preset for an inevitable kissing. Not tonight. It was like sleeping with a bag of upset cats. When she flung out a hand and smacked me in the face, I got up and stomped downstairs to the sofa in Birchie’s sewing room. I took my suitcase with me, but even with the racket I made wheeling it away, Rachel didn’t wake up.