The Almost Sisters(50)
He came back almost instantly, with flattery: Naw, too stalkery . . . you’re the famous artist.
It was really good flattery, reminding me how much he liked my work. I was comic-book famous, which was even less famous than that old double-rainbow guy on YouTube, but I still liked him saying it. My hands had hovered over the keys, full of a thousand questions that I ought to ask, but I saw the ellipses; he was already texting again.
If I’d texted first? Shit, girl, you’d have gone to check your closet. Seen if I was in there making out with your shoes.
So he was funny, even when I was sober. I smiled, but damn those fourth-month hormones, smiling wasn’t all I’d done. I also had a flash of memory: his full mouth moving against my instep, my ankle, the back of my knee, working its inexorable way upward to where his busy hand was already at work. Not helpful.
I had to nip the flirting in the bud. If there’d been no Digby? I would have leaned in. Maybe even hard. There was obviously a physical attraction here, and meeting at FanCon implied we shared some interests. But I was pregnant, which meant I was actually the stalker, crouching in his metaphorical closet with my secret and a long list of invasive questions. Flirting made what I was doing feel even worse, and every text I sent that left out Digby was so inherently dishonest it felt callous.
It wasn’t a decision I made lightly, though. I wasn’t playing, and I didn’t want to play him. This was serious business, and I did have a decision to make—one that would echo in the rest of both our lives. This man had fathered Digby, but I needed to know he was at least decent, at least kind, before I gave him the option to become a dad. Absence was a better start for a kid than ugliness. If Batman was some sort of baby-hating basement dweller with a violent temper, Digby needed me to know that.
We texted on and off over the next couple of days. I asked him question after question. Maybe my level of interest in his life, his family, his job read as flirting, but I couldn’t help that.
Batman didn’t come across like any obvious kind of reprobate. He was a CRNA, a type of specialized nurse who worked with anesthesia. His parents lived in Columbus, Georgia, and he had three older sisters spread across the South, all married and raising families.
He was only thirty-four. It weirded me out to think I’d graduated high school the year before he was a freshman. He was also single, and that hit me with a wave of tardy relief. At least I didn’t need to add adultery to my lost night’s list of crimes and misdemeanors.
He seemed overly interested in me right back, so much so that if I hadn’t known better, I might have suspected him of being secret pregnant, too. He asked about my family, my church, my friends, my life. I told him bits about my Tuesday gamers, being in Birchville, the Lewy bodies, Lavender and Rachel. I didn’t mention bones.
The contact snowballed. By the end of Rachel’s first week in Birchville, he was texting me in between his surgeries, and I was sneaking off to answer every other minute, as phone-addicted as my teenage niece. Friday night found me tucked into a nest of blankets on the sewing-room sofa, texting with him until almost midnight. That was when he suggested meeting up for some online gaming the next evening. He played Diablo, Counter-Strike, even some old-school StarCraft with his friends from college.
I loved StarCraft, but I texted back, My gaming comp is back home in VA. I didn’t like gaming with the Cintiq’s touch pen, and the old laptop ran so slow. Also, Saturday-night StarCraft sounded too much like the über-nerd version of a date. The instant I hit send, I had second thoughts, though. He had a TeamSpeak server, which meant we could voice-talk over the computer while playing. That was tempting. An actual conversation, with tone and nuance, would let me know him faster. Decide faster. The longer I didn’t mention the pregnancy, the worse it would be when—or if—I did. Maybe it was too good an opportunity to turn down. I added, My old laptop can manage online Scrabble, though. If that’s not too weird?
No such thing, he sent back. I’m down for some Words with Friends.
Saturday night Wattie took Birchie off at seven to begin her bedtime ritual. Rachel was sitting on Birchie’s love seat with dirty hair, sad-eating carrot sticks the way a normal human would have had potato chips and watching one of those old Merchant Ivory films she and Mom both loved.
Lavender had already ghosted up to the tower room, no doubt to her own Saturday-night virtual hookup via Snapchat or whatever the kids were using now. Since I knew that Snapchat existed, my guess was thirteen-year-olds now used something else.
She was still on the outs with me. She was waiting, like Rachel Jr., for me to tell her she’d been right to contact the Batman. Or maybe I was projecting and she wasn’t even avoiding me. After all, she was young, and the world outside this off-kilter house was soaked in golden summer. Hugh and Jeffrey Darian rang the doorbell every other minute to call her out into it.
I went back to my own hidey-hole in the sewing room, where I’d turned Birchie’s old Singer table into a makeshift computer desk. I plugged my earbuds in and opened up Facebook and the voice-chat program. While Words with Friends was loading, I heard the robotic voice of TeamSpeak say, “A user has entered your channel.”
“Hello, user,” I said.
“Hello, you,” he said. It was the Batman. I recognized the voice, an echo of memory from way down low in my brain. “Are you up for some one v. one? Scrabble style?”