The Almost Sisters(60)
“I need my airplane socks,” Birchie said, lisping a little with her teeth out.
I looked to Wattie. “In her bedside drawer.”
I opened it and found fleecy socks in a multitude of cheerful colors. None of them had airplanes on them, and Birchie called flying “so much nonsense.” Neither she nor Wattie had ever once gotten on a plane, not in their whole, long lives.
“You brought her a pair like this from the airport once,” Wattie said. I vaguely remembered that. “She loved them. Frank helped us order more off of the Internet.”
I knelt and put the socks on, and then it was time to tuck her between her cool, clean, lemon-colored sheets. I didn’t, though. I stayed kneeling, looking up at her.
Frank had told me not to ask. Maybe it was better not to know, but I was going to know soon anyway. Science was going to tell me. I’d rather hear it from this mouth I loved. Whatever truth she told me would change nothing.
“Birchie,” I said. “Birchie, is it Ellis? Is it your father in that trunk?”
She looked at me, her eyes bird bright and so, so blue. One soft hand came out to pat my cheek. “Yes, honey,” she said, almost like she was sorry for me.
“Leia,” Wattie said, a warning bell that I ignored.
“Did you put him in there, Birchie?” I asked her.
“I surely did.”
From this angle she looked like an apple-head doll, her lips sinking into her face because her bridges were out. Then she smiled at me, and it was a baby’s smile, gummy and wide, sprinkled with teeth.
“Did you . . . ?” This I could not ask, but she answered anyway.
She raised her hand, her arm bent at the elbow. Her hand fisted around an imaginary handle. She brought her hand down, once, in a definitive swing.
“Lord, Lord,” she said. “I’ll never forget that sound. That bone noise. It was like stepping on ground seashells.”
That jabbed the breath right out of me. It was so specific. It sounded true.
“But it had to be self-defense,” I said with surety. In Birchville her father’s name was linked to words like “hard” and “proud.” He knew his worth, and he made sure everybody else knew it, too, Myra Rhodes would chime in when Ellis Birch was mentioned in her presence. He’d been “Mr. Birch” to every human in the town, except his daughter. To her he’d been “Daddy.” Even so, he must have caused her to do it. But when I tried to say it, it came out like a question. “You didn’t have a choice?”
Birchie’s gaze on me didn’t waver. “I had a choice. I made it,” she said, but that could mean anything. That could mean she’d had a choice to live or die, or a choice to save someone in danger. I wanted it to be a choice that put her squarely in the right, but she kept on talking. “He was sitting in his chair, reading the paper. I came up behind him.”
She made that gesture again, and in an awful way it reminded me of Rachel. Virginia didn’t have a baseball team, so Rachel was a Braves fan. The Tomahawk Chop, she and Jake called it, when they put on their red shirts and had their sportsball friends come over.
“That’s Lewy bodies talking. That’s not true,” I told Birchie, but I did not believe me.
Her nostrils flared, and I saw a sharpness come into her eyes. I was irritating Birchie, the real Birchie, the one who was alive in morning hours and afternoon moments and nighttime sparks like this one.
“Enough. It’s too late to get all riled now,” Wattie said. She held up Birchie’s most recent copy of Persuasion, read almost to pieces. “Out you go. Let me tuck her in and do our reading.”
I stood in the hall for I don’t know how long, crying into my hands and listening through the door to electric crickets and the deep, sweet voice of Wattie reading aloud. I wept because my great-grandfather’s bones had been upstairs in a trunk for my whole life, and because my Birchie had put them there. Now she was so frail and folded, brain-sick and as innocent as a baby. I pictured her small hand with its short, coral-colored nails and pale blue veins. I could not imagine those lined, powder-dry fingers wrapped around a hammer.
She didn’t even own a hammer. But that chopping motion had been so definitive. She had once swung a hammer at a person. At her own father, and when I’d told Lavender that we Birches had bad luck with fathers, oh, what an understatement that had been.
Ellis Birch had been proud, but also the town’s benefactor. Had he secretly been awful? Even if he had, I knew a lot of awful people. If being awful were reason enough, there would be ball-peen hammers sticking out of the brainpan of every other person walking. The way I’d felt about Cody Mack today, I might have put his in myself. It was one thing to let Violence eat up paper people, but in real life? Dear old ladies didn’t kill their daddies and tuck the bodies away up in their attics.
Except my dear old lady had.
I stood hitching and snotting into my scarf until I was flat wept out. Then I stood waiting, hollow and dry inside, because all the truth and all the weeping in the world would not change my decision. That roaring wash of love I’d felt, standing in the balcony at church, it was still in me. It was more powerful than truth or tears.
I’d always thought of myself as lawful good, but I wasn’t going to do the right thing here. I wasn’t even certain what the right thing was, but I wasn’t going to do it. Instead I would use every weapon in my arsenal to protect my Birchie. Pity, public opinion, her standing in the town, her money. I would use it all.