The Almost Sisters(79)

I was under no illusions that this would last. Rachel would get her life on track, spearheading economic and emotional counseling for her family. She’d go back to work and be amazing; she’d been a hellishly efficient wedding planner in her pre-Lavender years. If anything, she’d honed that skill set after she went full-time wife and mother. I hoped her marriage would survive, for Lavender’s sake, but if Rachel divorced Jake, it would be so perfectly done it would make Gwyneth Paltrow’s conscious uncoupling look like a bar brawl. I had no doubt that Rachel: The Comeback would be an epic, sweeping story, with multiple morals and endless opportunities for her to explain them to me, but I didn’t think it would bother me quite as much post-Birchville.

We were coming up on the park on the back side of the square. Jake and Hugh turned left, to go around on the side that would put them closer to the Darian house. Birchie and Wattie turned right, and Lavender dropped back to join them. Rachel and I were still behind, and now I was the one who kept our pace overslow. I wanted, in this rare moment of Rachel being vulnerable, to make some amends of my own.

“Rachel? I’m sorry Violet looks like you,” I said. “She’s not based on you, but”—and this was hard for me to say—“I wanted her to be pretty. You’re what pretty looks like in my head.”

That did make her smile, but not the irritating one that seemed to beam down on me from Olympus. She squeezed my arm a little tighter.

“Really? That’s sweet. I thought you drew her like that to make fun of me,” she said. “She’s so stupid. What girl goes skipping down an alley that looks like that?”

“It’s a metaphor,” I said. “But apparently I do, because she’s actually kinda based on me.”

We walked on, turning right to follow Birchie, Wattie, and Lav back to the house, and Rachel asked, “Do you think they’re lovers?”

“No, I really don’t,” I said, though it was a popular theory on the Violence in Violet forums.

Ship-nerds who wanted them to be in love argued bitterly with the Jekyll-and-Hyde dorks who thought Violet turned into Violence when threatened. There was a third faction who thought Violence wasn’t real, just an extension of Violet’s will. A smaller set still thought Violet wasn’t real. That was a huge stretch, but they’d written reams and reams “proving” Violence had invented her to have an excuse for blowing the planet to smithereens.

I got asked about these theories all the time at cons and on my fan page, but I always said people had to make their own decisions. In my head, though? Violence was real, and Violet had to be separate because I really did see myself in Violet. I wanted Violence, who ate people and eventually destroyed Earth, to be separate from me.

But now I’d stood in the balcony of First Baptist, looking down at Birchie and Wattie. I’d felt myself capable of so much ugly. In that moment I’d have pulled the roof down on the right half of the church if I’d had superstrength. I’d gladly have eaten up Martina Mack in two brittle, bony bites. Turned out I had ferocious in me. One day, sixty years back, there’d been ferocious in my grandmother, too.

It was the Violence in me that had blown up every relationship that might have become something real. I’d realized it when I accepted the weak-ass apology Jake had divvied up between me and Lavender and maybe God. When I took my share, I’d felt it as the easing of a hurt so old that I’d grown used to it. So used to it I hadn’t noticed its pulse and presence even as I’d destroyed all of my own possible futures, wrecking every family I could have had into a wasteland.

Now I thought the Jekyll-and-Hyde dorks might have been right all along.

I said, mostly to myself, “I always thought of Violence as maternal or big-sistery, not romantic. But I’m thinking now, what if Violet really is Violence? I haven’t been able to write an origin story that doesn’t include Violet. I can’t imagine Violence without her. The way Violence looks at her, with the songbirds and the rabbits, sweet and innocent, maybe that’s how she sees herself, in the beginning. She’s protecting herself, and she doesn’t even know it.”

I found myself excited by the idea, but Rachel was chuckling.

“I wasn’t talking about your story thing,” she said. “I meant them. Birchie and Wattie. Do you think they’re lovers?”

I’d been onto something, but that snapped me right out of it.

“Ugh! No!” I said immediately. Birchie and Wattie walked on ahead of us, rounding the last corner, arm in arm, chatting with Lavender. They were almost exactly the same height, and their sloping shoulders met in a perfect, gentle angle. “They were both married!”

“So?” Rachel said. “It was a different time. Maybe they—”

“Absolutely not,” I interrupted. My grandfather had died before I was born, but I’d known Wattie’s husband. She’d had a good marriage. He always seemed to have a hand on her hip, her back, her shoulder, and she’d leaned into his touch. I couldn’t imagine Wattie having his babies, working beside him down at the church, calling him “Big Bear,” the whole time secret-pining for my granny. “Don’t be gross!”

“And you say I’m homophobic,” Rachel said, primly but with no rancor.

I laughed. “You are. A little bit. Look, it isn’t that. They shared a crib, Rachel. They practically had the same mom.” Birchie had told me Vina stories the way I’d one day tell Birchie stories to Digby. The piecrust she and Wattie made was Vina’s family piecrust. Birchie was at Vina’s bedside with Wattie and all of Wattie’s older brothers when she died, and she took flowers to her grave four times a year. “Vina gave Birchie every bit of mothering she got. She and Wattie were born barely a year apart. They nursed together.”