The Almost Sisters(99)

Birchie put a hand to her heart, her eyebrows rising.

I was still talking to Wattie. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t look to see if the genes are from a black person or a white person. Not on a paternity test.” I spoke with all the authority of a person who had once been trapped in a dentist’s waiting room with no book and a trashy daytime talk show on the TV. They’d been doing a thing the smarmy host called “father reveals,” where the guy who thought he was the daddy never was and they told him so on TV. “They only look at those markers. Specific ones. I think. I’m pretty sure.” I wanted to go ask Google, but I didn’t want that particular search in my browser history. I needed to go to a library. A big one with a lot of anonymous computers. Far away.

“You switched them? My cells and Wattie’s?” Birchie asked me. She stood up, hand still pressed to her heart.

I nodded, surprised she understood that much.

“I’m so sorry,” Birchie said. To Wattie. Not to me.

Wattie’s nostrils flared, hands pulling at her hair, and she said, “Don’t.”

“I’m so sorry, so sorry,” Birchie told her. She came across the room, already reaching for her.

“We don’t know,” Wattie said, stiff and unmoving in her arms. “You do not know.”

They were having a conversation that I was not having.

Birchie said, “I do know, and you do, too,” and Wattie crumpled. She burst into sound, hands still pulling her hair. It was an awful noise, long and rising, a shuddering howl. Her hands finally unfisted from her hair, moving to cover her face. The sound broke, becoming sobs so deep and racking that they shivered her foundation. She shook so violently that without Birchie’s arms around her I thought her body might come apart. Her hands pressed so hard against her face it must be hurting her.

“What’s happening?” I said, but to them I wasn’t even in the room. I was as unpresent as one of Birchie’s rabbits, practically imaginary. Birchie rocked her back and forth while Wattie wept.

“You do know,” Birchie said. “I am so sorry.”

Wattie shook in her arms, saying something I could not understand.

“What’s happening?” I said again.

Birchie met my eyes over Wattie’s shoulder, and now her words seemed made for both of us.

“That test is going to come back positive. Doesn’t matter that you swapped them. The answer will come back the same,” she said.

“No,” I said, a red bolt of negation.

That could not be so. But my artist’s eyes were looking for it now, without permission. Once it was said, my eyes could not help seeing it.

Not in their faces. Birchie had small eyes, close set. Wattie’s were large and round and spaced wide. They had different noses, different mouths, and they were made of such different color palettes.

The truth was written in their bodies. As they held each other, Wattie racked with weeping, Birchie’s arms around a sorrow that was larger than the room, I could see it in the shapes of them. The downslope of their meeting shoulders, the rounding of their hips and bellies, the curve of their equivalent short calves. They had broad foreheads and small pointed chins, so that their disparate features were set in matching hearts. Their bodies told my future, and my body spoke their past; they had looked at me, and each had known that I was pregnant. They’d known because they both recognized their shape in me.

“Jesus,” I said. “Jesus, Jesus.”

I could not unsee, so I stood witness. I didn’t know how else to be in the presence of such ugly pain.

Wattie finally looked up, eyes streaming.

“Hear me,” she said, clear as day. “My daddy was Earl John Weathers, and that’s all.”

“I know. I know he was,” Birchie said, and tears were spilling down her cheeks as well. “And Vina Weathers was the only mother that I ever knew. Whether she bore me or not.”

She was saying Vina’s love had made them sisters, but my artist’s eyes saw that they were sisters twice over. Sisters in their hearts and in their histories, two halves clasped together in a tangle of good love and bad history.

I’d thought that every human secret must eventually get too old to matter, but the echoes of this one filled the room. They wept in each other’s arms, and I was crying, too. They became a single thing in my blurred vision, smashed together, leaning on each other. They turned their heart-shaped faces toward me, their very different features painted on the same-shaped canvas, and now that I had seen it, I would always see. This was the past rising up alive to eat us. History breathing. Alive in their bodies, mirrored in mine.





24




Emily Birch was firmly on the shelf when she was twenty-nine, but it was a shelf of her own making. She was the rising Birch in Birchville, and the boys who came a-courting in her girlhood were overdiffident, cringing like dogs before her father. She knew it without being told: They would not do.

It was plain in the amused, pitying way Ellis Birch invited them in when they showed up in fresh collars with combed-back hair. They sweated through their half hours in the parlor, and no vase of cool water could stop their field daisies and Queen Anne’s lace from wilting in his presence.

Clayton Mack took a different route. He joined Emily when she walked out alone, cocksure and overly familiar, coming up behind her to tug on her braid. He made her laugh. He did not come by the house, properly, to genuflect, and he soon found himself invited to pursue opportunities elsewhere. In Georgia, say, or Mississippi. As Alabama sealed itself shut behind him, the already sour blood between the families curdled thoroughly.