Chapter 24
Violet
“One comes to Petey’s Pizza,” Dodie said, “for a certain ambiance. A je ne sais quoi.”
Even in the nasty, morgue-like light of Petey’s, I could see that my sister was beautiful.
She had our father’s dark eyes—Dad was an awful father, but he was wildly handsome—and expressive arches of eyebrows.
Her skin was immaculate, her lashes long even without makeup.
She didn’t have my sullen look or the default glare that Vail and I gave everyone we met.
Dodie was a lot, but unlike us, Dodie looked like someone you might actually want to know.
She caught me looking at her for a second too long. “What?” she asked.
I dropped my gaze to her top, the one with the bows on the shoulders. “I’m thinking about that shirt,” I said.
She touched one of the turquoise bows with a fingertip. “You like it? I thrifted it for fifty cents.”
“I believe it. Your whole wardrobe screams I thrifted this for fifty cents.”
Dodie waved a hand over my all-black outfit. “And yours says I’m dowdy, yet mean. Very expressive.”
Vail scrubbed his hands over his face. “God, I hate having sisters.”
“You should think about clothes more often,” Dodie shot back at him, dropping her gaze over him. “Or ever. Tell me, how many fishermen died to make that sweater?”
“Barbers are a real thing, Vail,” I added. “They use scissors. The technology has been around for thousands of years.”
“Please, Violet,” Dodie said. “Thousands of years? Cavemen didn’t use scissors.”
“How do you know? You’re a model, not an archaeologist.”
Vail lifted his head. “Shut up,” he said, his voice deceptively calm. “Both of you. Shut. Up. Things are bad enough.”
My gaze dropped to the table, where our emptied plates were stacked.
I had told them about my trip to the hospital, about what Joan had found in the records.
I had told them about seeing Alice. I told them about Martin Peabody and the reason for the mark on my forehead, though I didn’t tell them what Martin had said to me in Joan’s office. I’d had enough shame for one day.
“So she spoke to you,” Dodie said, getting back to the subject. “Alice. Do they usually speak to you?”
My jaw tightened. Talking about this had cost me jobs, friendships, my marriage, and custody of my daughter.
It had won me a stay in a mental hospital.
I had trained myself over a lifetime never to speak aloud about what I saw, and talking about it now made a headache throb in my temples.
“No,” I managed. “They don’t speak. This is new. ”
“It’s changed,” Vail said. When I lifted my gaze, I saw he was staring at me with an intensity I couldn’t read. “It isn’t like it was when we were kids. Something has changed.”
“Ben came into my bed,” Dodie added. “That’s different, too, from my usual old nightmares. Why?”
Was it Sister? I was certain, now, that she had controlled Martin and the young man in the storage unit.
She had somehow had them do her bidding.
They had told me as much. Alice, with her warning, didn’t seem to be under the same control—but did Sister control everything in the house?
Was she controlling Ben? If she was, what could we do about it?
There was no dispelling Sister, no eliminating her.
Sister was permanent darkness. I might, if I was lucky, keep her away from my siblings.
“We have to think clearly for once,” I said.
It was hard to strategize in the house, which was why we were talking about this in a restaurant.
At least it was a deserted restaurant, with no one to overhear our insane conversation.
“We know now that Mom didn’t give birth to Ben.
We need to figure out who did give birth to him.
We have to find whoever it was, and if they didn’t give Ben up willingly—or even if they did—we have to tell them what happened. ”
“I keep coming back to the fact that our parents wouldn’t have stolen a baby,” Vail said. “Not because they had morals but because they didn’t want the kids they already had. Why would they steal a fourth one? Why would they go to the trouble?”
“I agree,” I said. “I think the baby was given to them or left to them somehow. Who would be so foolish as to give our parents a baby?”
“Mom didn’t have siblings,” Dodie said. She picked up a napkin and folded it into squares, her elegant fingers working. “Her parents were still alive when we were born, but they were both gone by the time Ben came.”
I had no memory of my mother’s father, but I had an image of my grandmother, a stern woman with a salon hairstyle and an unapproachable, vaguely angry air.
She had died of cancer, we were told. I had no idea what kind of cancer, which meant it was probably in an unmentionable body part.
How embarrassing, to die of a cancer that has to do with a breast, a vagina, or an ass.
Better never to speak of it, or her, again.
“Maybe our grandmother had a late baby,” I said. “Or maybe there was an illegitimate aunt or uncle. What about Dad’s side?”
Again, Dodie knew the answer. “His parents lived in California. He had a brother, but he always said he didn’t know what happened to him. He hadn’t seen his brother in years and didn’t know where he lived.”
“So Ben could have been the brother’s,” Vail said. He shrugged. “Or it was simpler than that. He could have been Dad’s.”
We looked at one another.
“It’s the explanation that makes the most sense,” I said.
The idea sat there, on the table in the middle of us, sitting on top of the messy plates, crumpled napkins, and pizza crusts.
I had no feeling about the idea of my father cheating on my mother, I discovered. No betrayal or outrage, not even sadness. No feeling at all.
“They hated each other.” Dodie’s voice was almost a whisper. She dropped her napkin to the table. “I don’t know why they even got married. It wasn’t because they were in love.”
For the first time, I thought about my parents as people younger than me. I tried to picture my father proposing, my mother saying yes. Had it been hopeful at one time? Had either of them thought it would work?
Both of them were good-looking, so maybe there had been an attraction and nothing else.
Mom’s family had money. Dad’s family, from what I could tell, were California dreamers with no money at all.
Somehow, Dad had twigged on to Mom’s healthy bank account and used his looks to do the rest. I didn’t even know how they met, and now I would never know.
I was conceived so close to the wedding that they’d probably fudged the dates. Dad had impregnated his meal ticket, thinking he’d won the lottery. That sounded like Dad. That he’d gotten careless years into a miserable marriage was not only possible, it was almost probable.
“Mom never said anything about it,” I said. “And she loved Ben.”
But the theory still fit. Mom never talked about anything unpleasant.
And Ben was an innocent baby, easy to love.
Maybe by then Mom hadn’t cared who Dad slept with.
Maybe she had someone else, too. Maybe she’d hated all of it, but the baby—that particular baby—had made it better. Not loving Ben wasn’t possible.
“We’re never going to know,” Dodie said.
“They left us with this mess, with all of these questions, and we can’t ask them anything.
And even if we could, they wouldn’t answer.
They were so good at that, weren’t they?
” She lifted her chin. For a second, I wondered if she was going to spiral, but her gaze was hard and focused instead of wild.
“What gets me is that none of it matters.” She lifted her hands.
“You live your whole life, and you feel all these things, you experience all these things. You learn things. And if you don’t tell anyone about it, it all just dies when you die.
What you know, your life, your experience, it dies when you do.
It’s all just—what? Electric impulses in your brain.
Your memory of your whole life from beginning to end is just vibrating brain cells, and when the brain cells stop vibrating, then it never happened. Don’t you ever think about that? I do.”
In the back of Petey’s, a phone rang. The teenager behind the counter picked it up reluctantly and took an order, reaching for a pen and writing with it, his expression annoyed.
“It’s like the photos of Pompeii,” Dodie continued.
“Skeletons in ash. When I see those pictures, I think of how those people knew things, felt things, thought things. They had memories and important information. Every secret thing they knew disappeared forever when the volcano erupted, and those are just the people we know about. Most people vanish so completely they don’t even leave bones. ”
“If you’re asking whether I wonder what the point of life is,” Vail said, “I think about it all the time.”
“So do I,” I said. “But not everything disappears forever. Not for everyone. Not every time.”
We exchanged a look. The things I saw—had always seen—were remnants of lives, for better or worse. The last traces of Dodie’s electric brain impulses, maybe. Or maybe they were something else.
“You should have called one of us,” Dodie said. “When they locked you up in that hospital. You should have called Vail or me. We would have come to get you out.”
I swallowed hard, remembering sitting in that room, thinking stupidly that it was the key to getting my daughter back.
I hadn’t called my siblings. Neither of them had known about the hospital until long after it was over and I was already out.
“They didn’t give me very many phone privileges,” I said.
“And they wouldn’t have released me. You wouldn’t have had the right paperwork. ”
Vail scowled. “Paperwork? You think I couldn’t have made the right paperwork and made it look real?”
“Easy peasy,” Dodie said.