24
Violet
Petey’s Pizza hadn’t changed since 1971. It still smelled like burnt mozzarella and sweat. The vinyl seats still stuck to the backs of your legs if you wore a skirt. The Coke was flat, the napkins felt like sandpaper, and no one really wanted to be there. There was a bored teenager behind the counter and old soda ads on the wall.
“One comes to Petey’s Pizza,” Dodie said, “for a certainambiance.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 screamsI thrifted this for fifty cents.”
Dodie waved a hand over my all-black outfit. “And yours saysI’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 staringat 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 whodidgive 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.”
