They marry in the autumn of Violet’s senior year, though Violet’s insistence on graduating is so vehement that her husband has no choice but to acquiesce. It is Deb’s one spark of hope that Violet might still, perhaps, shed domestic life like a too-tight skin.
Their parents throw Violet a lavish graduation party. The doors of the estate are thrown open, the spring breezes grass-scented and carrying the last vestiges of winter chill. Deb gifts Violet Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James R. Newman.
“Sorry, I started reading it,” Deb tells Violet as her sister changes from cap and gown to a party dress. “Did you know there’s a number called a googolplex? Ten to the power of a googol which is a hundred digits long! It’s the largest definite number anyone’s written down.”
“That’s silly,” her sister says, smoothing her dress repeatedly. “Add another zero and you’ve already beaten it.”
Deb frowns. Her sister stares at herself in the mirror, swinging her hips this way and that. She’s never known Violet to be vain—she hasn’t needed to be. She is the kind of simple, natural beauty that requires zero bells and whistles. Enviable, if Deb cared about that kind of thing.
“Come here,” Violet tells Deb. She grabs Deb’s hand and places it across her belly. “It’s still early days so you can’t say anything. I haven’t even told Mother. But say hello to your little niece or nephew.”
It is as if Deb has been plunged in ice water. She fights the urge to snatch her hand away. “Oh,” she says. “That’s—that’s marvelous.” Her smile is a tight line across her face, a long, long line of zeros.
Violet pretends, too, giving her sister a big hug. “You’ll be the best Aunt,” she murmurs, her lips pressed into a kiss atop Deb’s head.
Deb remembers wishing this secret felt like the hundreds she’d shared with Violet for so many years: private, alimental, like fertilizer. Deb is a sunflower, her sister the sun; Deb has soaked her in since she was young enough to know what it was to adore something completely, to always follow its light.
What is she to do when, with each subsequent birth, Violet’s light fades more and more?
At first, everybody is celebratory. Jocular, even. “My, you two have been busy,” her mother says, poking Violet’s belly after she tells the family their happy news only a few months after she gives birth to Sunny.
Then after Charlotte, John is born in the same calendar year. Six weeks later, she’s pregnant again with the twins.
“Blessed,” Violet’s mother-in-law calls Violet at the baby shower she throws for the couple since they will need double of everything.
Violet is a hot air balloon amid paper wrappings and pink and blue ribbons. Her face is red and puffy, and she declines a piece of cake. “I can hardly fit anything else in there,” she laughs. She gets up to use the restroom. When she walks, it is more lateral than linear. Even with Violet’s notorious self-control, her face belies her pain.
She still has another three months to go.
When the doctor puts Violet on bedrest, she moves temporarily back home so her parents and siblings can help keep an eye on her. A little bell summons someone to Violet’s bedside whenever she needs a snack or to use the restroom. She grunts her apologies, leaning heavily on her mother or one of her sisters as they finagle her to the toilet. “Think nothing of it,” their mother coos. Deb can’t think of a time her mother has seemed so motherly than when she is tending to Violet, pushing her hair off her sweating forehead or lifting her by her armpits and hugging her to her chest so someone can change the bedsheets one side at a time. Perhaps it’s the result of some kind of motherhood squared, a mother helping her child become a mother.
When Deb visits Violet with stacks of textbooks on Latin, botany, and geometry, their mother tries to shoo her away.
“Is that Deborah? No, Mother, I’m fine. I’m fine! Let her in.”
Their mother gives Deb a stern look, as if Deb is doing something wrong. She checks that the bell is within Violet’s reach. “If you need anything—” she says, pointing at the bell then turning to leave.
“I can look after her for a few minutes,” Deb mutters, slipping the textbooks onto the side table. It doesn’t take becoming a mother to care for someone.
“Ah, you’ve brought me a little light reading,” her sister jokes. Her face is sallow and waxy, and her ankles are two potatoes at the ends of her legs. Veins distend upward, green and spidery. When Violet catches Deb staring, she covers her legs with a blanket and blushes. “Pregnancy isn’t for the faint-hearted. Or the vain.” She tries to laugh, but the sound is too tender and breaks.
Deb makes a face. “Of course you’re beautiful. Don’t be boring.” She sets the books on a side table and slides into the bed beside her sister. “I’m worried about you.”
Violet puts her head on Deb’s shoulder and sighs. “You’re growing up.”
“I should think so. I’m moving to Smith in a week.”
“Hmm,” Violet says, her eyes drooping. “You’ll do great things, Deborah. I just know it.”
Deb doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t say anything. Oddly, she can’t explain why, it feels as if the sisters are saying goodbye.
Violet’s weight presses heavily onto Deb, and her breathing evens out and deepens. Deb stays still, so still, afraid that even a fraction of a movement will shatter the rest her sister so desperately needs. When Violet shifts to her side twenty minutes later—a warm spot of drool dotting Deb’s shoulder, her arm tingling painfully—Deb covers her sister with a blanket and grabs the textbooks off the nightstand.
What she hadn’t come to expect is her love for the children. Kids have always been a bore to Deb, which makes sense coming from the youngest child. She’d never grown up around other, younger children, not really, and the idea of a bunch of little calamitous hands around her experiments made her sweat.
But it turns out her niece and nephews are incredible.
Sunny loves plants, and especially enjoys feeding Benedict, Deb’s pet Venus fly trap. He helps Deb catch crickets in the fields behind the estate. She instructs him how to scoop the crickets into the small cave of his palms, allowing a sliver of light and air to reach the wild, ricocheting creature without releasing—or squashing—it. “I’ll give you a penny for each one you catch,” Deb says, though she is certain that Sunny would do it for the sheer, shrieking joy of it.
John is a quiet copy of his mother. Tow-headed and serious, studious, a rule-follower even at one year old. He is the one for whom Deb has brought the books. He flips through the pages, taking in the carefully sketched botany drawings and listening contentedly as Deb reads stories in Latin, the language soothing and rhythmic in its antiquity. His fingers are pudgy, clumsy, and sometimes tear the pages, and though it makes Deb cringe internally, she gently pries his fingers from the page and hooks them around her own, never reacting, never scolding, never even breaking the steady hum of the story. Sometimes, much to Deb’s delight, he babbles in something that sounds like language—a question, a comment—and Deb babbles right back.
But best of all is Charlotte, her two-year-old niece. She is spit-fire and spunky, a terror to anything fragile or private. Nothing is off-limits to Charlotte. If a door is closed, she finds a way to open it. If a bag is sealed, she tears at it with her tiny fists until whatever is concealed—flour, potting soil, desiccated beetles that Deb feeds to Benedict in the winter—is in her hands, available for poking, prodding, and tasting. She can never sit still. From room to room she toddles, climbing on furniture if something is unreachably high, peering into vases and bowls, digging at the contents of her grandfather’s pipe until her fingers stain brown. “Charlotte, get down. Do you have to get into everything?” Violet says sometimes a dozen times a day.
“Oh, lighten up,” Deb tells Violet. “She’s just curious.”
“She doesn’t listen,” Violet complains. “She’s feral!”
“You might be right,” Deb laughs, swooping Charlotte off a bookshelf that she’s using as a ladder. “She’s a scientist. And the world is one big experiment.” Charlotte reaches earnestly for a book on the shelf which Deb gives her. It’s Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart. “Oh, good choice,” Deb says, then dodges the book when Charlotte throws it at her. She tosses the child into the air to her squealing delight. “You’re going to change the world, naughty kitten.”
“For better or worse?” Violet grumbles.
“Yes,” Deb says with a wink, then trundles Charlotte off to her crib for a nap.
The twins end up coming eight weeks early in a sea of blood in the middle of the night. They slip from Violet as easily as water, their mother an inlet, salted and still, her babes two silent dripping puddles. It takes violent hands—two compressing Violet’s chest, another few pairs slapping sense into the babes—for the room to erupt in noise and color, the shouts of nurses for warm towels, the doctor calling for drugs to be added to the drip, the machines beeping Violet’s erratic, pulsing heartbeat.
“A placental abruption,” the doctor explains to the family later. “She lost a lot of blood and needed a transfusion. We’re incredibly lucky that everyone is still alive.”
“What are they, Doctor?” Violet’s husband asks.
Deb’s brow furrows in confusion. Humans, you nitwit, she wants to say.
“Boys. Two healthy baby boys, or they will be in a few months’ time.”
Violet’s husband beams.
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Wonderfully urgent writing. Beautifully written. Can't wait for the next.....