“Edison,” I whisper. I want him to look at me. I want to see his eyes. But he buries his face into the curl of my throat as he fumbles with the button of my denim shorts.
I ease back, and when he still won’t look up, I grab his wrists to stop him. He notices immediately and murmurs, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I keep my voice gentle. “Look at me.”
At last, he does. That pitiful look is still in his eyes. He’s mourning the woman tucked away in those photo albums, and he’s drunk. If we do this now, he’ll hate himself in the morning when he sobers up. He’ll think he betrayed his dead love, and he won’t want to see meagain, because no matter what I do, there’s just no way to compete with a ghost.
No. That is not our story. I’ll make him fall in love with me slowly, with guitar strums and soft kisses. I’ll cook him dinner and make sure he goes to his AA meetings, and tell him how proud I am of him. I’ll be the living force, the light, the salvation that fills up a house that was once a tomb.
I reach up to give him the lightest, gentlest kiss. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I say.
My body is ablaze with protest, but I guide his hands away from my jeans and I sit up, forcing him to come up with me.
He stares straight ahead at the liquid gleaming in the bottles on the coffee table, and I think he might cry, but he only says, “What am I doing, Jade?”
I wrap my arm around his back, tuck my chin up on his shoulder. It’s a sweet gesture. I’m patient. I care more about his cracked heart than my own needs. I am not a one-night stand. I am his one love, and we were brought together by fate. Call it God if you like.
He tilts his head against mine, and we sit like that for a long time, until the lust is gone and there’s something new forming in its place. Right now, it’s a fragile stem—our love—but soon it will be towering and great and impossible to escape.
8
An opportunity has been gifted to me. I help Edison down the hall and into bed. I won’t get a good look at the bedroom tonight because I don’t want to turn on the light and wake him. If he comes out of his drunken haze, he might regain enough sense to ask me to go home, and I’d lose this rare opportunity to be alone with unfettered access to his things.
He’s pliable and trusting as I guide him onto the mattress and draw the comforter up to his shoulders. I position him on his side. I’ll leave the door open just in case he calls out.
“Good night,” I whisper, and lean in to kiss his forehead.
He grasps my wrist, and when I look at him, his eyes are open and they catch the scant light coming from down the hall. A tired smile spreads across his lips, and he’s still smiling when his eyes close and his hand falls slack.
Affection blooms in my heart for him. My sweet broken thing.
It’s a small house, but perfect for a young married couple. If there were ever any family photos on the wall, they’re gone now. The hallway bears the generic scenic photography one would find in a waiting room. Landscapes, mountain ranges, cacti against the setting sun.
There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. Edison isn’t a decorator. Rather, his passion is in the structure of the house itself. The living room is outfitted with antique wooden beams that surely aren’t original to the house. The floors are aged hardwood, polished dark. The kitchen has brick walls, each one of them distressed and discolored. Edison rescued them from a demolished building. He picked them up one by one and decided they were beautiful.
But Sheila is still here too. She liked lace, it would seem. A lace-trimmed towel draped over the stove handle, and a lace-trimmed oven mitt—teal blue—shining out against the warm kitchen colors from where it hangs on a hook by the sink.
I pour out the bottles of Jack and I take them to the recycling bin in the garage. In the morning, he won’t want to see them. They’ll only embarrass him, and I can’t have him associating any of those uncomfortable feelings with my presence. Instead, they’ll be out of sight and out of mind until later in the week when he’s taking the recycling to the curb. He’ll see the bottles, empty and neatly placed, and think how sweet it was for me to clean them up and not say a word about it. I will be a tomb to his secrets, and I’ll never judge him. I will be everything he was looking for that day he walked into the diner. The only one who could ever love him the way that he needs.
When Edison has been asleep for a while and I’m positive he won’t wake up, I crouch by the bookshelf and peel one photo album away from the others. I’ll put it back exactly where it was, between a serial romance novel and a hardcover photography book of scenic Japan.
All the photos are square-shaped, some of them heavily filtered, and I know these came from Sheila’s Instagram because this is not how Edison sees the world. Looking around his house taught me that he sees things simply, as they are. He doesn’t embellish, and he only lingers on details to enhance their natural shine, not filter them with too-bright colors.
I can’t pull out my phone and search for Sheila’s profile because I am always careful about my search history. But she was thoughtful enough to compile her life story for me, a gift to the next woman who will take care of the man she so loved.
I carefully turn the pages of their early life together. They were married on a beach on an overcast day, holding hands beneath a floral trellis while a minister fed them their vows. He wore dress shoes, and she was barefoot in a short white dress and a crown of flowers.
To my great relief, Sheila looks nothing like me. Taking the place of a dead spouse would be far more trouble than I’d hoped for, particularly if Edison had a type. Sheila is much shorter than him, whereas I come up past his shoulder. Her hair is pale blond and curly, and she has bright eyes that make her look just like a doll.
My own hair is dark and stubbornly wavy. My sisters and I maintain our identical appearance, and since this is my kill, I got to pick how we would look—right down to the nail polish we’d wear. When Moody gets her way, she always makes us dye it blond, or once, a pale blue that never fully set and stained our pillowcases for months.
Sheila was wrong for Edison. Too pristine, too virtuous. From her pictures alone I can tell what sort of person she was. She was sober for five years, and she judged him for it. When he told her that he was exhausted or that he was hurting, she didn’t listen to him. She didn’t tell him to put his feet up or hold him or bring him a mug of tea. She dragged him out for morning runs, and to pottery classes, and out todinner with friends. Distraction is its own addiction, and that’s what their love was.
When she died, suddenly he had no one to tell him what to do with his time between all those church visits, and now he’s starting to break again. I’ve come just at the perfect time.
Once I replace the wedding album, I reach for a new one. The first several pages are travel photos. An airplane wing against the clouds. Two entwined hands with wedding rings on the armrest. Sheila gazing wistfully into the distance within a beam of window light. A blurry shot of Edison adjusting his cuff.
I look through all six of the albums, but I learn too much about Sheila and nothing about Edison. Sheila was all about appearances. She took only the pretty moments, and she and Edison existed in a vacuum. There are no shots of family or friends, not even at her wedding. There is one shot of her flower girl: a blond preteen with dark eyelashes staring down at a satin pillow with two rings on it.
