After I’ve wiped my fingerprints and put the final album back in its place, I go back to exploring. Two bathrooms, one decorated to impress guests—black and gold cloth roses, a satin shower curtain—and one that looks more lived-in. I step into the latter and close the door, turning the knob to make as little noise as possible.
It’s less impressive, with pale blue walls, no windows, and a glass shower door. This is the one Edison uses. I slide the glass door on its track, and when I step inside the stall, I can smell him. The faint damp of his last shower, an uncapped bottle of shampoo that fills the tiny space with a cologne scent.
This is where he’s alone. Completely alone.
I feel dizzy with the love I have for him. Moody and Iris have never felt this, because if they understood this force pulsing though my arteries and veins, they wouldn’t have told me to go find someoneelse. Yes, Edison is broken, but he was given to me. Someone carried him and nurtured him and birthed him out into this world for me to find.
From down the hallway I hear the creak of a door, then the shuffle of bare feet on the hardwood. I ease out of the shower. I flush the toilet and run the sink.
“Jade?” Edison’s voice is soft. When I open the door, he stares back at me in a twilight, his face pale. “You’re still here.”
“Of course I am,” I say. His expression is unreadable. I don’t know how much of this he’ll remember tomorrow, but in whatever memories he does have of me, I’ll be speaking and touching him with great care. “I want to make sure you’re all right.”
He rushes past me to vomit in the toilet. I kneel beside him, rub his back. He murmurs something about not being able to drink like he used to. I don’t say anything. I have plenty of experience taking care of someone in this state. Another sort of mess I’ve learned how to clean.
At thirteen, I exhausted Elaine’s good graces and it was with great sorrow that she told me, “I just can’t have you in this house anymore.”
I became a ward of the state once again, but what should have been one of the worst days of my life was one of the best, because I was dumped into the same group home as Moody. We collapsed into each other’s arms and we were inseparable for nearly a year, until she was shipped off to a home for troubled teens when she stabbed one of the boys with a ballpoint pen. Nobody bothered to ask her why she’d done it, what he’d tried—unsuccessfully—to do to her when he thought she was asleep.
For two years, I cycled through group homes and temporary placements. For a few months, at age fifteen, I was lucky enough to be within two miles of Iris, who never let me see where she was living but would meet me at my bedroom window every night. We would walk the sameblock over and over until the sun came up, just grateful for each other’s company. No matter where I lived in those transitory years, I didn’t bother to unpack. I barely spoke—there was no point. The revolving door of faces, some kind and others cruel, meant nothing to me.
I was returned to Elaine when I was sixteen. She ran into me by chance outside the grocery store where I had a summer job gathering carts and stocking shelves, and she asked me how I’d been. I looked like shit. My hair was stringy; I was the skinniest I’d ever been; there was a bruise on my arm the size of a baseball.
“Oh, honey,” she’d said. She hugged me so gently, as though I might crumble and break. When she couldn’t see my face, I closed my eyes and breathed in the familiar smell of her, like fresh-baked cinnamon bread and dish soap. Her guilt at giving me up had been plaguing her, even though I couldn’t blame her for getting rid of me. But in the time since I’d been away, my elder foster brother, Colin, had become an alcoholic and graduated to cocaine. I liked him. He made me laugh, and he had a good heart even if he cursed like a trucker.
I’d always gotten along with him, and Elaine wanted to take me back on the condition that I’d keep an eye on him. Six months later, when he ODed in the bathtub, I’d be the one to find him, so I suppose her instincts were correct. Pulling him out of the water and doing what the 911 operator instructed me to do was a blur, but somehow he survived.
I was the only one Colin talked to most of the time, because I didn’t yell at him to get help and I’d give him whatever money I had when he asked.
I nursed Colin through countless withdrawals, and I learned that the worst thing you can do is talk. All he ever wanted was a cold cloth for his face and to not be judged. “You’re looking rough, kiddo,” I used to tell him, and for some reason it always made him smile.
I don’t talk about my time with Elaine, but especially not Colin. After all my sisters have done for me, it would kill them to know how much I love those outsiders. It would kill them to know that when Colin referred to me as his sister, I never corrected him. But even so, I carry everything I’ve learned from my time with them, and Edison’s state right now is nothing I can’t handle.
When Edison is done being sick, I wipe his face with a damp cloth and guide him back to bed. I turn for the door, but he grabs my wrist. His skin is clammy and hot. “Don’t let me get behind the wheel,” he slurs, barely conscious. “Don’t let me go over there.”
“Where?” I ask, gentle like the guardian angel he’s imagining I am in this moment.
“I’ll kill him,” he whispers, his eyes dark and sad. “I’ll do it.”
My heart flutters desperately. He is giving me a secret he would never confess if he were in his right mind, and already I’m losing him to sleep.Stay with me, I want to beg him.Tell me what’s hurting you. Tell me what’s in that head of yours.But all I say is “Who?”
Edison doesn’t answer me with words. A visceral hatred paints his face, and I have never seen anything so ugly and so beautiful. His sweetness and innocence are gone, revealing something I know as intimately as myself, because I have it too.
“Don’t let me,” he says. “Promise me.”
I sweep my knuckles against his forehead. “I promise,” I say. “I’m here. I’ve got you.”
He’s asleep as soon as the words are said, and I stand watching him in the shadows of his room for a long time. When I finally leave him, I curl up on the couch in the living room and I listen to the sound of him breathing.
I dream that I’m in his lungs. Endless blooms of red and black throbbing with the force of every breath.
It’s the quiet that wakes me in the morning. No TV forever murmuring down in the living room, no throbbing music from the wall I share with Dara and Tim. Instead, there’s the softwhooshand then the trickle of coffee being poured out.
Edison emerges from the kitchen, his damp curls backlit by the morning sun. He’s wearing a fitted gray shirt and black boxers, and he smells like coffee grounds and freshly showered skin.
“Hey,” he says, and at his contrite expression I go soft. He is so beautiful. Shadows stretch across the lean muscles of his arms. Last night, I only got a taste of what it was like to be held by him, and already I’m aching for more.In time,I tell myself.
More intriguing than the physical are the words he muttered when I brought him back to bed. There’s someone out there he wants to destroy. Left uninhibited, in a world without laws, he would. I could teach him how to get away with it. I could show him how to clean up and secure an alibi.
