I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking, but I liked Moody’s thought more than anything I could have come up with myself. In my delirium it seemed romantic, grasping their greasy over-gelled hair and cutting their throats with my knife because they’d hurt my sister. I didn’t want anyone to touch Moody or Iris. I hated everyone who had torn us apart, every schoolyard bully who made fun of our clothes, our unwashed hair. Every timid social worker who didn’t fight to keep us together.
The romance turned to anger, and the anger circled back around to the love I had for them. A love that strangled me and cut me deep.
“I would kill them,” I agreed as we watched the boys laugh and nudge each other. Moody had a hunger in her eyes, and I felt it too. I squeezed myself closer to her, so close that it was like we were the same person with the same thoughts. “I’d kill anyone for you.”
—
I LOVE THE DESERT—who knew? Rainwood is an ironic name, considering the air is impossibly dry, and seeing a tree is a rare event outhere. Every city block is like a blank page made of sand and sky. Then the rides of the town fair emerge like simple ink lines against a blue canvas. If I’d grown up in the desert, I would have been an artist. A writer. With so much space around me, I’m constantly dreaming of all the ways I could fill it up.
Edison finds me after I’ve parked my car and made it to the entrance at the chain-link fence that borders the fair. When I’m close, he takes a step to bridge the space between us, and he reaches for my hands. “Hey.”
His eyes have changed, and right away I know that I handled everything perfectly the night before. He was worried that he’d scared me away, or worse, that I would judge him, but I’m still here. He looks at me now in a way that he didn’t before last night, and when he catches me searching his gaze, I kiss him.We’ve found each other, my kiss says.It’s all right now.
I wait until we’re through the gate before I ask, “How was your meeting?”
He smiles at his shoes, scratches at the back of his head. “Coffee and sob stories.” He looks at me. “By which I mean I was the one sobbing.” I laugh, and the gratifying expression he gives me is a gift. “Thank you,” he says. “For this morning, and last night.”
Don’t let him wallow, I remind myself. There’s a thin line before he starts to associate me with his cathartic confessions and sees me as a sister or a friend. But it’s an act of great restraint for me not to ask him.Tell me everything, something within me is begging him. I want to see every sharp angle of his pain. The day he found out his wife was gone, and their dreams dead with her. Every woman from that church to come by with food and smiles and love. I want to climb inside his head and watch his memories playing out all around me. Hundreds of Edisons, all the different timbres of his voice.
“Are you close to your family?” I ask, because it’s something I can learn about him instead. “Parents? Siblings?”
“No siblings,” he says. “My mother died when I was young.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he shakes his head because he’s heard this a million times.
“I don’t remember her. I was a baby,” he says. “And my father. He’s... around. We don’t really keep in touch.”
He’s alone, like I was whenever Moody and Iris had been torn from me. I want to tell him this.I was left in a stroller at a rest stop, and whoever put me there never came back.
My parents abandoned me, but I have my sisters. Moody and Iris are a religion, a sanctuary from the storm.
I weave my fingers between Edison’s and draw him closer. All he had was a church and pictures of his dead wife, but now he has me. I’ll be his faith, his sanctuary, the arteries that encase his lonely heart.
When we walk, he rests his hand on the small of my back. I think of the beauty in his eyes as sleep began to take him last night. That delicious, fearsome rage when he murmured about killing someone.Who was it?I look at him now, his face guarded, pleasant.Who hurt you?
I don’t ask him. Not yet. I could fill this entire fair with all the things I wish to know about him.
We spend the afternoon burning in the Arizona sun, laughing, kissing in shy bursts as we wait in the line for the merry-go-round. He moves forward and surprises me with a kiss to my forehead. His lips linger and his arms cross around my back. I lean into him, inhaling the sunlight and heat in the soft cotton of his shirt.
In answer, I tuck my head in the slope of his neck and leave a trail of kisses there. The line has started to move, and we shuffle forward, still locked together.I’ve found you. It’s okay.I kiss his flushed skin again, and electricity moves through me. I’ve never been held likethis. Grabbed, yes. Groped in cars because I needed money or a ride. Kissed clumsily in empty hallways of my high school, and behind the restaurant where my boyfriend worked a few years ago, right before Iris made her first kill—her old guidance counselor turned secret lover because he was forty-something and married—and we had to skip town.
I was angry with Iris when she did it. I’d planned to give my boyfriend my virginity that weekend while his parents were away, but then I got the frantic phone call saying they needed my help. We left town just as soon as we’d cleaned up. That was the night that changed everything for all of us. The night we all forfeited any chance of having a normal relationship with a lover, and became murderers instead.
I’m grateful for Iris’s poor timing now, grateful for the six years I’ve spent hopping from town to town, cleaning up my sisters’ messes, because it led me here.
We spend our first day together, Edison and I, and we never run out of things to talk about. We’re sitting on a picnic bench, eating ice-cream cones, when the sky turns gold and then deep gray with early evening. The air has cooled, but my skin is pink and hot from the afternoon in the sun.
I look at Edison, who is staring straight ahead at the Ferris wheel turning lazily against the horizon. He has the most beautiful throat. Despite the stubble at his chin, he keeps his neck entirely smooth. Muscles hint below the skin like ripples on a calm sea. His Adam’s apple swims within him as he breathes.
When I kill him, it won’t be like Iris, who leaves a sharp red line across her lovers’ throats, their eyes red and bulging as they stare into the hereafter with tears on their cheeks. Or like Moody, who destroys them by tearing into their vital veins, making the cleanup a living hell.
Edison is too lovely for that. I’ll kill him gently, kill him slow. I’ve thought of giving him something to take the edge off, but that isn’t right. I want him fully with me when I do it. We’ll be in bed, our bodies warm and spent, sweat at the line where our hair meets the backs of our necks. The air will smell like us, and we’ll be drowning, delirious with love. When I climb on top of him, he’ll reach for me, smiling lazily. What I’ll know, and what he will soon learn, is that we’ve already been together for the last time.
“Jade?” Edison’s voice brings me out of his bed and back to the fair. I slap at a mosquito that’s sucking on my shoulder.
“Yeah?” I look at him, and I realize he must have been trying to get my attention for a while.Stop daydreaming, Sissy. Pay attention.
“I just asked if you’ve been to Arizona before.”
