I shake my head. “I’ve moved around a lot.” I’ve been finding little ways to tell Edison the truth even as I lie to him. “California is where I was born, but I’ve never really felt at home there. I’m not sure how long I’ll be here.” I can’t tell him outright that I’ll be staying here for the next six months. For all the passion brewing between us, we haven’t known each other a week, and I can’t go scaring him off with talk of moving in and taking his dead wife’s place. Not yet.
He’s still looking at my face, a slight smile on his lips, a bit of strawberry ice cream in the crease. He’s got a square jaw and a permanent five-o’clock shadow, but in glimpses like these I can see how he must have once looked as a little boy, inordinately vulnerable and sweet. His mother was gone and his father didn’t love him enough, and there he was, looking for someone to come along and be his home.
I have a thought I shouldn’t: Edison and me as children. I see him on the playground down the block from one of my first group homes. My sisters have just been taken away, and I can see that he’s lonely too. Children don’t say as much, but they can smell emotions likebloodhounds. They can see misery, see loss at such a level that it frightens the words right out of them. I see his gentle brown eyes and he sees the dried tears on my cheeks, and we know before we’ve even approached that we’ve just saved each other.
I could have loved that Edison forever. We could have spared each other a lifetime of searching. Rather than shyly getting to know each other through songs and drunken late-night confessions, we would be well past needing to say anything at all by now.
But I will never have a lifetime with Edison, and Edison will never have any kind of a lifetime at all. I reach out and touch the drop of strawberry ice cream with my thumb, capturing it and bringing it to my own mouth for a taste of him.
“Jade,” he says, “I—”
“Thereyou are,” a voice calls through the waning crowd, and I go rigid. It’s dark out now, the sun replaced by the neon floodlights set up around us. But when I turn my head, I recognize the figure sprinting toward us even though her face is in the shadows. Her long dark ponytail bounces from shoulder to shoulder, the exact same length as my own, which is wound into a loose bun.
Edison doesn’t understand what’s happening until Iris comes into the light, and he sees a face that’s identical to my own.
“Hey,” Iris says, out of breath from her jog. She’s faking it. I’ve seen her run ten miles at a time on the treadmill while belting out the lyrics of whatever she’s playing on her headphones. She wants to look vulnerable, endearing. She’s wearing a baggy gray T-shirt. This is deliberate. She’s letting me be the beautiful one, in my formfitting sundress—white with little strawberry buds.
Half a dozen people are killed by carnival rides every year. If I shove Iris at the Tilt-A-Whirl, maybe I’ll get lucky and a stray foot will knock her head off.
“Sorry to interrupt.” Iris flashes a brilliant smile and holds her hand out to Edison. He stands as he takes it, ever the gentleman. Rage burns in me as I watch her manicured little fingers coil around his broad palm. “I’m Jade’s sister, but you probably guessed.” She gives a flirtatious laugh. “I’m Lisa.”
Lisa Canter. A name on one of the random unused IDs in our pile. Colin made them up for me the last time I saw him because he owed me more than one favor. Iris is wearing a plain wedding band. A nice touch to say she’s off the market, and to make it easier for Edison to tell us apart. We learned little tricks like that when we needed to distinguish ourselves from one another—clip-on earrings, necklaces, rings—because even our foster parents couldn’t tell us apart. Besides which, jewelry can be exchanged. I slip on that ring and just like that we’ll have traded places.
Colin couldn’t tell Moody from Iris, but he always knew me, because I’d spent so many years drifting in and out of his house. We were both the problem children in an otherwise perfect family. Joking together in the pews until Elaine hissed at us, which only made it that much harder not to laugh. And then later, scraping him up from the bathroom floor and dragging him to bed so he could come down. “Your sisters are psychopaths,” he murmured in his delirium on one such night, shaking with withdrawal. This was years before we ever killed anyone, or did more than fantasize about it, but maybe he always saw something. I drew up my knees and told him I was a psychopath too. “Yeah, but I like you.” He’d reached for my hand before he fell into an unreachable sleep.
Edison will come to know me. No one can love him like me, touch him like me.
“You said you had sisters, but you didn’t tell me you were a twin,” Edison says, looking at me. “I thought you said they were both older.”
“Oh, I am older,” Iris says. “By about a minute or two.” She lets go of him, her eyes on me as she does it. There’s not a drop of triumph in her gaze, but I know that’s part of the act. We didn’t talk about this. We didn’t plan this. I am getting too defiant, she’s telling me. Too unpredictable. “Jade, I came to get the car keys. I need to run to the store.” The fucking store. “You don’t mind riding the bike home, do you?”
There was a rusted ten-speed left behind by a previous tenant in the laundry room. I assume Iris cleared the cobwebs off the seat before parking herself atop it.
“Of course not,” I say, all smiles. The Tilt-A-Whirl is only a few yards away.
“You’re the sweetest,” she tells me. Her eyes change when she looks at Edison, like she’s appraising him. He isn’t her type. She likes the gym rats, sexually charged and handsy. The ones who can wrap her waist in their hands and twirl her around. They’re nothing like any of the men she used to date, and in stark contrast to the guidance counselor who was her first kill. She isn’t attracted to them and she says the sex is terrible, but the behemoths are more of a challenge.
She stays only a minute longer, to tell Edison she’s charmed to have met him and crack a joke about him not keeping me out too late. “Just text me if you’re not going to be coming home,” she says, and only I would recognize the edge in her tone.
I watch her walk away, swinging her hips in a faded pair of black leggings, and all I can think is that she touched him. She touched my Edison with the same hand she used to make her last kill. She wounded herself on the garrote and I made her let me treat it, because if it got infected, we couldn’t very well go to a doctor after a man she was associated with had just been murdered. She sat on the toilet lid while I hunched over the sink, flushing it with antibacterial soap,patting it dry, and then plastering a clear bandage over it. Both of us entirely trusting, knowing we had it in us to kill a man twice our size, but that we’d sooner die than let any harm come to each other.
The betrayal cuts deeper than any salve could heal.
Edison is careful about how he lays the bike in his trunk, even though the bike is fit for a scrapyard. He wants to take me somewhere for dinner, but I tell him I’m getting a migraine so that he’ll take me home and won’t try to follow me inside.
My anger is a poison that muffles the world. I barely hear what Edison is saying as he drives, barely hear myself giving him the directions. It’s a bit early to be telling him where I live—he might show up unexpectedly—but it would be more suspicious if I refused when he insisted on giving me a ride. He doesn’t want me to take my bike five miles in the dark. It’s a crazy world and you never know what’s out there at night, he tells me. Last week a man went missing when his truck was found abandoned on the side of the road.
10
It takes a week for me to forgive Iris, and even then, it’s only in the interest of keeping things uncomplicated. Moody is ever the peacemaker, and she points out that Lisa can be a helpful addition to my mission if I allow it. I know that I’m being selfish. I don’t want to share Edison at all, but I can’t come out and say as much, emotional thing that I am. If my sisters knew I was dreaming up little fantasies of a future with Edison, they would stop everything right now. End our lease, pack up the car, drag me someplace far from here, like Minnesota. Or Dubai.
I can’t have that.Focus on the positives, Sissy.I brush my teeth in the morning and regard my rumpled reflection. I have six months with Edison. Six delicious, glorious months, and the best is yet to come. At the end of our first month together, he’ll realize he loves me. He’ll tell me, but I won’t return his feelings. I’ll make him wait. I’ll come to his house in the middle of the night—maybe I’ll be crying,or my car will have broken down and my phone will be dead. Vulnerable, helpless, I’ll rush to him and he’ll save me, and that’s when I’ll confess that I love him too. We’ll tumble into bed and it will be everything I’ve waited my whole life for.
I haven’t seen him since that evening at the fair, and sometimes I don’t reply to his texts just to see how long it will take him to send another.
Last night, I called him when I knew he’d already be in bed. He was dozing, and his voice was warm like a mug of tea and honey. I asked him when his next meeting was. I told him I was proud of him for being strong. He laughed, a slow humming sound. “Where did you come from?” he asked, his voice starting to fade. I knew he’d fallen asleep by the way he breathed, and I lay in bed listening to him for a long while, until I heard one of my sisters coming up the stairs.
This morning, I’m choosing to be happy. Edison texted me good morning, there’s a church cookout on the Fourth of July and would I like to go? Of course. Three smiley emojis. I’m jubilant. Sick with anticipation because Thursday is four days away and I’ll get to kiss him again, get to feel him slipping his hands under my shirt the way he does when he holds me for long seconds.
