“Eddie?” At the voice, Edison relaxes and lets out a relieved laugh. His arm drops back to his side. I follow him to the threshold, and from here I can see right through the living room to the figure standing at the front door.
“Sades? What are you doing here?”
Immediately, I recognize her as the flower girl from the wedding album. She’s older now than she was in the pictures—at least thirteen. What the fuck is she doing here? Wearing a blue tank dress, her blond hair piled into a messy bun. She drops the bright purple backpack from her shoulder and launches herself at him, erupting with a sob.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right,” Edison whispers to her. “It’s all right.”
She’s small in his arms. A little damsel in distress wearing neon pink Converse sneakers. A knife tearing through the fabric of our perfect morning. She’s left the door open, heat and sunlight and insect buzzing filling up the house. Her presence invades every corner of the tidy home, and a tornado may as well have wrested its way inside.
At last, Edison draws back. He wipes at her tears with his thumb, and for the first time, I see the girl’s impossibly blue eyes. So starry and piercing they’re like a scream. They were downcast in the only photo I saw of her, hidden by her burden of blond lashes. But I see the resemblance now. It’s as though Sheila herself has just walked through the door.
I don’t move, and it’s a good thing Edison’s back is to me, because it takes a moment for me to wipe the stunned look off my face. The little interloper sees it, though, and her expression goes slack when she notices me standing in the doorway in Edison’s shirt.
Edison sees the girl’s confusion and remembers that I’m still here. By the time he’s turned to face me, I’m wearing a pleasant smile.
I already know what he’s going to say.
“Jade, this is Sadie. My stepdaughter.”
12
They have nicknames for each other: Eddie and Sades.
Sadie stopped crying when she realized she had an unwanted audience in me. I went into the bedroom to give them some time alone, but I left the door open and listened to every word they said. The acoustics in Edison’s open-concept house made this an easy task. This month is the anniversary of her dear mother’s death and she can’t take it at her father’s house. He’s too overbearing, positively obsessed with what she’s doing and whom she’s talking to. He won’t stop harping on her about taking summer classes to keep her grades up, and she had to be with family. Someone who understood. Edison. Her mother’s one true love.
Edison didn’t tell her he had to go to an AA meeting, I noticed. He only said he had to be at work early today—a contract installing a hot tub at a new development in town. And then he came to thebedroom to whisper an apology to me and say that he’d drive me back to my car and that he’d call me on his lunch break.
Sadie was on the couch with her iPad when I left. She was eating the scrambled eggs and potatoes I made, and drinking tap water out of her mother’shersmug. She didn’t look up when I made for the door, pretending to be too engrossed in the streaming show she was watching to notice me, but, oh, she knew I was there.
If the holy glowing ghost of Edison’s wife herself had burst through that door, it couldn’t have been worse than this. Sadie may not be a woman just yet, but she’s old enough to be smart. If Edison had a dim-witted stepson or a neighbor with a crush, I would know what to do. But a doting stepdaughter will see through the veils. She’ll want to protect him.
—
IRIS ISN’T HOME WHENI return to the condo, but Moody is on our shared laptop watching a cooking show and eating chocolate chip cookies right out of the bag. She senses my anxiety even before I’ve said anything and closes the laptop with a soft slam. “What happened? You slept with him?”
I hesitate, wishing Iris were here. I swear she invented Jade’s twin, Lisa, just to get out of the house. It’s been months since her last kill and she’s past the mopey phase and onto the energetic second wind she gets when it’s no longer her turn. Like she’s a kid out of school for the summer, gifted with more time than she knows what to do with.
But she’s also whom I’d rather talk to about this. Iris is uncomplicated about murder. She sees it practically and responsibly, the same way that I see the cleanup. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. Clean mark, clean kill, clean disposal.
Moody is messy and impulsive. If she thought we could get awaywith it, she’d drown every neighbor who lets his dog shit on our grass, follow home every soccer mom who cuts her off in traffic and hang her by the emergency release cord in the garage. Her violent mood swings are why Iris and I gifted her with her name. Long before our talk of murder, when we were only children, one never knew what to expect of her. She’s sloppy because she knows that I’m here to fix it. She’s hardly the one to turn to for advice about keeping things simple.
“Sis?”
“It’s nothing,” I say.
“Bullshit, it’s nothing. Sit down.” She throws the bag of cookies at me, and I just barely catch it. “Have a snack. Tell me what’s up.”
“Promise not to get dictatorial,” I say. She only smirks at me. I slump into the ratty armchair. “Edison may not be as alone as I thought.”
“Ex-girlfriend?” Moody guesses. “Cunty sister?” At my grim expression, she begins to look concerned.
“Stepdaughter,” I say.
“Oh. Fuck. How old?”
“Thirteen.”
“I thought his wife was dead. Why is her kid still coming around?”
