I wanted to ask Dara how she knew Tim was the one. That was part of why I came over here. What did she see in that scrawny blond boy that ignited so much passion in her? I’ve seen the way they kiss. At the church picnic, during the fireworks, she grabbed at him like he was a life raft in a violent storm.
But now I realize that he lured her in slowly. He plied her with promises and nice words. He got her far away from her family. He puts on a suit and tie and tells her that one day he’ll buy her the house she’s dreamed of. She has given him all the love she should be dispersing to the others in her life, because he’s taken the others away.
“My advice, you’re on the right track,” Dara says. “His step-kidwill come around for a while because he makes her feel close to her mom. But she’ll move on. Find some friends in high school and realize it’s fucking weird to keep hanging around her ex-stepdad. All you have to do is show Edison you’re okay with it.”
It usually sets me on edge when other women say his name, but not Dara. She handles it with all the care it deserves. She knows what he means to me.
She’s down to the end of her cigarette, and when she sets it in the ashtray, her eyelids are drooping. She coils the blanket around herself and leans back against the cushion. “I only took half a pill, but these things make me so damn tired.” She yawns.
I watch her fall asleep. Her arm goes slack, wounded wrist splayed out beside her on the couch. Awake and active, she’s a force. Lovely and bubbly with a mouth like a trucker. But here and now she’s small. Like a lost kitten. Or a baby left abandoned in a stroller at a rest stop.
I take the ashtray and scrape the contents out in the trash, refill the empty glass on the end table and leave it beside her. Then I sit on the arm of the couch and rake my fingers through her soft black hair. She’s a rare mind, a loyal soul, a precious thing. But I can’t ride in on a white horse and save her. She would never let me and never forgive me for trying. Tearing him forcefully out of her life wouldn’t give her freedom—only leave her with a gaping, bleeding wound and about a thousand awful things to fill it with.
But still, I imagine how easy it would be to end him. Quiet and quick. With a shoelace or a razor, his blood ribboning into warm bathwater. I could strangle him with the strap of the designer handbags he buys her in penance.
“Oh, Dara,” I whisper. She doesn’t hear me, lost in a deathlike sleep. “Say the word and I’ll do it.”
14
I pull into Edison’s driveway a half hour after he’s home from work. My car blocks him in so that he won’t be able to leave to pick up Sadie from her dad’s. We’ll have to go together in my car. The five-minute commute will give us a chance to talk. I’ll put my hand on his arm and tell him that we need to honor her father’s wishes. It isn’t healthy for her to come here every time she’s sad.
Edison already knows this. There’s a spare room in his house, and it belonged to Sadie once, but not anymore. There’s a twin bed with a neutral gray bedspread, thumbtack holes on the walls where posters used to be, a wooden dresser with the remnants of band stickers that have been scraped off. I’d seen the room that first night, as Edison slept off the Jack Daniel’s, and I’d assumed the furniture was secondhand and the holes were from a previous owner, but to know that Edison has purged the room of Sadie’s presence is better. She mayalways have a place in his heart, but not under his roof; he wants her to move on.
I won’t try to get rid of her. She’ll keep coming back around for the rest of Edison’s short life, but she’ll mark the past while I become his future. She’ll move farther and farther away until she’s little more than a gleam in his eye.
Once he’s dead, I’ll reel her back to me. Console her and make sure she’s eating okay. I’ll tell her I’m sorry that we’ve never really gotten along, she and I, but that I’m here for her if she’ll be here for me. I’ll need her trust when the cops come sniffing around.
I make my way up to the door, unsure whether to knock or try opening the door and letting myself in. I decide to knock; I’m a gentle force creeping up on him slow. Not too much all at once.
Voices murmur inside. Footsteps approach. The door swings open, and instead of Edison—sweaty from work, dirt smudged all over his fitted T-shirt, his arms open to embrace me—the little lightning bolt is the one standing before me.
The persistent thing. Walked all the way back here after I dropped her off at her dad’s and specifically told her that dinner would be at seven thirty. It’s six fifteen.
Sadie doesn’t smile at me. She shrugs by way of greeting and wanders back into the bright depths of the living room, grazing on the bruised banana from the kitchen. Edison emerges from the hallway, tugging a clean shirt over his head. He only likes to shower in the mornings. At night, he smells of the day’s sunlight and sweat, a rugged must that mixes with his faint cologne. The bedsheets smell of him.
He pulls me into his arms, and I forget about my irritation that the little lightning bolt was a step ahead of me this time. I’m carrying a grocery bag in one hand. Fresh broccoli, a can of baby corn, organic steroid-free chicken breast, no additives, no fillers. I’d hoped to bringDara to the store with me so we’d have more time to talk about this Sadie situation, but I knew that was out the moment she opened the door.
She was still sleeping when I left her. I checked the bottle, and she had told me the truth: she had only taken half a fentanyl. There was one pill split clean in half among the others. She tries so hard to be careful, not to protect herself but to protect him. As I browsed the fresh carrots in the produce section, I imagined how gratifying it would be to wait for him behind the door, fire extinguisher in hand, and to bash in his skull with it. Drag him inside, check if he still had a pulse, and then wait for him to wake up. As he lay at my feet, weak, bruised, groaning in pain, I’d give him a list of all his sins and why they meant I was going to dismember him.
But instead, he will come home to a beautiful wife dozing on the couch. He’ll bring her flowers, chocolates, tell her he spent the day positively wracked with guilt. She’ll forgive him, kiss him.
I want him to die.
But this is exactly the sort of thing Moody and Iris worry about when it comes to me. There’s no shortage of people who deserve to die, and if I tried to kill them all, I’d be caught in a heartbeat; we’d all go down together if one of us did. For murder to be committed well, it must first be an act of love. And so many vile people in this world are not worth loving. The key is to find someone who is, and to give that person all your heart. Kill them with passion, bury them with love, obsess over every detail the way that only a lover could, and you won’t make a careless mistake.
Tim belongs to Dara the way that Edison belongs to me. His fate is in her hands. She is choosing to squander her strength and love him instead, and I can’t control that. I can’t make her see what it’s doing to her.
Edison kisses me. “Sadie’s going to pick out a movie for us.”
I smile at him. “Great. Perfect.”
I get to work in the kitchen. Edison orbits in and out, pouring me ice water in a long-stemmed wineglass and telling me how great what I’m cooking smells. He sits on the couch beside Sadie, and she plucks one of her earbuds out to talk to him.
This is what it would be like to have a family with him. Worried about how well I’m seasoning the chicken, the smell of his cologne in the fabric of my shirt, a child’s voice giggling with him in the next room. They would have been beautiful, a boy and a girl, one with brown eyes and one with green, both of them tall and broad like us.
“What are you smiling about?” Edison raps his knuckle gently on my cheek.
“Just you.”
