I like to think we’ve gotten closer since I learned about Tim. She still won’t admit to the monster she married, but I keep an eye on her for bruises, for any slight change in her posture. There’s been nothing. I haven’t asked, because she’s onto me, both of us trapped in this silent game of her own design. The closer I look, the better she’ll hide it.
Dara must think I’m trying aggressively to save her soul, because I’ve been taking her to every church function that I can. Picnics, baptisms because I’m in the choir and I say I want her in the audience to alleviate my stage jitters, Saturday fellowship drive-in-movie night. The latter is a particular testament to our friendship, because I let Edison take Sadie in his own car while Dara and I stuff our faces with candy and talk through the entire thing. I am giving her precious hours I could be spending with my man while our time together is ticking, because I want her to be okay when I leave this place.
There’s a man at the church who flirts with her. Liam. He’s twenty-four, in medical school. He wants to be a neurologist. He’s about twice Tim’s size, but gentle as a lamb, with a soft voice. When Dara talks, he shuts his mouth and listens to her, rapt. Dara pretends there’s nothing there, but I’ve seen the way she smiles and lowers her eyes when the two of them congregate beside the coffee urns.
It’s that easy, I want to tell her.There are so many out there who would grab the world in a fist and give it to you.
“Still trying to make a Christian out of the nonbelieving neighbor?” Iris asks, climbing into the driver’s seat.
“I am just being thorough,” I say, and slam my passenger-side door. “I’ll need friends after it’s done.”
“Uh-huh.” She leans forward to have a better view of Dara, high up on her balcony. “And this has nothing to do with the fact that Mr.Wonderful beats the shit out of her, right?”
One night while I was away sleeping at Edison’s, Moody and Iris told me that the power went out. As soon as the music stopped blasting from Tim and Dara’s apartment, they heard Tim shouting. The sound of something shattering against the wall. It was so brutal that my sisters pressed their ears to the wall because they thought he might kill her. “To her credit, she didn’t cry,” Moody had told me; after her own nightmarish experiences in group homes, she has a lot of respect for anyone who can go through hell without breaking down.
I’m relieved that I didn’t have to be the one to tell them about Tim. I’m already burdened enough hiding all three thousand dollars of Dara’s cash under the upholstery of the trunk. It’s the one place my sisters will never think to look.
I don’t answer Iris’s question; she puts the car in gear and we ride in silence. I’ve never seen as many food trucks as I have in Rainwood. There’s an ice-cream truck that’s taken up permanent residence outside a thrift store on the main thoroughfare. I’ve only been there once, but they pile an unholy amount of sprinkles on their cones.
Not wanting to make a mess in the car, Iris and I sit on a bench in the shade of the thrift shop, ice cream dripping onto the napkins wadded in our hands.
I wish Iris would come out with whatever it is she wants to say. She handles me like I’m made of glass sometimes, especially after Iscrewed it up with the man who should have been my first kill. “I couldn’t do it,” I’d told her that night as we conspired in our apartment. “He was all wrong. It wasn’t me. It was him.”
Now Iris takes a gentler approach. “Has he told you he loves you yet?” she asks me. “You haven’t said.”
“No,” I say, doing my best not to be terse with her.
“Really? After two months?” She licks the chocolate ice cream around the rim of the cone and then bites mercilessly into the scoop. I watch goose bumps rise on her arms from the shock of the cold. “That’s a little slow. How’s the sex?”
I’ve labored not to make a big deal of Edison being my first. Years ago, long before we ever thought we’d kill a soul, I saw what boys did to my sisters. Made them irrational, jealous, sad. When I got my driver’s license at seventeen, Moody made me follow her boyfriend around Fresno for a week straight because she was positive he was cheating on her. Damn near impossible to be inconspicuous when you’re following a man in a part of town with about three other people in it.
And when Iris killed her ex–guidance counselor, I realized it was so much easier to come in and clean the blood from the walls than to mend my sister’s broken heart afterward. It was the only messy kill Iris ever made, enraged by her love for him, her hatred that he wouldn’t leave his wife and children to give her all the things he promised. After him, Iris became so much smarter about her marks. She chose men who adored her but meant nothing to her, so that she could handle their demises with intelligence and grace.
“He’s just being careful,” I say. “He still misses his wife.”
Edison’s sensitivity has been useful to me. He believed Sheila was his soul mate, and he blames himself for not protecting her. If he’d been there to put the spare tire on her car, she wouldn’t have been hiking that stretch of highway and she’d still be alive. But she’s gone,and in her place is me. He is so careful when he kisses me, drawing back to seek my eyes for permission, watching my face to be sure that I’m with him. In his bed, he pushes his palm to my chest to feel my heart. He makes me his queen. He falls asleep holding me.
Even though I could kill any intruder who broke into his house in the middle of the night to overpower us, I let him shield me. I turn into something delicate and sweet. I sleep wrapped in the steel of his arms and make myself small.
I drink it like rain. I’ve never been anyone’s precious thing.
Iris takes my hand. She weaves her fingers between mine. “Sissy, everything I’ve done has been to protect you. Both of you.”
I stare down at our hands. Identical pink nail polish. She held my hand just like this when we were five and the social worker was prying her away. We were so small then. I screamed her name—the legal name she no longer uses—over and over. She was the one with the ferocity. The one who bit and scratched and screamed until she got her way. She was my hero, but now I can look back and see that she was as powerless as me.
“When he’s gone, you have to talk to me,” she says. “Don’t get lost in your head.”
I nod, but her gaze is relentless, and I’m forced to look into her green eyes.
“Don’t screw this up for yourself by loving him the wrong way,” she says. “You don’t have a lifetime to let him sort his shit out. You need to go to him and make him say it.”
“I have four months, Iris,” I say, bristling.
“Yes, and they’ll speed by.” She squeezes my hand. I watch as a drop of chocolate ice cream falls to the bench between us. “Get everything that you can out of this, Sis. If there’s anything you want to say, anything you wanthimto say, any fucking position youwant to try in bed—do it. Do everything. That’s the only way to get out of this without being haunted by regret.”
Everything. So small a word for what I want with Edison. Still, I know that Iris is only trying to guide me. I want a full love with Edison. Eager kisses, grasping at each other in desperation. I want him to gasp for me, cry for me, murmur for me as he falls asleep.
Edison and I will never have two beautiful little children who look like us. There’s a finite number of hikes and movies and lazy mornings lingering in bed. When he’s gone, I can’t have him back. I can only have the memories we’ve created, playing over on a flickering film reel in my mind.
