I consider the dumpsters downtown, behind the restaurants and apartments. The trash collection for our apartment complex is onMondays and Thursdays, and the town pickup goes by district, which means the city block with the Safeway is due for collection this afternoon.
I park behind the grocery store, and at my urgency, Dara snaps out of her trance and helps me to carry the severed pieces of her husband into the dumpster. We bury him amid coffee grounds, expired cans, runny produce, and rat droppings. This has to work, I tell myself. A dumpster burial has never been my modus operandi; there’s the risk of being seen, or of the bags rolling out of the truck, but it’s also the only way to ensure the body will be gone forever. Greater benefit but a stupid risk to take unless you have to.
If this were one of my or my sister’s kills, it wouldn’t matter that the body may be found in the wilderness or floating up from a lake after the marine wildlife has eaten away at the plastic. We’d be long gone by then, leaving behind only a fake identity. Besides which, to cement our alibi, one of us is always on a security camera at the time the murder is being committed.
Dara retches and then stands with her face canted to the falling rain.
“It’s done,” I tell her, my breathing ragged. I touch her arm. “Come on. Let’s go back.”
She starts crying again in the car, and I let her. The empty storage bins—stacked one inside the other—slide across the back seat.
I don’t speak until the turn for our apartment complex comes up. “Bring the bins into the bathtub and wash them with one cup of bleach and hot water.” The recommended amount for cleaning, not enough to leave a suspicious chemical stench. “Rinse them thoroughly with hot water. Then let them soak with a half-bottle of dish soap in each one. Dry them with paper towels. Put everything back.”
I know it’s not an ideal time to be giving her instructions, but it’s important.
“Jade?” It’s the first word she’s spoken since before Tim’s unceremonious but arduous burial. She looks at me as I pull into her parking space.
I turn off the ignition and turn to face her. Her eyes are moving up and down the length of me, her split lip quivering. I know what she wants to ask me, even though Dara herself doesn’t seem to know how to ask it. She wants to know how a churchgoing musician from California can tie her hair back in a bun and set about such a grim task so calmly, how I didn’t retch at the tang of blood as I arranged the pieces. Like I’ve done this before.
When she doesn’t speak, I reach out and cup her cheek. She flinches at first, but then purses her mouth thoughtfully. This is it, all the comfort I can offer her, and she understands just how much she needs the reassurance.
I instruct her to put the towels in the dryer, and then wash them again with some other dirty laundry. Repeat three times. Don’t forget about the storage bins. Don’t panic and overbleach them, because the smell and the stains will be suspicious to police. You may not think forensic investigators will look through your closets, but they will. They’ll think of everything, and two bins large enough to fit a human body leave no room for mistakes.
She takes the bins and enters her condo though the laundry room entrance, while I take the stairs to my front door. Twelve steps, but it feels like Mount Everest, I’m so exhausted.
The door swings open before I can reach for the knob. Moody must have been watching for me. Distantly, I remember that I left my purse and Edison’s blanket on the couch.
I’ve never seen my sister look so frantic. “Sissy, what the hell happened to you?” she says, ushering me inside. The door closes behind me with a slam that rattles my brain inside my skull.
Everything hurts. I taste blood on my lips, and for a second I think it belongs to Tim, I missed a detail, I forgot something. But then Moody reaches forward and touches the bandage on my forehead, and I realize it’s soaked through and dripping down my face.
“Where have you been?” she’s asking me.
Moody’s image triples. Two ghostly, translucent sisters with big horrified eyes standing behind her. I want to tell her everything, my dearest sister, my best friend in this world. I want to tell her that I’ve made so many horrible mistakes, that I won’t know how to stop loving Edison when this is through and that we’ve created something I know I can’t keep. That I’ve fallen in love with the desert and with the way the rain here smells like cheap perfume and the sky is always buzzing. That I wish I could keep all of it.
But I know that I can’t.
The world turns blurry and spins, and I feel her small but steady hands catching me right as I collapse.
19
I dream that it crumbles into dust and dissolves inside my womb.
This is the image that wakes me, an empty feeling replaced by one of turmoil as I regain consciousness. The thing inside me is still alive, and it frightens me that I feel relieved. I should be angry with it for intruding on my plans and for making me so weak.
“Get her some water,” Moody is saying. “Bring the fan closer.” She’s kneeling beside me when I open my eyes, dabbing at my face with a cold wet cloth. “Sis?”
My feet are propped up on a pile of the ugly green throw pillows that came with the couches, and the oscillating fan from the bedroom is blowing a steady stream of cool air onto my face.
“Hey,” Iris says, emerging from the kitchenette. She hands me a bottle of water, but I shake my head.
“What happened?” Moody is fussing over me with the damp cloth.There’s a bottle of peroxide and a newly opened package of bandages on the coffee table, and I realize she’s changed my soaked hospital gauze.
“I crashed the car,” I say, feeling guilty about my half-truth.
My head throbs and my muscles are taut with pain when I sit up. I tell my sisters about my proclamation of love with Edison, how my plan did not play out as expected but still left him melting in my palm. It was better than I could have hoped for, even, except for the expensive damage I’d just inflicted on our only vehicle.
Iris and Moody don’t care about the car. Whatever it costs, we’ll sort it out. The emergency room bills too. They only care about getting me well again. When one of us is broken, we all are.
