“You must love what I did, then,” Dara says. She laughs and then clasps both hands over her mouth. Her eyes go wide with terror. “Oh God,” she says. “That was so horrible. I don’t know what made me say that.”
I glance at the clock over the stove. Just after one o’clock. In less than two hours, Edison will be on his way to take Jade and Lisa to the mechanic, and I want to make sure I’m ready. I don’t want Moody to be alone with him. It isn’t that I don’t trust her, but that I selfishly want to scrape up every memory of Edison for myself. Later, when he’s gone and we’re looking back on this time, I won’t be able to bear the thought of Moody or Iris having a single memory of my man that I wasn’t present for. I want to relive every detail.
Which means I don’t have much time. “Bring me every cleaner you have in the house,” I say. “You’re not going to buy anything new. Not even Windex. All of your purchases have to stay consistent. But we can make do.”
While Dara is busying herself with the task at hand, I dump my untouched coffee down the sink. I crawl across the floor, checking under the cabinets and then inside them. I did a good job even in my addled state last night, because all the visible blood is gone. I work at fresh corpses the way that some work at needlepoint or knitting. It’s taken years of practice, but I’ve learned where all the seams in thehuman body are—the vulnerable joints that come undone when you hack at them with enough force.
“If you have mouthwash or peroxide, bring that too,” I call up the stairs.
The first time I did this, Iris left me with a startling mess. Her lover expelled what seemed like a gallon of waste. That, combined with the blood, left me feeling nauseous and light-headed. But Moody was busy taking care of Iris, who was reeling from the shock and still spattered with blood. The two of them went into the bathroom to clean up while I contended with the living room.
Peroxide-based mouthwash is what I ended up using for all the angel figurines. Combining it with some dish soap got the stains right out of the throw rug, before the washing machine did the rest of it. Even once the blood was gone, I went over everything thrice. I developed a method: Listerine, dish soap, peroxide. As the smell diminished with every round, it got much easier.
Once the body was gone, I went back to the apartment, feeling pleased with myself that I had aided my sister in erasing all signs of her tragic love life. But the worst was yet to come. After we dumped his body, she didn’t speak for days, barely looked at us.
After a week of the silent treatment, I crawled into the bed beside her one morning, snuggled up against her back, and put my arms around her. She tensed but didn’t push me away. “What can I do for you?” I asked. Moody was a shadow in the doorway, her arms folded where she stood in the predawn dim.
Iris was silent for a long time, and then she whispered, “I loved him, and you can’t possibly know how this feels.”
But I wanted to know. I wanted to climb inside her brain and sit beside her, because I loved her and I didn’t want her to be trapped in that dark place by herself.
“Tell me,” I whispered.
“I can’t.” Her voice was cracked. “He’s gone and I’ll never get him back.”
“Fuck him, Iris. He broke your heart,” Moody said, getting impatient. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll kill the first man I fall in love with too.”
All these years later, I’m still not sure if Moody meant it, or if she ever relives that moment and wishes she had said something else. But it happened the way that it did, and very slowly, the promise took root.
Dara brings me a bottle of OxiClean, two full, unopened bottles of peroxide, and a mostly empty bottle of bathroom cleaner that smells far too abrasive and is useless to me because the strong smell of it will linger and there’s nothing in it to treat blood. Dara leans against the refrigerator, arms folded, watching me.
“See what I’m doing?” I tell her, not looking up as I scour the baseboard under the cabinets with a damp rag. “Clean like this every day for a week. Just to make sure.”
After a beat, Dara slumps to the floor and folds her legs. “I really loved him, you know,” she says. “I thought I could go back to Florida for a few weeks. Spend some time with my parents and keep my phone off, so he’d worry about me. I wanted him to think—think that I’d left him for good, or maybe even that something had happened to me, like that man on the news who disappeared. If I really scared him, he would appreciate me when I came back. It would be like it was before things got so ugly.” She whispers that last word, like she realizes it wouldn’t be possible as she says it. If she left and came back a thousand more times, it would always turn ugly.
“You did the right thing,” I tell her, and toss the rag into the sink.
She looks at me. “How can you say that?”
“There’s someone out there who’s desperate to love you,” I say. “Someone who will make you so happy, you won’t be hoarding your money and dreaming of running away. Someone who makes you want to stay all the time.”
I give her these words because I know that Dara isn’t like me. She doesn’t have sisters who will give her the strange, unconditional love that comes from growing up the way Moody, Iris, and I did. But she’s got something perhaps more powerful, which is the bravery to stay in one place. To build a life with someone and really give the long haul a shot.
I can see her with someone—maybe the man at the church who’s been flirting with her, or some other tall, strong creature with kind eyes. I can see her conceiving a baby and being able to keep it, to hold it when it comes out and see if it has her long fingers and her dark eyes.
Dara will have a lifetime filled with chances at happiness. She’ll live with the mystery of what each moment might bring her, and she’ll grow from all of them. I want this for her. These things I can’t have, because all my outcomes have already been determined.
“You aren’t freaked out,” Dara says. It’s not a question.
I stop hunching over the newly scoured tiles and sit up to face her. Whenever I can, I give Dara the truth, much as I try to do with Edison. Deep in the make-believe existence of Jade Johnson, there is just the tiniest, thinnest thread that connects Dara and Edison to the real me—even if they can’t know as much. So when I speak, I tell her the truth.
“If I had to come in here last night and find a dead body on the floor, I’m just thankful it wasn’t yours.”
Dara stares at me for a few seconds, and then tears fill her eyes and her entire face scrunches into a grimace. I advance on her cautiously, not quite touching her.
I want to tell her that she’s going to be so much stronger for this. One day she’ll look back and see that this was the only way. When she’s in the arms of someone who sees her for all she’s worth, and when she’s living in a new place that smells like all her scented candles, where she doesn’t have to blast music or keep the curtains drawn to hide the ugly bits. When her life is so full of beauty that she won’t have to live on promises and platitudes. But I know that Dara is not like me, and that these words won’t comfort her now. She has to slog through this despair, this guilt. She has to make a saint of the monster whose blood I spent last night scraping from the grout. Only in this way will she emerge.
I inch closer, and when I put an arm around her, she sinks into me. The way that a sister would, full of trust, her guard stripped away. Terrible wailing comes out of her, and I hold her head against my shoulder.
