I have been a teenage girl and I know where this is going, but I don’t let on. I don’t tell her that she’s only thirteen, which is far, far too young. Whatever she did or didn’t do, it’s already happened, and there’s no point in me scolding her. She doesn’t have a woman in herlife to listen, and this is an opportunity to reach her that may never come to me again.
When she realizes no reprimand is coming, she goes on. “He said he wanted to be my first. But... I don’t know. He put his hand up my shirt and I panicked. I locked myself in the bathroom and started crying, and he—” Her voice cracks, a fresh well of tears making her mouth and nose wet. “He said I was a little baby and he never wanted to see me again. He said, ‘That’s what I get for dating a middle schooler.’ ”
“Did this just happen?” I ask.
She nods, shuddering as she cries.
“Okay, it’s okay,” I tell her. When I open my arms, I’m not sure if she’ll spurn my efforts, but she crushes herself against me, her arms tight around my back.
Something strange floods me. Sympathy. Worry. A ghost of a life that I could have had. This is how I would console my own daughter, if I could let her come into this world, if I didn’t have to leave her behind with her father’s ghost.
Her tears soak my church dress. I put my hand against her hair, which has been made hot by the sun. “You’re going to dehydrate yourself.” I say the words tenderly, the way that a mother would. The way I always wished that someone could do for me when I was as small. “Come on. Let’s get you in the air-conditioning. We’ll get some lunch before we take you home.”
She nods, takes a step back.
“Sound good?” I say.
Her nose is running. “Yeah.”
Edison can’t read lips, because if he knew what Sadie had just confided in me, we’d be speeding over to that little punk’s house to do something that would probably get Edison arrested. He keeps his violent side hidden, but I know it’s there. He parks outside late atnight and watches the man who killed his wife, his fists clenched, his mind alight with fury. If he knew what that boy tried to do to Sheila’s little girl, if someone did to me what I did to that missing trucker, his quiet love would break into a tremendous rage.
The thought electrifies me, and I wish we were alone.
By the time we get to the diner, Sadie has pulled herself together. The AC has dried away her sweat and tears, and she says she could go for a cheeseburger. “Anything you want, kid,” Edison says.
His loss will hit her far deeper than a sweaty high school crush ever could. I’m mending her heart only so that I’ll break it again. This is what I’m thinking as we file in through the front door, a bell chiming our arrival. We’re a little family today. A mom, a dad, and an ethereal blond child who looks too pure and holy to belong to either one of us, as though she were gifted by the divine.
Sadie stands close to me as we wait to be seated. We read the daily specials on the chalkboard above the cash register. I feel a painful want to tell her my little secret, since she shared hers with me. I’ve looked up where all the clinics are, and there’s one an hour away, but when I leave the house I find myself driving past the on-ramp. I talk to the little thing. I tell it what I am and ask it why it chose me, of all things, to use as a portal into this world. Doesn’t it know how fucked it would be with me as a mother?
But I can’t tell Sadie. I can never tell Sadie. I can’t even tell my sisters; if I would swallow my pride and come to them, they would give me the strength I need to follow through. That’s why I haven’t. I just need a little more time before I’m ready to let go.
Sometime after our food has arrived, Sadie goes to the bathroom. Edison reaches across the table and takes my hand. “She really has a hard time opening up to people,” he says. “I don’t know what magic you worked out there.”
“She’s a sweet kid,” I say. “Really, really sweet.”
I’ll take care of her when he’s gone. The thought stabs at me, and I think of Iris curled in her bed in the dark after each kill. I think of Moody’s anger when she relives her fights with Montana. I will feel the gaping wound like what they felt, because it’s my turn. This is the price of loving my sisters, and of being loved by them.
They’re all that I have. They’re the only ones who will never break my heart. I will remind myself over and over, until the world ends, or until it feels likeenough.
23
I can’t sleep. After two hours of lying wedged between Moody and the wall, listening to the rasp of my sisters’ breathing, I climb out of bed.
The TV is on in the living room, and without Dara’s music coming through the wall, it feels strange. More invasive somehow, like the actors on the screen know that we’re using their voices to cover up our secrets.
I make a mug of chamomile tea and cradle it as I curl up on the ugly recliner. It’s two weeks into September. Three and a half months before I’m in Edison’s bed for the last time. I’ve given a lot of thought to how it will go, how I can make him say all the things I want to hear, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
There’s the creak of footsteps coming down the stairs, and then Iris emerges in her oversize Lilith Fair T-shirt, which she fished outof the bargain bin at Goodwill back in Iowa. She saunters to the couch and then flops onto the cushions and stares me down.
Iris can smell a secret the way a jungle cat smells blood.
When I don’t relent, she says, “It might help to talk about it.”
To what end, Iris? So you can pin me to the ground and call me weak?I take another sip of my tea. I’ll have to give her something. She’s already suspicious.
Iris was smart not to ask me a direct question. She knows that I’ll avoid it in order to maintain control over the direction of the conversation. What she brings in brute strength and ruthlessness, I apply to the art of manipulation.
I know what she wants. She’s looking for me to mention Edison so that she can convince me it’s time to kill him and leave. Abandon my romantic burial and do what’s practical. What’s clean. That’s what Iris would do. She’s cold and she’s calculating, and that indifference brings its own sort of poetry to her kills.
