Every kill but her first one, that is.
“Why won’t you talk about that night with your first kill?” I ask her.
“Where the hell did that come from?” she says. I’ve rattled her and that makes me smug. She thought she was going to have the upper hand.
“Did you really want to do it?” I ask. “You never talk about him.”
I don’t have to tell her who I mean. She knows. Her eyes flit to the screen, the gray-blue glow making her eerie and elegant.Do you regret it? Do you dream of what your life together would have been?I don’t ask, because I know the answer, and if Iris is honest with herself, she knows it too. He was never going to leave his wife. She was just a passing fancy, a pretty young thing he could have on the side. He would have already thrown her away by now, or she would have gottenexasperated and left him. Keyed his car, stuffed a potato in his tailpipe, found someone else she didn’t love half as much.
Finally, Iris says, “Your situation is nothing like that.”
Situation. Is that what Edison is? Like a parking ticket, or outstanding student loan debt.
“How would you know?” I say.
She shakes her head, makes a bitter sound. We both watch the meaningless faces on the screen.
“You’re more like me than you realize, you know,” Iris says.
I look at her, but she’s smiling into the glow of the television. “You don’t want to do it,” she says.
There’s a sick feeling in my stomach, and I try to melt it away with another sip of tea, but it’s been building for weeks now. I have been so careful to hide this very thought from my sisters. I’ve answered their questions; I’ve even told them that I plan to do it on New Year’s Eve. We’ve decided that Iris will be the alibi, attending a party two towns over, while Moody will be parked outside, waiting for the signal to help me with the cleanup.
But it hasn’t been enough to deceive Iris, who has a way of seeing right through me, even though Moody is the one I confide in.
Iris is older somehow. She says little about her time in foster homes when Moody and I were placed together, and I still don’t know all the things she’s seen. I wonder often if this is what having a mother would be like—someone who is always a step ahead, someone who tries desperately to stop me from making her mistakes.
“I want to do it,” I say.
“I hope you learn to lie better than that when you’re in prison because you fucked it up,” she says.
“I’m the reasonyou’renot in prison.” I regret it the instant I say the words, but a dam has been opened and I can’t stop myself. “Youcouldn’t take it that he broke your heart. You cry about him all these years later like he was your one shot at happiness, but he wasn’t, Iris. He was a piece of shit. You think he was going to marry you? Hell, you think you were even the only one?”
Fire in her eyes, she clenches her jaw.
“Millions of people get their hearts broken every day, but you had to kill him. Violently. And I had to wipe the blood off of the walls, then pick up your broken pieces. So if you don’t like the way I’m handling things now that it’s my turn, then maybe you shouldn’t have dragged all of us down into your own personal hell.”
I’ve said them. The words that have been trapped so deep inside me that I’ve never heard them myself before now. But they feel familiar, like the chorus of an old lullaby.
Iris isn’t rattled. Just as easily as she can read my emotions, she can hide her own. Patient enough to knit a scarf, cool enough to kill a man in under three minutes and never look back. “Watch it, Sissy,” she says. “Moody and I are all you have. It’s a really dark world out there.”
I have never been strong enough for Iris. All my life, she’s been holding me at knifepoint, twisting my arm behind my back, pinning me in the dirt when there’s no one to hear me scream. Be stronger. Be faster. Be colder. The world will kill you, destroy you, if you aren’t.
“I’m not the one putting us in danger,” I say. “That text you and Moody sent to his phone was real cute, Iris. Do you even understand how stupid that was?”
“We used a burner.” She waves her hand dismissively.
“Don’t underestimate the cops just because this is a small town in the middle of nowhere,” I snap. “A clock isn’t exactly genius levels of cryptic.”
Iris gets up. She walks across the room and crouches in front of me until her face is all I can see, identical to mine and yet entirely herown. “It was just a reminder,” she says. “He isn’t worth the risk. He isn’t worth ruining everything for.”
“I know that.”
My eldest sister is taciturn until suddenly she isn’t, and all the anger and sharpness she carries come out in bursts. I try not to be mad at her. Something is hurting Iris, though I can’t figure out exactly what. I’d never have expected her to be jealous of the time I’m spending with Edison. She didn’t envy Moody when she pursued her own lovers, even as recently as Montana. Delighted in it, in fact. Asked Moody about how she would do it, where they would be. She drove me to the burial site, belting out the words to “Livin’ la Vida Loca” along with the radio while his pieces were stacked in three coolers in the trunk.
There’s no reason that Edison should be any different. If anything, she should be relieved that I’ve finally settled on a mark and she doesn’t have to pick up my slack like the last time.
She takes the mug from my hands, sets it on the end table so that there’s nothing between us, not even a little piece of ceramic. She sees all the moments with Edison that I’ve hoarded for myself. His hands on my hips; the taste of him in my mouth; the things we whisper when we can’t sleep; his hand on my shoulder as he walks past while I sit on the floor and teach Sadie to play the guitar.
