“Out of area’s going to be a collect call,” he says. “You sure your person will pick up?” I nod. I give him the rest of the number and hehands me the receiver. The recording asks me to say my name clearly so that it can patch me through. And then it connects.
I haven’t called him since I was with my sisters in Montana. I told him I was in Niagara Falls. I said it was beautiful and that I’d send him a postcard. I never did. Now he answers on the first ring with a sleepy “Hello?”
“Colin.” My voice cracks. “It’s me.”
“Hey.” He’s awake now. I hear a rustle. “Where are you? I thought the operator said you were calling from jail.”
He calls me by my name and I recoil at the sound of it, feeling exposed. I’ve always hated it. It’s meaningless, issued to me by a faceless state employee because my mother didn’t think to give me one. But Colin says it with so much affection, because it’s the name of the troubled little foster child who helped him put worms in his brother’s shoes and told him scary stories as we huddled under a blanket fort in the living room.
“I don’t have long to talk.” I swallow my grief so that he won’t hear how upset I am. “I’m in La Paz County.”
“Where the fuck is that?”
“Arizona. Listen to me. I need that lawyer, the one who helped you the last time.” I hope he knows what I’m talking about, because I don’t want to list his bevy of possession charges in front of the sheriff.
“Is this because of your sisters?” he asks. “I told you. I told you they were going to get you arrested or killed. The three of you are like a goddamn coven when you’re together.”
I close my eyes, tears squeezing out. “Please,” I say.
“Yeah.” He says this like it should have been obvious to me. “The lawyer’s my next call. I’m on the first flight out there, okay? Don’t say anything. Don’t even tell them if you’ve got to take a dump.”
I nod, even though he can’t see me. It’s all that I can manage.
“It’s going to be all right,” he says. “Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than the shit you’ve dragged me out of. We’ll fix it.”
—
I DON’T KNOW HOWmuch time passes. Minutes. Hours. I curl up on the metal bench in the holding cell and drift in and out of a fitful sleep. Voices all around me, metal doors slamming, a loud cackle like a vengeful ghost.
Was it only this morning that I held Edison for the last time? He came undone in my arms, and I was the only one who could soothe him. Now I dream that he’s here. He walks right through the metal bars and kneels before me.They told me what you did,he whispers.I forgive you. I still love you.
His face is blurry. No matter how I try to focus on him, he evades me.
I need to get to my sister,I tell him.She was bleeding.
Edison doesn’t answer me, and when I reach out to touch him, he dissolves into nothing.
“West,” a voice bellows, and I wake with a start. West is my last name, because my sisters and I were found at a rest stop on the west end of State Route 99. There’s a lieutenant shuffling a key into the door and then sliding it open. “Get up,” he tells me. “Your charges were dropped. You’re free togo.”
30
The West triplets in an undated photo.
At the top of the article is one of the only pictures of my sisters and me together. We’re eighteen, arm in arm and smiling in a blurry photo that a reporter has taken off Elaine’s Facebook profile. It’s our high school graduation and Elaine hosted a party in her backyard, even though she never fostered my sisters and didn’t especially like them. They were bad influences, she would tell me. But she took my letters for them to the post office. She handed me the phone when they called, because in her own way Elaine loved me despite my efforts to shut her out.
Below that photo, my mug shot and Moody’s. I look dazed, my eyes fixed straight ahead. I don’t even remember having it taken, processing was such a blur. But Moody stares at the camera in defiance, jaw clenched, eyes red with old tears.
From the article, I learn that Moody has admitted to thekidnapping of a Rainwood teen, whose identity is being withheld due to her age. Iris was taken to a hospital and her condition is unknown. All three of us were famous for being abandoned at a rest stop in 1999.
The article goes on to say that I was cleared of any wrongdoing. Sadie told the police that I was the one who saved her. And whatever Moody said in her own confession must have corroborated it.
Both my sisters are staring down the barrel of life imprisonment when they go to trial. And even then, this is the best-case scenario. There’s no mention of all the bodies that have gone missing in our wake. No one has discovered the fake names. Prior to our processing, our records were clean. I scoured every crime scene and made sure there wasn’t a single fingerprint to enter into the database.
But it’s only a matter of time. Our photos will make the national news. Someone will recognize us, call the police because we were dating their cousin’s aunt’s brother, or a neighbor, or a friend.
It’s over.Those were the words Moody said to me on our first day here, right after she knocked out the trucker with a tire iron. They killed him to protect our secret, and it’s all going to come out anyway. It was always going to, I realize now. All those years of blood and of rage and of bodies had to float up to the surface sometime.
Over.
