But she doesn’t, and for the first time in my life, I know what it is to bealone.
33
For days, it hurts to breathe. I shut myself in the bedroom, arguing when Colin tries to make me eat, barely dragging myself into the shower.
Moody refused my visit even after the chaplain told her about Iris, and of all the things she’s done, this is the one I can’t forgive. I stood outside the jail, screaming at her even though she couldn’t hear me. I called her a coward, a traitor, a terrible sister, and then no sister at all. I said that I wish she had died instead, and in that moment, I meant it. The guards dragged me away when I started crying. They left me on the sidewalk outside the chain-link fence, blubbering helplessly like a lost little child. When I came back to our rented condo and saw Iris’s unfinished knitting project in the basket by the couch, my knees buckled.
I think of everything Moody cost me. Things I gave up willingly to try to fill the bottomless well of her sorrow, her jealousy. When Iwas a child, I had a chance at happiness with my foster family, but I fought them. I said cruel things I didn’t mean to Elaine. I snuck out at night, flunked classes I could have passed in my sleep. I made her hate me so that she would give me up and I wouldn’t carry the guilt of living in a nice house while my sisters bounced like pinballs from one nightmare to the next.
“She isn’t your mother,” Moody told me. We were six years old, crouched in the tall grass that surrounded the pond in Elaine’s yard. “That makes her bad.”
Iris sat between us, gently stroking the papery wings of a dead moth she’d found in the dirt. Bits of it flaked onto her fingers, and as she watched it fall apart, she grew angry and her face went red. She plucked the wings off, leaving only a husk of a body, exposing how small and insignificant the thing really was.
“Say it,” Moody told me. “Say that Elaine is bad.”
“She’s bad,” I said. “I hate her.”
But my hatred wasn’t for my foster mother. It was for whatever force had decided I could see my sisters for only a handful of hours every few weeks. I hated the moth for being broken. I hated my bedroom for having only one bed. I hated our real parents for not loving us. I didn’t want to hurt Elaine. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I was horrible to her anyway. I did it so that Elaine wouldn’t want me. And then, I thought, Moody, Iris, and I could be together. Even if we were only united in our misery, it was something.
In the end, all of it was for nothing.
Colin stays, even though I tell him he should go back and that my mess isn’t something he should have to clean up. He tells me, “How many times did you wash the puke out of my sheets? Who called 911 when I ODed?” and then he finds something to do, like vacuum or brew us some tea. He calls me by my real name, not Sissy. There areonly two people in this world who called me Sissy, and they never will again.
Colin is something familiar and comforting, even as I try to reject him. I don’t know who I am without Moody and Iris, and it perplexes me that I can still stand upright at all, that I’m expected to find my way alone. I don’t want this.
Edison doesn’t call, not that I would answer even if he did. He and Dara were the only ones who had that number, and without them my phone is little more than a paperweight. I let the battery die.
A week after Iris’s death, I see Moody for five seconds on a livestream on my laptop as I lie in bed.New murder charges in the case of a Rainwood woman accused of kidnapping.She’s handcuffed as she stands in the courtroom for her arraignment, her bruise faded now. Her jaw is clenched. The judge asks her how she pleads to the charges of murdering the man whose remains were recently found on a closed-off hiking trail. Through the camera lens I see what the rest of the world does: a remorseless killer. A kidnapper. A woman who is never going to be free.
She pleads guilty. She knows details not released to the public—that his teeth were shattered and what he was wearing. She says that she and Iris acted together and that I had nothing to do with it. As though I was some imbecile who didn’t know she was living with two serial killers.
Colin sees the same broadcast on the TV downstairs, but when he comes to check on me, I pretend I’m asleep. He fits a blanket around me and leaves a sandwich on the nightstand. He doesn’t say anything, but he presses his hand against my shoulder before he leaves. I’m not alone, he’s telling me. You don’t have to share a womb with someone to love them like a sibling.
We’ll have to get out of this town. It’s small, and the media hasalready begun to descend. But he hasn’t pushed me. I know that if I had let my sisters see how much my foster brother means to me, he would have ended up like Dara. I’ve known this since even before that first kill. I knew something awful would happen if any of us tried to have a family outside of our trio.
I listen to him moving about downstairs, and I can see the lines and shadows of a life I could have had. A prettier life. A free one. But in this moment, for all the ugliness and destruction they’ve wrought, I only want my sisters.
Take the freedom, you idiot.The voice belongs to Iris, and to Moody, and to me.Better late than never.
34
Two months later
True to her word, Moody will have nothing to do with me. My letters are returned, torn open and stamped by the jail staff, with no indication that she has read them. I sent my latest letter a week ago, the ink dark and bleeding from the force with which I pressed the pen into the paper. It was one sentence long:
At least help me decide where to scatter her ashes, you selfish bitch.
But Moody’s silence says more than any words could. Iris is dead, and she blames herself. If she hadn’t tried so hard to control us, maybe Iris would be off making terrible love decisions out there with another man Moody and I both hated. Maybe she would be a dentist, a famous singer, a chef. Maybe she would have robbed a bank and gotten herself killed anyway. The torment is in all the things we’ll never know.
But my life, Moody can predict: if she stays out of it, I’ll get to have one. So, when my letters come, they stab her through the soul. She sees my name there on the concrete floor of her cell and it reminds her of everything that’s ruined between us—everything that could have been. It hurts her so much it steals her breath. This is the cross she will bear for the rest of her life, and her only redemption is to let me go.
Maybe that’s why I send them, knowing they’ll go unread. Because this pain will never go away, and I want to make sure she feels it too.
When we were together, I could hear my sisters in my head so clearly, narrating my conscience, telling me what to do, their will so tangled up in my own that I never knew which ideas were mine. The clarity in their absence brings little solace now. I stare at my own face in the mirror and I don’t see a fake identity. I don’t see one-third of a whole. There’s a stranger I’m still learning, and the only messes left to clean up are my own.
I left Rainwood the day after I saw Moody’s arraignment, got into the rental car with Colin and drove two hours away from anyone who might recognize me. The media was relentless for days. The famous West Triplets took a dark path. They forgot about us for all those brutal years when we were left to the foster system, but now that we were entertaining again, they brought in some TV psychologists to speculate where it all went wrong.
But just as quickly as the hype came, it disappeared. I knew it would. My sisters and I were babies when we first became the subject of the limelight, but there’s always a more exciting story around the corner. A toddler who falls down a well, a set of quintuplets born to a couple who thought they were infertile, a little boy who flatlined and swears he met God.
