I return to Rainwood on a Sunday evening, when I know all theupstanding members of polite society will be home for the night. Edison’s car is already here, parked on the shoulder near the ten-mile marker, and empty. When I called him last night after nearly two months of silence, I wasn’t sure what he would do. He picked up on the first ring even though I called him from a blocked number, and even before I heard his voice, I knew he’d been waiting for me.
I see him when I park my rental car in front of his. He’s high up on the dirt path that leads to the new housing development. Standing on his would-be grave.
He turns when he hears the car door open and stands with one hand shielding his eyes from the brightly setting sun. From here, I can see his guarded expression, the way his lips press together when he sees my stomach. Four months, a half-moon in my pale blue shirt. I didn’t tell him about this part. But he doesn’t speak as I make my way toward him.
We stand arm’s length apart, and I can hardly believe he’s real and that he was crazy enough to meet me after everything I confessed to him last night.
His hand hovers over my stomach, some magnetic pull, an instinct that overtakes him before he remembers himself and draws back.
“Everything you told me last night, and you didn’t think to mention this?” There’s no anger in his voice. He’s learned how to protect his emotions, giving just enough to let me know he’s in there, but not so much I can read him as easily as I once could.
This is a skill learned while we’ve been apart. He was dragged into the media spotlight too; a news van camped outside his house, he told me during our call. Took photos through his blinds. Every time he jogged from the door to his car, a coat over his face, someone asked him to speak up about the accusations against his girlfriend, who had gone MIA.
“I was afraid you’d feel like you had to come if I told you about her,” I say, bringing a hand to my stomach.
“Her?” At that, something within him cracks. A bit of light coming through the veneer.
I nod. I only first went to a doctor last week when I thought the media scrutiny was gone and I’d found someone who wouldn’t have seen me on the news, or remembered me if she had. “There’s her heartbeat,” the doctor said, changing the trajectory of my entire life without even looking up from the screen. “Nice and strong.”
“She’s mine?” Edison’s voice is dazed, and I can see that he wants to touch me, wants to touch the place where our baby’s heart is beating.
“Only if you want her to be,” I say.
“Of course I want—” Edison starts, but cuts himself off. He remembers that I’m not Jade. That the woman in his bed all those times was a stranger. But not entirely. There’s some part of me he recognizes. Some part of me that he has always loved and still does.
The housing development is much further along than I remember. The support beams for most of the houses have gone up, sharp skeletons against the setting sun.
Now Edison stands before me and I focus on a bright blue vein in his throat. It recedes into the abyss of him, and I want to reach out and trace it. I want to feel his heart thudding against my fingers.
I look at him and he stares back at me, both of us wary. But the strangeness between us isn’t unpleasant, and for the first time I think he sees the real me. Not Jade. My face and name have been all over the news, and he’s heard what the reporters have to say about my sisters. I’m the mysterious one who has been cleared of all charges, who has never been implicated in a single crime. Moody has begged the media to leave me alone, screaming from the courthouse steps at the journalists and cameras that she and Iris did everything.
It’s true that I’m not a killer. I couldn’t even do it for my sisters. If I had been able to, Sadie would be buried in a hillside and Iris and Moody would still be here with me. I replay that day over and over in my head, but I make the same decision every time. I can’t stop Iris and Moody from making theirs.
But I’m not as innocent as Moody tells them. I have hidden their crimes, watched in silence as their victims struggled and slowly died with their eyes pleading with me. I have destroyed evidence. I have been a half dozen different girls in a half dozen cities, and I wish I could say I was haunted by the things I covered up, but I did it because I loved my sisters. I would burn this world down to nothing if it would save them.
I called Edison because I had to confess to someone. I needed someone to know the real me, even if I’m still learning who that is. Moody and Iris would have been livid that I was telling him these things; they would have said that I was throwing my chance away. But the more I ignore their voices in my head, the more I start to hear my own.
I told him the whole ugly truth of our serendipitous meeting in the church that first day. The thoughts lurking in my head when I sang “Ave Maria” for him. I told him my real name. I told him why we’d come. The fantasies. The burial site. The revelation that I couldn’t do it, and that it still terrified me to be so different from my sisters even now.
He was silent through all of it. He could have hung up, I thought, and called the police. Driven to my new apartment and shot me through the window. Told me he never wanted to hear my godforsaken voice again. I wouldn’t have blamed him.
There was a long pause through the line, and I could hear him breathing. I could feel all the space and stars and cell towers betweenus. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “Show me where you were going to bury me.”
We’re both standing over the spot now. He looks down at my stomach, and then at me. “When would you have done it?”
“New Year’s Day.”
“How?”
“In bed, I think.” I meet his gaze when I say it. We’re both tentative, but some undercurrent churns within our silence.
“Why here?” he asks.
“I thought it was pretty.” I nod past his shoulder to where the cacti and brush are silhouetted against the fading golds and emerging blues of night. “Peaceful.”
He turns around to see the desert beyond the development, and I think he sees what I do in all that vastness.
“You’re pretty fucked up,” he says.
