She snorts in her sleep, her white hair, thinned with age, pooling around her head like a halo. She looks like a freaking angel. I squint at her—if someone who I’m pretty sure murdered her husband can be so good, maybe that means I can be a decent human too. Though I doubt it.
I don’t have hair like that, and I’m definitely not kind or patient, nor do I have a name reminiscent of anyone so lovely as Betty White. Maybe if I’d been born Betty, like my gran, I’d have turned out okay.
Instead, I’mNadia. Give me one famous person with that name. I bet you can’t—in fact, I bet you found out my name’s Nadia, and that I kill people for a living, and you nodded your head and thought,Hmm, she sounds like she’d be an assassin.
I touch tentative fingertips to her arm. I don’t want to wake her—but also, I do. I have to. “I need to talk to you. About Brian.”
A sharp inhalation, a slight snore as she sputters out. A CPAP machine rests unused at her bedside. I stare at her some more, remembering the spicy grandmother who did not do things like bake muffins or make homemade lemonade. No, she took us hiking through the woods and was the first person to show me how to shoot a gun—“Don’t tell your mother!” she’d hissed conspiratorially, holding up a revolver like she was in a Bonnie and Clyde flick. Graham, of course, was thrilled. Piper pretended to be unimpressed but was also thirteen and already pissed off at the world, especially our parents. Going behind their backs wasexactlywhat she wanted to spend her time doing. And I was nine. I had yet to sort myself out or realize what I was, but guns? New, exciting, forbidden.
“Women should know how to shoot,” she’d whispered to Piper and me. “You never know when it will come in handy.” Then she winked, as though that meant something very specific.
So we fired the revolver at a target. Another day, we rented a shotgun and shot skeet flung into the sky. Afterward, we ate ice cream, the one normal thing we did with our grandmother. Our parents would have been horrified if they ever found out the truth.
But now I wonder where Gran learned to shoot a gun. I wonder what she meant by all her whispered comments. And I wish to god I’d asked her when I had the chance. Why hadn’t I? Probably because I was so swept up with figuringmyselfout, in harnessing the monster so I could have a semblance of a normal life. But now I remember those early days when Gran recognized what I was, and I wish I’d just said the words:Do you know what I am because you see yourself in me?
“Gran?” I say again.
More muttering, moresleeping. I sidle up closer to the edge of her bed. The clock on the wall ticks away, like it’s taunting theresidents, reminding them their time here is short. It makes me want to get a similar clock and put it over our bed. Have Brian hear thattick-tick-tickand let it wake him from his slumber like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story.
“I’m supposed to kill Brian,” I whisper close to her ear, then wait, as though this admission might lead to her eyes flying open, Gran sitting up, giving me instructions on how to do the deed the same way she once gave me instructions on how to blend in, how to stay alive, being what I am.
But she doesn’t.
Maybe it’s better this way. She won’t get confused or ask who is killing whom, nor mistake the nurse formeand ask how my husband’s murder went. I rise to my feet, make a circle of the room. It’s small, tidy. A chest of drawers that holds her clothes built into the wall. A few shelves that store everything else—what her life has been reduced to. Photo albums and a single framed photo of Gran and Grandpa. I stop, stare at that one. A nurse’s aide must have helped unpack her things, must have thought that was a good one to display. Because I wouldn’t have—nor would my siblings. We all knew my father’s stories.
Graham is the eldest and the only one with memories of our grandfather—he died when I was little. When we were kids, Graham, Piper, and I would gather in Graham’s bedroom as he flipped through baseball cards, the one thing passed on to him from our grandfather. One night, at Piper’s prodding, he shared the memory of the morning he woke up to find out our grandfather had died in his sleep, even though he’d been given a clean bill of health the month prior. Gran, when she talks about him, maintains a veneer of calm, a proper amount of sadness, but I swear, there is a gleam in her eyes. The gleam of a woman who’s finally free of a man who was a tyrant.
I always wondered.
“Piper, do you think Gran killed Grandpa?” I asked one day when I was fifteen and she was nineteen.
Piper squinted at me. “What?” she’d said, like she had no idea what I was talking about.
I went silent.
No one else suspected what I did—likely because no one else saw the world in the same blood-tinted way I did. Maybe the way Gran did too.
Another glance at that clock, ticking down the moments until maybe I look at Brian and pull the trigger.
“Gran?” I whisper one more time.
She snores in response.
I stand to leave—I really do need to get going—but before I kiss her goodbye, a tall woman with a blond bob wearing scrubs walks in, flipping through papers in her hands.
“Oh. Hello.” A small, professional smile. “Are you Mrs. Dawson’s family?”
“I’m her granddaughter.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re visiting. I’m Penelope, the RN on shift.” She holds out a hand, which I carefully shake. I’ve never seen her here before.
“You’re new?”
“I started last week. Were you the granddaughter who reached out about her safety?”
“I am. I caught her…” I hesitate, because I feel like I’m betraying her. But we put her here to keep her out of trouble. “In the kitchen,” I say. “Do you know how she got there?”
Penelope frowns. “No. It’s kept locked at all times.”
