NOW
MARCH 2024
My mouth is full of blood.
I clamp down on my tongue as we crest the hill. The Sara’s remains are draped over the exit sign, dark and shapeless, like a black dress hanging out to dry.
I wonder how long it’s been there. We drive closer, and all I want to do is look away, but I can’t. I’m supposed to look. Long and hard.
Because I didn’t the last time. When it happened to Mom.
It’s probably been a couple of hours since the body was exposed to sunlight. It looks wet and dry at the same time: a stiff waterfall of charred entrails. There’s no use trying to make out a face, so I don’t search for one.
The exit sign reads BATEMAN STREET, but the hardened smears of sun-scalded viscera make it look more like BAT MAN. There’s a stupid caped-crusader joke on my lips, but I’m swallowing too much blood to form words right now.
Beside me, Cora sucks a hoarse gulp of air. I feel the burn of her gaze in my periphery, but I keep my eyes on the road. On Batman Street.
“I need another pill,” she rasps.
“You’re fine. You took one at six.”
“That was four hours ago.”
I train one eye on her. She curls her purple-pedicured toes against the dash and buries her face into her knees. Rakes her nails through her thick chestnut hair, unraveling her messy bun to wisps.
“You know you can’t be taking them less than six hours apart.”
“Who died and made you my fucking doctor?”
She flashes her teeth. It’s not a smile.
We’re both trying to pretend we’re not scared. But she’s a bitch when she’s terrified. Doesn’t hide it well.
I think about reaching out to squeeze her shoulder or tuck the hair back into her bun. But trying to comfort her just pisses her off even more. It’s best to let her simmer. That’s probably the most important thing I’ve learned about her.
Batman Street shrinks in the rearview until finally, blessedly, it’s out of sight.
“ADAPT’s got people around here for sure,” Cora says.
The name is a fist in my gut. “You think that was them?”
She nods and pops her long, swanlike neck. Flips down her mirror and pulls a tube of green apple ChapStick from her sequined backpack. I breathe the sticky sweetness as she applies the ChapStick in thick, generous strokes. A calming ritual. Next, she’ll smoke a clove. And I’ll pretend I don’t want one. We’ve done this about a hundred times, now.
Right on cue, Cora negotiates with a cheap lighter and that warm, spicy fog rolls in. She switches on the radio. The last station we were listening to outside Pittsburgh has faded to unintelligible static.
“Mmm, ’merican as apple pie,” she says as she drags the clove, scanning through the local stations. “You sure you don’t wanna try?”
I shake my head. I get the appeal. The flavor combo. But cinnamon was Mom’s go-to appetite suppressant. In gum form. Trident, specifically. I was never allowed to have a piece of her gum because she needed all of it. Actually, it was more like … I never allowed myself to have a piece.
It’s still hard to untangle the rules from the things I did because I knew I should.
Cora finds a clear station—a country channel playing a twangy, retro Garth Brooks bop. She groans and presses her forehead to the window, leaving a halo of bronzer behind. “Think it’s worth it to turn on my data and download a playlist?”
“Not unless you’re trying to narc on us before we hit Ohio.”
“Obviously, I am joking.” She pulls from the clove. Quirks her head toward that black smudge in the rearview. Her energy softens. Like she can feel my fear circulating through the air vents. “I’d never let that happen. You know that, right?”
I hiss out a breath. Don’t want to dwell on this. “How much further is the Red Market?”
Cora procures a huge, prehistoric road map from her backpack. Unfurls it like an unwieldy parachute. “We got a minute. It’ll be exit one-twenty-two. That one back there was two-hundred-something.”
She wrestles with the map, trying to accordion the thing back into place as Garth Brooks yodels about all his friends in low places.
“You or your mom ever go to one of these?”
“Uh, no. We didn’t live near one.”
“Right.” She gives up on folding the map and just stuffs it into her bag. “Arizona, right?”
Shit, when did I tell her that? She keeps doing this. Making me say more than I should.
“Right.”
I crack the window, letting the cold air pelt my face like a punishment.
Maybe it’s fine. As long as I never said Tucson, specifically. I’m not that stupid.
The white lane lines pull my gaze as I drive, streaking past like lines of Morse code. SOS. SOS.
I concentrate on my poker face, but I’m afraid it’s not good enough. Afraid she can see the seams as I weave together all the lies I’ve told.
“You think he’s gonna be there?” I grapple for a new topic.
“Hopefully? I told him I was coming through.” Cora expels a plume of spicy smoke. When it clears, there’s a wistful smile on her lips.
My chest tightens. I hate the look on her face, when she talks about him. But listening to her talk about Devon is better than dodging her questions.
All the blood in my exhausted body curdles. I can still feel his flinty eyes watching me from the window. That ice-cold insolence thrumming in the air.
I have to keep reminding myself: This time, it’s me watching him.
Cora kisses her clove. I’m aching to tell her the truth. She needs to know what kind of man he is. What he’s done to me. Who he’s killed.
Only the first time, Mia.
The hair on the back of my neck spikes.
The second time …
The second time …
No.
This was his fucking fault and he deserves what’s coming.
I’m biting my tongue again, hard. Blood pools in the back of my throat. Cora glances at me as I sputter.
“You good?” She gently pats my back.
Unlike her, I actually do respond to comfort. To her touch.
I hate myself.
I hate myself for getting into this car with her. For starting this at all.
I hate myself for everything.
NOVEMBER 2023
TUCSON
There’s no funeral because there’s nothing to bury. Nothing I wanted, anyway. Most of what was left on the living room carpet that morning went to the Sara center in Phoenix, so it could be submitted to a study. Before the hazmat crew left the house, one of the technicians lifted the mask of his pillowy white suit, like a sentient Stay-Puft man, and gently asked if I’d like to “keep anything.”
I said no.
I haven’t been back since that night. June 6.
I was already packed, ready to move into Jade’s minivan and accompany her on tour. Start a new life in New York. Get a little place with a terrace near a park, where we’d watch the puppies wrestle in the dog run and drink cold beer on hot nights, hidden in crumpled paper bags. At Christmastime we’d go to Radio City and see the Rockettes. We’d watch the icicles melt on our fire escape, sipping coffee—which she’d teach me to enjoy. The puppies in the park would grow up, and so would we.
What a fucking mess.
* * *
There are laws about harboring a Sara. Most people get hit with a court date and a nasty fine, but there’s jail time involved if they can prove you were helping them hunt. A lawyer from the Sara center calls to tell me they’ve reviewed my situation. Because I contacted them to surrender Mom, I’m in the clear. That, combined with how young I was when it first happened, helped them determine I was worthy of a clean slate. Legally, at least.
Sandy is good to me. The walls of her quaint adobe cottage are crammed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves—a seamless extension of her store, the Book Bunker. Her wife, Alyssa, is an amazing cook, even though I barely eat anything the first month I’m at their house. She bakes corn bread in her cast-iron pan every morning, making a show of melting honey butter over the crispy golden top to lure me to the dining table. Eventually, I cave. It’s still weird to go into their kitchen and open the fridge, though. Not because I’m living in a house that’s not my own, but because there’s just so much food in there. Only one person ate at my house, and it was me. I always knew exactly what was in our fridge, and I never had trouble deciding what I wanted. Choosing a flavor of sparkling water exhausts me. I pick up the cans and replace them a dozen times before making a decision. Keeping track of all the different milks gives me so much agita I’ve stopped drinking it altogether. There’s almond milk, 2 percent, and oat milk. They use the almond for smoothies, 2 percent exclusively for cookie dunking, and the oat milk is for lattes. Actually, the almond might be for lattes. I don’t know. It’s just a lot.
I share the guest room with Sandy’s elderly Boston terrier, Winnie, and she snores like a tractor, but I don’t mind. I haven’t had a pet since I was ten, when Cheddar the orange tabby cannonballed out our window in a blaze of terror after Mom’s turn. Sometimes Winnie hops into bed with me, taking the shape of a doughnut between my shoulders. That’s the best thing she does. Problem is, she’s so old she can’t jump down from the bed, so whenever she wants to get off, I have to wake up so I can carefully guide her back to the floor. But it’s okay. It’s never a deep sleep. It’s an Ambien-induced twilight doze, which has been getting weaker and weaker by the day because I’m building such a resistance to the stuff and the doctor won’t write me a stronger prescription. “You should ease off the caffeine,” he says. “Try a guided meditation.”
Every morning, Sandy cracks the blinds a quarter of an inch to coax my eyes open and whispers, “Time to head to the mines, buddy.” I wonder if she knows I’ve been awake the whole time.
Sandy doesn’t make me talk about anything. She has the bullet points. Getting those was hard enough.
Once the cops got settled to stake out the house the night it happened, they realized I had nowhere to go. I called the only person I could think of.
I waited for Sandy in the driveway, watching the sun fade. Keeping my back to our door, counting the donkey tail succulents in the neighbor’s window boxes across the street. An old woman in a periwinkle bathrobe appeared, eyeballing the swarm of squad cars as I skirted her gaze. It’s not like we knew each other. We never knew any of our neighbors. Never introduced ourselves.
They probably suspected us all along.
Sandy kept asking if I was sure I didn’t want to keep anything. I didn’t want what the moon men scraped off the living room carpet, vacuum-sealed in that heavy titanium vial. And she said no, not that. “I mean, what about something that was special to her? Some jewelry? Or a few pictures?”
No, I said. There’s nothing here. I want to leave.
A couple weeks later, I put out an obituary because Mom’s employees at the restaurant kept calling me to ask what happened, and I didn’t have it in me to answer. Twenty-four words in the Arizona Daily Star: Isobel McKinnon passed away due to complications with Saratov’s syndrome on June 6, 2023, in Tucson, Arizona. She is survived by her daughter, Mia.
There’s no grave. No memory stone or anything. I don’t know where I’d put it. What it would say. Having nothing to bury makes certain things easier. Then again, thinking about the absence of remains still means I’m thinking about them. And then I stop eating again.
* * *
I’m on my lunch at the bookstore, picking at a hunk of Alyssa’s corn bread in the break room. I don’t go to the Starbucks anymore. It’s not like I’m trying to avoid Jade. She isn’t there. But I go metal-mouthed with panic every time I walk past. Gag on the smell of espresso. I’ve started confining myself to a strict eight-foot radius around the Book Bunker.
Jade’s in Seattle. I know this because of all the stories she’s just posted. She hasn’t reached out to me, and I’ve paid her the same courtesy. I don’t know what we’d even say to each other, so it’s honestly fine. Except, well, it’s not. I’m on my phone way more than I should be. I’ve deleted all my social apps twice now, only to shamefully reinstall them in the dead of night when I’m wide awake with Winnie snoring into my back. I don’t like her posts and I definitely don’t leave any comments. I don’t know what I’m looking for. A crack in her smile as she poses for a selfie? Some sort of telltale, smudged asymmetry in her blue eyeliner? A glimpse of Gabi? The whole thing is pointless and I’m well aware. But something about it feels good and nothing else feels good right now. So.
I’m watching a video of her at the Pike Place Market, trying to master the icy fish toss with Tony, when my phone rings.
It’s Sabrina. She’s still saved as “Real Estate Woman” in my contacts because I couldn’t retain any information back in June, when we met. In fact, I barely remember meeting her at all. I only remembered her real name about a week ago. My memory is full of holes, like the sun burned ultraviolet lesions into my brain that morning to punish me.
“Mia, honey, it’s Sabrina.” Her voice is staid but soft, with a put-upon breathiness she probably thinks sounds comforting.
“Yup.”
“About the house.”
“I know.” Last time she called she might as well have been signaling an alien planet. A former version of me probably would’ve been embarrassed. But I didn’t feel anything then, and I don’t feel anything now. I guess that’s growth or something. Who knows.
“We’re planning to list it on Friday. But it needs to be cleaned out, before we can start showing it.”
I sit up straight. There’s a dry, scratchy feeling in my mouth. I paw around for my water bottle, but I left it up at the cash wrap.
“Oh um … I thought we were gonna like, get a big dumpster and just—”
Copyright © 2024 by Elizabeth Kerin
