Mercedes’s card is right on schedule, but Vic and Eddison usually space theirs out a bit differently.
These are nothing like the card they’ll send in May, the one all three of them will sign. That one won’t have a note, not even a preprinted one. Just their signatures. Just a reminder that my sister’s murder hasn’t been forgotten. It takes some careful planning and an awareness of the postal service to make sure that one doesn’t arrive with my birthday cards.
Because nothing says happy birthday like the reminder that the FBI still doesn’t know who murdered your sister and a string of other girls over the years.
Inside the house, I strip off the outside layers to hang in the front closet, then head up the stairs to my room, peeling off the rest on the way. The cards get dropped onto my bed, the clothing onto the chair I dragged up from the neglected dining room to contain the chaos. After a hot shower that has my nose and fingertips painfully aware of returning sensation, I go back down to the kitchen and make packaged oatmeal, adding in cinnamon and honey and milk, and take it upstairs with me.
It’s only once I’m settled on the bed in pajamas, the oatmeal working its magic to warm my insides, that I reach for the envelopes.
Mercedes’s card is exactly what it should be, a cheerful back-to-school message in neon pen, half of it in Spanish because it cracks her up when I write back to her in French. I pull out Vic’s next, a black-and-white photo of three cats in massive sunglasses. The note inside is nonoccasional, a few lines about his oldest daughter’s college letters and the miserably rainy weather in northern Virginia. Eddison’s, with a picture carefully straddling the line between gross and funny, doesn’t have anything written in it at all.
Why all three?
But then I look at Mercedes’s card again, the front decked out in enough glitter to make a unicorn shit itself in glee, and realize some of the glitter doesn’t belong. The rest of it is superfine, pastel in tone. Here and there, though, are swirls of what look to be glitter glue, thick and a little gloppy and dried into little ridges of bright color. I slide a thumbnail under one of those swirls, gently prying it away. The paper tears on one curve, then releases. A moment later, I’ve got a rough circle of glue on one finger and an unobstructed view of part of the original card.
She covered over the butterflies.
Her name is Zoraida Bourret, and it’s Easter Sunday.
You like Easter in the more traditional churches, when the girls and women still wear white dresses and lace, and hats with ribbons or flowers. There’s something about sitting near the back of the church and seeing the sea of Easter hats.
And this year, you see Zoraida.
You’ve seen her before, of course, helping her mother with a horde of younger siblings. You’ve listened to the gossip, and that subtle something other that isn’t gossip but isn’t quite news. Her father was a police officer killed in the line of duty, and even though Zoraida was a sure shot for college and great things, she’s dropped all her extracurriculars and probably her chance for higher education in order to help at home, and no one even had to ask it of her.
What a good girl, the women say.
What a sweet child.
What a wonderful sister.
She doesn’t look anything like Darla Jean, but there’s something there that reminds you. It’s been almost a year since Darla Jean betrayed you, and even still you love her, miss her, mourn her.
But Zoraida really is a good girl. You’ve watched her enough to know that. She comes straight home from school, picking up her siblings on the way, and gets them all sorted with snacks and homework and activities, and almost always has dinner nearly done when their mother gets home from work. She helps with the baths and getting all the younger ones in bed, and only then does she sit down at the kitchen table and start on her own homework. It takes her late into the night, but then she’s up early again, making sure everyone gets breakfast and gets dressed and gets off to school.
And when the boys come round—and they do come round, because she’s a beautiful girl, and Lord, but the world lights up with her smile—she politely sends them away, because her family is more important.
Because she’s a good girl.
When the service lets out, it’s easy to steal the cute plastic purses a couple of her younger sisters have left on the pew. They forget them all the time, the twins, remembering them only halfway home, and because it’s a long walk to the church to save gas on the weekends, it’s always Zoraida who comes trudging back for them. She shakes her head at it every time, but she smiles, too, because she loves the twins and would do anything for them.
And you know you have to help her.
You have to make sure, for her sake, that she’s always this good, this pure.
So you steal the purses, knowing the twins will forget, and wait for her to come back. The church empties faster than usual, everyone heading home to egg hunts or dinner or extended family. You sit in the shadows and wait, and there she comes, fanning herself with her hat. It’s starched white lace, stiff and inflexible, with peach-colored ribbons woven through the brim and base of the crown. The peach and white look so soft against her dark skin. A single purple-throated lily is pinned like a corsage to her dress, almost high enough to be her shoulder.
You come up behind her, steps soft on the thin carpet, and cover her mouth with your hand. She draws a sharp breath, starts to scream, but your arm comes up against her throat. She struggles, but you know how long to keep the pressure firm, and she falls unconscious.
Her dress is so white, so clean. So innocent. You can’t bear the thought of ruining it.
So when one of her brothers comes by a bit later, worried when she didn’t return home right away, he finds her laid out before the altar, purple-throated white lilies in a halo about her head, her clothing neatly folded and stacked on a pew, the hat atop the pile and her plain buckle shoes beside. The gash across her throat is a clean line, because she couldn’t struggle while unconscious.
No pain, no fear.
She won’t have the chance to fall like Darla Jean, won’t face that temptation and betrayal.
Zoraida Bourret will always be a good girl.
Eddison’s apartment will never win prizes for decorating. It’s not homey, nor is it particularly cozy. If it has an aesthetic, it would probably be vaguely institutional. It’s tidy—even the dishes in the sink are rinsed and neatly stacked, waiting for him to empty and reload the dishwasher—but it doesn’t contain much that makes it feel personal. The walls are the same eggshell they were painted before he moved in. He did add curtains over the windows, partly because the blinds let in too much light and partly because he really doesn’t want anyone looking in. With the exception of the dinner table, a gaily colored tile-topped monstrosity Priya and her mother rescued from a closing Mexican restaurant and gave him as a joke, the furniture is dark and utilitarian. His movies and books live in the random extra closet near the television.
Generally Eddison prefers it that way. When he comes back from assignments where he’s been in people’s homes, seen all the personal ways people shape the places they live, he’s grateful to have a fairly neutral space where he can center himself again. And perhaps there’s a bit of paranoia to it. He’s not sure he knows anyone in law enforcement without the lingering, nearly-always-unspoken fear that one day someone might go after their loved ones in revenge. If he doesn’t have his loved ones out on display, if he doesn’t leave clues to his vulnerabilities lying around in open sight, even in his own apartment, it makes him feel safer.