Maybe it’s only the humidity, but the rings around the moon are turning faintly green. Some women believe that a green light in the east can reverse the aging process, and sure enough Sally feels as though she were fourteen. She’s having thoughts no grown woman should have, especially not one who’s spent her whole life being good. She notices that there are bruises all up and down Gillian’s arms; in the dark they look like purple butterflies, like something pretty.
“I’m never getting involved with another man,” Gillian says. When Sally gives her a look, Gillian goes on insisting she’s through with love. “I’ve learned my lesson,” she says. “Now that it’s too damn late. I just wish I could have tonight, and call the police tomorrow.” Her voice is sounding strained again, and even littler than before. “I could cover Jimmy with a blanket and leave him in the car. I’m not ready to turn myself in. I don’t think I can do it.”
Gillian really sounds as if she’s cracking up now. She has a tremor in her hand that’s making it impossible for her to light another cigarette.
“You have to stop smoking,” Sally says. Gillian is still her little sister, even now; she’s her responsibility.
“Oh, fuck it.” Gillian manages to light the match, then her cigarette. “I’ll probably get a life sentence. Cigarettes will just shorten the time I have to serve. I should smoke two at a time.”
Although the girls weren’t much more than babies when their parents died, Sally made snap decisions that seemed forceful enough to carry them both along. After the sitter they’d been left with became hysterical, and Sally had to get on the phone with the police officer to hear the news of their parents’ death, she told Gillian to choose her two favorite stuffed animals and throw all the others away, because from then on they’d have to travel light, and take only what they could care for themselves. She was the one who told the silly baby-sitter to look for the aunts’ phone number in their mother’s date-book, and she insisted she be allowed to call and announce that she and Gillian would be made wards of the state unless a relative, however distant, came forward to claim them. She had the same look on her face then as she does now, an unlikely combination of dreaminess and iron.
“The police don’t have to know,” Sally says. Her voice sounds oddly sure.
“Really?” Gillian examines her sister’s face, but at times like this Sally never gives anything away. It’s impossible to read her. “Seriously?” Gillian moves closer to Sally, for comfort. She looks over at the Oldsmobile. “Do you want to see him?”
Sally cranes her neck; there’s a shape in the passenger seat, all right.
“He really was cute.” Gillian stubs out her cigarette and starts to cry. “Oh, boy,” she says.
Sally can’t believe it, but she actually wants to see him. She wants to see what such a man looks like. She wants to know if a woman as rational as herself could ever be attracted to him, if only for a second.
Gillian follows Sally over to the car and they lean forward to get a good look at Jimmy through the windshield. Tall, dark, handsome, and dead.
“You’re right,” Sally says. “He was cute.”
He is, by far, the best-looking guy Sally has ever seen, dead or alive. She can tell, by the arch of his eyebrows and the smirk that’s still on his lips, that he sure as hell knew it. Sally puts her face up to the glass. Jimmy’s arm is thrown over the seat and Sally can see the ring on the fourth finger of his left hand—it’s a big chunk of silver with three panels: a saguaro cactus is etched into one side panel, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, and in the center there’s a cowboy on horseback. Even Sally understands that you wouldn’t want to get hit if a man had that ring on; the silver would split your lip right open, it would cut quite deep.
Jimmy cared about the way he looked, that much is clear. Even after hours slumped over in the car, his blue jeans are so crisp it appears that somebody tried hard to iron them just right. His boots are snakeskin and they obviously cost a fortune. They’ve been very well cared for; if somebody spilled a beer on those boots by accident, or kicked up too much dust, there’d be trouble, you can tell that by looking at the polished leather. You can tell just by looking at Jimmy’s face. Dead or alive, he is who he is: somebody you don’t want to mess with. Sally steps away from the car. She’d be afraid to be alone with him. She’d be afraid one wrong word would set him off, and then she wouldn’t know what to do.
“He looks kind of mean.”
“Oh, god, yeah,” Gillian says. “But only when he was drinking. The rest of the time he was great. He was good enough to eat, and I’m not kidding. So I got the idea of a way to keep him from being mean—I started giving him a little bit of nightshade in his food every night. It made him go to sleep before he could start drinking. He was perfectly fine all this time, but it must have been building up in his bloodstream, and then he just conked out. We were sitting there in the rest area and he was looking through the glove compartment for his lighter, which I bought for him at the flea market in Sedona last month, and he got bent over and couldn’t seem to straighten back up. Then he stopped breathing.”
In someone’s backyard a dog is barking; it’s a hoarse and frantic sound that has already begun to filter into people’s dreams.
“You should have phoned the aunts and asked about the correct dosage,” Sally says.
“The aunts hate me.” Gillian runs her hand through her hair, to give it some fullness, but with this humidity it stays pretty limp. “I’ve disappointed them in every way.”
“So have I,” Sally says.
Sally believed the aunts judged her as far too ordinary to be of any real interest. Gillian felt sure they considered her common. Because of this, the girls always felt temporary. They had the sense that they’d better be careful about what they said and what they revealed. Certainly they never shared their fear of storms with the aunts, as if after nightmares and stomach viruses, fevers and food allergies, that phobia might be the last straw for the aunts, who had never particularly wanted children in the first place. One more complaint might send the aunts running to collect the sisters’ suitcases, which were stored in the attic, covered with cobwebs and dust, but made of Italian leather and still decent enough to be put to good use. Instead of turning to the aunts, Sally and Gillian turned to each other. They whispered that nothing bad would happen as long as they could count to a hundred in thirty seconds. Nothing could happen if they stayed under the covers, if they did not breathe whenever the thunder crashed above them.
“I don’t want to go to jail.” Gillian takes out another Lucky Strike and lights it. Because of her family history, she has a real abandonment anxiety, which is why she’s always the first to leave. She knows this, she’s spent enough time in therapy and paid enough bucks to discuss it in depth, but that doesn’t mean anything’s changed. There is not one man who’s gotten the jump and broken up with her first. That’s her claim to fame. Frankly, Jimmy comes the closest. He’s gone, and here she still is, thinking about him and paying the price for doing so.
“If they send me to jail, I’ll go nuts. I haven’t even lived yet. Not really. I want to get a job and have a normal life. I want to go to barbecues. I want to have a baby.”
“Well, you should have thought of that before.” This is exactly the advice Sally has been giving Gillian all along, which is why their phone conversations have gone from brief to non-existent in the past few years. This is what she wrote in her most recent letter, the one Gillian never received. “You should have just left him.”
Gillian nods. “I should have never said hello to him. That was my first mistake.”
Sally carefully searches her sister’s face in the green moonlight. Gillian may be beautiful, but she’s thirty-six, and she’s been in love far too often.
“Did he hit you?” Sally asks.
“Does it really make a difference?” Up close, Gillian certainly doesn’t look young. She’s spent too much time in the Arizona sun and her eyes are tearing, even though she’s no longer crying.