Page 98 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

She stirs beneath the blanket. Her elbows and knees pop.

“Grace.”

Every question is about me. Are you angry with me? Can you forgive me? Have I committed the unpardonable sin? Am I evil? Did the world make me this way or is this who I have been all along? Is this my nature, the way a snake must always bite?

My father deserved to die, but my sister did not deserve to become an orphan. I don’t know how to reconcile that both canbe true. I don’t know how to reconcile how I can feel so righteous and so depraved all at once. When I thought of killing my father, I thought of him as just that. Mine. I forget he is ours, mine and Grace’s and Harmony’s, and even if we all prayed for him to die, I am the one who ended his life.

I am a killer.

I am nauseous at the word, but that’s a good thing. Taking a human life is meant to weigh on your soul. This pang of remorse is what separates me from a sociopath.

I will tell myself this for the rest of my life, but I will only believe it some of the time.

Grace cloaks herself in a blanket like E.T. She brings her vape to her lips, but stops short of smoking. I want to crack open our skulls and compare our brains side by side to see if the same defect that made me capable of unspeakable violence afflicts her too. I picture it as a malignant growth spreading across the tissue, turning it from gray to black, and if I find it within her, I will take a melon baller and scoop it out.

“Thank you for staying.” I reach toward her. She hesitates but takes my hand.

“You would have stayed for me.”

“Is …” I swallow hard. It’s difficult to speak. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”

“Mitesh said I could stay with him and Karishma for a little while.”

“That’s kind of him.”

She sneaks a tiny pull from her vape and exhales into the blanket. She slips it into her bra like I did with the switchblade. “It’s just the two of us now. We’re all that’s left.” She climbs into my bed. We lie forehead to forehead.

“I know about Harmony.”

We search each other’s eyes for absolution we cannot grant. My sin is unforgivable, and her sin is not mine to forgive. If we fall short of forgiveness, we must pay each other the kindness ofsilence, now and forever. Grace curls into me, once again the tiny baby I cradled in the linen closet, bringing the crucifix necklace to rest on her bottom lip. Maybe it is not Jesus lashed to the cross. Maybe it is the penitent thief after all.

She begins to tremble. I draw her closer.

“It’s okay, Grace. You can grieve if you need to.”

CHAPTER

29

September 9th

9:43AM

TILLMANCOUNTY DECLINESto press charges in the death of Tom Byrd. A deputy questioned me while I was still in the hospital—“just due diligence,” he promised, “just making sure we got our story right”—but nothing further came of it. Josiah assures me I don’t need to worry about a wrongful-death suit either, seeing as the only earthly family my father has left are me and my sisters. “It’s all over,” he tells me over the phone. “Go home. Live your life. It’s done now.”

I’m free.

I spend two weeks recovering at Sara’s, and that’s when I start having anxiety attacks and nightmares. The nightmares are always a little different. Sometimes my father and I are reliving the liquor store, other times we are brawling at the pool hall, occasionally we are fighting in the house, right over the dead spot on the landing. The settings change, but each dream ends with my father pinning me to the floor and driving the switchblade through my chest like a stake through the heart of avampire. It never kills me instantly. I gasp for air and struggle against him, but he plunges the knife deeper, twists it, then stabs me again and again between different ribs.

Merely shaking me does not end the nightmare. Sara quite literally throws me on the ground to wake me, and when I do, I am struggling to breathe just as I did when he shot me.

The bullet is gone, but the pain lingers, a persistent, dull throb that aches the same way my reconstructed cheek does in the winter. The doctor wanted to prescribe me Percocet for the pain, but I thought of my mother and declined. Regardless, he assured me it would dissipate in time. The limp would be temporary too. He said the same about my hearing loss, and while I still hear out of both ears, the left will never be the same. Things sound tinny and distant, and I lose words like I’m trapped in a permanent game of telephone. Eventually, only a scar will remain to remind me of that day, a patch of mottled flesh not unlike Mitesh Jadhav’s neck, warping my moth tattoo beyond recognition. Kiera was horrified when I sent her the picture.

At my final post-op appointment, the doctor apologizes for leaving such a grisly scar, but I smile and tell him it’s okay, I’m covered in scars as it is, what’s one more? He writes me a prescription for Valium to ease the nightmares and sends me on my way.

One afternoon, as I am lounging in the sun with Zenobia and my sketch pad, Sara invites me to the annualwacipi—or powwow, as she translates—a colorful gathering of dancing, ceremony, and music. It’s her favorite weekend of the year. “You haven’t left the house in two weeks,” she says. She keeps herself busy by cleaning out my father’s liquor store. I’ve given her the deed. She still doesn’t know what to do with the building, floating a new idea by me every day, but I know it will be a beacon of hope amidst the squalor of Annesville, the way flowers persist even in the harshest tundra. “You should be among the living.”

“It’s been nice to have peace and quiet,” I say.

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