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Jordan is crying again. I am crying. Jay won’t let himself cry. Jordan shakes her head at the floor, then at me. “I’m not, though, Mom. I have to—” she sucks air in wetly through her mouth and holds it “—I have to do something, too.”

  Before I can respond, she throws herself at me. She’s grown a few inches in these past weeks; her ear presses level against mine. She hugs me and I hug her back, pressing harder than I should, willing our bodies to fuse together, to become one, so I can carry her home with me now.

  Jordan speaks into my neck, the heat of it igniting gooseflesh on my skin. “Mom, I… Mom.”

  “I love you.” It’s always been a dangerous thing to say to her, met with hurtful sarcasm or disdain, or ignored. But I can’t help it; I can’t help it. “I love you so fucking much.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”

  It’s enough.

  Jordan lingers with me for another moment, then pulls away and bends down to her father. He’s curled in on himself, so she hugs his head, nuzzling his hair with her chin. He reaches up and wraps his fingers around her wrist. They stay like that until the door opens again.

  Jay gets up at the sound of the door creaking on its hinges. Omalis comes into the room but doesn’t say anything, just stands with her arms held behind her, very officious.

  Jay clears his throat. “Well, kiddo.” He doesn’t want to say goodbye but he can’t bring himself to believe in “see you later.”

  “It’s okay, Dad.” Jordan backs away from us, letting us go. It’s too soon, I want to reach out for her but I know she’ll only push me away. Not with cruelty, but because she has to. We all do what we have to.

  I walk out ahead of Jay, forcing my eyes to face forward, my knees to bend, my feet to take even steps. I can hear Jay walking steadily behind me, and then we’re in the hall and Omalis has closed the door.

  “I’ll need you to put these on one last time,” Omalis says. She hands us the blindfolds.

  We walk back to the helipad in silence. Once seated, before the sedative kicks in, Jay leans in close to my ear and says, “You’ve killed me.” I’m too tired to care.

  THIRTEEN

  OMALIS

  IN THE DIMLY LIT BEDROOM of her apartment, Omalis surrounds herself with aborted memories of summers past. Spilling out of every drawer in her dresser, pushing against the door of the walk-in closet, creeping out beneath the bed, are remnants of Omalis’s life, of the lives she’s allowed to be taken. All of the care packages she has created in the names of the children to ease their parent’s anxieties; all the letters she has promised to deliver from parent to child, each carefully handwritten mark upon the page like a stab wound driving its ink deep under her skin. The Over create this façade, this summer camp fantasy, not because it soothes the parents to think their children will get their letters, or reassures them that nothing can be so wrong if their child can send them happy sunshine cards and candy gift baskets. The Over do it because it amuses them; the Over do it because they can.

  Omalis is not instructed to hang onto these lies—she can destroy the letters, eat what she wants from the gift baskets, throw away the toys. But she keeps them. She’s kept them all. Hundreds of stale chocolate bars, staler greeting cards bearing forged signatures, plastic bubble-gum-machine toys, miniature travel board games, dried flowers pressed between the yellowing pages of drugstore paperbacks. The brown nondescript packaging kicked to the corners, the elements inside—the memories she never allowed to grow—clawing at her ankles. But it’s the parents’ letters that really cut her down.Earlier in the night, when the moon was high enough to cast its light through the blinds and remind Omalis just how much she was not sleeping, she had gotten up and walked to the closet and pulled the boxes off the shelves, ripping into their guts as if she were a beast and they her latest kill. This fantasy is so close to the truth, yet so late; most of them, she killed years ago.She doesn’t look at the names on the packages; she does not have to. She remembers them all. She kept them locked away so she would not have to think of them, or only if she wanted to, just enough to make her want to feel guilty, just enough to make her ache to be hurt, just enough to make her call Marla. Tonight she felt something deeper than that ache—grown coldly familiar—something sharper. So she tore into the packages, every one, grabbed them up from the floor of the closet, the shelves, under the bed and inside the dresser drawers that have been empty of her clothes since she moved most of her things to Marla’s place. She spilled them out, violently, shook out everything so she could wade through it, kick and toss and stomp it around until she felt something else. Something else. That something that has kept her going through all these summers, these memories, these murders; that something that shifted—maybe four days ago, maybe five—and slipped and fell into a place so hidden inside of her that it is lost.She knows it is lost, which is why she makes no sound as she kicks the contents of the packages. It is why she takes her bronze letter opener and slices through the seals of the parents’ envelopes, opens each with careless vehemence, as if only to rip them up and add the fragments to the mess at her feet, but then she stops and stands there and reads them. Every single one, every single word. She has taken everything else from these people, why not their privacy, too?It was Jordan who did this to her. It was Jordan, the only kid through all these summers who ever looked at her with such hatred, such controlled anger, and didn’t plead or bargain or threaten or break, but demanded. Commanded. Omalis responded to that kind of straightforwardness, that futile strength, with obedience.Regret came only later, after dropping the Fontaines at the runway, boarding her private jet, and promptly vomiting into the toilet. She experienced some sort of seizure, a physical sensation so completely foreign and alarming that she relished it. Cold sweat poured from her, her skin hardened and her muscles contracted in a state of paralysis that lasted maybe forty seconds before something snapped in her brain—she could literally hear the snapping, feel it, like a nerve ending being pulled apart—and she doubled over and vomited one more time before blacking out. She had thought it was the Over, punishing her for something, or retiring her. She had thought, “At last.”And then she woke up in her apartment, in her bed, in a freshly laundered pantsuit and a message scratching across her frontal lobe: Take a day off. Omalis took four.

  In those four days, she has not eaten, slept, showered, left the apartment, answered the phone or called Marla. Not eating hurt the most at first but she found the stomach cramping bearable if she drank a little water. She knows that her body will not let her brain control it in that way, for the simple fact that she is not the sole proprietor of her brain. If Liaisons were capable of suicide there would be no Liaisons. No, that is too hopeful. There would be fewer Liaisons. She knows she will break soon but not tonight. Tonight—or early this morning, as the sun begins to rise on other parts of the world—tonight, Omalis reads.

  “Your mother and I love you very much. Don’t ever forget that, no matter what they do to you. You have us, and your sisters, and grammy and grampy and even Auntie Edie though I know you two have not always gotten on. You have us, sweets, and they can never take that from you, even if it seems like they can. Remember last Christmas when we…”

  “Sweets” was a twelve-year-old girl named Shauna Grimes who was selected for Breed. Omalis remembers that during their meetings Shauna refused to talk about anything that was happening at camp, or about her parents, or the life she used to have, or the future she feared. Instead, she would make up stories about faeries living in the woods, or mer-people in the lake, trolls under bridges, the usual. She went so far as to suggest that Omalis was a princess, “But a secret one,” she said, “and you’re not supposed to know it so forget I told you.” Omalis asked, “But aren’t you the princess?” To which Shauna did not reply but only poked at her thighs with her little-girl fingers and sang a nonsense song that had no words. This was six years ago. Girls in Breed last maybe ten years at the longest. If Shauna is alive, surely she is not thinking about her parents�
��who killed themselves three years ago, anyway, after their fourth daughter was also sent to Breed—or grammy or Auntie Edie or anything outside of her suffering and her hope, however tenuous, that she will just fucking bleed out and end it already.Omalis has tried to kill herself, in more blatant ways than starvation or alcohol poisoning or even jabbing a mysterious needle into her thigh and dreaming of air bubbles. Every year, before prepping for the camps, she wakes up, draws a bath, and takes a straight razor to the thick, pulsating blue vein in her wrist. She can’t press down hard enough; whatever the Over did to her, however they wired her brain in those initial, painful connections, she is unable to leave behind much more than superficial scrapes along her skin. She figures she has to try, though. It is the least she can do.

  Someone is knocking at the apartment’s front door. Omalis ignores it. She’s come to June Fontaine’s letter. Well, she’s been saving it, but now there are no other letters to distract her. It’s only one page and on that page, a single line addressed not to Jordan or to one or both of her brothers, but to Omalis.

  “Omalis, wake up. We all know you’re their puppet, so cut the fucking strings already. Best, June.”

  June Fontaine is not the first parent to realize—or to openly acknowledge—the illusion Omalis is forced to create for them, but she is the first to point to the Liaison as something separate from the Over. Not that she has not received her fair share of pleas appealing to her humanity; but this, June’s words, appeal to her agency.

  “Yeah, right,” she breathes into the stillness of the wrecked room. Whatever agency she might have had was bludgeoned by her mother’s promise twenty-six years ago and buried by the Over alongside her ability to run a blade across her own arteries.

  The knocking grows insistent, thundering. Omalis only looks up when there’s a crash, a harsh splintering of wood and a primal scream, then a string of cursing. Marla appears outlined by the bedroom door frame, hair frazzled down her cheeks, overcoat hanging loosely, revealing the black pleather short-shorts, hot pink fishnet stockings and black tank top of her trade. She sees Omalis in her room and rushes over to her on eight-inch heels, tossing her tiny clutch purse behind. Her makeup is dry and flaking off around her eyes and lips. She stops in the doorway.

  “Jesus, Heaven,” she says, the two names running together like a curse.

  Omalis realizes she is naked. Has been since she lay down to try to sleep, then got up to maybe shower, then felt ill, felt that sharp stabbing something, and went into the closet for the packages. She feels a light soreness on her arms and looks down to see just how carelessly she has been using that bronze letter opener to slice open the envelopes. There is no blood but bright red streaks criss-cross the skin of her forearms. She drops Mrs. Fontaine’s letter and the opener into the pile at her feet.

  Marla takes in the room, her irises widening and contracting, tears building up in the corners of her eyes near the small clumps of day-old mascara. The sight of those unshed tears makes Omalis’s blood run hot.

  “Were you worried about me?” Omalis asks. It’s the first time she has spoken to anyone in four days. The words sound raw, stale, hollow.

  Marla puts a hand over her mouth and Omalis imagines her biting down on the palm to keep the tears back. But they seep out of her regardless. She hugs herself with her other arm and takes a step back, out of the room, shaking her head.

  “I suppose this means you won’t be fucking me tonight,” Omalis says.

  The hand drops from her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Heaven. I’m so sorry.”

  “Would you do me a favor, baby, before you run off screaming into the night?” Omalis kicks her way through the garbage, stops in front of the doorway to the bathroom. “Would you take care of this shit? I won’t be needing it. You’re a peach.”

  In the bathroom, Omalis doesn’t close the door behind her because she wants Marla to follow her. She leans over and twists the faucet handles until the water is just hot enough to burn but not hot enough to make her brain tell her it’s harmful to stay under too long. She flips the shower on, and turns, and Marla is there.

  “Tell me what happened.” The tears are gone from her, sucked back into the center of her chest where they belong. She shed her overcoat in the bedroom and now Omalis is having a hard time looking at anything but her cleavage. “What happened at the parents’ visit, Heaven?”

  Something inside of her tries to claw its way free, but Omalis suppresses it. “You’re incredibly beautiful,” she says. She steps backward over the edge of the tub and stands under the steaming water. Marla says something to her that she can’t hear over the rush, and she holds her hand out, inviting Marla in. Marla hesitates, looks around the room, as if making sure they are alone, and then begins to undress.

  In the shower, neither attempts to say anything. Omalis takes up most of the stream, but the excess moisture sprouts gooseflesh along Marla’s collarbone and chest. Omalis covers Marla’s breasts with her hands and kisses her. It takes a few stubborn seconds for Marla to part her lips for Omalis’s tongue, but she does part them, and then adds her own tongue, and then kisses back harder than Omalis expected. It makes her wet.

  With Marla’s fingers inside her, Omalis closes her eyes and thinks about Jordan.

  She thinks about Jordan’s eyes, swollen and hard, unwavering accusations that burn along the frayed edges of whatever Omalis has been calling her heart these days. How her voice was like a rock curled inside unsure fingers, delivered to the base of her own skull in five swift blows—five quick syllables—”I. don’t. want. you. here.” How really she acquiesced not out of admiration for a flare of hatred often seen but rarely unleashed from her charges, but because Jordan ripped her open—Marla’s fingers pushing deeper, her thumb parting flesh to find the clit, her teeth still not brave enough to do more than brush Omalis’s neck—like she found that seam, the one loose thread, and it was so easy to pull and watch everything inside of Omalis slither its way into the light. Omalis had given her that thread the first night at the sound barrier, when she let herself believe she was doing the girl a kindness by letting her freak out, going easy on her; she let herself believe—in their subsequent meetings, through their innocent flirtation, Jordan’s blushing and her own suggestive body language—she let herself believe she was a source of comfort for Jordan. She allowed Jordan to believe that there was something worth seeking within her—solace, consolation, empathy. She deceived her, and in that deception she failed her.

  She failed her.

  Jordan looked at Omalis the same way Marla looks at her now—her fingers quickening, Omalis’s legs stiffening, skin reddening beneath the hot water. Jordan looked and she saw what Marla refuses to see. She saw the emptiness, the cowardice, the murderer.

  Omalis really has become her mother.

  Omalis shudders through her orgasm. Marla starts to pull her hand back but Omalis grips her wrist and holds it there. With her other hand she pulls Marla’s face next to hers so that her lips are pressed against Marla’s ear. She feels her body shaking as if she were cold, which is impossible. The water lashes Omalis’s shoulders, back, and legs. She back-steps into the stream so that it covers them both.

  “Hate me,” she says into Marla’s ear. But she speaks so low, the water is so loud, she is certain Marla cannot hear her. “Please.”

  They get out of the shower. The room is filled with steam, fogging up the mirrors, layering a film around the metal faucets, the brass doorknob. Omalis wraps a towel around herself without offering one to Marla. Marla dresses silently without drying off. Omalis leads her through the bedroom, the hall, the living room, and to the front door, which still hangs ajar from its hinges as a consequence of Marla’s heroic entrance.

  Liaisons are given a hefty salary, a pittance compared to the promise that any offspring of the Liaisons are safe from the Over, but certainly enough to afford a house, several, one for each season on any coast at all. Omalis has always lived in an apartment; anonymously, she has given th
e extra money to the families who’s lives she’s taken.

  Omalis flicks her eyes at the door, tightens the towel above her breasts. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  “Shit.” Marla hisses the word out like a sigh. She goes to the connecting kitchen and drops her overcoat on one of the barstool chairs at the island. She opens the fridge, and Omalis watches with amusement her reaction to the absolute nothing the appliance contains. Thwarted, Marla pulls a glass down from the cupboard and fills it from the tap.

  “I don’t know why we don’t stay here more often,” Marla says into the half-empty glass. “It’s charming. Very forty-year-old bachelor.”

  “I’m not forty,” Omalis says.

  Instead of responding with the expected “You’re not a bachelor, either,” Marla drains the rest of the water in her glass and refills it. She sips slowly, gently. Omalis moves into the kitchen and leans against the island’s marble countertop, watching her. Finally, Marla sets the glass down.

  “Heaven.” She struggles to meet Omalis’s eye. “What happened at the parents’ visit?”

  “I think we should break up.”

  “Did you get to talk with Jordan?”

  “It’s not me, it’s you.”

  “Were you able to see her at all, or—”

  “We’ve grown apart as people.”

  “I’m asking you something.”

  “I’m ignoring you.”

  “Goddammit—”

  “I’ll move my stuff out tomorrow. I’d prefer if you weren’t in.”

  “—Goddammit!” Marla slams her palms onto the countertop, upsetting her glass. It falls to the hardwood floor but does not break. Omalis’s body tenses, but Marla breathes deep and curls her arms against her chest. “Heaven…”

  She begins to count.

  At “four,” Omalis launches herself across the table. Her gut and hip absorb the brunt of the impact with the tabletop’s edge, shooting alarms of pain up her spine. She throws her hand over Marla’s mouth so fast it’s like a punch. Marla recoils, bites her tongue, curses and spits blood as she backs up. Omalis pushes herself up, vaults her legs over the table, lands in front of Marla and slams her left hand over her mouth again, using a forearm across her chest to push her into the refrigerator. The lone magnet on the freezer door—a cartoon pen from her car insurance company—wobbles, tilts, and joins the glass on the floor.