Page 89 of Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter

Harmony shakes her head. “All three of us know that isn’t true.”

“If you feel this strongly about it, why didn’t you ever do anything?”

“Because I didn’t learn how to stand up for Grace until it was too late, and I’ve been scrambling to make amends ever since. I’m a lot like you that way, always looking out for number one.”

“Sometimes people just need to hear ‘I’m sorry’ for them forgive you.”

“She’s forgiven me,” she says. “I haven’t forgiven myself.”

We stare at one another, trying to commit our faces to memory, but we already doomed to forget. As soon as I peel my eyes from her, she begins to fade, like a photograph exposed to sun until it blanches white.

“I’m going to go now.” Abruptly, Harmony is on her feet. The handcuffs are looser than the last time I visited. If she manipulates her wrists just so, she could slide right out of them. “I need a nap. The Seroquel …”

I want to keep her in our slice of purgatory forever, but this is done. We will forever share blood, but we will never again be sisters. “Good luck, Harmony.”

“I’m a force of nature, remember? I don’t need luck.”

Cued either by a secret signal or by eavesdropping on our conversation, the deputy glides into the room. Harmony shoots me one last smile before being escorted from the room. I watch the back of her head until she rounds a corner. I hold my breath until I can no longer hear her footsteps. I tell myself not to cry because she will not cry, and because she would not want me to shed a single tear. She has given me the gift of closure. She jettisons me from her life with ease, and though it will not be as painless for me, now I must do the same to her.

It is the last time I ever see Harmony. I will tick the days of her sentence off my calendar, her absence a primal lack in my life, like hunger or thirst, but I will never speak to her again. Inthe future, when I think of her, a precious serenity will wash over me, and I’ll know she’s thinking of me too.

I follow Sara around the trailer like a shadow. When we go outside to throw tennis balls for the dogs, I finally break our silence. I want to tell her everything—how extraordinarily fucked up my life has become, how I am choosing to uphold a grievous injustice, how I am indeed the selfish and stupid bitch she thinks I am—but it would be another act of selfishness on my part, more emotional waterboarding that my friend does not deserve. As we settle into her metal patio chairs, all I can tell her is: “You’re in my will, Sara.”

She wipes the slobber from one of the tennis balls onto her sweatpants. “Gee, fantastic. That’s not ominous at all.”

“I thought you needed to know.”

“Providence …”

The dogs confuse the pause in our game of fetch for ending it entirely. Left to entertain themselves, they roughhouse in a patch of dirt. Every time it looks like one of the boys has her pinned, Zenobia breaks free and turns the tables. “If I had a house and a yard, I’d steal Zenobia from you. I like her.”

“Don’t try to distract me.”

“You’ve always been in my will. I have no one else to leave anything to.”

“What about Grace? Harmony?”

“Harmony and I are not going to have a relationship.”

Her frown softens into pursed lips. “Did something happen?”

“Everything and nothing. She doesn’t want anything to do with me, and I’m going to do my best to respect that.”

“You can still leave things to Grace when your time comes.”

“I mean if something were to happen soon,” I say as I fish a cigarette from the carton in my lap, “before I could change anything. I don’t have much, but everything goes to you.”

“Why are you giving me a verbal suicide note?”

“I have to get Grace out of that house, Sara. If it’s the last thing I do on this earth, I have to do it.”

She withholds her lighter, as if denying me a cigarette will make me see reason. She flicks the flame on and off. “You’re going to kill your dad,” she says at last.

“I’ll try to reason with him first.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll get real far with that.”

“Stop acting like you know him the way I do. You weren’t raised by that monster.”

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