The Vanishing Season (The Collector #4)(34)

And the feeling afterward, of needing to scrape my tongue raw with a toothbrush, is a good reminder to deal with my shit in more mature, healthy ways before it gets this bad.

After the first involuntary taste-bud spasm of “oh shit, what poison are you giving us?” the ritual starts its work, and I resettle into the hammock in a more comfortable position, reaching for my phone to call Shira.

“Ima!” is the childish shriek that answers the phone. “Ima, is doda ’liza!”

“Erev tov, Noam,” I greet with a laugh. “How’s my favorite nephew today?”

“Ima, doda ’liza!”

“Noam, what is . . . oh, dear,” I hear in the background. There’s a shuffle and a meep sort of sound, and a huffing breath. “Erev tov, Eliza. Have you gotten rid of The Dress yet?”

“And suddenly I’m wondering why I called you.”

Her warm laughter eases something that even the familiar ritual of the cigarette can’t touch. “I’m keeping my promises. You told me to hold you accountable for getting rid of the damn dress.”

“Damn!” I hear Noam chortle happily, because of course he’s at the catch-and-release stage of verbal development.

There’s a muffled conversation between Shira and her husband, Asher, then footsteps and the sound of a door opening and closing. “Sorry, I’m on the porch now. We’re still working with Noam on understanding that the phone isn’t just the game and picture thing. So I’m guessing that means it’s still lurking in your closet.”

“Yes, damn you.”

“It’s going to become sentient and eat you in your sleep.”

“Death by wedding dress? Isn’t that a show on TLC?”

“You’re smoking, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Bless you, I’ve been fucking desperate.” Two seconds later, there’s the snick of a lighter and a deep, relieved inhale.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“You’re the one calling with a cig already in hand; shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

“Shira.”

She sighs, and it’s so easy to imagine her sitting on her porch, perched on the thin rail because furniture is for people who don’t know better, the thin plume of smoke wreathing around her as she shivers in the October evening. She doesn’t allow herself a coat while smoking; it’s her self-punishment. The location of the porch has changed over the years, different places in and around the greater Denver area, but the threads of it always remain the same. “Ima got a call from the prison on Friday. Hadn’t told you yet because I’m still working my way through it.”

When Shira—or any of the Sawyer-Levy family, really—says “the prison,” there isn’t a question of which one. They only ever mean one: the Coleman Correctional Facility in Florida. Her father has been a prisoner there since we were in middle school. We came home from school one day to find her house swarmed with police officers and FBI agents, her father arrested for a string of murders over nearly two decades. Women raped, murdered, their bodies thrown away like so much garbage, while he had a loving family at home.

I practically grew up in that home. Shira’s mother, Illa, and my ima were sort-of friends, and part of the same mothers’ group at our temple. As an only child with an ima who makes Elizabeth Bennet’s mother look sturdy and well adjusted, I adored the noisy, chaotic, warm Sawyer-Levy home. They were my family as much as my parents were. Her father used to take us to the park and teach us baseball, because he didn’t think it was a game only for boys. He cheered at all our Little League games and walked us through neighborhoods and office parks, keeping an eye on us as we used devastating cuteness and sincerity to sell Girl Scout cookies, and then he drove us around when it came time to deliver them. He used to watch us fall asleep in the living room after we swore we were old enough to stay up late with the big kids, and then carry us up to Shira’s bed and tuck us in together, kissing our hair before he left us to dream.

We studied his case in the academy, and I learned all the details Illa had protected us from, details she may not even have known, and fuck, they were awful. What that man did to those women, some of them only a few years older than his firstborn . . . Strangely, perhaps, those details never crept into the nightmares that started in middle school and got significantly worse for a while in the academy. Rather, it was the literal blood on his hands. I used to dream—still dream, sometimes, certain times of the year or when a case comes too close—that he carried us up to bed and tucked us in, kissing our foreheads, and through all of it, his hands were coated in blood that never darkened, never washed away, spilling over our hair and skin and the lavender-and-white gingham sheets.

All the pain and suffering Shira and her family went through afterward is a big part of why I joined the FBI. A part of me wanted to understand why. Why did he do it? Killers were bad men. They were supposed to be noticeably bad men, not my second father. They were supposed to be scary and evil and alone, not laughing and cheering as the girls outhit the boys at the local Little League home run derby while the rest of his family laughs along with him.

That desire to know and understand, to make sense of it, got me to the academy. What got me through it, and what’s kept me in the FBI since, is realizing how many other families go through that trauma. We help the victims.