Rainbow was a family code word, invented by Adrienne herself when she was a really little kid, maybe four or five, and persisting in conversation between the two of them to this day. Used as an adjective, the word added urgency or veracity or weight to anything it modified. (You like that guy—rainbow like? Yeah. I am really going to flunk that math test. Rainbow flunk? You bet… )

She frowned. It wasn’t enough. What if Adrienne came and knocked and…

She scribbled a note to her sister and took it downstairs. Ramon was out front helping Mrs. Parkhurst out of a taxi, so she just ducked behind the desk and stuck the note into the slot for her apartment. If Adrienne came, Ramon would look there. He was very responsible.

Back upstairs, she went out to the balcony and made a little fire in the chiminea. The sun was going down now, splashing the sky with a swirl of violet and orange that reminded her of a Gauguin. As she stuffed some twisted-up newspapers into the chiminea’s belly, she tried to remember which Gauguin, but couldn’t. Atop the newspapers, she crisscrossed a few pieces of Georgia fatwood, and crowned it all with a length of piñon wood. Then she lit a match and watched her construction bloom into flame. I’m practically a Boy Scout, she told herself.

Returning inside, she checked the bath. It really did smell fabulous, and she saw with satisfaction that the froth of bubbles was deep and luxurious, and almost to the top. She turned off the water and stuck a finger in—hot hot, as Marlena used to say.

Then she left the bathroom.

Getting a step stool from the broom closet in the kitchen, she went into the bedroom and, with the help of the stool, retrieved an old scrapbook from its hiding place at the back of the closet’s top shelf. Climbing down, she carried the book out to the balcony and, seating herself beside the crackling chiminea, opened it.

There were maybe a hundred snapshots in the album, each affixed to the page by little dabs of glue in the corners. They were family pictures, mostly, showing herself and Adrienne, Deck and Marlena, over a number of years. There was a picture on the first page of herself in a swing, hair flying, as Marlena pushed her from behind, her own face alight with laughter. In the background, a redbrick rancher.

Elsewhere on the same page—a snapshot of Adrienne at the free throw line, her eight-year-old face frowning in concentration; Deck, standing beside the barbeque in the backyard, a spatula in one hand, a Bud in the other; Nico and Adrienne at the beach, building sand castles; Adrienne, putting the finishing touches on a gingerbread house; Nico sitting next to Deck, with her arms around the pumpkin that she’d carved; and so on. There was even a photo of Nico in her prom dress, just before she went to Europe and all hell broke loose.

If you judged the family by the album, it was very nearly perfect, and about as wholesome as a Minnesota spring. But Nico saw what was not in the album as well as the people who were. And what was missing was the nightmare, manifest in the absence of Rosanna—whose face she couldn’t even recall.

There were no pictures of her older sister, not one. It was as if she’d never existed. Which meant that the album in Nico’s hands was a part of the deception. Forget what had happened to her. She, at least, was alive. At least she had a past. But her sister—her sister didn’t even exist as a memory. First, she’d been slaughtered, and then she’d been erased—like a Moscow apparatchik whose existence was suddenly, terminally inconvenient.

Nico removed the photo of herself and Marlena at the swing, and turned it over. Written on the back in her foster mother’s spidery hand were the words:

Denton, Del.

Even that was a lie, Nico thought. The ranch style house in the background was nothing like the peeling and dilapidated mansion she’d known in South Carolina. Had she ever even been to Delaware? She didn’t think so.

Crumpling the picture in half, she laid it on the fire in the chiminea, then watched the paper flatten, even as the faces faded to black. Finally, the snapshot flared into flame, and sparks snapped from its surface, swirling into the chimney above it. One by one, Nico fed the fire with pictures from the album until, in the end, the only photos left were of herself and her surviving sister. Then she got to her feet, blinking the tears from her eyes. And as much to the walls as to herself, she muttered, “Ding dong, the witch is dead.”

It was almost dark now, or as dark as it got in D.C., the winking lights of planes standing in for the myriad, invisible stars. She got a wire whisk from the kitchen and when the fire had subsided to a smolder, smashed up the ashes.

This done, she went into the living room and removed an envelope from the top drawer of her desk. Written more than a month before, it had lain out of sight until the time was right—and that was now. Going into the kitchen, she glanced around for a place to leave it, and finally settled on the refrigerator. Clearing the door of everything on its surface—cartoons and take-out menus, a recipe for chicken saté and a picture of Jack—she tossed it all in the trash. Then she centered the envelope to Adrienne, and affixed it to the door with a magnet shaped like a tiny bottle of Tanqueray gin. She looked at her watch. Six-thirty. There was still more than an hour before Adrienne was due, so there was no hurry.

Standing at the kitchen counter, she poured herself a cold glass of Russian River Chardonnay, and put on a Miles Davis CD. Sketches of Spain.

Sipping the wine, she felt a shiver run through her as she walked into the bathroom. All that time on the balcony, sorting through the album had given her a chill. Removing the space heater from the linen closet next to the bath, she plugged it in and set it on the ledge that encased the tub.

Flicking on the heater, she luxuriated for a moment in its bright and sudden warmth, then undressed slowly, tossing her clothes into the hamper. Standing there in the nude, she took a sip of wine, and, swaying slightly, gave herself over to the viscous, haunting slur of the trumpet, as Miles soared through “Concerto de Aranjuez.” Finally, she stepped into the water and, ever so slowly, eased herself into the cloud of bubbles that lay on its surface.

The water was perfect. So hot she could just barely tolerate it. So hot, the warmth seemed to suffuse her. So hot it was just at the perfect intersection of pleasure and pain—in other words, just over the pleasure edge. She thought about that phrase—the pleasure edge—and smiled as she continued her glacial slide into the water. She could hear the tiny explosions of the bubbles, collapsing under the pressure of her back. She could feel them in the hair at the nape of her neck.

Languidly, she sipped her wine and watched the coils of the space heater turn a deeper and deeper shade of orange. Then Miles hit a note so heartbreakingly pure that it brought a film of moisture to her eyes—and gently, almost tenderly, she extended her foot, and tipped the heater in.