I twist in my office chair, thinking, before glancing over to my phone and noticing a blinking red light—one voice mail. I turn on speakerphone and listen to the familiar voice radiate through the room.
Doctor Davis, this is Aaron Jansen with The New York Times. We just spoke on the phone earlier and, uh, I would really appreciate just an hour of your time to talk. We’ll be running this article no matter what, and I’d like to give you the opportunity to say your part. You can call me back directly on this number.
There’s silence next, but I can hear him breathing. Thinking.
I’ll be reaching out to your father, too. I just thought you’d want to know.
Click.
I sink lower into my chair. I’ve been actively avoiding my father for the last twenty years, in every sense of the word. Speaking to him, thinking about him, talking about him. It was hard to do at first, right after his arrest. People harassed us, showed up at our house at night screaming obscenities and waving signs as if we, too, partook in the slaying of those innocent young girls. As if we somehow knew and turned a blind eye. They egged our house, slit the tires of my father’s truck still parked in the yard, spray-painted PERVERT on the side in dripping red paint. Someone broke through my mother’s bedroom window one night with a rock, shattering the glass across her body as she slept. It was all over the news, the discovery of Dick Davis as the Breaux Bridge serial killer.
And then there were those words: serial killer. It seemed so official. For some reason, I never thought of my father as a serial killer until I saw it plastered across the newspapers, labeling him as such. It seemed too harsh for my father, a gentle man with a gentle voice. He was the one who taught me how to ride a bike, jogging alongside me with his hands clutching the handlebars. The first time he let go, I had crashed into a fence, smacking straight into the wooden beam and feeling a searing pain in my cheek. I remember him running up behind me, scooping me in his arms, followed by the warmth of a damp washcloth as he pressed it against the gash beneath my eye. Drying my tears with his shirtsleeve, kissing my tangled hair. Then he fastened my helmet tighter and made me try again. My dad tucked me under the covers at night, wrote his own bedtime stories, shaved his facial hair into cartoon mustaches just to watch me laugh as he emerged from the bathroom, pretending like he didn’t understand why I was wailing into the couch cushions, tears streaming from my cheeks. That man couldn’t be a serial killer. Serial killers didn’t do things like that … did they?
But he was, and they did. He killed those girls. He killed Lena.
I remember the way he watched her that day at the festival, his eyes tracing her fifteen-year-old body like a wolf eying a dying animal. I’ll always credit that moment as the beginning of it all. Sometimes, I blame myself—she was talking to me, after all. She was holding up her shirt for me, showing off her belly-button ring for me. Had I not been there, would my father have seen her like that? Would he have thought of her like that? She came over a few times that summer, stopping by to give me some old hand-me-down clothes or used CDs, and every time my father walked into my bedroom and saw her there, lying belly-side down on the hardwood floor, her legs kicking freely in the air and her ass busting out of her ripped-up denim shorts, he stopped. Stared. Cleared his throat, then walked away.
His trial was televised; I know because I watched. My mother wouldn’t let us at first, Cooper and me, kicking us out of the room when we wandered in to find her crouched on the floor, her nose practically touching the screen. This isn’t for children’s eyes, she would say. Go outside and play, get some fresh air. She was acting like it was nothing more than a rated-R movie, like our father wasn’t on TV being tried for murder.
But then one day, even that changed.
The doorbell had been jarring, I remember, the way it had reverberated through our perpetually silent house, vibrating off the grandfather clock, creating a tinny buzzing that made my arm hair bristle. We had all stopped what we were doing and stared at the door. Nobody visited us anymore—and the ones who did had abandoned polite formalities like that long ago. They came by screaming, throwing things—or even worse, without making a single sound. For a while, we had been finding foreign footprints littered throughout our property, left behind by some stranger slinking across our yard at night, peeking through windows with a sick fascination. It made me feel like we were a collection of curiosities preserved behind a museum glass case, something haunted and strange. I remember the day I caught him, finally, walking up that dirt pathway and seeing the back of his head as he peered inside, thinking no one was home. I remember pushing up my sleeves, charging at him blind with nothing but adrenaline and anger forcing me forward.
“WHO ARE YOU?” I had screamed, my little fists balled up by my sides. I was so sick of our lives being put on display. Of people treating us like we weren’t human, weren’t real. He had swung around then, stared at me with wide eyes and hands raised, like he hadn’t even considered the fact that people still lived here. Turned out, he was just a kid, too. Barely even older than me.
“Nobody,” he had stammered. “I’m—I’m nobody.”
We had become so used to it—to intruders and prowlers and threatening phone calls—that when we heard the bell politely ring that morning, we were almost more afraid to know who was behind that thick slab of cedar, patiently waiting for us to invite them inside.
“Mom,” I had said, my eyes drifting from the door to her. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her hands woven between her thinning hair. “Are you gonna get that?”
She had looked at me, confused, as if my voice were something foreign, the words no longer intelligible. Every day, her appearance seemed to change. Wrinkles etching themselves deeper into her sagging skin, dark shadows smeared beneath her eyes, bloodshot and worn. Finally, she stood up wordlessly and peered out the small, circular window. The creak of the hinges; her soft, startled voice.
“Oh, Theo. Hi. Come in.”
Theodore Gates—my father’s defense attorney. I watched as he walked into our house with his slow, lumbering footsteps. I remember his shiny briefcase, the thick, gold band stretched across his wedding finger. He had smiled at me, sympathetic, but I had grimaced back. I didn’t understand how he could sleep at night, defending what my father had done.
“Can I get you some coffee?”
“Sure, Mona. Yeah, that would be great.”
My mother stumbled around the kitchen, clanking the ceramic mug against the tile counter. That coffee had been sitting in the pot for three straight days and I watched as she poured it, absentmindedly spinning a spoon in circles even though she hadn’t poured in any creamer to mix. Then she handed it to Mr. Gates. He took a small sip, clearing his throat, before placing it back down on the table and sliding it away with his pinkie.
“Listen, Mona. I have some news. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”
She was silent, staring out the small window situated above our kitchen sink, tinted green with mildew.
“I got your husband a plea deal. A good one. He’s going to take it.”
She had snapped her head up then, as though his words had clipped a rubber band that had been stretched tight down the back of her neck.
“Louisiana has the death penalty,” he said. “We cannot risk that.”
“Kids, upstairs.”
She looked at Cooper and me, still sitting on the living room rug, my finger picking at the burnt hole from where my father’s pipe had landed. We obeyed, standing up and skulking silently past the kitchen and up the stairs. But when we reached our bedroom doors, we closed them, loudly, before tiptoeing back toward the bannister, taking a seat on the top step. And then we listened.
“You can’t possibly think they’d give him death,” she had said, her voice a whisper. “There’s barely any evidence. No murder weapon, no bodies.”