And that was the last time I saw my father. His face on my television screen, describing the invisible monster that made him strangle those girls and bury their bodies in the woods behind our ten-acre lot. He made good on his promise to take the police there. I remember hearing the slam of the cruiser doors, refusing to even glance out the window as he led a team of detectives into the trees. They found some remnants of the girls—hairs, clothing fibers—but no bodies. An animal must have gotten to them first, a gator or a coyote or some other hidden creature of the swamp desperate for a meal. But I knew it was the truth because I had seen him one night—a dark figure, emerging from the trees, covered in dirt. A shovel slung across his shoulder as he slumped back to our house, oblivious to me watching from behind my bedroom window. The idea of him burying a body before returning home and kissing me goodnight had made me want to crawl out of my skin and live somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
I sigh, the Ativan making my limbs tingle. The day I turned off that television screen was the day I decided that my father was dead. He isn’t, of course. The plea deal made sure of that. Instead, he’s serving six consecutive life sentences in Louisiana State Penitentiary without the possibility of parole. But to me, he is dead. And I like it that way. But suddenly, it’s getting harder and harder to believe my lie. Harder and harder to forget. Maybe it’s the wedding, the thought of him not walking me down the aisle. Maybe it’s the anniversary—twenty years—and Aaron Jansen forcing me to acknowledge this horrible milestone I never wanted to be a part of.
Or maybe it’s Aubrey Gravino. Another fifteen-year-old girl gone too soon.
I look back at my desk and my eyes land on my laptop. I open the lid, the screen glowing to life, and launch a new browser window, my fingers hovering over the keys. Then I start to type.
First, I Google Aaron Jansen, New York Times. Pages of articles fill the screen. I jump to one, then another. Then another. It’s becoming clear now that this man makes his living writing about the murder and misfortune of others. A headless body found in the bushes of Central Park, a string of missing women across the Highway of Tears. I click over to his bio. His headshot is small, circular, black-and-white. He’s one of those people whose face and voice don’t match up, like it was stitched on as an afterthought, two sizes too big. His voice is deep, masculine, but his image is far from it. He looks skinny, wears brown, tortoiseshell glasses that don’t actually look prescription. They look like blue-blockers—glasses made for people who wish they had glasses.
Strike one.
He’s wearing a fitted, checkerboard, button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, a thin knit tie hanging limp against his scrawny chest.
Strike two.
I scan the article, looking for a strike three. For another reason to dismiss this Aaron Jansen as just another journalist prick looking to exploit my family. I’ve had these interview requests before, lots of them. I’ve heard the whole I want to hear your side of the story. And I’d believed them. I’d let them in. I’d told them my side of the story, only to read the article in horror days later as they painted my family as some kind of accomplice to my father’s crimes. As they blamed my mother for the affairs that were discovered in the wake of the investigation; for cheating on my father and leaving him emotionally vulnerable and angry at women. They blamed her for allowing the girls into our home, too distracted by her suitors to notice my father eyeing them, sneaking out at night, and coming home with dirt on his clothes. Some of the articles even suggested she knew about it—she knew about the darkness in my dad and simply turned a blind eye. Maybe that’s what drove her to cheat: his pedophilia, his rage. And it was the guilt that drove her mad, the guilt about her role in it all that made her recoil into herself and abandon her children when they needed her most.
And the children. Let’s not even get started on the children. Cooper, the golden boy, who my father supposedly envied. He saw the way girls looked at him, with his boyish good looks and wrestler biceps and charmingly lopsided grin. Cooper kept porn in the house, like any normal teenaged boy, but my father had found it, thanks to me. Maybe that’s what caused the darkness to creep in from the corners; maybe flipping through those magazines unleashed something in him he had been suppressing for years. A latent violence.
And then there was me, Chloe, the pubescent daughter who had started wearing makeup and shaving her legs and hiking up her shirt to show her belly button the way Lena had done that day at the festival. And I walked around like that, around my house. Around my dad.
It had been classic victim blaming. My father, another middle-aged white man with a meanness he couldn’t explain. He offered no concrete explanations, no valid reason why. He offered only the darkness. And surely, that couldn’t be possible—people refused to believe that otherwise average white men murder without a reason why. And so we became the reason: the neglect of his wife, the taunting of his son, the budding promiscuity of his daughter. It was all too much for his fragile ego, and eventually, he snapped.
I still remember those questions, those questions I had been asked years ago. My answers that were twisted and printed and archived on the internet to be summoned across computer screens for the rest of time.
“Why do you think your father did this?”
I remember tapping my pen against my nameplate, still shiny and scratchless; that interview had taken place during my first year at Baton Rouge General. It was supposed to be one of those feel-good stories they run on Sunday mornings: The daughter of Richard Davis had turned into a psychologist, channeling her childhood trauma to help other young, troubled souls.
“I don’t know,” I had said finally. “Sometimes these things don’t have a clear answer. He obviously had a need for dominance, for control, that I didn’t see when I was a child.”
“Should your mother have seen it?”
I stopped, stared.
“It wasn’t my mother’s job to notice every red flag that my father exhibited,” I said. “Oftentimes, there are no blatant warning signs until it’s too late. Just look at Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader. They had girlfriends and wives, families at home completely oblivious to what they were doing at night. My mother wasn’t responsible for him, for his actions. She had her own life.”
“It certainly sounds like she had her own life. It came out during the sentencing that your mother had been involved in several extramarital affairs.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Clearly she wasn’t perfect, but nobody is…”
“One specifically with Bert Rhodes, Lena’s father.”
I was silent, that mental image of Bert Rhodes’s unraveling still fresh in my mind.
“Did she neglect your father, emotionally? Was she planning on leaving him?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, she didn’t neglect him. They were happy—or, I thought they were happy. They seemed happy—”
“Did she neglect you, too? After the sentencing, she tried to kill herself. With two young children still under the age of eighteen, still dependent on her.”
I knew in that moment that the story had already been written; nothing I could have said would have swayed the narrative. Worse, they were using my words—my words as a psychologist, my words as his daughter—to reinforce their blind notion. To prove their point.
I click out of the Times’s website and open up a new window, but before I can start typing, a breaking news alert chirps across the screen.
AUBREY GRAVINO’S BODY FOUND
CHAPTER TWELVE
I don’t even bother to click into the news alert. Instead, I get up from my desk and close my laptop, the Ativan fog lifting me across my office and into my car. I float weightlessly down the road, through town, through my neighborhood, through my front door, and eventually find myself on the couch, my head sinking deep into the cushions as my eyes bore into the ceiling above.
And that’s where I remain for the rest of the weekend.
It’s Monday morning now and the house still smells like chemically produced lemon from the cleaner I used to wipe down the wine-soaked kitchen counters on Saturday morning. My surroundings feel clean, but I do not. I haven’t showered since my return from Cypress Cemetery, and I can still see the dirt from Aubrey’s earring wedged beneath my fingernails. My roots are damp with grease; when I run my fingers through my hair, the strands remain stuck in one spot instead of cascading across my forehead the way they usually do. I need to shower before work, but I can’t find the motivation.