I remember seeing Lena’s parents once, Bert and Annabelle Rhodes, sitting in the audience of Breaux Bridge High School’s annual end-of-year play. That year, the year of the killings, they were putting on Grease, and Lena was Sandy, her tight-as-skin pleather pants shimmering every time the fabric caught the glare of the auditorium lights at just the right angle. Her usual French braids were replaced with a perm, a fake cigarette peeking out from behind one ear (although I very much doubted it was fake; she probably smoked it in the parking lot after the curtain had dropped). Cooper was in it, too, which was why we were there. He was good at sports—but acting, not so much. The pamphlet identified him as some tertiary role like Student #3.
But not Lena. Lena was the star.
I was with my parents, sliding through the rows of seats looking for three empty chairs together, apologizing as we knocked into the knees of the other already-seated parents.
“Mona,” my dad called, waving his hand. “This way.”
He motioned toward three chairs in the center of the room, situated right next to the Rhodes’. I watched my mother’s eyes bulge for a fraction of a second before she plastered a smile on her face and put her hand on my back, pushing me forward with too much force.
“Hey, Bert,” my father said, smiling. “Annabelle. These seats taken?”
Bert Rhodes smiled at my father and gestured to the open seats, ignoring my mother completely. In the moment, it struck me as rude. He had met my mother; I had seen him at our house, just weeks before. He installed security systems for a living; I remember his tanned, leathery arms as he knelt outside in the dirt of our backyard before she tapped him on the shoulder and invited him inside. I watched through my window as he looked up at her, his arm wiping the moisture from his forehead, the unnatural loudness of her laugh as she pulled him in. They went into the kitchen, where I heard them talking in hushed voices; from the bannister on the stairs, I saw her lean over the counter, her chest pushed together as she cradled a glass of sweet iced tea.
We took our seats just before the lights dimmed, and Lena pranced across the stage, her twirling hips making her white hoop skirt fly around her waist. My father shifted in his chair, crossed his legs. Bert Rhodes cleared his throat.
I remember looking over at him then, at the stiffness in his posture. At my mother’s eyes, glued to the stage. And at my father in between them, oblivious to it all. Bert Rhodes wasn’t rude, I realized. He was uncomfortable. He was hiding something. And my mother was, too.
The news of their affair came as a shock to me after my father’s arrest; I suppose all children think of their parents as perfectly happy people, some kind of subhuman life form devoid of feelings and opinions and problems and needs. At age twelve, I didn’t understand the complexities of life, of marriage, of relationships. My father was at work all day while my mother was home alone. Cooper and I were at school or wrestling practice or camp most of the time, and I never really stopped to wonder what she did all day. Our languid nighttime routine of dinner served atop TV trays, followed by my father nodding off in his La-Z-Boy while my mother cleaned the kitchen and retreated to their bedroom with a book in her hand seemed like just that to me: routine. I never thought about how lonely it must have been, how stale. Their lack of intimacy seemed normal—I never once saw them kiss, hold hands—because I had never witnessed anything else. I had never known anything else. So when she started inviting a steady stream of men into our house over the course of that summer—the gardener and the electrician and the man who installed our security system, the man whose daughter would later vanish—I didn’t think of it as anything more than friendly Southern hospitality. Helping them beat the heat with a glass of homemade sweet tea.
Some people speculated that my father killed Lena as payback, as a sick way of evening the scales after he found out about Bert and my mother. Maybe Lena, his first kill, was the onset of his darkness. Maybe it crept in from the corners after that, became bigger and messier, harder to control. Bert Rhodes certainly believed that.
I thought back to him standing next to Lena’s mother during that first televised press conference, before Lena’s status shifted from missing to presumed dead. He was a man undone, barely forty-eight hours into his daughter’s disappearance and already unable to string words together to form a coherent sentence. But when my father was identified as the man who killed her, he snapped completely.
I remember Cooper pulling me into the house one morning because Bert Rhodes was outside, pacing like a rabid animal in our front yard. This wasn’t like our other visitors, throwing things from a distance or scampering away when we chased them out. This time, it was different. Bert Rhodes was a full-grown man. He was angry, frantic. My mother had already left us, at that point—mentally, at least—and Cooper and I didn’t know what to do, so we huddled in my bedroom and watched through my window. We watched as he kicked at the dirt and shouted curse words at our home. We watched as he screamed in our direction and ripped at his clothes, his hair. Eventually, Cooper went outside. I had begged him not to, pulling on his shirtsleeve, tears streaming down my cheeks. Then I had watched helplessly as he walked down our front steps, emerging into the yard. I watched as he shouted back, pushing his outstretched finger into Bert’s beefy chest. Eventually, Bert left, with promises of retaliation.
This ain’t over! I heard him scream, his gruff voice echoing through the vast nothingness that was our home.
We later learned that the rock that came hurtling through my mother’s bedroom window that night had come from his callused hands, the slits in my father’s truck tires the work of his blade. In his mind, it was his fault. He had slept with a married woman, after all, and within that same stretch of summer, her husband had murdered his daughter. Karma had been served, and the guilt was too much to bear. He was angry to his core. If Bert Rhodes had been able to get his hands on my father after he confessed to Lena’s murder, I’m positive he would have killed him, and not quickly. Not mercifully. He would have killed him slowly, painfully. And he would have enjoyed it.
But of course, he couldn’t. He couldn’t get his hands on my father. He was in police custody, safely locked behind bars.
But his family wasn’t, so he set his sights on us.
* * *
I unlock the front door now and peek my head into the house, searching for Daniel. I’m home before lunch, as promised, and I can smell fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen. I eye my laptop in the living room, and I want to grab it, open it, start typing furiously.
I want to learn more about Bert Rhodes.