A lot of fathers are terrible. For some, it’s the definition of the role. Nicola had always known not to set her expectations anywhere near high.
A lot of fathers are hoarders, keepers of trash piled high against the walls of their homes like the after-effects of a tsunami tide.
And a lot of fathers leave that mess to their daughters to clean up when they die. Nicola’s father must have thought he’d live forever. Couldn’t imagine the ebbing of his own power. All the rage and disgust that animated him couldn’t have an end, could it?
But not many fathers leave their daughters a drawer full of trophies.
Nicola was already several dumpsters into the purge when she found the drawer. A sentimentalist might think she was looking for some sign of her mother, some signal among the wreckage to testify that a kind of family once lived in that house. But really she did it because she didn’t have the money to pay someone else to do it, and she was hoping that she could sell what was left of the house. It would be the first real gift he’d ever given her.
At first, she thought she’d just found another drawer of spare keys. But then she saw the jewelry—necklaces, earrings, rings. Nothing she recognized. Cheap, light-weight. Some of it for fingers so small.
Leave him, why don’t you leave him, she heard herself yelling at her mother over and over. Come live with me. But cancer came for her mom first.
Underneath everything else in the drawer, she saw a drivers license. A girl who didn’t look old enough to drive. A white teenager with a thin face, a little horsey, big front teeth in her half-smile.
Who the fuck was Emily Harrison? With her expired license and out-of-date hair.
So Nicola searched on her phone for that too-common name. Added the city. The address. The date of birth. She paused, then gave in to intuition. Added missing.
That was when Nic called the police.
The cadaver dogs alerted repeatedly in the back garden. The detectives stopped all her sorting. They even wanted to know where the previous dumpster loads had gone. They set up floodlights on high poles around the yard, lit it like a little league baseball diamond. They brought in a backhoe.
No, I left when I was 18. Soon as I could.
No. He didn’t. He hit me, yes. But no, he didn’t.
No, I didn’t know. I didn’t see anything. I left as soon as I could. Because he was—terrible.
Even before this.
She saw the crime scene photos later as part of the news stories. Skulls like sculpture. Ribs like the hammers of an open piano. Broken arches half-buried in the dark dirt.
When the police were done, weeks later, they left behind five pits, three or four feet deep. Each the width of a backhoe blade and at least the length of a young woman’s skeleton.
Nic surveyed the pits in the evening light. She stood at the edge of the largest one, looking down into its darkness.
I’m selfish as fuck, she thought. But what is this going to do to the resale value?
She stared some more. Stared until she could see it: at the bottom of each pit, there was a ghost, a soft, white whisper curled in on its young self. She’d been the same age as them once, all those teenagers. She’d been the same.
Her legs went out from under her then. She sat helplessly in the thick, spring mud.
On the one hand, he hadn’t killed her. On the other, all these proxies.
Did a kind of love make him do it? Or something he thought was love? That made her shudder.
She’d always worried that she carried his rage with her. Any number of therapists had convinced her otherwise, congratulated her that she didn’t.
But now she wondered. All those times when she was younger, she’d stopped herself from doing it, from letting the red heat wash over her. So many nights lying in her tiny, twin bed, fists clenched at her sides, picturing that one big knife in the kitchen, picturing him so vulnerable in his sleep. So many times she wanted to end him. But she didn’t.
She’d thought it made her decent. Made her better.
But there, in the mud, she saw it for what it was: an error. For the sake of all these others, she hadn’t been murderous enough.