Sweetheart, we don’t let people in who aren’t authorized.
“God, I keep telling you to stop taking these fuckin’ things,” he says, reaching for the bottle. He picks it up, and I can sense the weightlessness in his hands. “Jesus, did you take all of them?”
“It’s not the pills, Cooper. Fuck the pills.”
He looks at me the same way he looked at me twenty years ago, when I had stared at my father on the television screen, hawked those words through my teeth like dip spit, gritty and foul. Fucking coward.
“You knew him, Cooper. You knew everybody.”
I picture Tyler as a teenager, scrawny and awkward, almost always alone. A faceless, nameless body trailing my brother around the Crawfish Festival, following him home, waiting outside his window. Doing his bidding. After all, my brother was a friend to everyone. He made them feel warm and safe and accepted.
I think back to my conversation with Tyler on the water now, talking about Lena. How she was nice to me; how she looked after me.
That’s a friend, he had said, nodding. Knowing. The best kind, if you ask me.
“You reached out to him,” I say. “You sought him out. You brought him here.”
Cooper is staring at me now, his mouth hanging open like a cabinet with a loose hinge. I can see the words lodged in his throat like an unchewed chunk of bread, and that’s how I know that I’m right. Because Cooper always has something to say. He always has the words, the right words.
You’re my baby sister, Chloe. I want the best for you.
“Chloe,” he whispers, his eyes wide. I notice it now—the pulsing in his neck, the way he rubs his fingers together, slick with sweat. “What the fuck are you talking about? Why would I do that?”
I picture Daniel in my living room just this morning, that necklace tangled between his fingers. The hesitation in his voice as he started to tell me everything, the sadness in his eyes, like he was about to euthanize me—because he was, I guess. I was about to undergo a humane slaughtering right there in my living room. Put her down gently.
“When you told me about your father for the first time,” Daniel had said, “about everything that happened in Breaux Bridge, everything he had done, I already knew. Or, at least, I thought I knew. But there were so many things you told me that surprised me.”
I think back to that night, so early in our relationship, Daniel’s fingers massaging my hair. Me, telling him everything—about my father, Lena, the way he had been watching her that day at the festival, his hands dug deep into his pockets. That figure gliding through my backyard, the jewelry box in the closet, the dancing ballerina and the chimes that I can still hear playing in my mind, haunting my dreams.
“It just struck me as odd. My entire life, I thought I knew who your father was. Just pure evil. Killing little girls.” I pictured Daniel in his bedroom, a teenaged boy with that article in his hands, trying to imagine. The news had painted us all in such black-and-whites: My mother, the enabler. Cooper, the golden boy. Me, the little girl, the constant reminder. And my father, the devil himself. One-dimensional and wicked. “But as I listened to you talk about him, I don’t know. Some stuff didn’t fit.”
Because with Daniel, and only with Daniel, I could talk about how it wasn’t all bad. I could talk about the good memories, too. I could talk about how my dad used to cover the staircase in bath towels, pushing us down in laundry bins because we had never gone sledding. How he seemed genuinely afraid when the news had broken—me, in the kitchen, twisting my mint-green blanket, that bright red bar on the screen. LOCAL BREAUX BRIDGE GIRL GOES MISSING. The way he had held me tight, waited for me on the porch steps, made sure my window was locked at night.
“If he did those things, if he murdered those girls, then why would he be trying to protect you?” Daniel had asked. “Why would he be concerned?”
My eyes started to sting. I didn’t have an answer to that question. That was the question I had been asking myself my entire life. Those had been the very memories I had been struggling to make sense of—those memories with my father that seemed to be so conflicting with the monster he had turned out to be. Hand-washing the dishes and removing my training wheels; letting me paint his fingernails one day and teaching me how to hook a line the next. I remember crying after I had caught my first fish, its little puckered lips gasping as my father dug his fingers into its gills, trying to stop the bleeding. We were meant to eat it, but I had been so distraught, Dad threw it back. He let it live.