I park outside my office building and walk frantically up the steps, inserting my key into the lock, twisting, pushing. I flip on the lights to my empty waiting room and walk into my office, my hands shaking a little bit less with each step that takes me closer to my desk. Now I settle into my chair and exhale, leaning to the side and pulling open my bottom drawer. The mountain of bottles stare back at me, each one pleading to be chosen. I eye them all, chew on the side of my cheek. I pick up one, then another, comparing them side-by-side, before settling on 1 milligram of Ativan. I study the little five-sided pill in my palm, the powdery white, the raised A. It’s a low dose, I reason. Just enough to cloak my body in a sense of calm. I pop it into my mouth and swallow it dry before pushing the drawer closed with my foot.
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.