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.