“Is this where you tell me you got married?” Zig asked.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Zig froze. “N-No . . . not at all . . . I just meant—”
“Joke. I was joking, Ziggy. We’re engaged, you know that. No wedding date yet.”
He nodded, trying to laugh it off.
“I didn’t know you moved,” Charmaine said. “I had to look this place up to find you. The house is nice.”
“It’s smaller—but y’know, we can’t all live in model homes.”
Charmaine flashed a grin, another real one. Her fiancé was a general contractor, specializing in model homes in preplanned communities. “Make fun all you want, I know you like Warren.”
He hated to admit it was true. On the night they first met, bumping into each other at an airport, of all places—Charmaine and Warren were heading to Hawaii, Zig to Ohio for a mortician’s conference—Zig was ready to put his carry-on bag through Warren’s teeth. Instead, a snow delay in Philly gave them four hours in an airport bar, screaming at the Eagles game and bonding over who had the best mustache in Philly sports history. Dave “The Hammer” Schultz! The Enforcer!, who still held the NHL record for most penalty minutes in a season.
That night in the airport, as they hugged goodbye, Zig whispered two words into Charmaine’s ear: “Keep him.”
He meant it. Sure, it crushed Zig to see his ex so happy. But the only thing that crushed him more was to see her sad. Warren was decent, he was good to his older daughters, and his model homes were better designed than Zig would’ve expected. After everything Charmaine had been through, everything she’d lost, she deserved a model home of her own.
“So if you’re not married, why’d you come all this way?”
Charmaine reached into her handbag. Her hand shot out, slapping a black rectangle the size of a brick against the table. An old videotape.
Zig grinned. “That’s not from that night we—”
“I need you to look at something,” she explained.
She didn’t have to say another word. Like any long-married couple, they could have entire conversations with nothing more than a glance. He knew that look. This was about their daughter, Maggie.
“Why would—？”
“Just watch,” Charmaine said, handing him her phone, her elevens firmly back in place.
Onscreen was a gray circle with a black triangle in it, a video. She’d used her phone’s camera to record whatever was on the videotape.
“You need to see it for yourself,” she added.
Zig hit Play. Then his whole world unraveled.
24
“What is this?” Zig asked.
“Just watch,” Charmaine said as the video on her phone began to play.
Onscreen was another screen—an outdated television with a familiar silver border. “Is that our old—？”
“With the built-in VCR,” she said. Zig recognized their old TV, the one that used to be in their basement, where Maggie, at barely a year old, held on to the coffee table, eating Cheerios and bouncing to the maddening theme of Thomas the Tank Engine. “It’s the only VCR I could find.”
Zig leaned on both elbows, down toward the phone. The video was grainy, showing a teenage girl—not Maggie, someone else—maybe fifteen or sixteen, with jet-black hair and shiny lip gloss. She was sitting on a couch, facing the camera, like she was being interviewed.
“Is that . . . what’s-her-face . . . she had that dog who bit everyone . . . ?”