Tonight, though, every detail that he carried was gone, like it’d been ripped away.
“I-I’m sorry . . . so sorry . . .” his young daughter whispered onscreen, her body convulsing, shaking.
At just the sight of her, the globus expanded in Zig’s throat.
On the right-hand side of the screen, someone’s hand appeared in shadow, giving her a tissue.
Maggie took it, wiped her eyes. “You don’t have t— They don’t even know—” She blew her nose, never looking up. “I should’ve— I’m sorry to drag you into—”
The static swallowed her whole. That was it. The End.
Zig scrolled the video back again.
“I’m sorry to drag you into—”
“Into what?” Zig asked. “Who’s she talking to?”
Charmaine sat there, silent. Zig replayed it again.
“I’m sorry to drag you into—”
Zig put two fingers on the screen, expanding the image. As Maggie wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, he spotted a smudge of mascara on her knuckle. This was after she started wearing makeup. Twelve years old for sure, right before she died.
“I’m sorry to drag you into—”
He played it again. And again.
“I’m sorry to drag you into—”
“She sounds like— You think she was—？ Was someone hurting her?” Zig asked, the words tumbling from his lips, everything moving hyper fast and hyper slow at the same time.
Charmaine was crying now, head down, picking at the leather strap on one of her bracelets. “The talent agency . . . the daughter of the owner . . . I asked her, begged her . . . This was all she could find,” Charmaine muttered. “Sh-She said there were no records of Maggie ever being a client.”
Zig rewound the video and played it again. Then again. Seventeen seconds of his dead daughter sobbing—the hitch in her voice, the pain . . . An old swirling hole opened in Zig’s stomach, the one that took him back to the old funeral home, to Maggie, her tiny gray corpse lying there in the mortuary, Zig determined to prep her body, to wash her hair and put her in her best dress, to take care of her one last time . . . and then crumpling to his knees, unable to stand, unable to breathe, unable even to cry, his entire body collapsing in on itself, a river of snot running down his nose as he realized that when it came to prepping his own daughter’s body, he couldn’t.
“Ziggy, please say something,” Charmaine pleaded.
He was still staring at the screen. “Why would—？ The way she’s— Who’s she even talking to, anyway?”
“And why go to them instead of us?”
“Did she think we wouldn’t listen, or is it—？” Zig squinted at the screen. “This person . . . he looks like a man.”
“It’s definitely a man.”
He looked up at his ex, the rage in her eyes catching him off guard. “You do realize, Char, this is much easier when you’re the calm one, and I’m the one in the mad rage?”
“Ziggy, whatever’s going on in that video . . . This is our girl,” she said, the words stinging Zig’s chest. “You can call Waggs. You can call Dover. Hell, you can call every damn government operative you’ve met in the last two decades who owes you a favor. Someone should be able to find tax records for this rinky-dink SuperStars talent agency, and if there’re tax records, there’ll be an employee list. I need to know who was speaking to our daughter. Even if this was just her being a twelve-year-old girl, mad that . . . that . . . that some friend didn’t invite her for a sleepover or whatever the hell it was, I want to know who she was talking to. So go do what you do best and be a pain in the ass.”