Then—
There she was—
Barbara Jefferson—
Framed in the open doorway, dressed modestly in a coffee-brown blazer and matching slacks, her bonfire-red hair falling over her broad shoulders, her sparkling blue eyes searching the crowd.
I could breathe again.
Max called out to her: “Barbie! Barbie, darling! Here I am!”
She tracked the voice to its source, squealed, “Daddy!” and raced to him, abandoning her luggage tote in the excitement of the moment. The cameras came alive, capturing every moment of the reunion.
Max wrapped his arms around her, tearfully rejoicing in her name, planting kisses on her cheeks and forehead, and speaking words of endearment. This went on for an eternity before she maneuvered out of his grip, stepped back, pulled a kitchen utility knife from inside her blazer, and charged at him, shouting: “You killed my mommy, you miserable son of a bitch. Now it’s your turn to die, you bastard.”
She plunged the blade into his chest and belly, again and again.
He gave her what seemed a forgiving look, and called out her name one last time before he sank to his knees, then facedown onto the ground.
She dropped the bloodied blade and stood over his lifeless body, breathless and dry-eyed, and called to me: “Who do you believe now, Mr. Allen? Who?”
So, Adam, I’m too tired to tell the tape machine any more memories today. I’ll see you on Thursday. Don’t be late.
Window to the Soul
by Scott Loring Sanders
Scott Loring Sanders is the author of two novels, The Hanging Woods and Gray Baby, the short-story collection Shooting Greek and Other Stories, and the essay collection/ memoir Surviving Jersey: Danger & Insanity in the Garden State. The latter, published in 2017, has been selected as a finalist in the Creative Nonfiction category for the CLMP Firecracker Award.
I once read that after the Manson murders, Sharon Tate’s father had to clean up the crime scene himself. There weren’t companies or crews who did that sort of thing back then, so it was up to him to mop up his daughter’s blood. Can you imagine? To be hunched over, on hands and knees with a bucket and sponge, wiping away the stains that had spilled from the sixteen stab wounds your pregnant daughter had endured? I wasn’t Homicide, but I’d been first responder to a few murders, and I don’t care what kind of police you are — seasoned Boston detective or a grunt from the sticks — seeing a bloody crime scene is always chilling.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever contemplated my daughter Aubrey’s final moments. Because as much as Ginny and I have tried to keep things normal for her, the idea is always there. Lingering. Fifteen years old, battling liver failure, the result of a rare bile-duct disease. Every week, we wait for a donor. Every week, we come up empty. And that pisses me off, because doctors have pretty much perfected liver transplants, where they could cut out part of mine, stick it in Aubrey, and within only a few weeks those suckers would somehow grow back to the exact size they needed to be, both of us right as rain. But my blood was wrong, Ginny’s was wrong, and it didn’t matter how pissed off I got, or how much Ginny wished for different circumstances, the fact is, you can’t screw with blood type.
So we’d had no choice but to sit around and wait while Aubrey, for the past year and a half, suffered pokes and prods and needles and meds when she should’ve been cheerleading or singing in school musicals or chasing boys. It crushed me to watch my baby girl withering away as we prayed for a match. Which is messed up in its own right, if you think about it. Nudging God to maybe kill a stranger so my daughter could live. But who wouldn’t feel the same way? Who wouldn’t occasionally hope for someone to drop dead so their child could be spared?
The driving was getting sketchy, treacherous. Even the old-timers who’d lived in New England for seventy, eighty, ninety years said it was the worst winter in memory. Nine feet of snow so far, and it wasn’t stopping. But as exhausting as the winter had been, sometimes just driving around in the elements helped me get lost for a while, took my mind off Aubrey’s struggles.
The problem with the spring storms, like this one, was that before the precip changed over to snow, often an invisible ice layer formed, slicking the roads. Which meant I’d be handling accident after accident this evening, well into the night.
I was on a rural, twisty road that eventually wound its way back into town. I wasn’t far from Walden Pond, figured I’d skirt it, do a loop, then drive the cruiser to the station in Concord proper. My radio was bound to start popping shortly, dispatch sending me to this accident or that one, but so far, things had been remarkably quiet. Fine by me, though I doubted my luck would last.
For us locals, who’d grown up near Walden Pond and first learned about Thoreau in kindergarten, it was sometimes impossible not to imagine him sitting in his little cabin out there by the water. Or walking along this snowy road, the landscape pretty much the same now as it was back then. Off in the distance, across an open meadow, several deer stood at the wood line, motionless, probably starving. I envisioned Henry David tromping along that wood’s edge, contemplating life, thinking about the world, maybe stopping near those deer and clearing a space, digging all the way down to the forest floor, enabling those poor animals to forage for a few acorns or other mast or whatever the hell they could snack on.
Those deer, that falling snow, were a rustic postcard that took my mind off Aubrey. Off Ginny and our marriage, the disease taking its toll on all of us. So it was nice, those deer. Like, if only for a moment, I’d traveled back to Thoreau’s time.
I don’t ever intentionally think about Aubrey’s demise, but sometimes dark thoughts pop in, uninvited. We might be eating pizza, or playing Monopoly, or just watching a show on Netflix. Doing what other dads and daughters take for granted. She might laugh at some stupid joke I crack, like, “Hey, Aubrey, what time’s my dentist appointment?”
And she looks at me, confused. “What? How the heck would I know that?”
I might then use my tongue to probe my molar, and in an exaggerated lisp deliver the punch line. Once I say it, she pauses, squints, thinking, figuring, trying to decipher my mumbled words — I think it’s at tooth-hurty — until, bam, it hits her, and she drops into uncontrollable laughter. I’m proud of myself, pleased I’ve made her giddy. At least temporarily. Then, straight out of left field, one of those evil visions jumps in, of her lying dead in the hospital, or worse, of me waking her for school but she doesn’t respond. She’s all yellow and cold and, just like that, snap-of-the-fingers-quick, it’s over. My little girl is gone. And there I am, destroyed, the same as Sharon Tate’s dad must’ve been, picking up my daughter, holding her across my arms like a load of firewood, telling God and the world and anyone else who’ll listen that they can go screw themselves. That no man should have to endure such pain.
Then Aubrey is right there, a hundred percent alive and reeling me back in, her light hair pulled effortlessly into a ponytail the way girls can do, like it’s a trait they’re all born with, her nose dappled with those same cute freckles that once drew me to her mother so strongly. Back when Ginny and I were young and naive and life seemed worth living. “Dad, yoohoo, you still there?” she says, waving her hand. “We gonna watch Napoleon Dynamite or not?” Then I’m back, say, “Yeah, sure,” and for the twentieth time, I watch that stupid, goofy movie, repeating every line with her, the two of us snuggled on the couch, giggling, sharing the super-soft Harvard blanket I bought for her when she was eleven, when we all still believed dreams could come true. So I share that blanket, and a bowl of cheddar Goldfish, and a bag of Clark Bar Bites (sometimes you have to break the doctor’s orders), and I realize in that very instant, when she brought me back to reality, that I couldn’t have been happier or more grateful. That if I were only allowed to pick one moment that I could keep forever, could hold onto for perpetuity, that this is the one, this is the one right here that I’d choose.