“Of course not. They deserved it.”
But the girl was still crying. “I see them when I close my eyes. I hear the jokes they told between times. The way they planned to kill me.” Her voice broke again, and the break was deeper. “I still feel his teeth on my skin.”
“Channing…”
“I heard the same things so many times I started to believe what he said. That I deserved what they were doing to me, that I’d ask to die before they were done, and that I’d beg before they’d finally let me.”
Elizabeth’s hand went even whiter on the phone. Doctors counted nineteen bite marks, most of them through the skin; but Elizabeth knew from long discussions it was the things they’d said to her that hurt the most, the knowingness and fear, the way they’d tried to break her.
“I would have asked him to kill me,” Channing said. “If you hadn’t come when you did, I’d have begged him.”
“It’s over now.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“It is. You’re stronger than you think.”
Channing grew silent again, and in the silence Elizabeth heard the raggedness of her breath.
“Will you come see me tomorrow?”
“I’ll try,” Elizabeth said.
“Please.”
“I have to talk to the state police tomorrow. If I can make it, I will. If not, then the next day.”
“Do you promise?”
“I do,” Elizabeth said, though she knew nothing of fixing broken things.
When she got back in the car, Elizabeth still felt disconnected, and like other times in her life where she’d had nowhere to go and nothing to do, she ended up at her father’s church, a humble building that rose narrow and pale against the night sky. She parked beneath the high steeple, studied small houses lined like boxes in the dark, and thought for the hundredth time that she could live in a place like this. Poor as it was, people worked and raised families and helped each other. Neighborliness like that seemed rare these days, and she thought a lot of what made this place so special came from her parents. As much as she and her father disagreed on life and the living of it, he was a fine minister. If people wanted a relationship with God, his was a good path. Kindness. Community. He kept the neighborhood going, but none of it worked unless it was done his way.
Elizabeth lost that kind of trust when she was seventeen.
Following a narrow drive, she walked beneath heavy trees and ended at the parsonage where her parents lived. Like the church, it was small and plain and painted a simple white. She didn’t expect to find anyone awake, but her mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She had the same cheekbones as Elizabeth, and the same deep eyes, a beautiful woman with gray-streaked hair and skin that was still smooth in spite of long years of hard work. Elizabeth watched for a full minute, hearing dogs, a distant engine, the wail of an infant in some other far house. She’d avoided this place since the shooting.
Then why am I here?
Not for her father, she thought. Never that.
Then why?
But she knew.
Tapping on the door, Elizabeth waited as fabric whispered behind the screen, and her mother appeared. “Hello, Mom.”
“Baby girl.” The screen door swung open and her mother stepped onto the porch. Her eyes twinkled in the light, her features full of joy as she opened her arms and hugged her daughter. “You don’t call. You don’t come by.”
She was keeping it light, but Elizabeth squeezed harder. “It’s been a bad few days. I’m sorry.”
She stood Elizabeth at arm’s length and studied her face. “We’ve left messages, you know. Even your father called.”
“I can’t talk to Dad.”
“It’s really that bad?”
“Let’s just say I have enough judgment coming my way without the heavenly kind.”
It wasn’t a joke, but her mother laughed, a good laugh. “Come have a drink.” She led Elizabeth inside, put her at a small table, and fussed over ice and a half-empty bottle of Tennessee whiskey. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Elizabeth shook her head. She’d like to be honest with her mother, but had discovered long ago how a single lie could poison even the deepest well. Better to say nothing at all. Better to keep it in.
“Elizabeth?”
“I’m sorry.” Elizabeth shook her head again. “I don’t mean to be distant. It’s just that everything seems so… muddled.”
“Muddled?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Elizabeth opened her mouth, but her mother waved it closed. “You’re the most clear-minded person I’ve ever known. As a child, an adult. You’ve always seen more clearly than most. You’re like your father that way, even though you believe such different things.”
Elizabeth peered down the darkened hall. “Is he here?”
“Your father? No. The Turners are having troubles again. Your father’s trying to help.”
Elizabeth knew the Turners. The wife drank and could get abusive. She’d hurt her husband once, and Elizabeth took the call her last month in uniform. She could close her eyes and picture the narrow house, the woman who wore a pink housecoat and weighed a hundred pounds, at most.
I want the reverend.
She had a rolling pin in her hand, swinging at shadows. The husband was down and bloody.
I won’t talk to nobody but the reverend.
Elizabeth had been ready to do it the hard way, but her father calmed the woman down, and the husband-again-refused to press charges. That was years ago, and the reverend still counseled them. “He never shies, does he?”
“Your father? No.”
Elizabeth looked out the window. “Has he talked about the shooting?”
“No, sweetheart. What could he possibly say?”
It was a good question, and Elizabeth knew the answer. He would blame her for the deaths, for being a cop in the first place. He would say she’d broken trust, and that everything bad flowed from that single poor decision: the basement, the dead brothers, her career. “He still can’t accept the life I’ve chosen.”
“Of course he can. He’s your father, though, and he pines.”
“For me?”
“For simpler times, perhaps. For what once was. No man wants to be hated by his own daughter.”
“I don’t hate him.”
“You’ve not forgiven, either.”
Elizabeth accepted the truth of that. She kept her distance, and even when they shared the same room, there was a frost. “How are you two so different?”
“We’re really not.”
“Laugh lines. Frown lines. Acceptance. Judgment. You’re so completely opposite I wonder how you’ve stayed together for so long. I marvel. I really do.”
“You’re being unfair to your father.”
“Am I?”
“What can I tell you, sweetheart?” Her mother sipped whiskey and smiled. “The heart wants what the heart wants.”
“Even after so many years?”
“Well, maybe it’s not so much the heart, anymore. He can be difficult, yes, but only because he sees the world so clearly. Good and evil, the one straight path. The older I become, the more comfort I find in that kind of certainty.”
“You studied philosophy, for God’s sake.”
“That was a different life…”
“You lived in Paris. You wrote poetry.”
Her mother waved off the observation. “I was just a girl, and Paris just a place. You ask why we’ve stayed together, and in my heart I remember how it felt-the vision and the purpose, the determination every day to make the world better. Life with your father was like standing next to an open fire, just raw force and heat and purpose. He got out of bed driven and ended every day the same. He made me very happy for a lot of years.”
“And now?”
She smiled wistfully. “Let’s just say that as rigid as he may have grown, my home will always be between your father’s walls.”