He was taking up more and more of her thoughts. She was painting again, something she hadn’t done since high school. She was good enough to be decent, but not good enough to be great or ever have a show in a gallery. She found herself sketching Grant Wood photos she looked up online, copies of copies. She mailed them to Jon, who told her he taped them up on his cell walls and complimented her on her proficiency. She started a sketch of him, but every time she worked on it, after about a half hour she realized she was sitting alone in her apartment drawing a flattering portrait of a serial killer. She would close her sketchbook and watch TV instead.
Chloe drank a beer to calm her nerves. When the phone finally rang, she heard an operator asking if she would accept a collect call from an inmate at the Kentucky State Penitentiary. She said yes but had a hard time catching her breath. She was perched on the edge of her futon and found herself staring at her bare feet on the hardwood floor, her calluses and chipped pink polish looking in step with the warped wood, two of the oak boards water stained and bowing like they were inflated.
She’d already heard his voice from interviews posted online, videos of him in the scarlet-red jumpsuit designating the prison’s death row inmates. In them, he talked like a teacher — someone comfortable with the sound of their own voice, comfortable explaining things to people, and confident they had the knowledge to make people understand. In more recent interviews, he said killing people was like being possessed by a demon. The next day, he felt great remorse for what he had done, and it weighed on him that, “in the eyes of God and in the eyes of the law,” he was responsible for what a “great force” had made him do. He squeezed his eyes shut when he talked like this.
The lines on his face were deeper than they had been during pictures taken at his trial, and his eyes appeared sunken, with dark circles surrounding them. Although he would spend long portions of the interview looking at his hands, choosing his words with care, when he did look at the interviewers, his stare was intense and penetrating. Chloe wondered what it would be like to be on the receiving end of such a gaze.
There was a thrill when she heard him say her name. He asked her where she was. After she answered, he said, “You have a lovely voice with just the tiniest bit of a lisp.”
She blushed. She’d endured years of special speech classes in school because of her lisp. It used to be much worse. She and a girl who couldn’t say her Rs read aloud from books about jungle cats. Both she and the other girl had only slight traces of their speech impediments by the time they graduated from high school.
“Oh, God,” she said. “That’s embarrassing.”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s endearing. It’s sweet.”
She felt profoundly grateful to him in that moment. He had only twelve minutes of phone privileges. They talked about his daily routine — apparently the prison gym’s treadmill was broken — and she talked about her job.
“I saw the painting in person once,” he told her. “In Chicago. It was,” he laughed drily, “before all this happened. It’s an amazing piece.”
Chloe told two lies to get her job at the center. The first was that she liked American Gothic, when in fact she found it hideous. The second was that she had seen it in person. The truth was, although she had lived in the Midwest her entire life, she never had the opportunity or funds to travel to Chicago.
Still, she found herself nodding, even though he couldn’t see her. “Amazing,” she agreed. “I felt the same way.”
Finally, when they had to hang up, he said, “Thank you for this. You don’t know how much I looked forward to talking to you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. Once they were off the phone, she sat on her futon and continued to stare at her feet. She wondered what she was supposed to feel. Possibly guilt? Possibly conflicted? Instead, she tried not to smile.
Several phone calls later, he asked her to tell him something she hadn’t told anyone.
“I’m not that interesting,” she said.
“That’s obviously not true,” he said. “You were willing to become my friend. Not everyone would do that.”
She felt pleased he considered her a friend, and slightly unsatisfied — like when someone gave a hungry person only a bite of chocolate when they craved the whole bar.
“I guess there’s one story,” she said. “But it’s kind of weird.” Even thinking of it made her feel queasy.
“I like weird,” he said. So she told him.
She told him how her real father left when she was a baby. How he returned only once — when she was fourteen he came through town and asked to take her to dinner at a steak house in Fairfield, so they could catch up. Her mother hadn’t wanted to let her go, but Chloe wheedled until she got her way. The meal was good, a nice change from peanut butter sandwiches and ramen noodles. She learned he had done okay for himself, starting his own construction business in Illinois. He was ready to pay the back child support, to try to support her as best he could.
“You deserve that,” he said while they chewed their steaks. While he was paying the bill, she thought how lucky she was to have this man as her father and not her idiot stepfather, the father of her half siblings.
They had so much to talk about he drove down by the Des Moines River once they got back to Eldon, and they parked and sat and talked. It happened naturally. First he hugged her. Then he kissed her forehead. Then he kissed her neck. And then he reached up her skirt. The water lapped at the riverbanks. She put her hands where he told her, but she didn’t allow herself to think about anything. She kept her eyes closed, kept listening to that rushing water, kept letting it drown everything else.
When he dropped her off at her house, he kissed her on the forehead. He never visited again, but the child support payments continued coming until she turned eighteen.
When she finished her story, Jon cleared his throat. “It makes me regret I’m in here and not able to find your father and give him some nice whacks with a crowbar. That often does wonders for a person.”
That was the first night Chloe started fantasizing about Jon murdering people she knew.
She couldn’t deny his phone calls were becoming less a curiosity and more a thing stilling the loneliness beating inside her. The darkest thing he had ever done was out in the world for everyone to see. There was something comforting about that.
She didn’t fantasize about having sex with him. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t. Maybe because she had never enjoyed sex? Maybe because it always hurt in all the wrong ways? Instead, she pictured him putting a choke collar around her neck and leading her into the woods. She pictured him cutting off her clothes and making her kneel, naked, in the leaves. He would pull on the choke chain and grab a handful of her hair, yanking hard. For a while, that was the extent of the fantasy, and it was enough to get her off late at night, her fingers moving between her legs. But eventually, it changed. After he yanked at her hair, she would grab a sharp stick from the forest floor. She’d wait for him to let go of her hair, for him to give her chain some slack. Then she’d stab him in the neck with the stick, his warm blood flowing out across her hands and her naked chest until she was sticky with it.
“I think about stabbing you,” she told him once on the phone, surprising herself by saying it aloud.
“Do you?” he said, as though this amused him. “What else do you think about?”
She told him in precise detail, and when he finally spoke, his voice sounded deeper than before. “The first part of that sounds just fine,” he said. “But if you tried the second part, you would regret it.” He said this almost cheerfully.