Are you a pussy, Daddy? She hadn’t asked that, but I heard it dancing around in her words. Are you?
Hell, no, I thought.
Then what are you?
I’m one hard son of a bitch.
“What?”
I blinked. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Your lips were moving. Are you even listening to me?”
“Of course I am.”
“Then why were your lips moving?” She demanded.
“They’re not.”
“Yes they are.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Don’t change the subject. Do you feel like I’m sorry about it?”
“It seems like it,” she replied. The chicken sandwich had vanished. During this discussion of things like rape and killing, she’d eaten the sandwich anyway. The subject matter made that small an impact on her. Suddenly, I envied her very much.
“God will forgive you,” she said. “But you know what? I think if you’d let those guys hurt me and mom even though you had a gun and could have stopped it, He wouldn’t forgive you. I think that would have made Him mad. I think that would have made Him really mad.”
My mouth. I couldn’t eat anymore, McRib or not. “I think you’re right,” I said hollowly.
She gestured at my sandwich. “But He’s not mad. And now you get free food at McDonald’s. Which is cool, because you deserve it.”
I swallowed. A ki breath filled my chest. I didn’t want to ask this next question, but I had to. “What do you remember?” I asked.
“About what?”
“About that night.”
She shrugged and stole one of my French fries. I watched every movement of her face, searching for some sign of the truth.
“A bunch of firecrackers going off, then a bunch of screaming. Mom hauling me out of bed, and I’m still half asleep. I’m all like, what’s going on here, and Mom’s dragging me into the bedroom and calling the police. Aside from that, not much. Why?”
“What happened before that?” I asked.
“Uh… nothing. I was sleeping.”
“The whole time?”
“The whole time. What is this?”
I folded my arms. Ki breath. Time to ask point-blank: “There’s a theory,” I said, “advanced by my therapist. You knew I was going to counseling, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My therapist is wondering if maybe I didn’t encounter these two men on their way out of the house instead of on their way in.”
Her face screwed up with the effort of trying to catch my drift, but then she got it and her eyes widened.
“That’s crazy!”
“Did something happen to you that night that you’re afraid to talk about?”
“No!” She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, no! Eeew, Dad, that’s disgusting! No, nobody ever… yuck! Gross! Absolutely not. I’d have screamed and screamed and screamed. They’d have had to kill me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“You know you can tell me and your mom anything, right? Anything at all? No matter what?”
She rolled her eyes again. “Yes, Dad, I know. Tell you what, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll swear on a Bible that those guys didn’t rape me.” Her eyes came back to center and fixed on me. “And you know why they didn’t rape me? Because you shot them dead.”
She reached out and stole another French fry. To Hell with Pinnix, to Hell with Ramseur, she was hungry.
“And now you have a Facebook fan page.” She smiled and added, “Tell your shrink he’s stupid.”
Her words made me feel better. Her smile made me feel better. I’d watched her reaction to Dr. Koenig’s suggestion and saw nothing hiding underneath it. I looked at the healthy glow on her face—a combination of winning her soccer game, seeing her father worshipped like a god and then getting to tell that same god he was being silly—and I thought, nope. Didn’t happen.
It didn’t happen because I’d been ready. And I’d shot those two pieces of shit like a pair of landfill rats. Whatever remained of Pinnix and Ramseur lay now in a pauper’s grave in Burlington or Durham or wherever the coroner had sent the carcasses. And I sat in McDonald’s, eating free food with my daughter.
And suddenly, I felt hungry again.
“When you’re done,” Abby said, “go up there and see if you can score us some free ice cream.”
11.
That evening, I got on the internet and did a search on how to tell if your kid had been sexually abused. Her eating habits hadn’t changed, her grades hadn’t fallen, she hadn’t started sleeping more or sleeping less, she hadn’t suddenly become any more sullen or cantankerous than usual—nothing to indicate she’d suffered any sort of trauma. As far as I knew, she hadn’t suddenly become sexually promiscuous, either. I finished my web investigation satisfied that as to my daughter, at least, Dr. Koenig was barking up the wrong tree.
But my wife had changed—she’d gotten interested in having sex with me again—and so before bed that night, I asked her.
“Let’s say that I got knocked out longer than I think I did and when I shot those guys, they’d already come up here and… you know. Would you tell me?”
She set down her book, a library hardback with a blurry picture of a girl riding a bicycle down a country road on the cover. She removed her reading glasses and put them on top of it. “Of course I would. Where did this come from?”
“Dr. Koenig,” I said. “He remarked that the timing seems a little messed up with the shooting—he doesn’t think I could get hit, recover and get the gun in time to intercept Pinnix and Ramseur on their way upstairs. So he asked if there was a possibility that maybe I got them on their way down instead of up. Which would mean…”
“I see.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry about it, because it didn’t happen. Okay?”
I rolled over on my back and stared up at the ceiling.
“Are you worried?” She asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s just… that caller said a bunch of bullshit, and he rattled my cage. But then my therapist goes and brings up some of the same things, like the asshole might have been right or something, and so that really rattled my cage. Because it’s a good question. When you have so many coincidences and the outcome could change with any one, you do wonder. Sometimes.”
She picked up her book and glasses and placed them on the nightstand. Then she rolled over and propped herself up beside me, her brown hair spilling down over the hand on which she rested her head. I thought then that with a woman so beautiful, it was a miracle she didn’t have crazies following her home every week.
“You know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“I think that you’re nervous about this whole thing and your therapist threw that out there to make you confront the idea. Bring it up, make you face it, let you put it away. It’s actually a pretty good tactic, I’d say. Do you feel any better after asking me about it?”
“Yes.”
There came a silence then, my mind working through what she’d just said and trying to decide whether or not to tell her that Dr. Koenig wanted her to come to treatment with me. I had agonized over that, because I didn’t want her there. I wouldn’t do that, man, Bobby had said when I asked him about it. You’re supposed to be her hero, which means you’re supposed to be strong. Not breaking down and crying in a shrink’s office. I agreed. My wife now understood better than most women the importance of a strong mate. Sniveling, crying sissies have ways of getting people killed.