Which is exactly what he did. He walked down her hallway and found her bedroom, and then stood in the doorway the same way he’d stood outside, but this time instead of embracing the stars he was embracing the darkness. He’s been embracing the darkness ever since.
“She didn’t even wake up. I mean, not right away. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. Part of the room was lit up by an alarm clock, part was lit up because the curtains were thin and there was a streetlamp outside. I moved over to her bed and I crouched next to it and I just waited. I’d always had this theory that if you did that, the person would wake up, and that’s what happened. It took thirty seconds. I put the knife against her throat,” he tells them, and Detective Scenario flinches a little and looks ready to cry again, and the officer still looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. “I could feel her breath on my hand, and her eyes . . . her eyes were wide and terrified and made me feel—”
“I know all about Suzan with a z,” Detective Scenario says.
Jerry can’t help it, but he feels embarrassed. That’s one of the cruel side effects—he’s told her all this before and can’t remember. It’s the details—those damn details that are hard to hang on to.
“It’s okay, Jerry,” she says.
“What do you mean it’s okay? I killed that woman and now I’m being punished for what I did to her, to all of them, because she was the first of many, and the monster needs to confess, the monster needs to find redemption because if he can, then the Universe will stop punishing him and he can get better.”
The detective lifts a handbag off the floor and rests it on her lap. She pulls out a book. She hands it to him. “Do you recognize it?”
“Should I?”
“Read the back cover.”
The book is called A Christmas Murder. He turns it over. The first line is “Suzan with a z was going to change his life.”
“What in the hell is this?”
“You don’t recognize me, do you,” she says.
“I—” he says, but adds nothing more. There is something there—something coming to the surface. He looks at the way her thumb rubs against the callus on her finger, and there’s something familiar about that. Somebody he knows used to do that. “Should I?” he asks, and the answer is yes, he should.
“I’m Eva. Your daughter.”
“I don’t have a daughter. You’re a cop, and you’re trying to trick me,” he says, doing his best not to sound angry.
“I’m not a cop, Jerry.”
“No! No, if I had a daughter I would know about it!” he says, and he slams his hand down on the table. The officer leaning against the wall takes a few steps forward until Eva looks at him and asks him to wait.
“Jerry, please, look at the book.”
He doesn’t look at the book. He doesn’t do anything but stare at her, and then he closes his eyes and he wonders how life has gotten this way. Eighteen months ago things were fine, weren’t they? What is real and what isn’t?
“Jerry?”
“Eva?”
“That’s right, Jerry. It’s Eva.”
He opens his eyes and looks at the book. He’s seen this cover before, but if he’s read this book he doesn’t remember. He looks at the name of the author. It’s familiar. It’s . . . but he can’t get there.
“Henry Cutter,” he says, reading the name out loud.
“It’s a pen name,” his daughter says, his beautiful daughter, his lovely daughter with a monster of a father, a disgusting old man who moments ago wondered how she would feel beneath him. He feels sick.
“I don’t . . . is this . . . is this you? Did you write this?” he asks. “Did you write this after I told you what happened?”
She looks concerned. Patient but concerned. “It’s you,” she tells him. “This is your pen name.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You wrote this book, and a dozen more just like it. You started writing when you were a teenager. You always used the name Henry Cutter.”
He’s confused. “What do you mean I wrote this? Why would I confess to the world what I had done?” Then it comes to him, something he’s forgotten. “Did I go to jail? Did I write this when I came out? But then . . . how would . . . the timeline doesn’t . . . I don’t get it. Are you really my daughter?” he asks, and he thinks about his daughter, his Eva, but now that he’s thinking about it, Eva is ten years old, not twentysomething, and his daughter would be calling him Dad, not Jerry.
“You’re a crime writer,” she says.
He doesn’t believe her—why would he? She’s just a stranger. Still . . . the crime writer label seems to fit, like putting on a comfortable glove, and he knows what she’s saying is true. Of course it’s true. He wrote thirteen books. An unlucky number—at least if you believe in that kind of thing, and he has been very unlucky, hasn’t he? He’s writing another book too. A diary. No, not a diary, a journal. His Madness Journal. He looks around, but it’s not here with him. Maybe he lost it. He flicks through the pages of the book Eva handed him, but not looking at any of the words. “This was one of the early ones.”
“Your first,” she says.
“You were only twelve when it came out,” he tells her, but hang on now, how can that be if Eva is only ten?
“I was at school,” she says.
He looks at her hand and sees there’s a wedding ring, then looks at his own. There’s one on his hand too. He wants to ask about his wife, but doesn’t want to look a bigger fool for doing so. Dignity is only one of the things the Alzheimer’s has been taking away from him. “Do I always forget you?”
“You have good days and bad,” she says, in the way of an answer.
He looks around the room. “Where are we? Am I here because of what I did to Suzan?”
“There is no Suzan,” the officer says. “We found you in town. You were lost and confused. We called your daughter.”
“There is no Suzan?”
“No Suzan,” Eva says, reaching back into her handbag. She pulls out a photograph. “That’s us,” she says. “It was taken just over a year ago.”
He looks at the picture. The woman in the photograph is the same woman talking to him. In the photograph she’s sitting on a couch holding a guitar, a big smile on her face, and the man in the photograph sitting next to her is Jerry, it’s Jerry a year ago, back when all he was forgetting were his keys and the occasional name, back when he was writing books and living life. The last year has been stolen from him. His personality stolen. His thoughts and memories twisted and decayed. He turns the photograph over. Written on the back is Proudest dad in the world.
“It was taken the day I told you I’d sold my first song,” she says.
“I remember it,” he tells her, but he doesn’t.
“Good,” she says, and smiles, and in that smile is a lot of sadness and it breaks his heart that his daughter has to see him like this.
“I really want to go home now,” he says.
She looks at the officer. “Is that okay?” she asks, and the officer tells them that it is.
“You’ll need to speak to the nursing home,” the officer says, “tell them this kind of thing can’t keep happening.”
“Nursing home?” Jerry asks.
Eva looks at him. “That’s where you live now.”
“I thought we were going home?”
“That is your home,” she says.