My father was gone for a while this time, long enough that I started to feel like I could take a deep breath again. Long enough that I almost forgot this moment of trepidation we have when we wake in the morning, wondering how things will go when we get downstairs.
We walk into the kitchen together, sitting at our places in silence while my mother finishes putting breakfast out. I know immediately when I sit that this is not one of the days that will be okay. He has that look, that awful stillness. Today, the solid ground we use to edge around him will be a tightrope.
We begin to eat, silent and tense. My mother's face is drawn, but he ignores her, ignores all of us. He doesn't eat, but instead, opens bills, one after the other, growing angrier and angrier. I feel a tightness in my arms and chest as if I'm being squeezed in from all sides.
And then he holds one bill longer than the others. The air in the room seems to compress around him while we wait. "What is this?" he asks my mother, holding the bill in front of her face. His quiet voice is bad, far more dangerous than his loud one.
///
I can smell the fear coming off of her as she answers. "Daisy was having seizures," she says, her voice too faint, showing weakness. She shouldn't show weakness, even I know that. My father can smell fear and weakness the way a predator can smell blood, and he reacts the same way.
"I didn't ask you what the fuck was wrong with the dog. I asked you what the bill's for."
"The medicine," she whispers. "The vet said she needed it or they'd get worse."
I'm only five but I know she needs to stop talking, stop justifying, stop acting like she's done something wrong.
He says nothing. He holds still for a moment, and we wait for his hand to fly out, to send her sideways from her chair with a startled cry. But instead, he turns toward Daisy, curled in the corner of the room.
"Let me show you what we do with a sick dog," he says.
Daisy doesn't sense danger. She nuzzles into him as he reaches for her. Sometimes, just when I think a terrible thing is going to happen, it doesn't. And then I feel stupid for fearing it, as if I must have been crazy to expect things to go poorly. He cradles her in his arms and she relaxes, and I relax.
And then my father grabs Daisy's neck and twists.
She's still in his arms, her eyes open, unmoving. There is utter silence. I can hear my own pulse, nothing else. And then we begin to cry, a symphony of tears and pain and disbelief. My mother gasping, choking on her tears.
"Oh my God," is all she can say. "Oh my God oh my God oh my God."
"You killed her!" my brother weeps.
"Stop crying," he says to Matthew. "And go dig a hole."
But Matthew ignores him, his face flat to the table, his whole body loose and boneless with grief. My father pulls his collar so his face comes off the table.
"I said stop your goddamn crying and go dig a hole!" he yells.
I stop crying so fast that I choke a little. I stop as if it will make up for the fact that Matthew cannot. Matthew's always been soft in ways I'm not, and it's the only thing about me that's ever made my father happy.
Stop crying, Matthew. You've got to stop. Look at me, I plead silently. You can stop just like I do. Look at me.
Even my mother has come to her senses. She grabs Matthew's hand and through her own tears urges him to calm down, to go on outside like my dad said. But he doesn't. He can't. His tears are a form of insanity, suicide, and he just can't stop.
I jump up so fast my chair falls behind me. "I'll do it!" I cry. "I'll do it!" My voice is hysterical with enthusiasm. "I can dig the hole!"
My father nods. "That's my girl. Glad someone in this family takes after me."
My brother looks at me. I see blame in his face, hatred. I did it for him, but suddenly I'm a monster now, just like my dad.
61
Will
Her screams wake everyone in the house.
I'm there first and seconds behind me my mother and Brendan arrive, huddled at the door, staring at us in shock.
"I dug the hole," she says, scraping at her throat as if she can't breathe. She gasps for air once and then again. "I dug the hole."
She's curled up in a ball, knees squeezed tight to her chest. I try to pull her toward me but her whole body has gone so stiff that nothing moves. "It's okay, Liv. You're just having a dream. It's okay."
"No," she says, choking again, grabbing her own throat. "It wasn't a dream. It was me. I did it. I dug the hole."
"Dug what hole?" I ask, trying to pry her arms apart.
"Where he buried Matthew," she says. "I dug the hole."
If I heard the story from anyone else, I'd never have believed it because it's too terrible to be real. But Olivia's entire childhood was too terrible to be real, and her dream made far too much sense.
Her father drove her down the road to dig the hole for their dog, she said. He found a spot in the woods and left her there all day. There was a tree above her, raining down acorns at unpredictable intervals, and by the time he came to get her it was dark and she had small pinpoint bruises covering her arms. The next morning, Matthew was gone. Her father said he'd run away.
When she finishes talking, she's crying so hard that she's gagging. For the first time ever, I almost wish she could forget. All night I lie there with her, rocking her against me, running my hands over her back and promising things will be okay.
She sleeps sporadically, always waking with a gasp as if she's just remembered all over again. It's just before dawn when she wakes again, staring at me with her glassy, unseeing eyes on the pillow we share.
///
"We probably need to talk to the police, Liv," I tell her.
It's the first time I've ever seen her look terrified. Even when she fell yesterday, it wasn't like this. "No." She shakes her head. "I can't."
"Olivia, your father killed him. You know he did. If he's still alive, he needs to be stopped."
"I can't," she says. "I just can't."
I leave her asleep in the morning and go back to the office. I find the detective's card tucked carefully into the right side of my desk calendar. Somehow I think I knew that it would be me, not Olivia, eventually making this call.
I report what occurred last night, and he tells me he'll need to interview her right away. "She's not going to talk to you," I sigh. "She's as scared of talking to you as she is almost anything."
"Sometimes the kids involved are threatened so badly that the fear of speaking up never goes away," he sighs. "But I still need to try. Secondhand information from you doesn't get us anywhere."
"Look, can't you just interview the other adults involved? At least try to confirm the story through her mother if you can find her?"
"Her mother's been dead almost 15 years," the detective says, "so I don't think she's going to be much help at this point."
I lean back in my chair, and his words seem to whistle through me and right back out, as if they are impossible to comprehend. "Olivia told me her mother abandoned her. I mean, she really believes her mother abandoned her."
The detective exhales. "Look, buddy. I don't know what stories this girl's been feeding you, but she knows her mother is dead. She watched it happen."
I know for a fact Olivia doesn't think she's been lying to me about this. But I don't understand how she can't know the truth. "So … was it her father? Is he in jail?"
"He should've gone to jail, but there was nothing to pin it to him. Olivia was the only witness and she claimed to have seen nothing. It's probably what saved her life. If she'd talked, you can bet your ass he'd have come after her."
I feel something icy crawl along my back. "So if her father's still on the loose," I ask, "is Olivia even safe?"
"I think it's fair to say," he replies, "that as long as this guy isn't in jail, Olivia will never be entirely safe. Especially if she starts remembering."
I'm full of dread as I open up my laptop. A part of me, like a part of Olivia, doesn't want to know. Wants to continue believing the version of events she's created in her head.
It isn't hard to find articles about it once you know what you're looking for. Had I even once typed in her mother's name months ago it would have been the first thing I'd found. Is it really possible that Olivia hasn't? Yes. Something has warned her away from looking too carefully at anything for a long time, has assured her that she can't handle what she'll find out.