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“Clearly,” he answered, bitterly. My father had saved every penny he could, a single parent, on a cop’s salary, to send me to college and the semester before, after the incident with Brad, I’d dropped out. My father reminded me of his sacrifice often.
I’d planned to finish school. I just found the whole thing so distracting, so ripe with possibilities. The truth is, I’d never felt more complete, more whole, than I did after I killed Bradley Simmons. Nothing, not even sex, had ever brought me that much satisfaction. This lasted for days, the high, the fullness of it. Even as Megan cried day in and day out, even hugging Brad’s mother at his funeral, throwing dirt on his casket, I’d never felt more alive. I replayed the act over and over for days. It took about two weeks for the high to wear off.
When it did, I knew that I had to find that feeling again.
I just had to pick my next victim. But what could make me feel as strongly as Bradley had? I didn’t yet know.
And then, over drinks with Megan weeks afterward, I let something slip. I told her I was glad he was dead. I was glad he couldn’t hurt her anymore. Maybe it was the way I said it, but something for her seemed to click. “You drugged me,” s
he said, her voice edged with wariness. “That night. The night that Brad died.”
I didn’t deny it. I simply put my switchblade to her throat and asked her to write a note. Megan was found hanging from our doorjamb the following day. She’d been so distraught after her boyfriend’s death. No one seemed all that surprised.
After that, I grew bored with school. Decided I had to get out of that town where nothing ever happened. I needed to see the world. I applied for a job as a flight attendant and was shocked when three weeks later I got the call.
“I’m going back to waitressing,” I told my father. “But after…I plan to fly again.”
“Things never quite work out the way you think they will, Charlotte.”
I knew what he meant. Or at least I thought I did. I hadn’t been flying long, just about three months, when I met Dan, a captain on a crew I flew with regularly.
It was the first job I didn’t hate. It helped that I was out of Dad’s hair, and I was doing something he could be proud of—not college-level proud, but proud nonetheless. Then I met Dan. And then, just like with school, everything changed.
What had started as a one-night stand quickly grew into a fling and then into an unwanted and unexpected pregnancy.
I might have been young, but I wasn’t all together stupid. I knew Dan didn’t want another child. His own children were nearly grown, not so far from my age. So I told him not to worry and scheduled the abortion for a random Tuesday on a sunny day in May.
I showed up for my appointment and was surprised to find the clinic was roped off. Cop cars and ambulances lined the block. From across the street a familiar voice called my name. It was my father’s. He asked what I was doing there.
Looking for you, I’d said. Something we both knew was a lie.
You shouldn’t be here, he told me. Just an hour earlier, he explained, a gunman had entered the clinic and shot and killed eleven people.
When I called Dan to tell him, he told me it would be fine. We’d think of something. Over the coming weeks, I couldn’t bring myself to make another appointment. I didn’t really want to have to face my dad. More than anything, I was probably afraid.
Eventually, Dan promised me he’d tell his wife. He said she’d leave him, or vice versa, that we would be together, that everything would be fine. But of course it was all a lie. He was friendly enough when I told him I couldn’t go through with the abortion, but as the weeks went by and I began to show, he began to distance himself.
“I won’t bother you with any of it,” I promised my dad. “I just need to know I have a place to stay until she is born.”
His eyes met mine. “This is your home. You know that.”
Glancing at my father in his La-Z-Boy, I felt exactly as I had as a child, when I’d made a mess, or broken something, or said the wrong thing, or watched the TV with the volume too high. In those days, before she left for good, my mother would rage and yell and slam the front door, leaving my father and me alone. He would call me over to him, set me on his lap, and tell me one of his police stories. One of the good ones, with the happy endings. Afterward, he would smooth my hair and say, “Go clean your room,” or “When she comes back, make sure you say you’re sorry,” and most often, “Just fix it.”
But this time he did not call me into his lap, and he did not smooth my hair. He did not tell me to fix it. He sat and stared at the muted TV, his eyes fixed, his jaw set.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and just briefly which didn’t happen often, I wished my mother were there. I would have given anything for shouting and slamming doors over the deafening silence.
“I can’t believe you’d give away your own child,” he said, and then he turned the TV up as loud as he could.
Chapter Nine
Charlotte
“What were you thinking?” Henry demands to know the second I step foot on the plane. I have to give credit where credit is due—Henry asks really good questions.
The meeting at Estero was risky. Janine and Richard were not the reason I was in Florida. I considered the risk. I knew there was the chance of ruining things before they had ever gotten off the ground. I knew all of this before we ever landed. I just didn’t think any of it was probable. Plus, I was thinking about other things.
I was thinking about my appearance, wondering if it would be enough to draw him in. I was thinking about how to handle it if I did, understanding I had to be careful.
