by Tyler King
“Avery…”
“Don’t follow me.”
I turn into the afternoon glare and leave him behind.
9
The Butcher
Enderly’s father, my father, stands over the carcass of a slaughtered pig laid out on a wooden table. He dissects it with skilled precision, cutting slabs of meat while Enderly stands in the kitchen doorway, breathing through her mouth and staring at the floor. He does this on purpose. To intimidate and unsettle her. All part of his manipulative mastery to keep the people around him off balance. A means of control. And as he does this, brutalizing his daughter with the sight of this dead animal, he speaks about loyalty and questions her about the newcomer—the undercover journalist hiding in their ranks. Blade in hand, carving, he dares her to lie to him. Everything about the man is a carefully crafted threat.
I don’t know what motivated me to pick up Ethan’s book again. When I got home, the apartment empty, I put on my pajamas and tried three times to call my mother. Couldn’t do it. There was, is, no part of that conversation I want to have with her. Over the years, she’s mastered the art of avoidance. A hint of the topic arises, and suddenly it’s “The strawberries are coming in nicely this year” or “I’m thinking of taking up pastels.”
Or maybe I’m afraid she’ll care too much.
I’ve never asked what drove her to Massasauga in the first place. What catastrophe of a life she left behind to confine herself inside the forest walls that rimmed that compound. She was my age when she stepped through the wooden gates, down the long dirt drive. Arrived on foot, hitchhiking with a bag full of everything that mattered. Somewhere, somehow, her life took a sharp left turn straight toward Patrick Turner Murphy, his vision for a perfect tax haven, and a little girl a year later. At least once, and often more, every year of my life, I’ve wondered if my greatest mistake was being born.
Now sitting in the bathtub, steam creasing the pages of the book, Ethan’s words instigate a strange sense of déjà vu. Almost as if Enderly’s life is more real now, more tangible, than Echo’s memories. Though the conversation he describes never took place, its essence is familiar. There’s a level of authenticity that is both remarkable and unsettling. I can’t shake the feeling that, though his version of events is quite different, Ethan was there. Like he was always part of the story, observing and unseen. His words know me. They see the truth of my father. Even as fiction, they are perhaps the truest rendition of that life that has thus far emerged. I admit, my essay wasn’t as honest. I edited. I curtailed. In telling Echo’s story, I protected the most vulnerable parts of her. What I still can’t put into words, Ethan has managed to identify and distill.
Perhaps it is because Enderly was created to be approachable. To feel, on an emotional and psychological level, as real as any person walking around in the world today. Whereas Echo was always a fantasy. Conceived in a bubble, it was never the intention to make her fit for society at large. I don’t share a last name with either of my parents. Avalon is just an idea, a lofty ambition. Fictitious. And what sort of name is Echo but a feedback loop that dissipates into nothing? A decaying, distorted copy.
Ethan has always seen that. Even before we met, and every day since, he’s seen the blank, empty canvas of my identity. Not even unfinished, I’m not yet begun.
Three loud knocks shake me from the thought. Water sloshes in the tub around me. I stand and reach for a towel, dripping as I get out of the bath to dry off. Three more knocks.
“Yeah, just a second!”
With the towel wrapped around me and tucked under my arms, I navigate through the scattered stacks of moving boxes clogging our living room and go to the front door. I try to peer through the peephole, but the fisheye lens is dirty and crusted. All I see is a dark outline of a person.
Three more knocks.
“Who is it?”
“Ethan.”
Shit.
“What do you want?”
“Are you going to make me do this through the door?”
“Yes.”
There’s a swollen pause, and I imagine him raking his hands through his hair in that way he does when he’s met with resistance.
“Look, I’m sorry. I came at you a little strong back there. That was insensitive, I know. I wasn’t trying to maneuver you, I just—Avery, can you please open the door? I feel stupid shouting in the hallway.”
“I’m not dressed,” I say, standing in a puddle collecting on the floor.
“You’re what?”
“I’m not dressed.”
“Oh, uhh…”
Yeah. Bad timing there, buddy.
“Here.” I take the chain off the door and unlock the deadbolt. “Wait thirty seconds, then you can let yourself in. If I see you before that, I’m coming after you with a baseball bat.”
“Thirty seconds,” he repeats, and I swear I hear a smile in his voice. “Got it.”
I unlock the doorknob then scurry across the apartment to my bedroom and slam the door shut. Most of my clothes are still in trash bags from the move, so I dash around digging for the clean jeans and a shirt not too wrinkled. When I come out, Ethan’s standing with his back to me.
“How do you know where I live?”
He turns to face me, not the least bit contrite. “Your father’s attorney found your Syracuse address, the apartment manager gave me your forwarding address.”
“That’s a little creepy.”
Ethan shrugs. “It’s what we do.”
True. A person has to go pretty far off the grid to hide from an investigative reporter. If you’re motivated to find a person, there’s always a way.
“So…” Kumi will lose her shit when I tell her Ethan Ash was standing in her living room, boxes and packing paper strewn all over the place. One of her bras hanging off the back of a chair at the kitchen table. “Is there something else you wanted to say, or…”
He walks past me to lean against the arm of the couch and stare at the floor. Ethan looks exhausted. Like his whole life’s just caught up with him.
“I do think you should come with me to the prison,” he says, and holds his hand up to stop me from interrupting. “And I understand that you have good reason not to. So let me explain.”
Ethan is in a unique position, occupied by only one other person in my life: he’s met my father. I can’t explain the surreal, irrational fascination that holds, except to say I imagine it must be like traveling to a foreign country, some far-flung exotic location, and finding yourself sitting at a bar next to someone from your hometown. That sense of connection and security. Of kinship and familiarity. It’s both attractive and unnerving.
But the conclusion I’ve come to is that, whatever his motivations, Ethan is honest. His intentions are good, if misguided. He is not like my father, and I have to let him out from under that burden of association. So I take a seat at the kitchen table and listen to what he has to say.
“My brother died last year.” He tucks his hands in his pockets. I don’t respond, because the solemnness in his voice is more ire than sadness, and I’ve never been good at consoling people. “He was three years older. When I was a kid, I wanted so badly to be like him. He played soccer, so I wanted to play. He liked Nirvana and Soundgarden, so those were my favorite bands, too. I idolized him, always following Evan and his friends around, being the butt of their jokes, just to get my brother’s attention. I thought if I mimicked him in every way, did everything he said, he’d like me.”
Hero worship is an alluring and dangerous affliction. Some never recover from the addiction, even as it corrodes and corrupts them. Such a destructive thing born of simple admiration. It’s hard to imagine Ethan as ever so young or impressionable.
“But by the time we were teenagers, I realized my brother was just born an asshole. Evan went from ignoring to outright tormenting me. I’d come home from school and he and his friends would have pissed all over my bed. He cut a hole in my pillow and took a shit in it then put the cover back o
n. Broke my arm—twice. My freshman year of high school he started a rumor that I was having sex with the teacher who led the student newspaper. Almost got the guy fired. No girl would go near me for two years. When we got older, it just got worse. He conned our parents out of thousands of dollars for whatever bullshit new business plan he’d concocted that year. He was always on the verge of a major payday with some new startup. Always a venture capital investor this close to handing over a windfall. He took out credit cards in my name and racked up insane debts. The guy didn’t have a fucking conscience. He never apologized or admitted guilt for anything is his life. And our parents never saw it, or they chose to ignore what was staring them right in the face—constantly making excuses for him. I can’t tell you how maddening it was to watch him get away with torching everything he touched over and over again and coming out unscathed.”
Ethan takes a deep breath, like he’s been holding this in for years and now there’s all this extra room in his body that wants to be filled. He rubs his hands up the back of his head then lets them fall at his sides.
“The last thing he did was skip out on our mother’s sixtieth birthday party. It was this big affair, friends of hers from way back to preschool, practically everyone she’d ever met getting together. Dad flew people in from all over the country, put them up in hotels, hired caterers and a band—all that shit. But it’s time to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and where’s Evan? On some mountain in Big Sky.”
He laughs to himself, one of those humorless, inaudible huffs. His tempest-blue eyes meet mine, and in them I see years of repressed hatred. The stain that so much unresolved rage leaves on a person.
“If I believed in such things, I’d think I killed him. Because every time he screwed us over, every time he betrayed us, I wished he’d just hurry up and die. Evan was a waste of a human being, and nothing anyone could do would ever change him.” Then Ethan stands. He approaches and pulls out another chair at the kitchen table to sit beside me. As in our first encounter, he squeezes the space between us until he’s the only thing in the room. “I didn’t go to the funeral. My mom wanted flowers and a big service and people getting up to say nice things about a man who hadn’t helped a single person a day in his life. I couldn’t fucking do it. I couldn’t sit there and play a part in his farce, even for her.”
“And now,” I say, searching for the moral of this story, “what? You realize you should have honored your mother, and your brother’s memory, because family is family and—”
“Hell no.” Ethan slouches back in his seat and crosses his arms, defiant and unapologetic. “It took a few months, then one day I started to wonder. What if I’d gone? Just to see him in that casket and made peace with all the shit he put us through. Maybe I wouldn’t still be this angry. Maybe I could have let it go back then, instead of having a dead man wake me up in the middle of the night.”
Even after I stopped dreaming of the blood, after the anxiety attacks became less frequent, I still had recurring nightmares about my father. One in particular that still wakes me in a cold sweat. In it, I’m maybe fifteen, and asleep in my bed. In the middle of the night I wake up to use the bathroom, but as I’m washing my hands, I hear voices coming from my mother’s bedroom. I go to her door, and through the opening I see her standing in his arms. They’re hugging, happy, and smiling in the dark. He tells me we’re going to be a family again. That he’s come back for us, and he’s taking us away. I try to run, but the doors are locked. I beg my mother, yank her hand and try to drag her from his arms, pleading and screaming, but she just smiles in a hypnotic trance.
Reaching his hand across the table, stopping just short of touching my arm, Ethan says, “Avery, I don’t think I’m ever going to forgive my brother. I don’t even think I want to. But he’s dead, and I’m still walking around with shit I wish had died with him. Now maybe going to the funeral wouldn’t have made a difference. I won’t ever know that. My point is, if there’s even a small part of you that is hung up on anger and resentment for your father, don’t let yourself ask, What if? No one’s telling you to bury the man if you don’t want to, but if you think you can stomach it, come up there with me. It might be your only chance to find some kind of closure. Endings are important, Avery. You should have the one you deserve.”
I’ve always thought of closure as a decision rather than something to seek and attain. Simply choose to shut the door. Pack it up, put it away, and have no further use for whatever business has been done. And it’s worked, for the most part. Except with my father. His influence pervades me. It’s malignant, multiplying with time. The longer it’s been left to fester, the stronger it becomes, reinforcing its position. I concluded some time ago that it was a condition I would learn to live with. My new reality.
“How did he die? Your brother.”
“Snowboarding accident that weekend in Big Sky. Went off a jump and missed the landing. Snapped his neck. Evan was always convinced of his own invincibility, so gravity smacked him back to Earth.”
This might be a terrible mistake. What I think of now as a minor illness might become a debilitating disease if I allow myself any closer to my father and his memory. But what if it works? Even a slight remission would be an improvement. One less nightmare. One less anxiety attack. Isn’t that what we’re all seeking? Better quality of life, no matter how small. Perhaps I could put this part of me to rest at last. And I don’t have to do it alone.
“You’re leaving now?”
“My truck’s parked outside. Last I checked, the news still hasn’t hit the wire. If you want to get in before the press is crawling all over the prison, we need to hurry.”
If it were anyone else asking, I might not have let them through the door. But Ethan’s different. Compelling, yes. More than that, though, he might be exactly what I need.
10
The Illusive Daughter
I’ve seen dead bodies before. People I’d known my entire life. Some of them had held me as an infant, changed my diapers. There was one woman, Loraine, a former advertising executive who, I would only learn once her life prior to Massasauga was made public during my father’s trial, had faked her own death in the autumn of ’91. She taught me to play gin rummy and how to do that bridge trick for shuffling cards. Loraine was a beast at Pictionary and Scrabble. At Halloween, she told ghost stories. In the winter, we made snowmen.
The authorities concluded, after her body was identified among the victims of the massacre, she had deliberately wandered away from a campsite while on vacation in the Finger Lakes National Forest, leaving behind bloody clothing and her wedding ring along the way, in an effort to escape her abusive husband. The reports revealed, upon her supposed death, she had accumulated considerable savings, stocks, and other wealth—a nest egg she had hidden from her husband in preparation for her departure, and she willed it to a close friend with whom she had orchestrated the ruse. My father managed to swindle the money out of her, as he did to others who had any wealth to speak of, when Loraine eventually found herself among the inhabitants at Massasauga. But how or why she fell into my father’s sphere of corruption was never determined. Like the other victims, she took the secret to her grave.
I cried for her the night my mother and I escaped, and many more nights thereafter.
Standing in a hallway outside the morgue of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, I look through the glass of a reinforced window at the pale, lifeless body of Patrick Turner Murphy on a metal slab—and I feel nothing. A white sheet covers him from chest to ankles. His skin is the color of cinderblocks, the deathly hue darkening to shades of purple that peer around the backs of his shoulders and feet.
“Lividity,” Ethan says beside me. “His blood is pooling to the bottom.”
My father has a woolly gray beard that absorbs much of his face—somewhere underneath must be the scar from his suicide attempt—and a receded hairline exposing a mole off-center on top of his head. He’s massive on the table. A fat, hulking brute with arms like ship c
anons and a whiskey-barrel stomach. This man must have eaten three of my father.
“Are they sure it’s him?” I ask. “I don’t even recognize him.”
“I do,” Ethan says. “He’s maybe twenty, thirty pounds heavier than the last time I saw him, and the beard is longer, but that’s Patrick.”
And yet, it’s not. That cold corpse is not the man whose face Echo sees when she closes her eyes. He’s a stranger. Some distorted, disfigured imposter. I realize, studying the disturbing stillness of the cadaver, that my father withered away years ago. Unbeknownst to anyone outside these walls, he grew slovenly and obese. His interests stunted, activities curtailed by incarceration, he simply sat down to collect moss, becoming embedded in the floor, rotting away.
The staff physician told us he suspected a heart attack as the cause of death based on a preliminary exam. As a matter of procedure, the body will be transferred to the coroner’s office for a complete autopsy, a requirement for all inmate deaths.
“Why do you think he never gave an interview until you?” I ask.
Ethan watches the body. Hands tucked in his pockets, he absorbs the scene he’ll describe later in his article. The flickering fluorescent light tubes. The stench of bleach and ammonia. The almost abandoned austerity of the morgue’s interior visible through the window. Or maybe he’s just trying to imprint on his mind the idea that the man who launched Ethan’s career no longer exists.
“I asked him that question—several times. Rather than answer, he usually had a segue ready about the grand media monopoly and how the freedom of the press died in the bloom of the blogosphere. When anyone can call themselves a journalist, no one is. More than once he suggested I give it up, move out to Hollywood, and become a television writer. I’ll admit, there are days I wonder if he was right.”
