Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

  Andy watched him watching the car until he was just a speck in the distance.

  I’m sorry for the situation your wife and daughter are in.

  How had he known that Gordon was her father?

  Andy stood under the shower until the hot water ran out. Manic thoughts kept flitting around inside of her head like a swarm of mosquitos. She could not blink without remembering a stray detail from the diner, from the video, from the police interview, the car.

  None of it made sense. Her mother was a fifty-five-year-old speech therapist. She played bridge, for chrissakes. She didn’t kill people and smoke cigarettes and rail against the pigs.

  Andy avoided her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she dried her hair. Her skin felt like sandpaper. There were tiny shards of glass embedded in her scalp. Her chapped lips had started bleeding at the corner. Her nerves were still shaky. At least she thought it was her nerves. Maybe it was lack of sleep that was making her feel so jumpy, or the absence of adrenaline, or the desperation she felt every time she replayed the last thing that Laura had said to Andy before she went into the house—

  I’m not going to change my mind. You need to leave tonight.

  Andy’s heart felt so raw that a feather could’ve splayed it open.

  She rummaged through the clean clothes pile and found a pair of lined running shorts and a navy-blue work shirt. She dressed quickly, walking to the window as she did up the buttons. The garage was detached from the house. The apartment was her cave. Gray walls. Gray carpet. Light-blocking shades. The ceiling sloped with the roofline, only made livable by two tiny dormers.

  Andy stood at the narrow window and looked down at her mother’s house. She could not hear her parents arguing, but she knew what was happening the same way that you knew you had managed to give yourself food poisoning. She was seized by that awful, clammy feeling that something just wasn’t right.

  The death penalty.

  Where had her mother even learned to catch a knife like that? Laura had never been in the military. As far as Andy knew, she hadn’t taken any self-defense classes.

  Almost every day of her mother’s life for the last three years had been spent either trying not to die from cancer or enduring all the horrible indignities that cancer treatment brought with it. There had not been a hell of a lot of free time to train for hand-to-hand combat. Andy was surprised her mother had been able to raise her arm so quickly. Laura struggled to lift a grocery bag, even with her good hand. The breast cancer had invaded her chest wall. The surgeon had removed part of her pectoral muscle.

  Adrenaline.

  Maybe that was the answer. There were all kinds of stories about mothers lifting cars off their trapped babies or performing other tremendous physical feats in order to protect their children. Sure, it wasn’t common, but it happened.

  But that still didn’t explain the look on Laura’s face when she pulled the knife through. Blank. Almost workman-like. Not panicked. Not afraid. She could’ve just as easily been sitting at her desk reviewing a patient’s chart.

  Andy shivered.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance. The sun would not go down for another hour, but the clouds were dark and heavy with the promise of rain. Andy could hear waves throwing themselves onto the beach. Seagulls hashing out dinner plans. She looked down at her mother’s tidy bungalow. Most of the lights were on. Gordon was pacing back and forth in front of the kitchen window. Her mother was seated at the table, but all that Andy could make out was her hand, the one that wasn’t strapped to her waist, resting on a placemat. Laura’s fingers occasionally tapped, but otherwise she was still.

  Andy saw Gordon throw his hands into the air. He walked toward the kitchen door.

  Andy stepped back into the shadows. She heard the door slam closed. She chanced another look outside the window.

  Gordon walked down the porch stairs. The motion detector flipped on the floodlights. He looked up at them, shielding his eyes with his hand. Instead of heading toward her apartment, he stopped on the bottom riser and sat down. He rested his forehead on the heels of his hands.

  Her first thought was that he was crying, but then she realized that he was probably trying to regain his composure so that Andy wouldn’t be even more worried when she saw him.

  She had seen Gordon cry once, and only once, before. It was at the beginning of her parents’ divorce. He hadn’t let go and sobbed or anything. What he had done was so much worse. Tears had rolled down his cheeks, one long drip after another, like condensation on the side of a glass. He’d kept sniffing, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He had left for work one morning assuming his fourteen-year marriage was solid, then before lunchtime had been served with divorce papers.

  “I don’t understand,” he had told Andy between sniffles. “I just don’t understand.”

  Andy couldn’t remember the man who was her real father, and even thinking the words real father felt like a betrayal to Gordon. Sperm donor felt too overtly feminist. Not that Andy wasn’t a feminist, but she didn’t want to be the kind of feminist that men hated.

  Her birth father—which sounded strange but kind of made sense because adopted kids said birth mother—was an optometrist whom Laura had met at a Sandals resort. Which was weird, because her mother hated to travel anywhere. Andy thought they’d met in the Bahamas, but she was told the story so long ago that a lot of details were lost.

  These were the things she knew: That her birth parents had never married. That Andy was born the first year they were together. That her birth father, Jerry Randall, had died in a car accident while on a trip home to Chicago when Andy was eighteen months old.

  Unlike Laura’s parents, who had both died before Andy was born, Andy still had grandparents on her birth father’s side—Laverne and Phil Randall. She had an old photo somewhere of herself, no more than two, sitting in their laps, balanced between each of their knees. There was a painting of the beach on the wood-paneled wall behind them. The couch looked scruffy. They seemed like kind people, and maybe they were in some ways, but they had completely cut off both Laura and Andy when Gordon had entered their lives.

  Gordon—of all people. A Phi Beta Sigma who had graduated Georgetown Law while working as a volunteer coordinator at Habitat for Humanity. A man who played golf, loved classical music, was the president of his local wine-tasting society and had chosen for his vocation one of the most boring areas of the law, helping wealthy people figure out how their money would be spent after they died.

  That Andy’s birth grandparents had balked at the dorkiest, most uptight black man walking the planet simply because of the color of his skin was enough to make Andy glad she didn’t have any contact with them.

  The kitchen door opened. Andy watched Gordon stand up. He tripped the floodlights again. Laura handed him a plate of food. Gordon said something Andy could not hear. Laura slammed the door in lieu of response.

  Through the kitchen window, she saw her mother making her way back to the table, gripping the counter, the doorjamb, the back of a chair—anything she could find to take the pressure off of her leg.

  Andy could’ve helped her. She could’ve been down there making her mother tea or helping her wash off the hospital smell the way she’d done so many times before.

  I’ve earned the right to be alone.

  The TV by Andy’s bed caught her attention. The set was small, formerly taking up space on her mother’s kitchen counter. By habit, Andy had turned it on when she walked through the door. The sound was muted. CNN was showing the diner video again.

  Andy closed her eyes, because she knew what the video showed.

  She breathed in.

  Out.

  The air-conditioner hummed in her ears. The ceiling fan wah-wahed overhead. She felt cold air curl around her neck and face. She was so tired. Her brain was filled with slow-rolling marbles. She wanted to sleep, but she knew she could not sleep here. She would have to stay at Gordon’s tonight and then, first thing tomorrow morning, her f
ather would require she make some kind of a plan. Gordon always wanted a plan.

  A car door opened and closed. Andy knew it was her father because the McMansions along her mother’s street, all of them so huge that they literally blocked out the sun, were always vacant during the most extreme heat of the summer.

  She heard scuffling feet across the driveway. Then Gordon’s heavy footsteps were on the metal stairs to the apartment.

  Andy grabbed a trashbag out of the box. She was supposed to be packing. She opened the top drawer of her dresser and dumped her underwear into the bag.

  “Andrea?” Gordon knocked on the door, then opened it.

  He glanced around the room. It was hard to tell whether Andy had been robbed or a tornado had hit. Dirty clothes carpeted the floor. Shoes were piled on top of a flat box that contained two unassembled Ikea shoe racks. The bathroom door hung open. Her period panties from a week ago hung stiffly from the towel rod.

  “Here.” Gordon offered the plate that Laura had given him. PB&J, chips and a pickle. “Your mom said to make sure you eat something.”

  What else did she say?

  “I asked for a bottle of wine, but got this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pint-sized bottle of Knob Creek. “Did you know your mother keeps bourbon in the house?”

  Andy had known about her mother’s stash since she was fourteen.

  “Anyway, I thought this might help tamp down some nerves. Take the edge off.” He broke the seal on the top. “What are the chances that you have some clean glasses in this mess?”

  Andy put the plate on the floor. She felt underneath the sofa bed and found an open pack of Solo cups.

  Gordon scowled. “I guess that’s better than passing the bottle back and forth like a couple of hobos.”

  What did Mom say?

  He poured two fingers of bourbon into the deep cup. “Eat something before you have a drink. Your stomach’s empty and you’re tired.”

  Belle Isle Andy hadn’t had a drink since she’d returned home. She wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to break the streak. Still, she took a cup and sat cross-legged on the floor so that her dad could sit in the chair.

  He sniffed at the chair. “Did you get a dog?”

  Andy sucked down a mouthful of bourbon. The 100 proof made her eyes water.

  He said, “We should toast your birthday.”

  She pressed together her lips.

  He held up the cup. “To my beautiful daughter.”

  Andy held up her drink, too. Then she took another sip.

  Gordon didn’t imbibe. He dug into his suit pocket and retrieved a white mailing envelope. “I got you these. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to wrap them in something pretty.”

  Andy took the envelope. She already knew what was inside. Gordon always bought her gift cards because he knew the stores she liked, but he had no idea what she liked from those stores. She dumped the contents onto the floor. Two $25 gas cards for the station down the street. Two $25 iTunes cards. Two $25 Target gift cards. One $50 gift card to Dick Blick for art supplies. She picked up a piece of paper. He had printed out a coupon for a free sandwich at Subway when you bought one of equal or lesser value.

  He said, “I know you like sandwiches. I thought we could go together. Unless you want to take someone else.”

  “These are great, Dad. Thank you.”

  He swished around the bourbon but still did not drink. “You should eat.”

  Andy bit into the sandwich. She looked up at Gordon. He was touching his mustache again, smoothing it down the same way he stroked Mr. Purrkins’ shoulders.

  He said, “I have no idea what’s going through your mother’s mind.”

  Andy’s jaw made a grinding noise as she chewed. She might as well have been eating paste and cardboard.

  He said, “She told me to let you know that she’s going to pay off your student loans.”

  Andy choked on the bite.

  “That was my response, too.” Her student loans were a sore point with Gordon. He had offered to refinance the debt in order to help Andy get out from under $800’s worth of interest a month, but for reasons known only to her id, she had passed his deadline for gathering all the paperwork.

  He said, “Your mother wants you to move back to New York City. To pursue your dreams. She said she’d help you with the move. Financially, I mean. Suddenly, she’s very free with her money.”

  Andy worked peanut butter off the roof of her mouth with her tongue.

  “You can stay with me tonight. We’ll work out something tomorrow. A plan. I—I don’t want you going back to New York, sweetheart. You never seemed happy up there. I felt like it took a piece of you; took away some of your Andy-ness.”

  Andy’s throat made a gulping sound as she swallowed.

  “When you moved back home, you were so good taking care of Mom. So good. But maybe that was asking too much. Maybe I should’ve helped more or . . . I don’t know. It was a lot for you to take on. A lot of pressure. A lot of stress.” His voice was thick with guilt, like it was his fault that Laura got cancer. “Mom’s right that you need to start your life. To have a career and maybe, I don’t know, maybe one day a family.” He held up his hand to stop her protest. “Okay, I know I’m getting ahead of myself, but whatever the problem is, I just don’t think going back to New York is the answer.”

  Gordon’s head turned toward the television. Something had caught his eye. “That’s—from high school. What’s her—”

  Motherfucker.

  CNN had identified Alice Blaedel, one of Andy’s friends from high school, as a Close Friend of the Family.

  Andy found the remote and unmuted the sound.

  “—always the cool mom,” Alice, who had not spoken to Andy in over a decade, was telling the reporter. “You could, you know, talk to her about your problems and she’d, like, she wouldn’t judge, you know?” Alice kept shrugging her shoulder every other word, as if she was being electrocuted. “I dunno, it’s weird to watch her on the video because, you’re like, wow, that’s Mrs. Oliver, but it’s like in Kill Bill where the mom is all normal in front of her kid but she’s secretly a killing machine.”

  Andy’s mouth was still thick with peanut butter, but she managed to push out the words, “Killing machine?”

  Gordon took the remote from Andy. He muted the sound. He stared at Alice Blaedel, whose mouth was still moving despite not knowing a goddamn thing.

  Andy poured more bourbon into her empty cup. Alice had walked out on Kill Bill because she’d said it was stupid and now she was using it as a cultural touchstone.

  Gordon tried, “I’m sure she’ll regret her choice of words.”

  Like she’d regretted getting genital warts from Adam Humphrey.

  He tried again. “I didn’t realize you had reconnected with Alice.”

  “I haven’t. She’s a self-serving bitch.” Andy swallowed the bourbon in one go. She coughed at the sudden heat in her throat, then poured herself some more.

  “Maybe you should—”

  “They lift cars,” Andy said, which wasn’t exactly what she meant. “Mothers, I mean. Like, the adrenaline, when they see that their kids are trapped.” She raised her hands to indicate the act of picking up an overturned automobile.

  Gordon stroked his mustache with his fingers.

  “She was so calm,” Andy said. “In the diner.”

  Gordon sat back in the chair.

  Andy said, “People were screaming. It was terrifying. I didn’t see him shoot—I didn’t see the first one. The second one, I saw that.” She rubbed her jaw with her hand. “You know that phrase people say in the movies, ‘I’m gonna blow your head off’? That happens. It literally happens.”

  Gordon crossed his arms.

  “Mom came running toward me.” Andy saw it all happening again in her head. The tiny red dots of blood freckling Laura’s face. Her arms reaching out to tackle Andy to the ground. “She looked scared, Dad. With everything that happened,
that’s the only time I ever saw her look scared.”

  He waited.

  “You watched the video. You saw what I did. Didn’t do. I was panicked. Useless. Is that why . . .” She struggled to give voice to her fear. “Is that why Mom’s mad at me? Because I was a coward?”

  “Absolutely not.” He shook his head, vehement. “There’s no such thing as a coward in that kind of situation.”

  Andy wondered if he was right, and more importantly, if her mother agreed with him.

  “Andrea—”

  “Mom killed him.” Saying the words put a burning lump of coal in her stomach. “She could’ve taken the gun out of his hand. She had time to do that, to reach down, but instead she reached up and—”

  Gordon let her speak.

  “I mean—did she have time? Is it right to assume she was capable of making rational choices?” Andy did not expect an answer. “She looked calm in the video. Serene, that’s what you said. Or maybe we’re both wrong, because, really, she didn’t have an expression. Nothing, right? You saw her face. Everydayness.”

  He nodded, but let her continue.

  “When it was happening, I didn’t see it from the front. I mean, I was behind her, right? When it was happening. And then I saw the video from the front and it—it looked different.” Andy tried to keep her muddled brain on track. She ate a couple of potato chips, hoping the starch would absorb the alcohol.

  She told her father, “I remember when the knife was in Jonah’s neck and he was raising the gun—I remember being really clear that he could’ve shot somebody. Shot me. It doesn’t take much to pull a trigger, right?”

  Gordon nodded.

  “But from the front—you see Mom’s face, and you wonder if she did the right thing. If she was thinking that, yes, she could take away the gun, but she wasn’t going to do that. She was going to kill the guy. And it wasn’t out of fear or self-preservation but it was like . . . a conscious choice. Like a killing machine.” Andy couldn’t believe she had used Alice Blaedel’s spiteful words to describe her mother. “I don’t get it, Daddy. Why didn’t Mom talk to the police? Why didn’t she tell them it was self-defense?”