Women Who Stay, 30

Chapter 1 ... Chapter 29

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"Mom moved out in '92. She took Gordon, who was just a baby, and she tried to take me too, but I refused to go. I didn't want to be alone with her. I wanted to stay with Dad, and I wanted to stay at the Farm."

"I thought you hated it there, though?"

"Yeah, but I didn't want to change schools, and I thought it would get better once she was gone. Dad had already cleaned out the whole basement level."

"Did you sleep down there?"

"No." She twisted her mouth. "Dad said he'd found mold or something. It wasn't safe. I stayed upstairs, or outside, or hung around town with my friends. But he spent most of his time down there. "

"Did you know what he was doing in the basement?" Her hands went back to cover her face, slightly muffling her response.

"He said he was still cleaning. And I don't think he was doing anything bad, not when I was home. Mom still took me on the weekends. If he... brought people back, I guess it was then."

"You don't seem to believe he did," I said.

"No, I do. I know what he did. I've read all those articles and everything. You don't have to, like, convince me of it. And also, it makes sense with the things I saw. Sometimes, the smell from the basement was just awful. Something wrong with the pool, or a mold treatment, he'd say, but... it wasn't a chemical smell. You know what I mean?" I nodded. "And when he lit his fires out back, the whole place would smell like, oh, God help me, like barbecue. I still can't stand to eat it. But he'd just say he killed a raccoon or something. And that was very believable, what with all those bastards up in the attic."

"But still, you said 'if.'"

Tears filled her eyes again, but she didn't cover her face. She looked at me plaintively, as if seeking absolution.

"He was my Dad. My therapist calls it 'cognitive dissonance.' Like, my head knows what he did. But I just can't make it fucking stick in my heart." She blew her nose on a napkin, a loud honk that turned heads from the table. They stayed staring at us when she started sobbing. "I spent 16 years of my life loving him more than I've ever loved anyone, and that whole time, he was someone else entirely. How can I forget the best person I knew? But how can I love someone like that?"

She looked at me demandingly, like I could give her an answer. I couldn't.

"I think what's hardest about it all is not being able to ask him about anything. Not having the chance to reconcile the two identities in one person. It's like, my Dad died. And then, after that, after the search, a new man was born in his place. A man who did awful things, and never answered to them. I hate that man." She sniffed, and her voice wobbled, but she held her composure. "Sometimes I have this dream, about Dad up at the lake, writing his letter, getting ready to kill himself. But then a man who looks just like him walks up behind him and shoots him first. I guess that's how it feels to me. All of it."

As we parted ways, I thought about all I'd learned about Janie since her death. I guess it felt like that to me, too. Like a twin of her was still growing in my mind.

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Thank you all for your patience, as I focused on other projects this weekend! I am proud to say I wrote an embarrassingly bad action/adventure story for the second round of the NYCmidnight Short Story Challenge, and I'm gratefully returning to genres within my wheelhouse. More to come soon <3

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Read on to Chapter 31