A Flicker in the Dark(24)

“So you want him to give up.”

“No, I want him to live. Plead guilty, and the death penalty is off the table. It’s our only option.”

The house was quiet—so quiet, I started to worry that they would be able to hear our breath, low and slow, as we sat just out of sight.

“Unless you have anything else I can work with,” he added. “Anything at all you haven’t told me.”

I held my breath again, straining to hear against the deafening silence. My heart pulsing in my forehead, my eyes.

“No,” she said at last, defeat in her voice. “No, I don’t. You know everything.”

“Right,” Theo said, sighing. “That’s what I thought. And Mona—”

I pictured my mother staring up at him then, tears in her eyes. All her fight gone.

“As a part of the deal, he’s agreed to take the police to the bodies.”

The silence returned again, but this time, we were all left speechless. Because when Theodore Gates walked out of our house that day, in an instant, everything changed. My father was no longer presumed guilty; he was guilty. He was admitting it, not only to the jury, but also to us. And slowly, my mother stopped trying. Stopped caring. The days went by and her eyes turned dull, like they had morphed into glass. She stopped leaving the house, then her room, then her bed, and Cooper and I were left pressing our own noses to the screen. He pled guilty, and when his sentencing finally aired, we watched the entire thing.

“Why did you do it, Mr. Davis? Why did you kill those girls?”

I watched my father look down at his lap, away from the judge. The room was silent, a collective held breath hanging heavy in the air. He seemed to be considering the question, really thinking about it, chewing it over in his mind as if it were the first time he had ever really stopped to consider the word why.

“I have a darkness inside of me,” he said at last. “A darkness that comes out at night.”

I looked at Coop, searching his face for some kind of explanation, but he just kept staring at the TV, mesmerized. I turned back.

“What kind of darkness?” the judge asked.

My father shook his head, letting a single tear erupt from his eye and drip down his cheek. The room was so quiet, I could have sworn I heard the flick as it landed on the table.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I don’t know. It’s so strong, I couldn’t fight it. I tried, for a long time. A long, long time. But I couldn’t fight it anymore.”

“And you’re telling me that this darkness is what forced you to kill those girls?”

“Yes.” He nodded. Tears were streaming down his face then, snot dripping from his nostrils. “Yes, it did. It’s like a shadow. A giant shadow always hovering in the corner of the room. Every room. I tried to stay out of it, I tried to stay in the light, but I couldn’t do it anymore. It drew me in, it swallowed me whole. Sometimes I think it might be the devil himself.”

I realized in that moment that I had never seen my father cry before. In my twelve years spent living under his roof, never once had he shed a tear in my presence. Watching your parents cry should be a painful experience, uncomfortable even. One time, after my aunt had passed away, I had barged into my parent’s bedroom and caught my mother crying in bed. When she lifted her head, there was the imprint of a face on her pillow, her tears, snot and spit marking the very spots where her features had been, like some kind of funhouse smiley face stained into the fabric. It was a jarring scene—otherworldly, almost, her splotchy skin and her reddened nose and the self-conscious way she tried to push back the wet hair stuck to the side of her cheek and smile at me, pretending that everything was okay. I remember standing in the doorframe, stunned, before slowly backing up and shutting it closed without uttering a single word. But watching my father sob on national television—watching his tears pool in the crease above his lip before staining the notepad positioned on the table below him—I felt nothing but disgust.

His emotion seemed authentic, I thought, but his explanation felt forced, scripted. Like he was reading from a screenplay, acting out the role of the serial killer confessing to his sins. He was looking for sympathy, I realized. He was casting the fault in every direction but his own. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done; he was sorry he got caught. And the fact that he was blaming this fictional thing for his actions—this devil that lurked in the corners, forcing his hands to squeeze their necks—sent a shot of inexplicable anger through my body. I remember balling my hands into fists, my fingernails drawing blood from my palms.

“Fucking coward,” I spit. Cooper looked at me, shocked at my language, my rage.

And that was the last time I saw my father. His face on my television screen, describing the invisible monster that made him strangle those girls and bury their bodies in the woods behind our ten-acre lot. He made good on his promise to take the police there. I remember hearing the slam of the cruiser doors, refusing to even glance out the window as he led a team of detectives into the trees. They found some remnants of the girls—hairs, clothing fibers—but no bodies. An animal must have gotten to them first, a gator or a coyote or some other hidden creature of the swamp desperate for a meal. But I knew it was the truth because I had seen him one night—a dark figure, emerging from the trees, covered in dirt. A shovel slung across his shoulder as he slumped back to our house, oblivious to me watching from behind my bedroom window. The idea of him burying a body before returning home and kissing me goodnight had made me want to crawl out of my skin and live somewhere else. Somewhere far away.