Last Girl Ghosted(105)

You offer a shrug of surrender. Though I imagine you could run for the door. Maybe you could be gone before I could catch you. Maybe not. We all want to be seen, don’t we? No matter how we conspire to hide ourselves, don’t we all secretly want to reveal our true selves?

“It is. Adam Wilson.”

The name sounds familiar. I dig through my memory banks but come up empty. Did he write to Dear Birdie? I’ve found that other elusive connection that evaded Bailey Kirk. Lying around in the dark, bound and naked, you think about things. You dig through the recesses of your memories and your thoughts. Each girl—Mia, Bonnie, Melissa—each of them wrote to Dear Birdie.

And I answered each letter, offered them advice on moving on, finding a way through grief, pain, self-blame. Were you in the audience? Reading the blog? The newspaper articles? Listening to the podcasts?

“Don’t you know who I am?” you say. “You still haven’t put it together.”

“Tell me.”

“My family rented property from your father. We lived on the north end, in a house my father restored with his own hands. We were there the night of the raid.”

The revelation hits hard. Of course.

“The family that fled. The Wilsons.”

“That’s right,” you say, stepping closer. I lift the gun and you stop moving. “Fled with nowhere to go. We were homeless after that night, living out of our van. We traveled, moved around the country, wherever my father found work—mostly on farms. He drank. My parents split. Finally, my sister and I were left in Florida with my grandparents.”

I don’t feel sorry for him. At all.

“You really don’t remember us,” he says. “I saw you. Working in the garden with your father, climbing into your tree house. I would come with my father when the men met to talk about plans for the end.”

I shake my head. I was lost in my own world, and the only friend I remember was imaginary. The property was vast. We didn’t mingle with anyone. If he was really there, I never saw him.

“What happened to your parents?”

“Deaths of despair,” he says. “My father died in a bar fight. Can you imagine anything more ignoble? My mother overdosed on oxy.”

He wrinkles his nose in disgust. I notice with a shock that there’s a skein of blood down his shirt. “I don’t talk to my sister. Haven’t seen or heard from her in ten years. Sometimes I look on her social media feeds. She seems solid enough—husband, kids, stay-at-home mom. Normal. Bland.”

“Is that so bad?”

You shrug, eyes glassy. Just another broken man who resorts to hurting women to ease your pain.

“Maybe not. Comparatively.”

The metal of the gun has warmed in my grip.

“I remember those days on your family’s land as a kind of paradise. Peaceful. Easy. My mother was a good teacher. Homeschooling came easily to her. My father loved working the land. We had some sheep, sold the wool. A vegetable garden, fruit trees. It was beautiful there, wasn’t it?”

“I remember it differently. For my family, it was far from heaven.”

“Not always though, right?” he says. “There were good days, too.”

“There are always good days, too,” I concede.

You draw and release a breath, move closer still.

“I wrote to him,” you say. I see the hint of smile.

“Who?” I ask, already knowing the answer.

“Your father. After I went to MIT, found some venture capitalists to invest in my cybersecurity software, and was making a go of it, I wrote to him in prison. To thank him for that time and space in my life.”

A letter, to thank him for all he’d done. My stomach roils with disgust.

“He killed my brother and my mother. He’s a murderer.”

You lift your palms. “He’s sorry for the things he’s done. I am, too.”

The ease with which you forgive him and yourself stokes my rage, which is burning bright in my middle, growing hotter by the second.

“How nice.” The words feel like poison on my tongue.

“Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.”

“Don’t tell me what suits me,” I say mildly. “I’m the one holding the gun.”

A smile, the easy turning up of the corners of your mouth; it’s mirthless and cruel.

“It was you,” he says. “You called the police.”

“That’s right,” I say.

I have taken the journey of self-blame, only to realize if the choice played out before me again and again, I’d do the same. I thought that I was saving my family. I was calling for help. That it went another way does not rest with me. It rests with my father. I have Dr. Cooper to thank for that bit of mental clarity.

“You destroyed that place. If the police hadn’t come, your brother and mother would still be alive. Maybe my family wouldn’t have been destroyed. Maybe we’d have met sooner, been together.”

You sound petulant and young, a child to whom someone has broken a promise they were never able to keep in the first place. You are living in a fantasy of what might have been had we all remained in that place.

“We don’t get to go back,” I say. “We can’t change the past.”

Your frown deepens, but you stay silent.