Live to Tell (Detective D.D. Warren, #4)(54)

“You don’t have to be grateful,” Dr. Frank said.

“Yes I do.”

“You have a right to live, Danielle. You have a right to be happy and to fall in love and to find enjoyment in life. Your father didn’t grant this to you and you don’t owe him anything for it.”

“But he did.”

“Maybe your mother did,” Dr. Frank offered.

I scowled at him. “My mother? What does she have to do with this?”

“Or maybe it was your brother,” Dr. Frank said.

I stared at him in confusion.

“Or maybe your sister, Natalie, or Sheriff Wayne, or your Aunt Helen.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m just saying, there are many key people in your life, yet you hand all the power to your father. Why do you think you do that?”

“He took life. He granted life. He acted God-like, so I guess I make him God.”

“God doesn’t drink a fifth of whiskey, Danielle. Least I hope not.”

I didn’t have anything to add to that, so for a moment, we both fell silent. Dr. Frank sipped more tea. I prowled in front of his second-story window overlooking Beacon Street. It was busy outside. The streets swarmed with happy tourists buzzing about. Maybe they’d go for a walk through the gardens, indulge in a Swan Boat ride or a duck tour. So many things to do on a sunny August morning.

These families always seemed cheerful to me. I wondered if, twenty-five years ago, the neighbors thought the same about us.

“Do you think that if you’re joyful, your father wins?” Dr. Frank asked now. “You’ll be indebted toward him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Which meant, of course, that I did.

“You want to know why your father didn’t shoot you,” Dr. Frank said, steadily. “Twenty-five years later, it still comes down to that. Why didn’t your father kill you, too?”

“Yes.” I turned, less certain now, and stared at Dr. Frank. It wasn’t like him to cut so quickly to the heart of my mixed-up, f*cked-up life. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“Maybe your mother called to him,” Dr. Frank stated. “Maybe she called out his name and that distracted him. Maybe she begged for your life.”

“Couldn’t. She died instantly, single gunshot to the head.”

“Your sister, then; she was closer. Maybe she told him not to.”

“He shot her in the face, in the doorway of her bedroom. I don’t think she could say much after that.”

“Your brother lived long enough to be rushed to the hospital.”

“Yeah, Johnny lived a good twenty minutes. Johnny also made like Superman and tried to fly down the stairs. His spine was shattered by a bullet, his neck fractured from the fall. Only thing he probably begged for was a second shot, for my father to finally get it right.”

“I see you’ve been reading the police reports again.”

I had them laminated in a scrapbook. Something Dr. Frank and Aunt Helen discovered years ago.

“Did your family love you?” Dr. Frank continued to press. He was relentless today. I was less certain of this Dr. Frank, and I started pacing again.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to know?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“Did you love them?”

“My mother and siblings,” I said instantly.

“Really?” He cocked his head to the side. The shrink’s quintessential pose. “Danielle, you have spent so much time and energy on their deaths. If you truly love them, why not invest a little time and energy on their lives? That’s what they’d want you to remember, don’t you think?”

“But I loved him, too,” I heard myself whisper.

“I know.”

“I tried so hard to make him happy.”

“I know.”

“I thought, that night, if I did what he wanted, if I just made him happy, it would be okay.”

“What did he want you to do, Danielle? You are a grown woman now, a nurse with professional expertise. Don’t you think you can finally say it out loud?”

But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. There were things no child knew how to put in words. They didn’t have the vocabulary to match the experience. A dime if you’ll touch Daddy’s penis. A quarter if you’ll suck. What could a little girl say about that?

I worked now with two-and three-year olds who stuffed and regurgitated food in a desperate attempt to share. They didn’t know the term “oral sex”; they could only demonstrate the terrible violation, filling their cheeks with applesauce, then spitting it out while their mothers yelled at them for making such a mess. The children were honest in their desire to communicate. It was the adults who screwed everything up.

“She didn’t save me,” I said tonelessly. “But then, she didn’t even save herself.”

“Who, Danielle?”

“My mother. She told me to go to my room. She told me it would be okay. She told me she would take care of everything.”

“What would she take care of, Danielle?”

“They started fighting. I could hear them yelling from my bedroom. He was drunk. You could tell he was drunk. He was always drunk.”