Love in the Time of Serial Killers(22)

I didn’t know, but I wasn’t about to be the one to shatter it.

“I guess I wouldn’t care,” I said. “As long as I could tell the person really loved me.”

By the end of the day, Conner and I had cleared out the entire living room with the exception of my writing desk and a few boxes of stuff to keep we’d stacked in one corner. We’d only argued once—about whether to put the giant TV out on the side of the road or not. Conner said we should, because it was wasteful to throw it away when it still worked perfectly well. I said I had no intention of moving the damn thing twice, once to the curb and then a second time to the dumpster after it had sat out there overnight and gotten wet with dew. Conner promised me someone would take it. We went inside for five minutes to get some water and, to my intense irritation and relief, the TV was gone by the time we came back out.

“Don’t worry,” Conner said. “If Shani and I moved in now, we’d bring a TV.”

“Not going to happen,” I said.

Conner stopped to pick up the book on my desk, the memoir written by the daughter of the Sunrise Slayer. I’d been reading it instead of In Cold Blood, which was a travesty both because the latter was much better written but also because it was the one I needed to analyze in my next chapter. Even if I wanted to include the daughter’s memoir—and I wasn’t sure I did, in any more than a passing reference—no way would Dr. Nilsson let me. It was way too “sensationalistic” and “tabloid,” two adjectives that were the equivalent of steaming piles of dog shit left on the porch the way she said them. I could discuss the cultural significance of the pulp true crime genre as a whole, and give a few examples, but anything more and some hack author would be spending the first chapter of their mass-market paperback describing how my body was found.

But for all that, there was something compelling about the daughter’s memoir that held my attention. Maybe it was how compartmentalized she still seemed to be about her father, the murderer, and her father, the man she’d grown up with and loved. The disconnect was understandable, given the unfathomable darkness of living with the knowledge of what he’d done. But it also felt like the question it raised was the exact one you wanted an answer for, and you kept reading, hoping to find one.

Conner flipped to the glossy pages in the middle, going straight for the photos. From his next words, I knew the exact picture he’d stopped on—one of the author and her father in front of a spring, looking like any other family with their dumb bucket hats and tired smiles.

“Do you remember that camping trip?”

He didn’t need to specify which one. We’d gone camping a few times as children, but the most memorable time had been the last one, the summer before the divorce. I’d been twelve; Conner, five.

“What set him off again?” I asked.

“Marshmallows,” Conner said. “We’d been snacking on them, and there weren’t enough to roast over the fire.”

I closed my eyes. There had been other spats and skirmishes throughout the weekend, of course—nobody was helping him put up the tent, nobody knew how to put the tent up right, he was convinced the campground was trying to cheat him out of five dollars with a hidden charge, there were twenty minutes where he couldn’t find the car keys. But the marshmallows had been the big one.

“There were still some left,” Conner said now. “Mom said she was full from dinner, anyway, and I’d probably eaten my weight in sugar by that point. Dad could’ve just told me I didn’t get dessert and roasted a few for himself and you and been done with it.”

But then Conner would’ve been upset, and started crying, and Dad would’ve looked to Mom like it was her fault that her kid was so out of control, and it would’ve been the same problem with a different patina on it. As it was, he’d ended up angrily declaring he was going to the store to pick up more marshmallows, and then he just . . . hadn’t come back. I could still remember the way we’d tried to gather all the stuff up at the campsite, the way we’d had to push it to one side and stand there awkwardly while a new couple came to set up for the next day. The way the couple kept glancing over at us, like Why won’t they leave?, and my mom had held her phone to her ear and smiled as she tried to call my dad over and over.

Obviously he ended up coming, eventually. And we packed up the car and never said a word about it.

“You played Rock, Paper, Scissors with me,” Conner said. “While we waited. I remember that because I didn’t believe you that paper beat rock.”

“You said that rock would rip paper to shreds.”

“Was I wrong?” Conner asked. “Rock is overpowered. It can crush some scissors but it can’t do shit to paper? Please.”

He looked back down at the book in his hands. In a strange way, I was relieved that glancing at it had made him think about our childhood like that. It meant I wasn’t alone.

I’d realized in reading it that one of the main reasons I found myself drawn to the narrative was because of all the ways it made me think about my own father. Not because I thought my dad could be the Sunrise Slayer, or whatever equivalent, but because there were parts of the author’s childhood that felt too familiar to ignore. How they would walk on eggshells around her dad whenever he was in a “mood.” How everyone knew not to touch his stuff or ask any questions. How there were these moments of real affection and happiness, but they would always feel distant and doubted later, under the weight of other memories.