The Marsh King's Daughter(75)

Once the idea that my father had killed The Hunter was established, I was okay with letting it stand. I may not have been wise in the ways of the outside world, but I understood enough to know that confessing to The Hunter’s murder wouldn’t change anything except ruin my own life. My father was a bad man. He was going to jail for a very long time. Everybody said so. I had my whole life in front of me. My father had forfeited his.

That said, I guarantee I’ve paid for my crime. Killing a person changes you. It doesn’t matter how many animals you’ve shot, snared, trapped, skinned, gutted, eaten. Killing a person is different. Once you’ve taken the life of another human being, you’re never the same. The Hunter was alive, and then he wasn’t, and mine are the hands that did it. I think about this every time I comb Iris’s hair, or buckle Mari into her car seat, or stir a pot of jelly on the stove, or run my hands over my husband’s chest; I look at my hands doing these normal, everyday things and think, These are the hands that did it. These hands took another person’s life. I hate my father for putting me in the position where I had to make that choice.

I still can’t understand how my father can kill so easily and without remorse. I think about The Hunter every day. He had a wife and three children. Whenever I look at my girls, I think about what it would be like for them if they had to grow up without their father. After we left the marsh I wanted to tell The Hunter’s widow that I was sorry about what had happened to her husband. That I appreciated the sacrifice he made for my mother and me. I thought I could tell her when I saw her at the courthouse the day my father was sentenced, but by that time she’d filed a lawsuit against my grandparents for her share of the money they were making off our story from the tabloids, so my grandparents wouldn’t let me. She won a big settlement in the end, and that made me feel better. Though, as my grandfather grumbled, all the money in the world wasn’t going to bring back her husband.

Or my dog. Sometimes, I start to cry—which as you probably know by now is something I rarely do—and it’s because I think of Rambo. I’ll never forgive my father for shooting him. I’ve replayed the events that led up to that day more times than I can count, trying to see the places where I would have done something differently if I had known how things were going to turn out. The most obvious is when The Hunter asked for help the morning after my father handcuffed him in the woodshed. If I had done as he wanted me to before my father beat and tortured him until he was too weak to leave, most likely he would be alive today.

But The Hunter’s death wasn’t my fault. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the same as anyone who gets killed in a traffic accident, or a mass shooting, or a suicide bombing. The Hunter was the one who decided to go snowmobiling while he was drunk, not me. He was the one who got lost and then made a series of decisions that ultimately led to our ridge: turn left here instead of right, go around this clump of trees and not that one, drive into our yard to ask for help after he saw the smoke from our cabin. Certainly when he decided to hit the trail after he’d been drinking with his buddies he didn’t have any idea that he would pay for that decision with his life. Yet it was his decision.

Likewise when my mother and her girlfriend decided to explore the abandoned house by the railroad tracks. As she and her girlfriend ran around the empty rooms, I’m sure she had no idea that, by the end of the day, it would be fourteen years before she saw her family again. Naturally they would have played somewhere else if they had known. But they didn’t.

Likewise I doubt that when my father took me to see Tahquamenon Falls he had any idea he was setting in motion the events that would ultimately lead to the loss of his family. Just as when I decided to leave the marsh, I had no idea how badly things were going to turn out for my mother and me. I honestly thought that leaving would be as simple as driving away. I didn’t anticipate my father would shoot my mother and my dog. That the last thing I would see before I drove into my uncertain future was Rambo lying motionless in the snow at my father’s feet.

If I had known all of this before it happened, would I have done things differently? Of course. But you have to accept responsibility for your decisions, even when they don’t work out the way you wanted.

Bad things happen. Planes crash, trains derail, people die in floods and earthquakes and tornadoes. Snowmobilers get lost. Dogs get shot. And young girls get kidnapped.





27





Itake off running. Solid ground becomes wetland. Wetland becomes marsh. I shield my eyes against the rain and scan the opposite side of the pond. There’s no sign of my father. Whether I managed to get out ahead of him or he’s already at my house is impossible to tell.

I turn west into the marsh, heading for a thicket of tag alders near the end of the trail where the deer like to gather. I move quickly, jumping from grassy mound to grassy mound, keeping to areas of dry peat that are strong enough to hold my weight. A person who doesn’t know the marsh as well as I do wouldn’t be able to see the dangers that to me are as obvious as street signs: areas of fine silt that look solid enough to walk on but act like quicksand; deep pools of water that can swallow a person in an instant. Great black bubbles rose up out of the slime, my mother’s fairy tale says, and with these, every trace of the princess vanished.

When I come to the alder thicket, I drop to my belly and crawl the rest of the way using my feet and one elbow. The ground is wet, the mud crisscrossed with tracks. None of them recent. None of them human. It’s possible my father left the trail when it got boggy and cut out cross-country. It’s possible he’s already at my house, sneaking in through the back door because the house is never locked, creeping down the hallway, forcing Stephen to hand over the keys to the Cherokee so he can go after our girls, shooting my husband when Stephen refuses to tell him where they are.