The Watcher Girl(5)
“Do you have children?” I ask.
She looks at my father first, whose lips flatten, and then she shakes her head. “Wasn’t in the cards for me.”
He pats her hand again, as if this is a sore subject for her.
“Grace, your father says you do a lot of freelance work.” Bliss frames her question as a statement. “Something online? Background checks or something?”
“My employer prefers I keep details to a minimum,” I say. “But essentially I’m an internet sanitizer. People pay me to remove things they don’t want online. Unflattering articles. Revenge porn. Harsh reviews. Outdated photos. Stuff like that.”
I leave out the worst of the worst of the things I’m sometimes tasked with removing—things that require eye bleach, things that reaffirm my deep disappointment with society. Like the woman whose ex kept posing as her to post rape-fantasy requests on a dark web version of Craigslist, hoping a sick bastard would assault her. Or the husband who secretly attacked his wife’s successful, homegrown bakery business with accusatory online reviews involving race and gender and religion so she’d be forced to close her doors and once again be financially dependent on him. There was also the mother-in-law who hired us to dig up dirt on her new son-in-law, who she was convinced was an ex-con living under a stolen identity, only in the process of digging up dirt on the man, I stumbled across the mother-in-law’s secret involvement in a human trafficking ring. The son-in-law? Undercover agent. The worst part was that the woman got off on some technicality. I’m not sure she spent a day behind bars. I’m also not sure where she scampered off to, but I’m willing to bet my life savings that wherever she is, she’s up to no good.
If people like Bliss and my father knew how many truly sick and sociopathic individuals lurked among us, they’d sleep with guns in their nightstands, keep knives under their mattresses, and second-guess every word that comes out of another person’s mouth.
Sometimes I find myself envious of that level of ignorance. Being able to turn a blind eye to all life’s misfortunes. To go about my day like the sickest of souls don’t walk among us.
But there’s no going back now.
I’ve seen too much.
“That’s fascinating.” Bliss is finished with breakfast—apparently she has the appetite of a bird. It must be how she keeps her yoga-thin figure. She rests her chin on her hand and leans closer. “I’ve never met someone who does that before. How’d you get into that line of work anyway?”
My father smiles, and despite our finicky relationship, I still know him: he loves that things feel normal in this sliver-sized moment.
“It started as a part-time job in college. I worked for a major search engine, mostly removing things that violated copyrights, adding adult filters, recategorizing improperly indexed search items . . .” After graduation, I was approached by someone in senior management, who offered me double my salary and told me I could work anywhere in the world doing private assignments. I leave that part out. People always want to know how much this line of work pays, and it does nothing more than make for awkward conversation. Whenever it does come up, I typically say it pays enough to compensate for the dinners I’ve flushed down the toilet after digesting some of the more disturbing things I’ve seen. That tends to add a period to the conversation. “Made some connections, and it took off from there.”
I peer across the picturesque backyard, over a thicket of manicured boxwoods, to the house behind us: a story-and-a-half bungalow that was once an agreeable robin’s-egg blue. It’s blanketed in a sunny yellow now, with white trim and a wooden butterfly wind chime dangling outside the back door. The new owners have added a cedar pergola out back, and a stainless steel grill rests uncovered, exposed to the elements. Lazy or carefree? It’s anyone’s guess.
Twenty years ago, it was home to a man and his girlfriend—a deranged and obsessed woman who stalked our family online and infiltrated her way into our lives. We would later discover she wasn’t our neighbor by coincidence, though we couldn’t have known that at first.
She had a plan, and when she began working as my family’s nanny, she put that plan into action.
She claimed her name was Autumn Carpenter, which I later discovered was the actual name of my biological mother. Her real name was Sarah Thomas. And while she didn’t give birth to me, she knew the woman who did—a woman who also happened to go missing a few years after the McMullens adopted me.
But while Sarah was sick, it wasn’t a kill-your-husband’s-lover kind of sick. She was more along the lines of an unmedicated-and-delusional kind of sick. She was sweet and gentle and especially fond of me. There were times, even as a ten-year-old girl, that I fantasized about Sarah being my mother. Sometimes I prayed for it. Made wishes on dandelions and shooting stars. I was convinced that if I believed anything hard enough, it would come true.
And it almost did.
At least according to a chapter in that Domestic Illusions book, where a police report claimed Sarah intended to kidnap me from school and drive me across the border to Mexico.
I’ll admit there were years I wished it would’ve happened.
Sometimes I think I’d have been better off.
Even though Sarah wasn’t my mother, she loved me in a way Daphne never could—another factoid outlined in great detail in that unauthorized tell-all. Daphne couldn’t connect with me, it said. The bond felt forced. It was complicated. I was a handful, and while she gave me all she could, it wasn’t enough.