The other day, my father almost killed some girl and I’m just now finding out about it. No one

The other day, my father almost killed some girl and I’m just now finding out about it. No one sends me the news story. No one calls with a breathy voice to say, I just thought you should know. No, sitting in my office, I meet the man who would be a killer the same way as everyone else: in handcuffs, being led to a police car in a news alert video. Does my mother know? The constant question. When I first found out who he was, when I first saw his picture without his name flicker up on a casual friend’s dating app, when I snatched the phone to verify, when I bribed her into swiping right and talking to him when he messaged her immediately and together with this girl I only sort of knew found out everything, everything. The question which always follows immediately on its heels: Should I have known? The would-be killer, my father, he is rendered useless in the coverage. Caught out because the kidnapped girl made a break for it. Dragged him out into the sunlight. Wasn’t he the one who taught me nothing could frighten me by the light of the sun? Wasn’t he?Again and again the video plays, him in handcuffs, him snarling for a lawyer, him so obviously guilty I can taste it in every allegedly from the newscasters’ lips. I try to reach for my phone, unsure who I could call. Who do you call when your estranged father is a would-be murderer? Who do you call when they show pictures of the brave kidnapped girl in her senior pictures or ripped from her social media? The kidnapped girl who spent all of seventeen hours with him. The kidnapped girl who didn’t love him before she hated him, the kidnapped girl who only has to stand straight-spined having vanquished death. The kidnapped girl who will not have to wonder if the dark thing which slides under his skin also slides under hers.Am I supposed to search her face for my own? Or would that make me as sick as him? When she comes on screen, I unfocus my eyes until she’s a blur of pixel instead of a girl. I do it until my eyes water, or maybe I’m crying. I could get up and lock my office door, but then I’d have to tear myself away from my computer. I could ask to go home, I’m sure this is a situation in which one would be allowed to leave work, but how do you ask? My father kidnapped a twenty-three year old girl, may I please take a half-day? I’ll turn on my out-of-office replies, let everyone know my family is an emergency.On the news, his mug shot flashes. The alliteration in his name spat with disgust I recognize. Was it what I always wanted, for the whole world to despise him? Did I will this into existence? I wonder now if a reporter will find me, the skeleton which they had expected to discover in his closet. If some intrepid podcaster will, I don’t know, pull his records, if that’s possible. Will they see a daughter or will they see a woman, almost thirty? Will they know the last time they spoke she was the same bright age as the kidnapped girl? Clad in my mother’s last name like armor, I never wanted anyone to find me. Ask me who the monster was before he was the monster. Will I say he was only ever a monster?Or will I tell the story–you know the story. The one where the daughter holds back tears. The one where the daughter says he took her fishing or walked her down the aisle or held his granddaughter with hands so delicate she could have been made of glass. None of those are the story I have. Mine is this: that I would only sleep after he’d driven me out into the night for hours when I was first born and we were flat broke and he was working from five til near midnight and he’d drive til two if he had to and get up and work again. And when I was eighteen and a low disaster and he flew into the city where I lived on a layover, headed home from a business trip and when found me at college with a flu I thought would surely kill me, he took me to a hotel and stayed three days while I struggled to keep anything down. When I could walk again and eat again and when he had composed emails to my professors in my name, he drove me back to campus and I sobbed because I was weak and homesick and I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing my roommate and her boyfriend and the wide concern on their midwestern faces when I skipped class or didn’t come home. So my father missed the turn for my dorm and, without a word, he drove, looping city streets he didn’t know in the dark. It must have come back to him like it was vestigial. For hours with just the radio, he drove. Until I slept. The kidnapped girl finally stumbles into the light of the cameras, everyone calling her name at once so it sounds unlike a word at all. I watch the kidnapped girl tell the kidnapped girl’s story over and over on the little screen in my freezing cold office. I cannot look away from her bright and shining bravery. I almost wish he had finished the job. -- source link

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