the realization that Russ was hanging on by an exceptionally fragile thread, every day. The temptation of his own demise hounding him as relentlessly as his urge to drink and escape it. In my reading, I begin to understand the depths to which he’d spiraled, where he actually came to believe, with all his heart, that his family was better off without him.
“I didn’t make the connection right away,” my father says from across the room, where he continues to watch me peruse the files.
“What connection?”
“He was the drunk who murdered Brie’s mother.”
It’s as he says the words that I recall a voice through the walls. A man’s voice. Tearful and brimming with agony, confessing those very words to my father: I left her there to die.
“He once told me you saved his life.”
“I gave him another means of escape. A reason.”
“What reason?”
“You.”
“He had a son, though. A family.”
“One who didn’t want him, and as you read, he felt they’d fare better without him. He was a good man, but he made a number of mistakes. Ones he didn’t feel he could atone for.”
“Why didn’t he ever go to Brie. Or her grandmother? Why didn’t he confess?”
“C’mon, sunshine, you know the reason.”
Shaking my head, I skim through the rest of the notes. “Russ never told me anything about his past.
“You didn’t have to know his past. If he’d confessed to the authorities, you’d be dead now, too.”
“He couldn’t have known his fate. He couldn’t have anticipated that he’d one day be raising your daughter.”
“No, I suppose he couldn’t. That’s the thing about fate, isn’t it? We don’t really know what consequences await us. Or redemptions, for that matter.”
A tear spatters against the worn scribbles on the page, distorting the ink as I stare down at the notes, trying to absorb the sadness and desperation in Russ’s story.
I file away the chart and pull another, and as my fingertips grip the envelope, a cold dread fills my chest.
I set the file out on the desk, noting only a first name written on this one.
Vivienne.
As I read through the notes, I find she was a woman who came to my father in secret. Troubled. Didn’t even have the money to pay him, as noted in her lack of billing, but he met with her, anyway. For months, if the thickness of the chart is anything to go by.
She seemed reluctant to talk, at first, based on the notes that described earlier sessions, during which she spent most of the time staring off. As if terrified of something. The notes went on to describe a friend of hers, Appoline Dejarae, who helped her sneak away at night and drove her to the sessions with my father.
Appoline Dejarae.
Brie’s mother. I only heard it once, or twice, but the name is unforgettable.
In the notes, my father described Appoline as a nervous woman who seemed anxious, always looking over her shoulder, as if worried someone was watching. Just like Vivienne.
I recall that Brie was only about seven, or eight, years old when her mother died and she went to live with her Maw Maw.
In her sessions, Vivienne spoke of a religious cult that she’d been born into. One that apparently regarded sacrifice as a means of obtaining success. Shrewd in her omissions, as noted by my father, she seemed both careful and reluctant to offer too much information.
A painful reminder of my own sessions with a therapist.
He described her as exceptionally intelligent, beguiling, and almost seductive in the way she drew him into her well-choreographed confessions.
And then the notes stop. Flipping the page shows blank rows where her story from the prior visit should’ve picked up. A session date and time scribbled and crossed off. As though she suddenly quit seeing him.
Easing back into the chair, I lift the file from the desk, and something flutters out of it to the floor. I reach down to pick it up, flipping it over to see a picture of a woman, lying in muddy grass along the water. Needling branches of ice crawl across my chest and into my limbs as fear takes hold of me. In the image, her stomach has been sliced. The stark nudity is hard to look at, where she lies prone, body pale, green eyes lifeless and vacant. Crooked fingers show where they were broken at the joints. Bruises color her arms and thighs. Her neck also has a strange lump sticking out from the side as if it’s been broken.