the dispatcher, who told her to go back to her home. “The police are coming, ma’am, they are on their way.” “I can’t wait. I can’t wait out here when my baby could be in there hurting, please, I can’t.” “You must return to your house.” But she didn’t return to her house, she went into Luke’s, and she screamed as she saw her three-year-old boy bloody on the carpet, his face and most of the right side of his head missing. They did not play the rest of the 911 call because it was too graphic. Luke didn’t shoot her with the gun, though he still had four rounds, but he beat her to death by slamming her head into the kitchen counter over and over again. When the police arrived, he had just finished shooting himself in the head. They heard the gunshot as they broke down the door.
It was so terrible that it seemed to be from another world. I remember, too, a quote from the medical examiner that wound up in the paper, describing Donna’s skull as not just fractured but turned into a “mosaic of bone chips.” The violence was otherworldly. We couldn’t understand how someone could have performed it in a place that was so familiar to us.
“Doesn’t it seem weird,” Bunny asked one Sunday afternoon, a rare one that I wasn’t working at Rite Aid, as we sunned ourselves on her back patio, our skin glistening from the pool. “Doesn’t it seem weird that it was Donna Morse?”
I knew instantly what she meant. Donna, who was neither beautiful nor smart, who had not said one interesting thing as far as either of us could ever tell, seemed an unlikely object for such all-consuming desire. That was what we thought somehow. That all of this violence was over Donna, was, in essence, her fault, as though Donna were the gunpowder and Luke a helpless cannon, a series of mechanical pieces inexorably igniting her. If she had been beautiful or capricious, mysterious or charming, we could have understood how someone could have fallen so in love with her that it drove them to murder.
“It’s like, just get another girlfriend,” Bunny said.
“They had a kid together,” I said, but I wasn’t even sure what such a bond entailed. My own father had seemed to find it easy enough to let us go. They had gotten divorced while my mom was in prison, and he had certainly never contacted me again. Whatever life he lived he must have found sufficiently distracting to forget us. And as a child I had felt his love as physically as the heat of the sun. So where had it gone?
“Phh,” Bunny snorted. “Like he loved the kid.”
Did fathers love their children? It seemed only some of them did. Others were immune somehow, or they could turn it on and off, and we assumed that because of Luke’s violence, or perhaps because of the tattoo of a giant angry moon on his calf, or perhaps because he wore a beanie even in summer, that he was the kind of father who felt nothing for his offspring, or who felt the wrong things. We saw him often enough at the dog park, which was right off our street. He had a sandy-colored pit bull named Pecan. But even Hitler had a dog.
“She should never have let Spencer go with him,” Bunny said. “She should have fought harder in court to keep Luke from getting visitation.”
“She should have listened to the 911 dispatcher and stayed out,” I said. “Spencer was already dead. She couldn’t save him. She was already too late.”
Donna Morse had not been smart.
If she had been smarter, she would have succeeded in not being murdered.
Bunny and I were smart. Something like that could never happen to us. We would never let our own murderous fathers get out of hand. Our murderous fathers were more refined, confined themselves to smashing vases and brief bouts of strangulation.
Bunny was especially hung up on why Donna hadn’t fought him off harder. “How could you let yourself be slammed into the kitchen counter like that? I mean, after the first few times, aren’t you like, enough, get off me?”
“Maybe he was stronger than her,” I said.
Bunny shook her head. She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t fathom it. What it was to be physically weak. To be overpowered.
“I think she was waiting,” she said. “I think she assumed he would stop. That it would be