She was no longer the small blonde girl who had haunted my dreams for decades.
When I first saw her last summer, I struggled to replace my memory of the bloody child with the tall, dark woman who’d returned.
She’d answered her front door, and I instantly recognized her eyes. I repaired the water issue in her new home, a million questions running through my head. I handed her the bill, trying not to stare as my brain screamed, It’s her. She insisted on writing a check for payment right then. Britta Vale.
Confirmation. How many women are named Britta?
After that I followed her everywhere, not that she left her home that often, but I was obsessed with the girl who’d gotten away. The girl who’d survived impossible odds. The girl who’d won against my father.
Her return to Central Oregon released something from the hidden depths of my soul. Evil things I’d long buried now stirred to life. They stretched and yawned and looked around at the world with fresh eyes. They saw my father’s work was unfinished.
She walked the streets with confidence, her black clothing and hair like armor, and she never let her guard down. Britta always focused on her surroundings, checking behind her and across the street. It ate away at me that she walked around, living her life as if the world hadn’t changed. The night I climbed the bunk ladder and looked into her eyes decades ago, my life had changed.
I learned what my father was capable of. What I was capable of.
I’d noticed after the Verbeek murders that my father was normal for several months. Even throwing a ball with us kids and smiling at my mother. He’d exorcised some demons that night.
My personal demon had pale-blue eyes and now sported black hair.
I needed her out of my head.
Her dog was always at her side, a four-legged guard. One time I’d approached her at the hardware store and admired the dog and asked to pet it. She’d refused, stating the dog didn’t like people and might bite.
But she never leashed it.
The encounter bolstered my confidence and the need to purge the voices and urges in my brain. I pledged to finish what my father had started. It was the only way I’d find peace. Getting close to her and speaking to her had made it worse. The desire swelled inside me, and I felt unstoppable; I needed to take action, prove my strength.
My father had had strength, but he used it in the wrong ways. Like with his fists on my mother.
When I was eighteen, I took action for the first time. As usual he had passed out in his bed after leaving my mother black and blue. I stared at him from the doorway for a long moment, hating the stink of alcohol and body odor. I strode in and yanked open the drawer next to his bed. He’d shown the weapon to me many times, lovingly stroking it as he speculated about the soldiers who’d fired it half a century earlier.
The gun was always there and was always loaded.
I didn’t stop to think. I wrapped his hand around the butt, moved the barrel to his mouth, and pressed his finger against the trigger.
The spray from his skull covered the pillow and headboard. Bits of matter hit me in the face, but I didn’t care. I left his hand and gun where they naturally fell on his chest and stepped back, examining my handiwork. A gasp sounded behind me.
I turned and met my mother’s gaze.
Relief. Understanding. Accusation. Fear. They all flickered across her face, and I knew she’d dreamed of doing what I had just done.
Probably wished it a thousand times.
My father had been diagnosed with PTSD. He’d visited dozens of doctors and tried every medication. No one would be surprised at his final action.
My brother appeared beside my mother, and the same conflicting emotions shone in his eyes.
“I’ll call the police,” he said in a monotone. “You’d better wash up and get rid of those clothes.”
The police came. The detective came. They looked sideways at my mother, noting her black eye and the two sons who stood firmly beside her.
It was ruled a suicide.
We never spoke of it.
For a long time, his death was enough for me. My burdens evaporated and life was good. But years later, I started to have nightmares. My brother urged me to talk to a shrink, but I refused. There was no statute of limitations on murder, and I feared I’d spill my secret about killing my father. The incident had bubbled up to the surface of my inner thoughts and fought to escape. I yanked it back down, locking it away, but it kept coming back. Bigger and louder each time.
Then my father began to speak to me from the skull.
His favorite keepsake of Vietnam. The one I couldn’t bring myself to sell or store away with his other treasures.
I moved the skull to the safe, but I still heard his voice.
Is this what happened to him? Did he hear these voices too?
I remembered how he would drunkenly talk to inanimate objects and the one phrase I could make out: Stop talking to me.
Were they talking back to him? Is that what he was trying to escape from all those years?
That is why he battered their mouths. To stop the voices.
For the first time I understood my father’s rage and confusion.
How did he combat it?
Then I saw Britta. It was a sign. Finish my father’s work and find my peace again. The voice will stop.
But I couldn’t get close enough to her. I tried and tried. She was always prepared.
Someone else would have to do.
The first time, I came home and confessed to my brother what had happened. I cried and raged as I told him our father had taken over my thoughts and I suspected his soul had entered me after I shot him. Why else would I feel the need to kill?
In a panic my brother helped me hide the bodies in the dead of night, telling me everything would be fine, that we’d never talk again about the incident, that it would simply go away. I shattered the teeth of the cursed skull from Vietnam and then added it to the pile of bodies under the road, convinced that would quiet the voice in my head.
It did.
Until it didn’t.