Lauren
Looking back, I should have realized my father had been going downhill for a while. The accusations, the screaming, the sudden fights with mother at all times of day and night. The day he killed her, I came home a little before four in the afternoon, same as always. He'd been down the street in the old Cadillac of his, slumped down in his seat, his trucker cap pulled low like neither mother or I would recognize him as he tried to keep a watch on the house.
“Mom?” I called when I got into the house. “Mom, you here?”
“In the living room, honey.”
I went in and joined her in the front living room, the one that was reserved for when guests like the preacher or his wife came over to visit. She stood there like a vision. Tall, shapely, her long blonde hair flowing down the back of her sundress. She was peering out the blinds at the street.
“Mom, why is dad down the street like that?
She pulled her hand from the blinds, let them snap back into place. I could tell from her face she was troubled, but she put on a brave face anyways. “Lauren, honey, he's just, um, keeping an eye on the house, that's all.”
“He didn't come home again last night, did he?”
Pops had been doing that a lot, lately. Staying out at the new construction site he and Uncle Anderson were working on. And, whenever he actually was home, he and mother fought like cats and dogs. Always, it seemed, he started the argument over the smallest thing. She'd spent too much money, she'd been late coming back from the grocery store. Who was the man she'd been talking to?
“Oh,” mother chirped, “he's just working with your Anderson. You know that. A lot of people are depending on him.”
Since I'd been thirteen or so I'd had an idea of what they did for a living. He and mom said it was an import-export business, but people who ran companies like that didn't carry a gun on them all the time, or have envelopes full of cash in their briefcases. They also didn't know how to hot wire a car or pick locks, or any of the other nifty tricks he'd taught me. But my mother always wanted me to live a safe life, one full of delusion, where the world was a safe and happy place, and my father was just your run of the mill business man.
“Sure, mom,” I said. “But, doesn't that seem a little weird to you?”
She laughed, her voice like the tinkling of a bell. “Oh, honey, why would you think that was weird? He's just a man protecting his castle, that's all.”
“Fine. Well, I have some homework to get done. What time's supper at?”
“Just a couple hours, so six o'clock? How's meatloaf sound?”
“Sounds great,” I replied as I went to leave the room. “Call me when it's ready?”
“Of course, honey.”
I heard my mother moving in the living room behind me as I headed down the hallway. I'd made it all the way to my bedroom door when she called out to me. “Lauren?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you, honey. I just wanted you to know that.”
I gave her a lopsided smile and confused look. “Yeah, I know you do. I love you, too.”
She smiled again, the shadows of the hallway playing on her features. There was a certain pain in her eyes, a resignation that I wouldn't realize until weeks later. She'd known what was coming, or had at least been worried about it. I went into my room and pulled out my books, went to work. The time flew by as I buried myself in my math homework and reading assignments. Time that I could have spent with my mother, time that I could have savored, if I'd only known what was coming.
Pops didn't come in for supper. He just stayed out on the street, still keeping a watchful eye on the house.
“Think he's going to stay out there all night?” I asked finally, speaking the unspoken question she and I were both asking ourselves.
“I hope not,” she replied with that same wan smile as before. “I mean, he needs to rest. He's a busy man with a lot on his mind.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“How's school, honey?” my mother asked, changing the subject.
We didn't mention him after that. She kept everything focused on my education for the rest of the meal. After we finished eating, I cleared the table and did the dishes. She came up behind me and gave me a warm hug, pressing her body into mine and laying her cheek against the back of my shoulders. “You're a wonderful daughter,” she said. “I do love you.”
“Uh, thanks? Everything okay?”
“Just wanted to hug you, that's all. Any crime against that?”
I smiled and laughed. “No, of course not, mom.”
After the dishes were finished, I went back into my room and hit the books again. A couple hours later, after kissing my mother on the cheek goodnight, I was out like a light. Another long day of school work finished. Soon I’d graduate and I could get out of town on my own. Just a few months and I'd be off to NYU in the big city. No more Louisiana, no more country, no more just watching life on TV or reading about it in books. I'd be out of here for good.
The front door slamming shut woke me up instantly, wide-eyed and gasping for air. I looked around my bedroom, at its posters of girl and boy bands I still hadn't taken down from my teenybopper years, the moon light filtering in around the curtains covering my window. My parents were screaming at each other again in the living room, just like they had been for the last few months.
“You saw them again, didn't you, you double-crossing cunt?” he yelled, his voice piercing through the walls like the bass on a sound system.
“I don't even know what you're talking about!” she screamed back. “Who? Who am I supposed to be talking to?”
“You know who I mean! Them! The ones that have the lines wired, the ones that been following me!”
“No one's fucking following you, Dalton! No one!”
I rolled my eyes and tried in vain to go back to sleep. Things hadn't escalated before. He'd never laid a hand on her, not that I knew of it, just these screaming fights. Then I heard the glass shatter as it flung against the wall.
“What the fuck, Dalton? Are you fucking high?”
“Fuck you, cunt! Fuck you and your fucking friends that are out to get me!”
“I don't have any fucking friends, Dalton! All of them hate you!”
I climbed out of bed when the second glass shattered. I thought that, maybe, just maybe, them seeing me there in the room would somehow calm the situation down. They'd realize they were screaming with their daughter in the house, and I could keep things from escalating any further. Wearing my oversized t-shirt and pajama bottoms, I padded out of my room and down the hallway.
“Fuck you, you two-timing whore!” he screamed just as I was about to enter the family room. “Fuck you!” Then the sound like a meat tenderizer slapping a steak, followed by a weak cry and the glass coffee table shattering.
That sound made me sick. He’d slapped her. I ran into the room, expecting the worst. I learned that night that my imagination couldn't predict the worst. I learned that blood is darker in real life than on television. It was everywhere. On the carpet, on the coffee table, on the hammer in my father's raised hand. My mother's blood. He stood over her, his feet planted on either side of her chest, the coffee table flipped over on its side, its glass top as shattered as Humpty Dumpty.
My eyes drifted down to my mother's face. I was numb all over, couldn't process what was happening. My mouth opened and closed like a fish as my brain tried to piece together what was right in front of my eyes. She lay there, her face turned to mine, blood from her head wound matting her beautiful blonde hair to her left cheek. The right side of her, from the cheek bone down, was caved in, along with the back of her head. Her eyes stared at nothing. Nothing.
My father, hammer reared back for another swing, stopped in his tracks and looked at me, his eyes blood shot, wild. Specks of my mother's blood covered his face like gruesome glitter, crimson on his skin.
“She was working against me!” he growled. “But, don't worry, honey, I took care of her!”
I took a step back, my breath caught in my throat. I watched as he went back to swinging. It sounded like a melon being smashed, the sickest most unimaginable thing I'd ever witnessed. I backed up through the living room, away from the atrocity in front of me, not stopping till I was pressed flat against the front door.
He kept smashing into her face. More blood covered him and had begun to form a congealed pool beneath her. “We're going to be safe, honey, you and me, now that they can't spy on us no more! Safe forever!”
I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound ever came. I reached behind me, grabbed the door knob, twisted. He didn't stop as I ran out the front door. He just kept destroying the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen. I ran. I stole a car, hotwired it, then I ran some more. I couldn't go to the cops. They were all friends with the madman who was my father, and I knew it. That had been the last time I saw him for nearly six years. The nightmares began to go away finally or maybe I just got used to them.
Whatever the case. This was why I was here. This was why I'd come back with Asa. Dalton Saylor needed to die. This thought brought me back to the world from my panicked state, a single kernel of truth my mind could latch onto in the face of the horrors I'd seen, and was still seeing. I felt Asa's arm around my shoulders as I snapped back to reality, felt his hand squeeze, trying to reassure me.
I knew what I had to do, now. I had to make my pops drop his guard.