The Contradiction of Solitude

by A. Meredith Walters

  I was playing with my little brother, Matthew, or Matty for short, out in the front yard. It was getting dark but we wouldn’t come in until we were made to. I liked the dark. I wasn’t scared of the shadows. Even when Matty would cry and beg me to go inside, I’d refuse. I’d stay outside until I couldn’t see and even then I’d remain.

  Daddy understood. Better than anyone.

  “Yeah!” I yelled, running to my daddy’s pretty, blue car.

  “I wanna come!” Matty cried out, following me, his black curls bouncing as he ran.

  Daddy chuckled and rustled his hair. “Not this time, buddy. Mom needs your help to set the table.” I was already climbing into my booster seat in the back of the sedan. I stuck my tongue out at Matthew, pleased that I got to go somewhere with Daddy that he didn’t. His company was a treat better than any toy or ice cream cone.

  “That’s not fair,” Matty whined.

  “Next time, Matty, I promise,” Daddy said, and of course we believed him. Daddy never made a promise he didn’t keep. He was our constant. We had yet to discover the ability to doubt him.

  Sometimes when I closed my eyes I couldn’t see my father’s face. I felt cheated by my brain’s refusal to cooperate. I could see his broad shoulders. I could envision the soft, blue cotton shirt he wore that night he took me to get ice cream. I could even recall the shape of his hands. Large and calloused but gentle at the same time.

  But it seemed when I tried to conjure his face, it remained obscured. It was a blur. A non-descript blob above his neck.

  And then I’d see the pictures and I’d remember. It would be a relief. And then it would become a burden.

  Because I wished I could forget everything the way I could forget his face. Conveniently.

  My childhood had been a happy one. I had had a comfortable existence that was now, with the haze of hindsight, marred and ruined.

  I remembered birthday presents and Christmas dinners. Hide and seek with Matthew and movie nights on the couch. My father used to make origami cranes and leave them on my windowsill before he would go on his fishing trips. Special secrets between the two of us that I never shared with anyone.

  There were flashes of pure happiness that almost eradicated the foundation of pain.

  Joy. Contentment.

  Normalcy.

  Until it wasn’t anymore.

  Then it became tears and whispers and ugly suspicions.

  The truth killed my childhood.

  It became an invention created by a troubled mind.

  I remembered walking home from school one day after my daddy went away. I was only eleven, barely old enough to understand the gravity of who my father was and what he had done.

  Schoolmates had pelted me with vicious words and horrible taunts. They hurled the knives of accusation that had cut my skin. They had told me in their cruel, juvenile way, what my daddy was now known as.

  The Nautical Killer.

  The name, I would come to learn, was taken from the nautical star tattoo on the inside of his left wrist.

  As a curious child, I had been fascinated by the blue points and decorative scrolls on his arm. I remembered tracing it with my finger and my father, only ever patient and tender in those brief stolen moments, telling me how it was designed to look like the old compass rose.

  “So I can always find my way back home,” he had said.

  Isn’t it strange how I could hear his voice but seemed to struggle to see his face? Until it flashed in front of my eyes at the most devastating times.

  Like when I pulled out one of the dozens of newspaper articles I had collected over the years. Articles detailing his crimes. Spelling out for me the kind of monster he had been even as I tried to reconcile that with the memory of a loving, taciturn man who had been my hero.

  The Nautical Killer.

  The articles, the news channels, they all said the same thing.

  Cain Langley, the man I called Daddy, had been responsible for the brutal murders of over twenty young women. Some victims they believed would never be found. And my father would never disclose.

  Some secrets he would keep to himself.

  These crimes spanned the better part of ten years.

  Twenty girls not much older than I had been when he was finally arrested.

  Twenty girls.

  Why did I hate them almost as much as I hated him?

  He was a systematic predator. His targets were chosen carefully. He was never impulsive but instead took the time to learn their habits, familiarizing himself with all elements of their lives. He chose young women with a clear purpose. They each fit a certain profile. The disconnected. The runaway. The lonely. The girl rebelling against a controlling family. He was a killer with a particular ritual that never deviated.

  He’d choose his girl.

  They were lonely. They latched onto his freely given smiles and warm affection.

  They never stood a chance against his irresistible charm.

  He’d approach them. Engage in small talk. His innate charisma and allure made him easy to trust.

  He’d make them feel comfortable. They would confide in him. Talk to him about their problems. Their lives. His affable personality was unassuming and non-threatening. He was likable.

  They never knew, until it was too late, that death could hide anywhere.

  Even at the hands of a man pretending to care.

  Slitting their throats then cutting off their hands, he’d kill them then dump their bodies in places he hoped they’d be found. He wanted the glory of having his work showcased and reviled.

  He craved the shock. Longed for the trauma felt far and wide as a result of his vicious actions.

  He put on the perfect show, and everyone played their part.

  And mine was in some ways, the most important one of all…

  According to the news reports, my father had made his first kill at the tender age of twenty-three, the same year he had married my mother.

  He was young when he discovered his hunger for cruelty.

  Eight months after slitting the neck of a young runaway named Stella Arnold, my mother became pregnant with me.

  My father opened his hardware store and seemingly devoted his life to the care of his family, hiding the truest parts of himself away.

  Years passed and he would indulge in his depraved fantasies all the while building a home and a life for the people that depended on him.

  For ten years my father went undetected.

  Ten years he perfected the guise he had created.

  Ten years to convince himself that he’d never be caught. That he was smarter than everyone else.

  And maybe he was smarter.

  Craftier.

  Shrewder.

  Because for all those years he lived his double life, his wife and his children had no idea that the devil lurked beneath the face of the man they loved.

  And my brother and I later had to live with the realization that our childhood was an illusion and our reality was a nightmare.

  After my father’s arrest, I had lived a lonely existence.

  I didn’t make a habit of knowing people long enough for a connection to form. When I was younger I had been bubbly and happy. I lived a life of playdates and birthday parties.

  The years that came after that fateful day when I discovered, along with the world, exactly whom I was born from, were cocooned in confining isolation.

  After my father went away, my mother became depressed. Despondent. And in complete and total denial. She refused to acknowledge the gossip and accusations that followed us everywhere we went.

  When Matthew came home after being beaten within an inch of his life by a group of children that called him the “murderer’s son,” she looked the other way and went about her day as though Daddy was off on another fishing trip and not in a federal prison.

  When media camped outside our home and local police had to be stationed for our “protection,” she closed the curtains and made us our favori
te macaroni and cheese.

  She never went to my father’s trial. She avoided any and all mention of his name and his crimes. There were times I was envious of her head in the sand. But most of the time I hated her.

  She left Matthew and me to bear the brunt of our town’s malice. Never interceding. Unseeing. Blind.

  My father had put a target on our backs that never went away.

  The twenty dead girls weren’t the only victims of my father’s crimes yet somehow we became vilified simply by loving him. For not knowing his secrets.

  Even when I begged her to move, to find somewhere else to live, my mother wouldn’t hear me.

  “This is the house your father bought for me after we were married. I want to live here and I want to die here,” she had said tiredly when I demanded to know why we couldn’t leave.

  And die there she did.

  Six years after my father had gone away, my mother died peacefully in her sleep. An empty bottle of Codeine on the bedside table. Almost a decade of tears still drying on her cheeks.

  After burying the woman I had come to loathe, Matthew was put in the system because I hadn’t been fit to care for him. With eyes wide soaked with pain, my brother had clung to me before the social workers had forced him away.

  I watched him leave with a numbness that never really left. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t be angry or sad.

  If I felt anything, it was relief.

  I left that same day I said goodbye to Matthew and found a life somewhere else.

  I became someone else.

  I changed my last name to Whitaker, my mother’s maiden name. I had wanted no connection to the father I had loved so deeply and lost so totally.

  But as time wore on my hatred, my rage, faded into something else.

  I forever tiptoed the line between light and dark, never really knowing which way I’d go.

  It was hard to plan a future when I didn’t really know who I was.

  I struggled to breathe under the weight of a beast that had been given to me.

  A gift I had never wanted but received all the same.

  During the bad times I would remember what my life had been like before we found out who my father really was.

  Ignorance had been the balm for my battered soul.

  I liked to sit on the bench beneath the willow tree by the river that ran through the park. I could see the soccer pitch and the tennis courts. It was a great place to watch people. Invent the stories that consumed me.

  Today I had brought my green notebook and decided to write.

  I wrote for many different reasons. It was a therapy. It was a personal sacrifice. It was a means to an end.

  But today I wanted to write just for me.

  I started by describing the trees. It seemed like a harmless place to begin.

  Thin and crisp,

  Victim of fall’s destruction.

  Red

  Yellow

  Brown

  Falling

  Falling

  Down.

  Beneath my feet

  I walk on the ashes

  Of nature’s afterthought.

  The words poured out like acid onto the paper. Burning and fluid. They hurt. But I loved the pain.

  It was simple so simple. It helped but it wasn’t enough. I needed more.

  Different words for different stories…

  Ones that hadn’t yet been written.

  The sound of a child’s laughter got my attention. I looked up to see a young dad chasing his son around the swings before swooping him up in his big, safe arms and smothering him with kisses.

  My pen hovered above the paper but nothing would come.

  I watched the father with his son for a while, a soft smile on my face. Forgotten. Stagnant.

  “I’m sorry, my baby, baby girl.”

  The voice seemed to float out of the air, settling in the grass and trees.

  The whispered words of a father’s guilt.

  I tore the poem out of the notebook and crumpled it into a ball. Other memories…other stories filled my mind.

  “Imagine that all the stars are people. What stories would they tell?” Daddy whispered, his voice drifting in the inky darkness.

  Mom was inside with Matty. He had a stomachache and cried most of the evening, ruining my daddy’s welcome home dinner. I hated when he acted like a brat.

  It made me want to smack him.

  Daddy had been gone for almost two weeks. Two weeks was forever for a seven-year-old girl.

  Too long.

  Daddy and I lay outside on a blanket. It was our special time. When he would come home and tell me the stories of the stars.

  Sometimes I asked him about his fishing trips and why I could never come and he’d shake his head, never explaining why.

  But then he’d tell me his stories, and I would forget to be upset about him leaving all the time. About the fact that he was staying away longer and longer.

  “You start, Daddy. Your stories are better than mine,” I said, protected and comforted in the warmth of his presence.

  He pointed overhead to the brightest start in the sky. “That’s Emma. She’s sad. Her parents don’t love her anymore so she decided to run away from home. She doesn’t have a mom and dad like you do. No one loves her.” I cuddled into my father’s side, confident and sure of his affection. Affection he didn’t even give to Matty.

  It was mine.

  Only mine.

  “Why’s Emma sad?” I asked him; squinting up at the night sky as I tried to imagine the sad girl Daddy was telling me about.

  “No one loves her, Layna. She has no one,” Daddy answered, his deep voice rumbling in his chest beneath my ear.

  Poor Emma.

  “But she has pretty eyes and a nice smile. And she trusts far too easily…” He drifted off, and I wished he’d tell me more about Emma, the sad but bright star.

  He didn’t say anything again and the silence made me angry. I wanted my father’s words so seldom given. Not his quiet.

  “That one’s Bubba!” I called out, maybe a little too loud.

  My daddy laughed. “Tell me about Bubba,” he said.

  “Bubba thinks he’s really smart but he’s not. One day, he’s walking in the woods and he gets his foot caught in a bear trap.”

  Daddy squeezed my hand. “And then what happens, Layna?”

  “He bleeds. A lot. And then he dies.”

  My morbid imagination had always worried my teachers. Mom had been called into the school several times because of my drawings and stories. There was always blood.

  Lots and lots of blood.

  But it didn’t bother my father. He made me feel like my stories were perfect. That I was perfect.

  “I love that story, Lay. It sounds like one of mine,” he said, kissing the top of my head. Daddy so rarely exhibited any physical affection so I wrapped myself up in the glow of his approval and held it close.

  I smiled wide, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world to have a daddy like him.

  I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to be just like my father.

  His love mattered more because it hurt him so much to give it.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  I was sick inside.

  The father and his son were gone, and I realized it was now dark.

  When had that happened?

  Where did the hours go? The sun had left me all alone.

  My vision became fuzzy and my heart thudded painfully in my ears.

  Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.

  The beast raged. The darkness invaded. The force of a thousand suppressed thoughts and emotions threatened to take me under.

  I found my phone and dialed the number I knew by heart, knowing exactly what I needed.

  The only thing that could pull me back from the edge that I was dangling over.

  Ring, ring, ring.

  The phone trilled shrilly in my ear.

  The blood.

  So m
uch blood.

  Scratching, groaning, aching silence.

  Almost there…

  “Hello?”

  The air left my lungs in a violent whoosh.

  I sagged to the ground, my chin pulled into my chest, the phone clutched to my ear.

  I breathed. That’s all I could do.

  “Hello?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  I just kept breathing.

  “Layna,” the familiar voice said softly in my ear, recognition instant.

  I wanted to smile but my face had forgotten how. I wanted to wallow in the blissful wretchedness of his voice.

  “Bad day, huh?” he asked, knowing I couldn’t answer. Not right now.

  But he gave me what I needed anyway. He always did.

  “It’s one day at a time. That’s all we can do. But you being out there, that’s amazing. Your strength inspires me, Lay. It always has. And you’re nothing like him.” I wanted to sob and to scream.

  More than anything, I wanted him to be right.

  I wanted him to be wrong.

  “You’re not him, Lay. You’re not him. You’re not him,” he chanted over and over again, giving me everything and nothing.

  “I’m not him,” I finally said softly, my voice the barest breath of a whisper.

  “You’re not him,” my brother promised.

  I ran my hands down the length of the smooth wood, my fingers curving and shaping. I swiped the sandpaper one final time and carefully laid down the guitar neck I had just finished.

  “Fucking perfect,” I murmured, pulling a cigarette out of the pack I kept in my breast pocket and tucked it between my lips, sucking until the end was soggy. The taste of tar and nicotine sharp in my mouth.

  “Wow, nice job, man,” Tate said, coming over to the workbench I had claimed as my space.

  “Thanks, I just need to finish the body and I can hand it off to you,” I told him, proud of the approval in my buddy’s eyes.

  I had been working as a paid luthier’s apprentice at George’s Custom Shop for over a year now. My dream involved opening my own studio and designing guitars for everyone that loved music as much as I did.

  “You gonna smoke that thing or are you planning to eat it for lunch?” A pretty girl with long red hair and tits up to her chin leaned against the doorway, her lips curved in pretty little smile. I raised my eyebrows at Margie, and Tate snickered from beside me.