Like Father Like Daughter

by Christina Morgan

  It was nearly daylight by the time I walked out of the station and onto the vacant streets of my hometown. Well, it was vacant except for the black truck parked in the Pizza Hut parking lot directly across from the police-fire station. The windows were tinted dark so I couldn’t see inside but I got the eerie feeling the person or persons inside were watching me. It was a ridiculous thought, which I brushed aside immediately as I began walking as fast as I could away from Detective Dorne and his minions.

  Lake Mingo Park was adjacent to the police-fire station, so I walked the hundred yards or so to the park until I found a bench to sit on, where I could collect my thoughts and call my mother. And Ryan’s mother. That was a call I didn’t want to make, so I put it off as long as I could.

  I dialed my mother’s contact on my cell phone and waited as it rang several times. She finally answered.

  “Hello?” she said cheerily. My mother always woke at dawn, no matter what day of the week it was.

  “Mom, something terrible has happened.” I told her everything. From the time I woke up to the moment I walked out of the station.

  “Oh, my God, Libby!” Mom sighed into the phone. “Where are you now? I’ll come get you.”

  I told her how to get to Lake Mingo Park. When she pressed me for more details, I told her I’d explain everything when she picked me up.

  The next call was going to be even harder. God damn it. I did not want to call Ryan’s mother. But someone had to, and I wanted to tell her before the police got to her.

  It was just as bad as I had feared. She fell apart on the other end of the line. I could hear her wailing and praying to God to make it not be true. I tried to comfort her as best I could, but there was nothing else I could say, so I just told her I loved her and hung up the phone.

  As I sat waiting for Mom to arrive, I watched the ducks glide across the pond. The baby ducklings trailed behind their mother, leaving a wavy pattern in the water behind them. Babies. Ryan and I had never had babies. Not for lack of trying, mind you. In the early days, we tried like champions, doing everything we could think of and following every suggestion I could find on the internet. But every single fucking stick I peed on showed only one line, not two. Eventually, we gave up and lied to ourselves and each other that we were happy without kids and that we didn’t need them to make our marriage complete.

  Mom pulled up in her minivan—the one she bought years ago in anticipation of the grandchildren she would drive around to play dates and Chuck E. Cheese. I never told her we gave up two years ago, so every time I would see her, she’d ask me when she was going to become a grandmother. Never, I should have said. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. Just get it over with. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t look in her eyes and see the disappointment that would take over once she realized she was never, ever going to be a grandma. So I lied to her. Every single time. Told her we were still doing fertility treatments when in reality, our fertility doctor, Dr. Ashish Patel, had told me two years ago I had no ovaries left. The endometriosis had literally devoured them. There was no surgery, no treatments left to try. It was over. Caput. Finito.

  I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. Mom reached across the armrest and pulled me into a tight embrace. Just when I thought I was all cried out, big, ugly, animalistic sobs racked my whole body. Everything that had happened came pouring out of me, like I was vomiting information all over my mother. I told her about waking up next to Ryan with his head blown off, about my headache—which was finally dissipating—and my interview with Detective Dorne.

  “There, there,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Mommy’s here now. You come back to my place and get some rest, okay? Maybe you’ll feel better after a shower and a nap. Then we can talk about where we go from here.”

  When we arrived at my mother’s house on Jacks Creek Road in Richmond, I did just as my mother had suggested. I took a nice hot shower and then laid down for a nap on my former bed. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay there in the daybed I had slept on until I was eighteen, looking around at all the changes Mom had made to my room. The bed was the same. The furniture was the same. The decorations, however, were different. Gone were my posters of Marky Mark and New Kids on the Block—yes, I freely admit this—and all the pictures I had tacked up on the wall of friends and boyfriends from high school. In their places were neatly arranged photos my mother had taken of the roses in her rose garden.

  I lay there on my back with my feet crossed at the ankles, thinking about Ryan. Everything I had told Detective Dorne about Ryan and our marriage was one hundred percent accurate. We were in love. He did make me happy. He was my best friend.

  But now I had lost my best friend. I was utterly alone. No more would I get daily texts telling me he loved me. No more would we curl up on the couch and watch movies on Netflix. No more would I hear the sound of his laughter at his own silly jokes.

  Sure, things had been a little rocky over the last year or so, but all marriages go through slumps, right? That’s all it was—a slump. We had grown complacent in our lives together. Perhaps a bit too comfortable with one another. But that did nothing to diminish my love for Ryan, or the memories we had created over the past seven or eight years.

  I tried to force these thoughts from my mind and I prayed I would fall asleep, but no matter how long I kept my eyes shut, sleep just wouldn’t come. My body was physically exhausted but my mind was also filled with disturbing images of Ryan lying there in the bed and the many questions that came with them.

  Who would kill Ryan?

  Why would they kill Ryan?

  Why not kill me?

  Why couldn’t I remember anything?

  Why the horrible headache?

  Did I kill my husband?

  Finally, realizing sleep was going to evade me for quite some time, I gave up on the nap and walked down the stairs to find my mother standing in the kitchen, making coffee.

  “Would you like some? I don’t have cream, but I have organic skim milk.”

  “Sure,” I said with a wan smile. “Thanks.”

  She poured me a cup as I sat down on the barstool next to the kitchen counter. She pushed forward a package of Sugar in the Raw. My mother only ate organic, non-processed foods, so the raw sugar didn’t surprise me, nor did the lack of coffee creamer. I stirred in the coarse brown crystals until they dissolved and then added a bit of skim milk.

  “You need to hire an attorney,” Mom said matter-of-factly. “You work in the legal field; maybe one of your bosses could help you out.”

  “I don’t want my bosses intruding in my personal life. But thank you, Mom. I’ll call someone today.”

  “You know, my friend at church, her daughter is an attorney,” she said as she sipped on her completely black coffee. “Maybe she can help.”

  “Are you talking about Megan Taylor? Mom, she’s like, what, twenty-three? Plus she works in corporate law. I need a criminal defense attorney.”

  “Well, we could use—”

  “No, don’t even say it, Mom.” I knew exactly where she was headed. She was going to suggest we call the same defense attorney who had represented my father twenty years ago. But he was a dinosaur—old and way past his prime. Plus, he had represented my father, and in my mind, only a fame-hungry idiot would take on a client like Randall Terrance McLanahan.

  “All right, all right,” she said, holding her hands up defensively. “It was just a thought.”

  “I appreciate it, Mom, really I do. But I want nothing to do with that man, or his attorney. As far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t even exist.”

  “Honey, he’s still your fa—”

  “Mom, don’t,” I said, holding up my hand as if that would magically stop her from continuing. “Why do you even care? Mom…he did what he did, all while married to you and pretending to be my father. Why do you insist on me going to visit him?”

  Mom just shook her head. Tears were coming to her eyes now, and I instantly felt guilty. But it was true. My father was what he
was and nothing was ever going to change that. Mom’s continued insistence that I go see him in prison always confused me. Here was a man who would come home at night, crawl into bed with her, make love to her even, all the while knowing exactly what he had just done. We never had a clue—who ever does?—what he was up to. All I knew was that my father was a truck driver which explained why he was never home.

  My father ultimately repented of his sins and is now a “changed man,” so my mother takes pity on him and visits him from time to time, despite their divorce, and she never stopped trying to coax me into visiting him too.

  “Honey, your father loves you,” she said, leaning forward on the marble countertop. “I know what he did was awful and I know how badly he hurt you, but he is a different man now. He’s found his way back to God, and I believe he is truly sorry for his crimes and for hurting us.”

  “So, what? You’re just going to take him back? Remarry a man who’s never going to set foot outside of a prison? Please tell me you’re not considering going back to him, Mom.”

  I looked at her and for the first time in a long time, I saw her as a person, not just my mother. She was still so beautiful, despite her age and what she’d been through. Her dark blonde hair was curled, using hot rollers circa 1987, and fluffy, her bangs swept to the side, just like I had showed her. Her eyes were hazel, like mine, but today they looked mostly green against her blue button-down blouse. There was sadness in those eyes, a sadness that penetrated so deep it never went away, even when she smiled, which she did right now with a shrug.

  “No, honey. Don’t worry. That ship sailed a long time ago. I just want you to think about it. He asks about you all the time. What harm can come, hm?”

  “I’ll think about it.” It was a bold-faced lie right to my mother’s face, but if I didn’t agree to at least consider it, she would go on and on and on.

  “Good, that’s all I ask.” My mother, Kaye Barrett, nee McLanahan, was a force to be reckoned with, which was why I chose to give in and say I’d go see my father, even when I had no intention of doing so. She was kind-hearted and had a gentle spirit, but had the potential to be a tad bit controlling. Not in a bitchy kind of way, more in an “I like things the way I like things” sort of way. But I loved her. She was my best friend, especially now that Ryan was gone.

  Ryan. With the conversation about my father now ending, my mind was free to wander back to the terrible thing that had happened to my husband.

  Mom must have seen the obvious change in my demeanor, because she set down her cup of coffee and said, “Honey, what’s the matter?”

  “I’m just thinking about Ryan. Mom, it was horrible. All that blood. His head. It was…oh, my God…Mom, it was so terrible.”

  I covered my face with my hands and cried heavily into them. Mom walked around the kitchen counter and wrapped her arms around me once more. I could smell the Chanel No. 5 on her blouse and in her hair. She had worn that perfume since before I could remember, and the smell of it now brought back so many memories, the good and the bad. It made me cry even harder. Life had dealt me several very shitty hands, but the one good card I had was my mother, and in that moment, I thanked God for her.

  She pulled back slightly from our embrace and wiped my face with her smooth hands. Her shirt had dark blue circles all over from my tears and snot and I instantly felt bad for ruining her pretty blouse.

  “We will get through this. You will survive this,” she said, brushing my hair back behind my ears with her fingertips. “You have always been a survivor. A fighter. Don’t you dare give up on me now. You need to fight now, maybe harder than you ever have before. But I know you, and I know you can survive this. I’ll be right here by your side.”

  Now I really felt guilty. Here was my mother, as always, standing by my side, encouraging me, loving me, believing in me. But what if I did kill Ryan? What then? I wouldn’t be worthy of any of the love and support she was now offering me. She never asked me if I did it. She never would. Even if she doubted me, she would never say a word. So, I had to be the one to voice the fear I was certain we both shared.

  “Mom, what if I did it?”

  “What?”

  “What if I did kill Ryan?”

  She took a couple of steps backward and I instantly regretted saying it out loud.

  “Libby, listen to me,” she said, looking very serious. “You listen to me. You did not kill Ryan. Do you hear me? It’s impossible. It’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard. Don’t you start doubting yourself now. I have no doubt you are utterly incapable of killing another human being, especially the man you loved.”

  “But I don’t remember anything from that night. What if I blacked out and went on some crazy rampage and killed my husband? Shot him right between the eyes?”

  Mom looked horrified, but I could see that tiny little seed of doubt I had just planted in her mind.

  “I don’t believe you are capable of killing anyone, especially the man you loved so dearly. But, if you have even the slightest doubt in your own mind, then you need to call an attorney. Immediately. I will not lose you like I lost Randy. If you did this thing, and it’s a big if, I will still stand by you. I’ll love you no matter what. You’re my little girl. My only child. I will not lose you. So find yourself an attorney, because that detective won’t waste any time trying to pin this on you, guilty or not.”

  “You’re right, as usual,” I said.

  “And Libby?”

  “Yeah, Mom?”

  She put her hands on both of my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “No matter what, you never, ever say you killed Ryan. Even if you regain your memory and it turns out you did kill him—never, never say it out loud. Do you hear me? Never.”

  “All right, I hear you. I won’t say anything.”

  “Good,” she said, picking up her coffee mug. “Now, go call an attorney. Now.”

  Chapter 4

  Later that evening, as I lay in my daybed trying to process everything that had happened to me in the past twenty-four hours, I picked up the remote and turned on the television. Time for a little distraction. I changed the channel to Discovery ID, a channel which plays only true crime drama. You would think I would get my fill of crime day in and day out being a criminal defense paralegal, but I can never get enough. Ryan used to say I was obsessed. Maybe he was right. I did have a tendency to consume anything and everything crime-related. Perhaps it was because of my father, but it had been that way for as long as I could remember. I followed the OJ Simpson trial with rapt attention. Then, years later, I was mesmerized by other high-profile cases like Ray Carruth, Robert Blake, Scott Peterson, and Casey Anthony. I watched the CNN and Nancy Grace coverage of all of these trials every chance I could.

  I was especially drawn to anything involving death. At work, whenever we would sign a client charged with murder, I would get excited and it was as if a switch was flipped inside me somewhere. When I got the files, I would spend more time than was necessary pouring through the autopsy reports, witness statements, police reports, and especially, the photos. It wasn’t like I was sexually aroused by them. I’m not that twisted. It just excited me in a way I can’t explain. Luckily, I was able to hide my obsession from my coworkers, so no one knew just how much of a thrill I got from my work. I was lucky I not only enjoyed my work, but I was fascinated by it. How many people can say that?

  Perhaps the reason I didn’t pass out when I found Ryan the way I did was because I had become desensitized to violence. I had seen so many graphic crime scene photographs and videos in my career, there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen.

  I would never forget the first major case I worked. My client was accused of a violent bank robbery wherein two tellers and a customer were all blown away by shotgun blasts. I remember the day I received the photos from the prosecutor’s office, pursuant to a subpoena. I sat at my desk with the large manila envelope in front of me. My hands trembled as I picked up the envelope and slid my finger along the
top to open it. I dumped the pictures onto my desk and threw the envelope into the trashcan. I picked up the large, glossy eight by tens and flipped through them one at a time. The first few pictures were taken from a distance and I could only see the customer lying on the floor in front of the teller’s window. Finally, toward the end of the stack, were the up-close pictures of the victims. The customer, an elderly lady, had a large hole where her right breast should have been. The first teller was slumped in a sitting position against a wall and there was a large bloody circle in the middle of her abdomen. The second teller was found a few feet from the safe with half his face blown away. I was horrified but fascinated at the same time.

  This is not to say I’m detached or uncaring about the suffering of the victims of violent crime. My heart breaks every time I see the violence that some people are capable of doing to one another. Oftentimes, I close the door to my office and have a good cry. Especially when children are involved. In fact, if possible, I try to avoid working on cases that involve children. Even though I’ve never had children of my own, I think most decent human beings, even those like me who are a tad obsessed with crime, can’t imagine how anyone could ever harm a child.

  But all of this changed the moment I found Ryan murdered in our bed. I knew from that moment forward I would never be able to look at crime the same way again, not now that I was the wife of a victim. From that point onward, I would look at violent crime differently and the victims would no longer seem like strangers, but rather members of a club, which I now felt I was the captain of. The club for people with broken lives.