by Kerri Rawson
God? If I’m supposed to stay, I will. If I’m not, can you send a sign?
That afternoon the principal told me they needed to let me go—I was part of a dozen staff let go in those first months.
That was quick, God.
I replied, “I was thinking of quitting anyway.”
I packed up my things, alternating between anger at myself for putting myself into a hopeless position and crying out of sadness to have to leave the kids and my classroom. Another first-grade teacher tried to console me, and while talking to her, it all tumbled out.
Shaking, on edge, about to break, I asked sharply, “Do you want to know who my father is?” Without waiting for an answer, I googled my dad and tapped on the screen at the picture of him in the orange jumpsuit.
“Oh. I saw something about him on TV. No wonder you’re struggling. You need time to rest and heal.”
Yes, yes, I do.
I went home, crashed on the floor, and sobbed for hours while the kittens kept watch over me and my broken spirit.
I’d tried with everything I had in me—with everything I knew—to be a good teacher to those kids. I failed them. Failed myself.
A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, I found Hammy curled up in his turquoise-blue bed with blood coming out of his nose and mouth. I slept by him the rest of the night and took him to the vet as soon as it opened. They ran a simple test, and the results came back positive for feline leukemia virus. It was fatal, with an average lifespan of three years.
Devastated, I called Darian and drove home to pick up Molly to have her tested too. She was a positive carrier also.
The vet told me some people choose to put a cat down once they know it’s carrying a fatal disease, but he also said, “These guys don’t know they will die, and they aren’t dying today.”
We weren’t about to put down our kittens. I took them home and sprawled out on the living room floor again, sobbing.
Not dying today. I thought a lot about those words.
You can lie on this floor and cry all you want, but these two little guys—and you—aren’t dying today.
I grew a bit stronger after that.
November 17
Dear Kerri and Darian,
Warm Greeting from me. Hopefully warm, for I know it is probably cold winter by now.
I just watched our Kansas sunset, they are so beautiful in the winter; with shades of purple, pink and cream and the sun a giant orange ball. Have a west window, looks past home. Can watch the birds at times and the seasons change, that really helps in spirit.
Kerri, you were always like that, watched and appreciated nature to its fullest. So many people never slow down to enjoy life so simple, beautiful treasures.
My hope is you will write me someday. My love as a Dad is still there, and you don’t know how many times I think about you, Darian, Mom and Brian; every day. If betrayal is what is keeping you from writing, please forgive me.
So, proud of your brother, a Navy man now! He wrote a long letter, telling of his coast to coast adventures. Hold him in your thoughts and prayers. I know he was reporting to his sub soon.
One thing I do is study the bible and work toward Christian light. This is the only way God can forgive me. I have asked him to be in between me and the victims. They are gone, I’m so sorry and ask him to explain.
I gave confession before the sentencing, trial day.
But, I’m working with God, Christian pen-pals, and hopefully toward that light. It is my dear hope, I can meet you, Mom, Brian, and rest of relatives on the “other side of the river,” that final day for me.
Please take care, best of holiday to you and Darian.
God Bless, Love to you both,
Dad!
NOVEMBER
We nursed Hammy back to health, and Molly never got sick as a kitten. In November, I went back to substitute teaching—it was flexible and I could rest on the days I didn’t have it in me to face the world.
My night terrors were a constant companion, and one night, trying to flee whatever was trying to kill me, I jumped out of bed, fell into a laundry basket, and twisted my left knee. My left knee had been bum since 1998, when I jumped to make an Ultimate Frisbee catch and instead collided with a dumb boy.
I ended up limping to an orthopedist—who sent me to physical therapy and told me I might need surgery.
Hey, God, you up there?
Quiet, easy, restful life?
Okay?
December 17
Kerri,
I know this cannot be a very, “Merry Christmas” or a “Happy Holiday” due to my and family circumstances. You are deeply hurt and may never understand or come to term with things.
Want you to know I have found Peace with God, and someday we will meet again, on the other side of the River.
You will always be and remember[ed] dearly in my heart and love.
I have two great kids, and so glad you met Darian. It was great in memories all of us met for Christmas 2004. That was a special year, thanks for coming home. Please spend extra time, with Mom this year. It will be rough on her. Her world, she deeply love[d] is gone.
Hope things are okay there. Snowing here today! Blessed and better 2006.
Love,
Dad
CHAPTER 40
A Desert Is a Great Place to Hide
FEBRUARY 25, 2006
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
Time was forever marked: before February 25—after February 25.
Before Dad. After Dad.
It had been a year. We had made it; we had survived.
I woke up the morning of February 25, 2006, to bright sunshine filtering through my cousin Andrea’s windows. Darian and I were in Phoenix, sleeping on the fold-out couch in her living room. My knee ached, my stomach stung with trepidation—remembering—but my heart was okay. The house was full of noise, the best kind, and my mom was waking up in the guest room next to us.
Life. Hope. Peace.
Darian was in search of peace too. His grandma Pearl passed away the day before we flew out, the result of a stroke the summer before. We were glad we had made it to New York the past few years to see her.
The family wanted to be together for the anniversary—and far away from any news crews—so my mom and grandparents drove to Phoenix to gather with a bunch of other folks we were related to. Darian and I flew in from Detroit.
Earlier in the week, Darian and I drove north to tour the Hoover Dam, just as I had with my dad when we were out west in 1986. We took dirt roads to the far western edge of the Grand Canyon, and I breathed deep as we watched the hazy orange sun set on reddish-purple slopes that overlooked the Colorado River.
Dad and I would have floated right by here if we had made it on that rafting trip we were dreaming about.
While Darian and I traveled along Route 66, I filled the car with stories about my old life with my father. Another piece of me came back to life among the stark sand flats, warm ridges, and dark mountains. It’s the most at home I had felt in a year.
On the morning of the anniversary, my cousin gave Mom and me silver cross necklaces; I promptly put mine on. Longing for quiet, Darian, Mom, and I took off on our own, heading north.
In Sedona, we climbed up a steep stone walkway to the spectacular Chapel of the Holy Cross, which juts out from massive red rocks overlooking the desert. We were among many tourists, but when I entered the sanctuary, a peace I hadn’t known in a long time descended upon me.
Home.
God.
Rows of red votive candles flickered light onto the orange-brown stone walls, and I could have stood under the massive stone cross looking out at the rising buttes in the distance the rest of my days.
God?
More days like this.
We wandered through shops and an art market and drove north through Coconino National Forest along the Oak Creek Canyon, catching glimpses of water tumbling down through its copper-colored narrows. High up on a mountain road we stopped at a pullout, and D
arian and I walked out to the edge to look out over a valley of pines.
Dad should be here. He would have loved this.
As I let out a breath, I realized that even on one of the best days, I’d been on edge, anticipating something terrible. My body, my lungs, my bones—all felt the weight of the day, knew what it was.
We drove back to Phoenix late that afternoon and met a table full of family for dinner. It had been a good day, but as the evening progressed, a sadness descended on me and I cried. I was embarrassed to cry in a restaurant in front of a bunch of my family.
In low voices, they inquired after me, and I said, “Dad . . . miss him. It’s been a lot today . . .”
Grief. Funny thing, how it came and went.
I missed my father. That was one of the first times I’d admitted that. Was it okay to admit I missed a serial killer? That I loved one?
I didn’t miss a serial killer, didn’t love one—I missed my dad. I loved my dad.
I had no idea what anyone around that table, people I also loved, thought about me.
But that was it. That day he was just my dad, whom I loved and missed. It was always going to be that simple and that hard.
JUNE
DETROIT
I don’t recall receiving any letters from my dad in the spring of 2006, but one arrived four days before my twenty-eighth birthday. There wasn’t anything damaging in the letter, but it set me off into a fit of ire. It wasn’t what the letter said—it was the absence of what it should have.
Hovering under the surface of my anger was a cesspool of pitch-black pain I rarely acknowledged. Grief came with no rhyme or reason. Mine didn’t fall neatly into the stages you hear about: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Mine bounced around like a pinball, setting off whatever it felt like, whenever it felt like it.
Awakened by a night terror and unable to get back to sleep, I hobbled out of bed to my computer, propped my leg up on an overturned Rubbermaid bin, and typed a letter to my father for the first time in almost a year.
I’d been in a black hinged knee brace since March, after having surgery on the ligaments to realign my kneecap. The day after the surgery, it felt like my knee was on fire—the worst physical pain I’d ever suffered. When I called the surgeon about increasing my pain meds, he said, “Oh yeah, these types of surgeries hurt like a son of a gun.”
Hammy and Molly found it great fun to run up and down my foam-braced leg that first week. I could barely make it to the bathroom and back on crutches. Darian left lunch, drinks, and ice packs in the cooler next to the couch before leaving in the mornings. He brought home a three-disc set of the Jurassic Park movies to cheer me up and set up a patio chair in the tub before helping me bathe.
For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. Love never fails.
I slowly regained strength and ability with physical therapy and time, but it took several more months before I was fully healed. I eventually became pain-free, except when it stormed, after aching for eight years.
There were lessons in that: time, I needed more time. Therapy, I guess, was a lesson I could heed, too, but I didn’t want to go back to get my head shrunk again. Even though I knew I probably should. Instead, writing an angry letter would have to suffice.
I didn’t mail the letter. I didn’t want to hurt my dad.
June 2006
Dad,
It’s four flipping a.m. and I just composed the 1200th opening lines to you while lying next to my slumbering husband. I can’t get back to sleep, so I decided to go ahead, get up, drink a cold glass of milk (no ice), and type out what I was just yelling at you in my head.
Except typing it seems so mundane, so normal, when all I really want to do is grab a can of red paint and throw my words onto the semi-clean beige wall in front of me and tell you off.
Go ahead and write it down and say . . . what? Should I tell you I grew up adoring you, you were the sunshine of my life, the apple of my eye and all that other greeting-card crap? It’s true, even if it is coming out jaded and bitter now—but really, who could blame me. Hey, it’s okay to yell at your father all you want when he’s a serial killer.
Should I tell you in one breath I want to tell you I want nothing more to do with you and you can just rot in hell? Being called a “social contact” by her father in front of the whole world will do that to a girl.
Or maybe I should tell you in the very next breath, I miss you. I saw Cars tonight, the new movie by Pixar. In it, there’s a scene where they are driving along Interstate 40, coming down into the orangey-red vistas and buttes of the New Mexico desert. I thought of you and our trips out west. I remembered how much you wanted to drive old Route 66, and I just wished you were sitting next to me in that theater, sharing a tub of buttered popcorn.
But you’re not. You’re sitting in your concrete room. (What you like to call it: your room! Hello! It’s a jail cell, not a room! Like you’re staying at some inn where they serve you breakfast in bed, with a fresh-cut flower on the tray—instead of where you really are, where they serve you ground-up mush on a cold metal tray that slips through a crack in the door.)
And you won’t ever be sitting next to anyone ever again.
That tub of buttered popcorn reminds me sometimes I just want to go out and buy the biggest buttery tub I can find and wave it in your face and say, “Ha, you won’t ever have this again,” and ask, “Was it worth it?” Eating a really good hamburger makes me want to do that also. Does that make me a bad person—to enjoy eating a really good hamburger and getting pleasure from the thought you won’t ever get to?
Or should you know in the next breath I want to ask if you’re staying warm at night, did you get some house slippers and an extra blanket or two?
Are you lonely? I’m so sorry you’re alone in that small, cold, concrete cell, and sometimes I just wish I could give you a hug.
But most [of] the time I just feel like a part of a quote by Elie Wiesel I read a while back: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”1 I used to love you, but now I’m the opposite of that, it’s not that I hate you, it’s just I don’t care.
—Your lovingly indifferent daughter
AUGUST 2006
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
In August I flew out to Las Vegas, spending a few days with Darian, who was there on a business trip. I tried my hand at the slots, while Darian watched me toss his twenty dollars away. We walked around the strip at night and I marveled at how much it had changed since I had visited Circus Circus with my folks on our trip out west in 1986.
We had separate flights coming home, and I flew over the Grand Canyon and the Rockies, catching glimpses of them through the clouds.
Flying over two of my favorite places prompted me to try to listen to John Denver’s Greatest Hits album on my MP3 player. I hadn’t listened to much music since losing my dad, and I hadn’t gone near any that reminded me of him.
As soon as the first notes hit, I burst into tears.
It was my favorite album when I was young. Dad would drop the record on the turntable and dance around to “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He’d spin with his brown house slippers on, snapping his fingers in time. I’d giggle so hard my sides would hurt, watching him being a goof.
“Sunshine on My Shoulders.”
We had taken several trips to Colorado when I was a kid, staying in a cabin in Lake City and fishing for trout at a nearby stream. I can still picture my dad in his green-and-white plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, patiently casting colorful flies into the sparkling water, the sun bouncing off his shoulders.
“Rocky Mountain High.”
We had gone jeeping just once, near Ouray, driving up Engineer Mountain. My door popped off the rental when we hit a rut in the road, startling me. Dad chuckled as he worked the door back on. We drove above the tree line and came upon snow in a high valley, even though it was summer and we were in shorts. The sun, brilliant and bright under a startling clear-blue sky, was so
close I wanted to reach up and touch it.
I had a memory for every song on that album. The immense loss I’d suffered hit hard.
I was missing him so much it hurt to breathe.
As memories flowed through my ears, another sliver of pain was pulled from my soul. Thousands of feet above the mountains I loved, with my head up against the cool window, I gained another piece of myself back.
Thousands more to go.
NOVEMBER 2006
DETROIT
In the fall, I started subbing for a nearby district. I only had to drive a few miles some days, and I was able to string together more days of work—it was the happiest I’d been at a job. We also replaced the sputtering Corsica with Grandma Pearl’s huge silver Mercury Grand Marquis. Uncle John drove it over to us one weekend.
He was Darian’s height, and his sole goal in life seemed to be to try to figure out how to make us laugh. We took him to dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant, and he crashed on our floor next to the cats, who thought highly of him. We dropped him off the next day at the airport to fly back to New York.
Mid-November, we went back to church. When I stepped through the spinning doors into a brightly lit lobby, I felt peace and knew I’d come home. God had been waiting for us.
In the auditorium, there were cupholders for lattes from the café, and Coldplay’s “Fix You” was blasting out from the stage.
Tears ran down my face at church for the next several weeks as I heard our pastor preach on mercy and God’s never-ending love. As more shattered pieces of my spirit mended, I found grace once more, grace I was sure had been lost forever.
CHAPTER 41
PTSD Blows Chunks
JUNE 2007
Darian saw the agent out the door and I stood up and took the picture of my dad and mom off the wall. I propped the picture up against the wall on the floor of my closet.”
“Good. That’s when it ends—when the agent leaves. I think we will just need to go through it one more time,” the calm female voice said. We were in a small, peaceful room. There was gentle instrumental music playing softly, and I was sitting on a couch (not an eggplant one).