I quit applying snug rules to my personal or professional behavior a long time ago. I’ve taken a particular interest in rescuing girls like Angel who find themselves in the crosshairs of a county where a killer might be slumbering.
My father wouldn’t like any of this.
I let my fingers travel down the silver chain around my neck until they find the dull piece of metal that used to hide in the hairs of my father’s chest. While most cops wear a St. Michael or a cross, my father chose this.
I believe objects can acquire a heartbeat. This key is one of them.
I yank off the chain. I lean over and stick it in the drawer, the only thing he ever locked.
I hope, like always, I’ll find something I missed.
12
The first thing I lift out of the drawer is a half-full bottle of Tito’s vodka. I unscrew it and take a slug, not my first from this bottle. Next, I remove a cheap shirt box with an ugly cartoon Santa Claus printed on the lid, an unholy grimace that I met first a very long time ago under our Christmas tree.
I set the box on the top of the desk with the bottle of vodka.
That’s all of it. This is what my father kept under lock and key.
The first time I tugged open the drawer—the third day I sat behind this desk—I imagined it as a tomb for something terrible. Trumanell’s bone china skull. A confession from my father or Wyatt smudged with dirt and blood that would break my heart.
Loving dark men is a seesaw. They never tell you everything. You always wonder if the tiny red spot on a shirt is really from a spaghetti dinner like they claim. But then they put a bird back in a nest. They pull a drowning kid out of the water.
And that’s all it takes. The spaghetti is not blood.
I lift the lid of the Santa box and finger through layers of letters and notes my father found worth keeping in his sixty-two years on earth. I lay out everything neatly on the desk like a case I return to again and again.
Empty redneck threats abusing their and there and you’re and your. Gushing thank-yous from mothers and grandmothers who favored cards with close-ups of bluebonnets and portraits of horses.
An apology in childish block print that I wrote when I was in first grade. My Father’s Day stick figure drawing of him taller than our house holding a gun bigger than his head.
A youthful picture of him kissing my mother in front of the Empire State Building.
The box with his Medal of Valor. The Dallas Morning News article that praised him for stopping two capital murder suspects from Tennessee who drifted into our town to eat a hamburger.
A pack of Luckys, one missing.
A series of five snapshots, each dated. I slip off the gold paperclip that holds them together.
All of them, variations of my uncle dunking my father at the lake. Not as wild children—as full-grown adults.
My uncle’s pastoral white robe, soaked gray. My father’s chest, bare, with the key hanging right below a red triangle patch of sun permanently burned at his throat.
Every time my father shot and killed somebody, he asked my uncle to baptize him. I’d witnessed two of these cleansings for myself. He wanted full immersion and salvation from the younger brother he used to tease and hold underwater in that lake until he gasped.
I think of these photographs of my father as a historical progression of evil wearing him down—muscles going slack, belly rising like a yeast roll, hair turning gray, a fist ready to clench his heart.
My uncle delivered my father’s eulogy. At the cemetery, he had placed his hands on my shoulders while tears fell down my face. I focused on the beads of sweat on his nose. Behind him, the blur of yellow roses on top of the coffin was disappearing like the final seconds of the sun going down.
“A good life,” he consoled me.
I think about that. What’s a good life? I tap out one of the Luckys. Lift it to my nose and inhale my father. A mistake. For a second, I can’t breathe. I am back at his favorite spot at the lake, choking. The handful of ashes I kept out of his grave, blowing back, sticking in my throat.
I shove the cigarette back in the box. Daddy loved that lake. It was his meditation, even after he dragged it for Trumanell. It’s where he taught me to dive with two legs. Where he taught me to dive with one.
Don’t be afraid to touch the bottom, he urged the last time. I knelt on the edge of the dock, my hands clasped over my head in high prayer.
He thought my leg trembled because I was scared.
I was scared.
Not because of my missing leg. I never had a lot of doubt that I could save myself. My arms were strong. My will was strong.
I was staring into the murky water thinking Trumanell could be lying underneath, fishes nibbling at her pretty lips.
I was wondering, just for a second, the prick of a pin, if my father helped put her there.
And then I dove.
Trouble at the Branson place. That’s the anonymous call my daddy said he picked up at the station on June 7, 2005.
Just Daddy took that call, and there’s no recording of it. I’ve read his report. He found an empty house lit up, blood trailing into the field. He called for backup at 10:08 P.M., approximately five minutes after he arrived.
He searched the house and struck out on his own into the field when no one else showed up—not any Bransons, not any fellow cops. His call was lost in the chaos of the night. They say it’s nobody’s fault the scene wasn’t crawling with police for another two hours.
That’s because every cop and firefighter in town was handling a different priority—cutting their comrade’s bloodied, barely alive daughter out of her pickup. They were frantically trying to keep the wreck off the radio and my father’s life exactly as he knew it for as long as possible.
That’s the story I’ve heard dozens of times.
I know now that my father had to pass me in that dark ditch on his way to the Branson place. I was bleeding out, coming to terms with never seeing him again, and he was one of the brief lights of hope that flashed across my back window and disappeared. We never acknowledged that out loud.
Three weeks in the hospital went by before Daddy told me about Trumanell and Frank Branson going missing and why Wyatt was in a mental unit instead of at my bedside. I was OK with the part about Wyatt. Relieved, even. I couldn’t bear for him to see me with a stump. I was glad he was alive, and not sure I wanted to be. My father reassured me Trumanell would be found.
Opioids were still my very best friend, a button I could punch at will to blur my world. I look back and think the door shut on answers to Trumanell before I opened my eyes.
For my father, everything going forward was about not looking back. That night shoved a piece of sheet metal between us. I have the fuzziest memory of an FBI agent questioning me while drugs lolled in my veins. Of my father, yelling at him to get out, she doesn’t know anything, we have nothing to hide.
Which returns me to the drawer. Why, why lock this when he didn’t even lock the back door of the house where his only daughter slept?
Time to give this fucking drawer a cleansing. Bleach it. Sage it. Fill it with my YETI lunch bag, emergency tampons, evidence that is useful. Stop expecting an answer from my father that isn’t there.
I slam the empty drawer shut. It ricochets open. I slam it again. It pops open.
I lean over. That’s when I notice the scratches near the keyhole, like tiny ice-skate tracks.