He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 12

He Let Our Daughter Die to Save His Mistress Chapter 12

he stood at the office window with the blinds cracked.

He was on the far side of the road, past the fence, sitting on an upturned crate under the dead maple. Army surplus coat. A cane, or something like one. His right leg stuck out straight in front of him – set wrong, badly, the way a break heals when nobody sets it at all.

Naomi came and stood beside me.

“Six days,” she said. “He doesn’t come to the gate. He doesn’t call out. Frank went over Tuesday to tell him to move along and he apologized and moved to the other side of the road.”

“What does he do?”

“Watches the kids in the yard,” she said. “Between three-fifteen and four.”

That’s recess.

I put my forehead against the cold glass.

“Do you want me to call the police?” Naomi asked.

“No.”

“Do you want to talk to him?”

“No.”

She waited.

“I want him to be nothing,” I said. “That’s the honest answer. I don’t want to forgive him and I don’t want to hurt him. I want him to be a man across a road that I don’t have to have an opinion about.”

Naomi is the only person alive who’s known me since I was nine. She just nodded and went to get the kids

their snack.

I found out later how the leg happened. Ruth told me, because Ruth still keeps track of things whether you ask her to or not.

Two months after his release, a man in a bar in Somerville recognized his face from the news. He’d read the coverage. He had a daughter of his own. They took Damien out to the parking lot and did his knee with a tire iron and left him there, and he never filed a report, never went to an ER, never gave anyone a name.

He set it himself, apparently, with a piece of pipe and duct tape.

I sat with that information for a long time and waited to feel triumphant, and it didn’t come. What came instead was tired.

Here’s what nobody tells you about revenge: by the time it arrives, you’ve usually already left. I was on my fourth week of nights. I had a nine-year-old on my table with a crushed pelvis who I was not going to lose. Somewhere out there, the man who had once been my whole life was sleeping under a maple tree with a broken leg, and it was the fourth or fifth most important thing happening in my week.

The first hard freeze came the week of Thanksgiving.

That Sunday afternoon, one of the little ones – Dess, my night terror girl, who’s eleven now and fierce as wolf – came into the kitchen with something in her hand.

“The fence man gave me this,” she said. “Through the bars. He said don’t open it, just give it to Miss Grace,

and then he said sorry like nine times and went away.”

It was a sandwich bag, folded over twice.

Inside was a photograph, cracked white down the middle from being folded and unfolded a few thousand

times.

Lily, age five, in the yellow raincoat with the duck hood, mid-laugh, one front tooth missing, holding up a snail

on a leaf.

1 had taken that picture. It had been in the album I burned.

He must have had it in his wallet. It must have been the only thing he had left, through the arrest, through fourteen months inside, through a parking lot in Somerville.

And he gave it away.

There was writing on the back in pencil, small and shaky.

Her name was Lillian Grace. She was six. She was brave. I never looked at her. – D.

I sat down on the kitchen floor of a foster home with my back against the dishwasher and cried the way I hadn’t since the crematorium, while an eleven-year-old patted my head and told me it was okay, and it was not okay, and it was never going to be okay, and that’s the deal.

Then I got up, washed my face, put the photograph in a frame, and hung it in the hall at Lily’s House, over the triage desk, where every single person who walks into that unit has to look at it.

That night the temperature dropped to nineteen degrees.

I stood at the window at eleven p.m. and looked out at the maple tree.

The crate was there.

He wasn’t.