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An icy numbness falls over me when the call ends. I have a decision to make. To visit my father or never see him again. I look at my baby daughter, whom I’m holding in her carrier, for a sign. I swear she nods. It’s a go.
I make one call before I leave. My soulmate supports my decision.
Two hours later I’m boarding a plane to San Francisco.
San Quentin State Prison is located fifty-five miles north of San Francisco in Marin County. The all-men’s prison is the state’s only death row correctional facility for men and is notably the largest in the western hemisphere. For what my monstrous father did to all those poor innocent women and babies, he should have been one of the seven hundred men waiting to be lethally injected.
I shudder from the minute I enter the five-story medical complex. My father is asleep as I hesitantly step inside his room on the third floor. His skeletal body is buried under a stark white sheet while his head rests on a pillow. Reduced to a wraith, he looks nothing like the handsome, chestnut-haired man whose photo I kept. The man I once lovingly called Daddy. Now seventy-five, the once-robust man looks so frail. His face is lined and gaunt, his complexion wan, and there’s hardly a hair on his head. The few that sprout from his scalp are as white as the sheet. A few IVs and beeping machines are hooked into his stick-thin arms, monitors and morphine to take his vitals and alleviate the pain. Comfort care. He deserves none.
I take a few cautious steps closer to his bed. My three-inch heels clack on the laminate floor and his eyes flutter open. They make contact with mine.
“Ava, is that you?” His voice is weak. A breathy rasp, hardly above a whisper.
“Hi, Daddy.” Daddy. The word tumbles out. It feels alien and leaves a bitter taste on my tongue.
“Thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would.”
“I’m here,” I simply say, now regretting my decision.
“Come closer. Sit with me.” He manages to motion for me to join him with one of his withered hands, which have paid the price of his unthinkable crimes.
A magnetic force draws me closer to him. I pull up a chair and sit beside him. I resist the urge to touch him, feel his flesh and blood, that are so part of me. In my veins, my bones, and my DNA.
His sunken eyes fixate on mine. Though barely open, I can see their vibrant color. Green. The color of jade. The exact same as mine. I avoid staring into them, afraid to see if I can recognize a piece of myself in them. If I do, I’m as bad as he is.
“Ava, my dear, I have not asked you to come here to forgive me.”
I stay silent and let him go on.
“I don’t have much time. I just wanted to tell you that you were the apple of my eye and I’ve never stopped loving you.”
His words, as sincere as they sound, can’t atone for his sins. His eyes stare into mine and suddenly, without warning, the memory that’s been lodged inside me for so long breaks through the membranes of my brain. That of a young girl—me—bounding down the stairs to a dark, dank rat-infested basement filled with terrified young women, clutching their swollen tummies, some crying. I wandered into the operating room. Saw it all. The blood, sweat, and tears. And there he was, my father, holding a bloody scalpel, peering up from his surgical mask, his shocked green orbs meeting mine. I remember running out, nauseated, teary-eyed, desperately looking for a bathroom. Finding it. The toilet filled with red-stained water. I puked until I could puke no more. The clots of blood and vomit explode in my head, and now, for the first time in my life, I understand the reason for all my night terrors. The baby nightmares.
The basement. The secret “lab” where he performed his “experiments”…his procedures. Right under the roof of our house. Right below the kitchen I ate in. Right beneath the rooms I played in.
I saw it with my own eyes. I saw the women. The hope. The fear. Maybe one of them was Marley’s sister.
My mother knew I’d ventured down there, but she did what she always did. Nothing. Nothing to help me deal with the trauma, the nightmares, and phobias that followed.
Years of repressing this horrific memory bubble up inside me. A whirling dervish of emotions circles my heart. My chest swells with anguish. This man, this monster I barely knew, looks at me for pity. But the only pity I feel is for myself. And all the women and children whose lives he destroyed.
My father cuts into my memories.
“Come closer, Ava. I need to tell you something.” His voice so weak, I can barely hear him.
I lean into him, tilting my head so that my left ear is a millimeter away from his parched mouth. I listen to what he has to say, and as he recites the date of my birth, he takes his last breath. The beeping machine dies.
Goodbye. The word I never got to say.
My father, the butcher, is dead.
SIXTY
AVA
Two Months Later: September
My appointment at the Grand Cayman national bank is at 3p.m. I’ve arrived five minutes early, with my adorable four-month-old baby girl, Isa, happily strapped in her carrier, face-forward. Now weighing almost fifteen pounds, her delightful coos and gurgles are like music to my ears.
