Killer's Diary Read online

  She only sampled the voice, eavesdropping.

  She walked across the store, dipping into about a dozen books, effectively killing time. However, none of the books today captured her interest. They all seemed flat and dull.

  And that got her thinking again about the notebook.

  She had sampled it in a similar manner—not knowing anything about its author or subject. And it had seized her attention and produced tingles of excitement.

  What made it so special?

  She knew the answer. The notebook differed from the written works around her in a fundamental way:

  It was never intended for outside eyes.

  The writing was real, not manufactured for a publisher. The author was speaking from the heart to purge demons, not collect royalties. The words had not been edited by an editor, packaged by a marketer, self-censored by self-consciousness.

  The notebook bled with human honesty.

  That night, home in her apartment, bundled warm against the outside frost, curled on the couch, she held the notebook in her hands. The red cover was bland and generic, revealing nothing of the notebook’s inner vitality. With an almost ceremonial reverence, she opened the cover to face the first page. The penmanship stared back at her, strong black strokes, urgent and earnest.

  I am prepared to unravel my state of mind to isolate and confront the barriers to inner peace. The only way I can effectively accomplish this daunting task is through identifying and drafting on paper the elements of this equation. This notebook is my blackboard. This pen is my chalk. I am ready to see the calculation through to its absolute conclusion. Only then can I achieve the heightened awareness I require to begin the healing.

  I am on my own. We are all chained to our individual histories. No one else is equipped to support my endeavor. No one can feel my pain. No one cares.

  “I do,” she said, surprising herself with the sound of her voice breaking the silence.

  She read on. The writer journeyed deep into his childhood, collecting his earliest memories, identifying experiences that tore into him like high-voltage shocks. He spoke of losing his joy and innocence, stripped away like layers of skin, until he could no longer relate to others his age.

  Cruelty and abuse are most destructive when inflicted on the young and unshaped. The efforts required to undo the damage far outweigh the short, easy jolts that deliver the first strike. The emotional devastation flows forward to predetermine the future. We are bound to the suffering of our formative years. The only hope is to grasp the razor wire with both hands and fight to free oneself, accepting the pain as barbed edges shred the flesh.

  As the writer alluded to childhood experiences, Ellen’s eyes blurred with tears. The stories rocked her back into places she couldn’t avoid.

  The two of them shared a common starting point.

  For Ellen, the world had gone sour at age six, when her family cracked apart. She remembered the disintegration in a collection of moments, like a highlight reel: her mother sobbing at the kitchen table; the eerie emptiness of the house when her father no longer appeared at the end of the day with bellowing greetings and bear hugs; awkward phone conversations with her father after he moved out.

  “I will always be your daddy,” he tried to reassure her, a thin voice on a wire, nothing to hug. “Be strong,” he said.

  She kept the tears silent, but her words betrayed her, caught in her throat. “But when—when are you coming back?”

  “Not for a while, hon,” he responded, adding a heavy sigh. “I don’t think your mother wants me to visit right now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, that’s mommy and daddy business.”

  He told her he was twenty minutes away, but he could have been calling from the other side of the world. Ellen pressed for a commitment to visit. She told him she had written new stories to share. She wanted him to give her more piano lessons.

  “Soon, hon. Real soon.”

  In subsequent phone calls, his reply remained the same. He never offered a specific date or time, just “soon”. That word kept her hanging for nearly a year before she realized he was just reciting reassurances with no real meaning behind them. She pestered her mother about her father’s return, which did not generate pleasant reactions. Finally, her mother snapped at her in a brittle voice, “Why? Why do you want to see him? He left you, Ellen. He left both of us. He doesn’t love us anymore. He’s gone. Why should he come back? He moved far away and he’s not coming back!”

  Her mother’s emotional state began a long slide. She turned to an assortment of pills to give her energy and to make her sleep. She began seeing imaginary bugs on the walls. She paced the house at strange hours. Sometimes, Ellen would wake up to find her mother hovering over her, staring and silent, like a floating ghost.

  The money ran low and Ellen’s mother searched for work. She accepted a job at the middle school cafeteria and earned a reputation as the “crazy lady who talks to herself”. At school, the other children taunted Ellen about her “psycho mom”. One boy, Billy Harth, was particularly mean-spirited and told her, “They’re going to put your mom in a mental institution and then you’ll have to live in the street.”

  Ellen continued to thrive on any contact with her father. In the early months, she received occasional phone calls and mailings—short notes or cards to say hello, accompanied by McDonald’s coupons or small sheets of stickers. But the points of contact spread further apart until they only landed on holidays. Then he seemed to disappear altogether. She continued waiting for him. Every morning offered new possibilities. Every day concluded with aching disappointment. Eventually, Ellen accused her mother of blocking him from her, stealing letters and not sharing phone calls.

  “That’s what you believe?” said her mother, infuriated. “Fine. Then you answer the phone around here. You get the mail. You’ll see.”

  Ellen accepted her mother’s offer and soon regretted it. The truth became unavoidable. Ellen lost her enthusiasm for a ringing phone and the arrival of the mail. The pain settled in to stay. Her daddy didn’t care about her anymore.

  Eventually Ellen and her mother moved out of their Decatur, Illinois house. They relocated to an apartment building created from an old motel on a barren stretch of road on the edge of town. Her mother disposed of everything connected with the past, leaving piles of boxes on the curb in the splattering rain for neighborhood kids and junk seekers to sift through.

  Ellen’s mother sold the piano that Ellen’s father had brought into the home for Ellen’s fifth birthday. He was a skilled jazz pianist and had given Ellen weekly lessons. Sometimes they improvised duets with silly lyrics.

  On a Saturday morning, Ellen watched from her bedroom window as another family took the piano away from the house: a delighted mother, father, two sons and a daughter. A complete family unit. She cried for the rest of the day.

  As the schoolmates around her blossomed into maturity and independence, Ellen began her withdrawal from the real world. She spent increasing hours in her bedroom with the door closed, playing with imaginary friends and dreaming up stories for her dolls to enact around the furniture. She read countless books from the library.

  Sometimes she observed the neighborhood children from her window. They ran in circles, laughing and chasing each other like strange creatures. Watching them caused her to ache inside.

  The years following the divorce rocked with turbulence as Ellen’s mother struggled to regain emotional stability. Over time, she seemed to be making progress. She left the school cafeteria for a new job, a clerical position at a real estate agency. She ventured out on dates. She spoke promisingly of finding a “new and better daddy”.

  But the man she settled for was rough, and he frightened Ellen. His name was George Ravenwood. He worked in a meat-packing plant and smelled like smoke and sweat.

  George had a son from a previous marriage, a fumbling, overweight boy named Seymour, who was one year younger than Ellen. Ellen was encouraged to make f
riends with Seymour, but the two of them could barely manage a conversation. Ellen had a hard enough time making friends at school. If Seymour accompanied his father for a visit, he inevitably gravitated toward the television or brought a handheld video game. George often groused at the boy and knocked him around, smacking the back of his head with a cupped hand. The behavior scared Ellen.

  Then one day, George’s roughness extended to Ellen.

  Ellen was watching cartoons after school, and George entered the room, tired and irritable. “I want the remote,” he said.

  “No, I’m watching this,” replied Ellen, matter-of-fact. George grabbed her by the arm and threw her off the couch. She tumbled to the floor. Then he reached down and slapped her across the face—hard.

  He stood over her. “I’m the adult, you’re the child; you do what I tell you. Don’t every say no to me again.”

  Ellen burst into tears, her cheek hot and stinging. “You didn’t have to hit me. I’m telling my mom.”

  George thrust his face at her, ruddy and wide-eyed. Unshaven whiskers covered his cheeks like dirt. “If you tell your mother, I’ll smash you so hard you’ll think you got run over by a truck.”

  Ellen never told her mother. Weeks later, when her mother declared that she hoped to one day marry George, Ellen offered no reaction, which prompted a sharp response: “Nothing makes you happy.”

  George’s visits to the cramped apartment grew more frequent. He never proposed to Ellen’s mother, but he did act like the head of the household, barking orders, filling the big chair in front of the TV and taking control of the family finances. Ellen believed she was safe as long as she stayed hidden in her bedroom. She was wrong.

  Ellen discovered that she remained in George’s sights. When she reached puberty, his behavior turned strangely sweet, an ominous prelude to the horror to come. In the darkest corners of the night, he abused her. The first occasion was on a Saturday night, while her mother dozed in a drunken stupor. George, also inebriated, entered Ellen’s room and made her do things that she knew were wrong.

  He insisted that it was “fun play” that would bring them closer. He told her not to tell anyone. He said if she revealed their secret games to her mother, he would kill them both one night while they slept.

  The late-night encounters continued into Ellen’s middle teens, invading her slumber like surreal, close-up nightmares. She could not discuss the horrible acts with anyone. Instead, a swelling pressure spread inside her, turning her body numb.

  To survive, she shut herself down.

  The voice in the red notebook shared in Ellen’s pain and delivered solace.

  Buried in the words, Ellen found a passage that described her own feelings with such penetrating precision that it brought tears to her eyes.

  As a child, I felt so alone that I carried my loneliness like a heavy stone around my neck, which caused my head to hang and kept my eyes trained on the ground. I felt consumed by some flu that I could not shake and no one could understand. I felt different and isolated, one of God’s mistakes.

  I learned to accept the pain. I surmised that somehow, some way, I deserved it. I no longer questioned my fate. It became the natural order of the universe.

  The author alluded to a horrible, life-changing event at age seven, but offered no details. Instead he addressed the aftermath. He talked of losing memories to a black hole and awakening in the home of a senile grandmother in a faraway, nameless town, like a dream.

  Ellen read from the journal: My grandmother lived in a dark, static world of four rooms in a small square house on a dead-end street. Groceries were delivered. Curtains were shut. Cats defecated around us. I wanted to wake up from this strange, sudden change of scenery, but it was my new reality. I never saw my parents again. The box surrounding me shut and I lost the light.

  Ellen closed her eyes. It was almost midnight. Her emotions were on overload. She moved off the couch, revived the circulation in her legs and put the journal away. She prepared for bed, her thoughts still spinning in the past, pushed there by the notebook’s bold tones.

  Like the troubled author, Ellen had left home at an early age, but the circumstances differed. The journal’s narrator had left home at age seven, still a young child, while Ellen had moved out at sixteen, straining for adulthood. Most importantly, Ellen’s departure was a landmark of liberation, not suffocation.

  She remembered it clearly, the day she had broken out of her own box with uncommon courage and discovered the light.

  Chapter Four

  On Thanksgiving Day, at age sixteen, Ellen planned her escape.

  She began the holiday with the same sense of dread that squeezed her stomach into a ball anytime she gathered in the same room with George, her mother and Seymour in an effort to engage in a traditional family activity. She could still remember real Thanksgivings with her real dad. She longed for the genuine warmth of those days.

  Instead, she now sat through monumentally unpleasant spectacles dominated by a puffy-faced, alcohol-drenched deviant who bickered and shouted his way through the day, pushing people around like twigs to be trampled.

  When it came to George Ravenwood, Ellen had turned avoidance into an art. She slipped out the door to the library or went on long walks. But for something like Christmas or a birthday, her mother insisted on a full production that brought them all together.

  To make matters worse, on this particular Thanksgiving the meal took place at George’s house. George and Seymour lived in a cluttered split-level home that breathed bad odors. It sat next to an intersection glorified by a shut-down gas station, a convenience mart popular for liquor and lottery tickets and the blackened shell of a burned-down hamburger stand.

  George supervised the turkey, which he grilled outdoors, standing in the leaves in his stocking feet. Hovering over the propane grill with a succession of beers, he lifted the lid every five minutes to both monitor and impede the progress by allowing heat to escape.

  At least it was less ludicrous than the prior Thanksgiving, when he had tried to jam a turkey into her mother’s microwave oven.

  Seymour watched sitcom reruns in the family room, while Ellen and her mother worked in the kitchen on the side dishes. The meal was low-budget but well-intended, with green bean casserole, candied yams with miniature marshmallows, cranberry sauce from a can, warm rolls, sticky mashed potatoes and store-bought pumpkin pie.

  As they prepared the food, Ellen thought about her father. What was he doing at this very minute? Was he reflecting on earlier times, recalling special memories of his daughter? Did he regret leaving? Would he phone and leave his voice on the answering machine?

  Would he realize how long it had been since the two of them had spoken, and perhaps set up an afternoon out, maybe lunch together, maybe some Christmas shopping…

  Ellen’s mother derailed Ellen’s train of thought with a loud clearing of her throat, followed by the comment, “Maybe today’s the day, El. You know what I mean?”

  Ellen finished cutting the carrots for the salad, looked at her mother and shook her head. “No. What?”

  “George will propose. Maybe he has a ring. I saw them on sale at the mall. Thanksgiving is the perfect time, we’re all together…”

  Ellen couldn’t help it: she made a sour expression.

  Her mother slammed down the bowl she held. “What’s that face for?”

  “Nothing,” said Ellen.

  “You have no respect for him or my feelings,” her mother said, reaching for her wine glass and taking a drink.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” said Ellen in a flat tone.

  Her mother moved over to the carrots. “I’ll finish this. Why don’t you just go. Go talk to Seymour. He’s all by himself in there, go keep him company. Be like family.”

  Ellen left the kitchen.

  Seymour sat on the couch, eyes shut and asleep, hugging a small pillow on top of his protruding belly. The laugh track of Gilligan’s Island appeared to be directed at him.

  E
llen seated herself on the far side of the sofa. Seymour opened his eyes and sat up, but said nothing.

  She looked around the room—everything had been stacked in piles in a feeble attempt to clean up. One random pile mixed newspapers, clothes, a board game and a box of crackers.

  She spied fingernail clippings on the coffee table. Or were they toenail clippings? She almost gagged. She fixed her eyes on the television.

  “You can change the channel, if you want,” muttered Seymour.

  “No, it’s okay,” said Ellen.

  And that was the extent of their conversation.

  When the meal was ready, George called everyone to the dinner table with a loud shout. “Get in here! We’re eating now!”

  Ellen’s mother asked Ellen to say grace. As Seymour chomped into a roll, Ellen murmured, “Thank you, God, for blessing us with this special day. Amen.” She smirked at the irony in her words.

  Ellen’s mother and George consumed wine until they could barely get a firm grasp on their glasses. Predictably, George’s tone grew harder and more belligerent, while Ellen’s mother became glassy-eyed and clingy.

  When Seymour attempted to pour himself some wine, George barked at him about being only fifteen. “So what?” said Seymour. “You let me drink all the time. You just don’t want me to drink your wine.”

  An argument ensued, resulting in George spewing insults, most of them centered on Seymour’s weight, which made his ears burn red.

  “Fine,” said George. “Drink all the wine you want, but you’re not getting pie. You’re too fucking fat. Look at you, you’re exploding out of your goddamn clothes.”

  Seymour left the table. On his way out of the room, he flipped his middle finger at his father. George didn’t see it, which was a relief to Ellen because she knew that any escalation would get physical.

  George looked squarely at Ellen. “Don’t you think he’s fat? He’s gotta be the fattest kid in the high school.”