Content warnings:

Abduction, violence, murder

The call comes when Kaitlyn is at Little Star—the cafe on the corner of Third and Main—picking up lunch for the marketing team: two Caesar salads and a cream cheese avocado bagel sandwich. She answers her phone as it’s her turn to step up to the counter. The voice on the other end of the line says, This is Father Lawrence, chaplain from the Chillicothe Correctional Institution.

She already knows what he’s going to say next. Even before he finishes reading what is surely a speech from a printed paper. Still she listens, half to him and half to the cashier who is explaining the point system on the cafe’s new membership card.

The next morning, when she comes in to place her usual order, the news that the chaplain told her is playing across the television in the corner of the room: Ohio state officials have released a statement this morning. Death row inmate William Harvey Womack, the serial killer nicknamed The Forester, has died of lung cancer. He is survived by his daughter, Kaitlyn Womack.

As the news presenters discuss the story, she gets called to pick up her order. Her name echoes like a crystal ball dropped through the wood-paneled room. Some people turn and stare. Some people try not to look. Their averted gaze hits even harder.

She curls her arms around her body, her bones acting as both shield and armor, the way she’s trained them to. Ever since ninth grade, when the police came into her classroom to take her in for questioning because her father had escaped the penitentiary. Ever since her high school graduation, which happened to fall on the day after her father’s death sentence was passed. Ever since every job interview, every doctor’s appointment, every restaurant reservation.

Sometimes she considers changing her name, but the thought of having to go to the office and even file the request makes her stomach shrivel up under her skin. Instead, every day before she goes to work, she practices saying her full name in the bathroom mirror.

The first sound, K, always gets caught between the flip of her tongue; the W puckers her lips before breaking on the crest of another K. Eventually she bares her teeth to force it out, lips puckered like she’s uttering an ancient curse.

That weekend, she drives down to Chillicothe with nine hundred dollars to pay for her father’s cremation. The chaplain greets her with the urn and a plastic bag of her father’s last belongings. There’s a torn page from the Bible atop the folded jeans and pullover. The chaplain tells her that it was her father’s favorite passage.

Before she drives onto the highway on the way home, she stops at a gas station. She dumps out the ashes from the urn into a garbage can outside the bathroom. Then she goes into the cubicle and takes off her blouse and slacks, putting on her father’s clothes. He lost so much weight in the final years of the disease that the waistline of the jeans fits her just right. The pullover sleeves stretch a few inches past her fingernails and she tucks the extra fabric into a fist.

She spends a full minute running the tip of her nose over the sleeve cuffs, the neckline, the belly of the sweater. It doesn’t smell the way she remembers him. It reeks of cheap detergent. They must have washed the clothes before giving them to her.

She leaves the empty urn on the corner of the bathroom sink.

• • • •

The call comes in on a Wednesday night, halfway through rewatching her favorite episode of Scrubs with one hand buried in a bag of Hot and Spicy Cheddar Cheez-Its. Kaitlyn turns down the volume just as the ghost of Ben is telling Dr. Cox that he needs to forgive himself for the mistake he made with one of his patients.

She doesn’t recognize the number calling, but as soon as the voice speaks, she remembers. Suddenly she’s six years old and wearing Minnie Mouse socks for her first sleepover at Rupert Faithfield’s house. How she made him swear not to call her parents, even if she cried. How he taught her how to promise by crossing your heart. How he talked about dinosaurs and plant cells for an hour to help her fall back asleep after a nightmare.

You were so boring, she laughs into the receiver when Rupert recalls the story. You read to me from the Merriam-Webster’s Children’s Dictionary.

I didn’t know what else to do, he protests. And I would genuinely read dictionaries for fun back then.

They haven’t seen or heard from each other since third grade when his family moved to California. On the other end of the line Rupert Faithfield apologizes to her for two things. First for her mother’s death in a traffic accident; his own mother told him about it a few months after they moved. Then for her father’s death, the one that’s still chewing through the headlines for the third day in a row.

He is the first and only person to offer her condolences for her father.

They call each other again the following day, and then the next as well. When he tells her he’s coming back to Ohio for his sister’s wedding in March, she suggests that they meet up. She agrees to be his plus one to the wedding, but only for the after party. She doesn’t want to put down her name on any kind of guest list. Then she finds out his sister is marrying into an Amish family from Millersburg. They won’t know who her father was, and even if they did, their faith forbids judgment.

After the wedding ceremony Kaitlyn and Rupert slip away to the hills behind the farm, two long silhouettes stretched under the frigid gaze of the moon. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes from the inside of his suit jacket. He offers her one and she declines, because it’s not the brand her father used to smoke. She actually can’t remember which brand it was. It’s one of the details of him that has somehow escaped her since his death. Every time she passes a gas station she goes inside and tries to jog her memory, but the brand name never comes back to her.

The grass feels like cold skin when she peels off her shoes to walk beside Rupert. The trees around them thicken. Clumps of untrimmed weeds hug her naked ankles with a tenderness they denied her father when he ran barefoot through the foliage of his burial sites. One of his victims had a time of death that matched a call she made to him in sixth grade, asking if he would have time to come to see her perform in the Matilda musical that Friday. She wonders if her father stopped to dry his hands before hanging up on her, or if he let the blood smear across the phone screen.

Rupert holds her close while these thoughts slip from her lips in porcelain whispers. He doesn’t pull away like the rest of the world has. His heart beats a melody in her ear and she dreams about how to make it stop, how to cut a song into fifty-six little notes.

His fingers trip lightly through her hair and she circles her arms around his waist. She wants Rupert to rock her back and forth; she wants to be a third of her height, she wants to be small enough to fit on his hip and be carried around to pick Virginia bluebells that aren’t going to bloom for another month.

• • • •

The call comes in while Kaitlyn is putting the last pins into the lace veil on her head. There’s a nosegay on the cabinet in front of her, plastic bluebells and baby’s breath wrapped in crepe paper that she picked up from the craft store. When she answers the phone she asks the driver downstairs to wait a few more minutes because her fiancé is running late on his way back from the dry cleaners.

She was the one who asked Rupert to marry her. She had wanted to become Kaitlyn Faithfield from that moment in the woods after his sister’s wedding, when he let her press her cheek into his shoulder, unscorned. He had said yes to everything, from the proposal to the marriage date to her request not to have a wedding or invite anyone from his family.

All he asked was that she wear a white dress for the civil ceremony.

As Kaitlyn approaches the officiant she holds out her hand a little, imagining her father’s sweaty fingers clasped around her own. Her father had three calluses on his left hand from mixing cement. The paint marks on his fingernails could never quite be scrubbed off. He told her that he left the stains on to look pretty, like how she looked when she colored her own nails with white board markers.

The officiant regards her for a moment, bushy eyebrows drawn together. As if her satin gown is stained with the blood of the three women and two men her father was convicted of murdering.

Seeing the marriage certificate makes her cry. She asks Rupert to say her new name over and over again until she screams at him to shut up. Her tears fall into his lap on the taxi ride home; the nosegay is crushed against her naked collarbone.

Later that night, when her breasts are pressed against the hairs of his chest, she asks him to say her new name again. Very softly. Perhaps name a dinosaur after her: Kaitlyn Faithfield, a Stegosaurus who eats from trees and dies in a meteor storm.

His chapped lips graze her forehead as he breathes the tragic tale, his thumb caressing the round of her cheek. She falls asleep before the meteor ever lands. Kaitlyn Faithfield the Stegosaurus lives forever.

But when she wakes up, the transplant still feels mismatched. Every few days she cries over her new name again. At the dentist, on the phone with a telemarketer, and to the pizza delivery man. Even hearing her manager use the name when he congratulates her on a successful sales pitch makes tears push against her eyelids.

After a few weeks Rupert suggests that she join a support group. He tells her this while she is slicing up the homemade lemon pie he brought back from visiting with his sister. He talks about recovery and healing and hope, while she adjusts her grip on the knife in her hand, trying to figure out which hand her father used to make the lacerations on his victims. There were always more than ten, never less than fifteen.

Her father was ambidextrous.

She shifts the hilt of the knife from one palm to the other, imagining the wooden handle slick with nerves and earthen grime. Rupert’s fingers ghost over her lower lip and she realizes that he’s feeding her small bites from the broken pie crust. His eyes are kind like the way a child might draw them, round circles of sweet-smelling crayon.

She licks at the crumbs obediently and nods her head. Yes, I’ll get help. Yes, I need help.

In the second month of her group grief therapy she meets Janelle.

• • • •

 The call comes when her hands are deep in the suds of the kitchen sink. Kaitlyn’s wearing pink rubber cleaning gloves and a checkered apron over her father’s pullover. She wipes her hand on the dishrag and looks at the missed call from Janelle.

In group therapy Janelle talks about never being able to say goodbye to her father. Janelle doesn’t mention that her father was executed after spending ten years on death row for setting fire to his own house and killing Janelle’s two sisters and grandmother.

Kaitlyn knows this because Janelle told her a few weeks ago while she was drunk on red wine and crying over an episode of Scrubs on her living room sofa. Janelle carries herself the same way Kaitlyn used to, before she shed herself to be branded with another name.

Kaitlyn Womack is quiet now, thanks to the increased volume of Kaitlyn Faithfield. She gives her full name at Starbucks, just to be able to walk up to the counter confidently, not a single eye on her. She prints her name neatly on every form so all can see the entirety of its glory. She asks Rupert to say her full name when he’s inside her, when his hips move against hers and those syllables rise with his gasping breath.

Sometimes, though, she accidentally misspells the last letter of her name, the D becoming a K, her father’s wobbly scrawl invading her neat print.

Last week, Janelle confessed that she wished she had never survived the fire. Don’t you ever regret outliving your father’s victims, she asked.

No, she said. I regret outliving him.

My father used to drink this every Friday, Janelle went on, swinging the empty bottle around like a baseball bat. He would save the corks and make boats with toothpicks for me and my sisters to float in the bath.

I can’t remember what cigarettes my father used to smoke, Kaitlyn said, standing up to get a broom and dustpan for when Janelle inevitably dropped the bottle.

I don’t want to remember, Janelle cried noisily as she bent over the sparkling shards. I’m tired of rotating around this axis of memory.

How could you be tired, Kaitlyn thought but did not say aloud, of dreaming paths around the sun?

Now Kaitlyn pulls off her gloves and texts Janelle that she’ll be over in thirty minutes. She reminds her that they’re supposed to be watching My Finale, the last episode of season eight of Scrubs. It was originally planned to be the series finale. But nothing ever ends the way it’s supposed to.

The apron strings come undone with a tug of her fingers. She puts a dessert knife and a cord of woolen rope into her purse and doesn’t take the house keys. She kisses Rupert long and hard before putting on her coat. She walks out into the cold night air and stands there for a few minutes without her coat on.

Even then, the stench of her husband’s love is still all over her. Janelle must be able to smell it when she cries into her shoulder and says thank you for doing this.

It doesn’t sound very convincing.

The stars hum to Kaitlyn as she drives on the back roads towards Millersburg and parks a short distance away from the hills behind the Amish farm where Rupert first held her. Janelle looks almost serene when Kaitlyn unlocks the lid of the trunk. Janelle’s cheeks are red and splotchy but there are no more tears. Not even a whimper as she helps her out.

Kaitlyn misses the strain in her calves that her father must have felt as he tugged a body behind him. The police reports told her that her father’s victims always fought. Rope burns around the wrist, bruising under the ribs, blood-stained fingernails. Janelle walks forward much too compliantly.

The Virginia bluebells have already died by this time of year. Kaitlyn uses the kitchen knife to carve their small bell shapes into the lapel of Janelle’s skin. The blood makes them shine like silver foil struggling in a sea of midnight.

Kaitlyn takes off her shoes and socks and wiggles her toes in the dark earth. Her father worked on construction sites for twenty years. He had the arms for digging, for carrying, for lifting burdens from shoulder to depth. It takes her much longer than him.

Janelle is still warm when she finishes.

She lays her head on Janelle’s chest, listening to the count of the fading heartbeat. Hopefully someone held her father’s hand as he died. Maybe a nurse, or the chaplain.

When she was in kindergarten her father taught her how to count her own pulse by tapping his finger against her wrist and singing This Is The Way We Wash Our Hands. She hums the tune now, index finger thumping against Janelle’s rising chest. She still doesn’t feel him.

When Janelle is cold and the naked moon is out, Kaitlyn inhales long and slow. She smells her father’s smoky breath at the back of her neck. She finally remembers what kind of cigarettes he used to smoke.

Maverick. The brand with the golden eagle on the box.

She feels him wrapping her arms around her, keeping her warm despite the dropping temperature. He tells her a story about a dinosaur who only ate flowers and lived forever. The meteor never came, you see. All the dinosaur ever saw before she was tucked into bed was a starry blue sky.