48. Chapter 48
Chapter 48
David blinked at her. “Carter’s dead?”
“Yes.”
“Well, fuck,” he muttered, frowning. “That’s too bad.”
“It is?”
“There goes my fantasy of choking him to death with his own dick.”
She exhaled a partial laugh.
“So, how did it happen?” David asked, as a few appealing scenarios ran through his head:
Carter, sans seatbelt, crashing into a telephone pole and almost decapitating himself as he went head-first through the windshield, then bleeding out on the hood of his car.
Carter, unable to open any doors or windows in his burning house and being cremated alive.
Carter having a massive stroke while swimming in his pool, drowning after several hours of trying unsuccessfully to get out of the water.
Carter falling down the stairs to his basement where he kept his ping pong table and paddles, and lying there with multiple compound fractures, unable to move and starving to death.
Carter getting diagnosed with a prolonged, but terminal form of cancer (it didn’t matter which kind), combined with the contraction of a flesh eating bacteria, so that parts of his body (like his dick and balls) would literally get eaten away while the cancer was internally killing him.
David actually liked the last scenario best, because if anyone deserved to die in such a manner, it was that motherfucking pedophile.
“He committed suicide,” Paige told him. “He put a .9 millimeter Sig Sauer in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”
David frowned, actually disappointed at what was a quick and possibly painless end, but then shrugged it off. Dead was dead. “Well, as far as decisions go, that was a pretty good one to make.”
“I think I helped him make it, actually.”
“How?”
“I wrote a book about what he did to me and mailed it to him.” She paused and then added, “It was my ‘Fuck You’ letter.”
“What’s a ‘Fuck You’ letter?”
“It’s basically exactly what it sounds like. At the end of therapy, a sense of closure can be achieved either with a personal confrontation, or a ‘Fuck You’ letter. Most people go the ‘Fuck You’ letter route because confrontations can be very unpredictable, possibly even dangerous.
“However, that didn’t keep me from wishing I could confront Carter and get vengeance like a scene out of a movie but I knew that was never going to happen, not after a panic attack in the post office was brought on just because some guy smelled like him. I had no idea what would happen if I actually saw Carter again and that was enough of an unknown to make it clear that the last time I saw him, which was years ago, would be the last time I saw him.”
She then explained how Lauren had come up with the idea of converting Paige’s journals into a book and having that be her ‘Fuck You’ letter.
“That’s genius,” David murmured.
“I wrote a message to him on the inside cover, telling him what I might have said to him in person, along with some other stuff, then sent it certified mail. I’m not going to lie … it gave me a lot of pleasure picturing him signing for something from me, but not knowing what it was until he opened it.
“I knew he likely wouldn’t read the book, but that didn’t matter. It only mattered that he got it and knew I’d written and published it for the world to read. Well, maybe not the world, but there’s a lot of people out there who now know what he did and that feels pretty fucking good.”
“Damn right.”
“My mother got one, too. On the inside cover of hers, I wrote that my book was the truth, even if she chose to bury her head in the fucking sand.”
David chuckled.
“After she got it, she immediately called Carter to see if he’d received a book, but he didn’t answer,” Paige said. “When he continued to not answer his phone for several hours, she drove over to his house and found him in the basement, dead. None of his neighbors had heard the gunshot, so she ended up being the one to notify the police.
“She called me while she was still at his house and asked if I knew what I’d done. She was crying, so it took me a minute to understand that she was telling me Carter had committed suicide and it was all my fault because of my book.”
“Your mom is a piece of fucking work,” David said, his voice hard. “You know it wasn’t your fault, right?”
“I know,” she agreed with a slow nod. “It was just shitty hearing her say it, and with such venom in her voice. It was actually worse than the day she threw me out of her house. And I’m pretty sure it was because I thought, in some small way, that her getting the book would change things. Make it real. Make her believe me.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No. And I understand that she’d just experienced the trauma of finding Carter with the back of his head splattered all over the couch and the wall, so she had my sympathy there. Her mental state was obviously compromised, but instead of considering that he might have blown his brains out because he was, say, guilty of everything I said he did, she doubled down on her belief that I was lying.
“She said all these hateful things to me: that I was a lying bitch and she was ashamed of me, that I was ‘peddling’ my lies to make money, that I had Carter’s blood on my hands and she would never forgive me.
“And in that moment, I felt this emotional separation inside me. It was like a switch had been turned off and all the love and affection I’d ever had for her just vanished and she ceased being my mother. It was very bizarre, but at the same time, it made things very simple for me. So, I told her I would never forgive her for not believing me and hung up on her.”
David nodded his approval.
“Then I sat in my office—because it was one of my late work days—and thought about Carter’s last moments as he prepared to end his life in his basement,” she said. “I pictured him getting his gun, loading it, putting the barrel in his mouth, and pulling the trigger, and it filled me with peace.”
“I’ll bet.”
“The next day, I drove over to his house.”
“You did? Why?”
“I actually went for two reasons. The first was curiosity, because I wanted to see what it would feel like to be in his house again.”
“So, you actually went inside?”
“Yes. By this time the police and whoever else had been involved—it probably looked like a scene from Law & Order—were long gone and everything was quiet. I found the spare key that was always kept on the front porch under a flower pot, let myself in, and walked around for a little while, just looking. I had expected to feel fear, or anxiety when I stepped inside, but I didn’t feel anything. It was just a house and it looked exactly as I remembered, including my bedroom.”
“You had a bedroom there?”
She nodded. “It was pretty much just for show since I don’t think I actually ever slept in there, but if I hadn’t had one, it might’ve made my staying there so often a little suspect. Carter thought about things like that, so … I had a bedroom.” She gave a rueful chuckle. “He even had Claire decorate it for me, so it looked a lot like the one I had at home.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he muttered, mulling over how much of a sociopath Carter had been, to not only molest his sister’s daughter, but to also have his sister decorate a ‘show’ room for her daughter in his house of horrors. Which reminded him … “You said you went to his house for two reasons. What was the other one?”
“To retrieve the book I sent him, if possible.”
“Really?” He hadn’t expected to hear that. “Why?”
“Because I needed it for something.”
“Oh.” He wondered what she needed it for, but since her answer seemed deliberately vague, he decided Paige didn’t want him to know the reason, so he asked, instead, “Were you able to … retrieve it?”
Paige nodded. “It took me a while to find it, because it was outside in the garbage bin by the side of the garage. I don’t know who threw it away—if Carter did it before he killed himself so no one would see it, or if it was Claire making sure no one coming into the house saw it after she called the police.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I was just glad I got it back because after finding where Carter’s funeral was going to be, I made an appointment to talk with the funeral director. At that meeting, I told him I was aware there wasn’t going to be a ‘viewing’ because of the circumstances of Carter’s death, nor was the casket going to be open during the service, so I asked the funeral director if it was possible to have a keepsake put in Carter’s casket for me.
“He said yes, that he would put it in before it was sealed, so I gave him the book. I thought he’d just take it and send me on my way, but he actually took a minute to examine the cover and read the blurb. When he was done, he gave me this long, sympathetic look and assured me he would personally put it into the casket himself. I thanked him, then very nicely asked if he could also place it so that Carter was actually holding it against his heart, nice and tight.”
David half-chuckled at that.
“The director said he’d be happy to do that for me, so as far as I know, Carter’s buried holding my book against his heart.” She smiled. “And that’s my story.”
In the ensuing silence, David leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, feeling utterly spent. The bottle of wine that he’d mostly drunk by himself had more than caught up with him. “Thank you for sharing it with me like this,” he told Paige softly.
“You’re welcome.” Then, with concern in her voice, she asked, “How are you doing?”
“Well,” he replied, looking down at his hands, “I feel a little rough right now. Some of that was really hard to listen to, but … it explains a lot. And it changes things. Changes how I look back and see our marriage.”
“I know. It was the same for me.”
“I wasn’t your first.” The words came out with soul-deep sadness. It had always been something that mattered to him, something he had treasured, and now it wasn’t his anymore. “Carter took that away from me. From us.”
She moved so that she was semi-hugging him from the side, her hands circling around to meet across his chest and pressed her cheek to his shoulder. “No, David. In every way that counts, you were my first. Our first time is what I remember—it’s the only first time I know. And I chose you. I dated a few guys before you and I met, and I never slept with any of them because I never wanted to. I thought I was giving you my virginity, but even if I technically didn’t, I gave you my first consensual time and that matters. So much. I never gave Carter anything. Whatever he got from me, he took by force. You were my first ‘everything’ that mattered.”
David’s eyes were burning again and he pressed the heels of his hands to them. “He gave you away at our wedding,” he whispered, his throat tight. He didn’t know if it was the wine or the emotional overload of the evening, but he was starting to really break down.
Paige nodded and he could feel the movement on his shoulder. “I think about that a lot. I remembered right before he walked me down the aisle, he whispered that it was fitting for him to be the one giving me away, because I’d always ‘belonged’ to him. But he was wrong,” she said, her voice full of steel. “I never belonged to that son of a bitch.”