Chapter 2 Nicola
“IT SHOULD BE A CRIME.” Dishes clatter in my grandma’s sink.
She’s probably elbow-deep in warm, soapy water, scrubbing the remains of hamburger casserole off her battered pan.
“I watched last week’s episode, and the way she’s making you look—” A splash.
“Shoot,” Grandma mutters, her voice now far from the receiver.
“Have you looked into suing that Greer Woods woman? For… oh, what do you call it?”
“Slander?”
“Slander! Have you looked into suing her for slander?”
My gaze shifts to the pile of envelopes on the sideboard.
On my last day of work, there was only a small stack; however, it’s since fattened into the leaning tower of financial ruin.
I tried opening one yesterday, but the first few sentences (“You are at risk of losing your home to foreclosure…”) were enough to make me quit.
If I can’t find the money to keep a roof over my head, how am I supposed to come up with attorneys’ fees?
Besides, it’s not like I didn’t sign a release form.
I gave the producers permission to use my name and face and words, all with no guarantee of compensation. Because I’m a goddamned idiot.
“It’s technically not slander,” I say, wandering into the kitchen and opening the cupboards. They’re nearly empty. “It’s editing.”
“Editing,” Grandma grumbles. “She’s making it look like you knew what that son of a bitch was doing.”
I flinch, but, of course, Grandma can’t see me from almost two thousand miles away.
“That man,” she spits. “I warned your mother not to marry him. When we were in the vestibule, about to walk down the aisle, I told her, ‘Laurel, honey, you can still change your mind,’ but she was nothing if not stubborn. She was brilliant, just brilliant, could’ve been anything.
” She tsks. “He was a pitiful excuse for a husband.”
Silence on the other end of the line; I realize she’s waiting for me to agree with her.
“Yeah, sure,” I say, but the words are flat and lukewarm.
The truth is, my parents were in love. One of my earliest memories is hovering in the doorframe while they danced, barefoot, in the kitchen—a dishrag thrown over my father’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around my mother’s waist as she hummed along with the radio.
He was a good husband; he was an even better father.
He also murdered five women.
I close the cupboards, no longer hungry for expired pretzels. I need to stop defending him. He lied to me, ruined my life. I should hate him. Why can’t I just fucking hate him?
“We should’ve fought for custody,” Grandma says. “After your mother died. You should’ve come down here and lived with us.”
“That’s actually what I called to talk to you about.” I sit at the kitchen table and pull the spigot on the boxed wine. It dribbles into my glass, then runs dry. “I was wondering if maybe I could come for a visit this weekend.”
Her pause stretches long enough to fill the whole room. “A visit?”
“Yeah. With the finale coming up, it’s getting a little tense here.”
“Hank, can you—” She calls for my grandpa. “Just a moment, Nicola.” She mutters something to him; he mutters back. Then she comes back on the line. “We’d love to have you come, really, but—”
My phone clatters onto the table. Grandma’s voice recedes into a muffled blur: “A pipe burst in the guest bathroom, and now we have contractors coming in and out at all hours. It’s just not a good time.”
I press the heels of my palms into my forehead.
There’s no burst pipe, no contractors. There are only my grandparents, panicked about what the neighbors might think.
It’s my own fault. I haven’t seen them in years, but still—they’re family.
They’re supposed to be the last line of defense, the ones you can count on when everyone else has walked away.
“Nicola?” Grandma says, and I slowly lift the phone back to my cheek.
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be all right.”
“Funny. You know who said almost the exact same thing to me?”
No response.
“My dad. Right before he was arrested.”
I hang up without saying goodbye and replace the empty box of wine on the kitchen table with a full one.
Days pass; the situation only gets worse. I contact a property assessor to ask about selling the house and paying off the mortgage. “If you can sit on it for five, maybe ten years,” he says, “you should be able to recoup most of your original investment. Can you afford to rehab the facade?”
“No, and I can’t afford to wait, either. I need to sell as soon as possible.”
“Which house is this again?”
“The Fischer house.” When he doesn’t make the connection, I reluctantly add: “From To Catch a Killer?”
“Oh.” He heaves out a breath. “Between you and me? I’d cut my losses. You won’t be able to give that house away.”
I discover that some of our neighbors are selling memorabilia on eBay: work orders from the hardware store with my dad’s signature at the bottom, greeting cards with “Hope you have an amazing day” and “Sorry for your loss” scribbled inside in his hand.
A list of instructions he wrote for how to install a new refrigerator has a current bid of two thousand dollars.
I look around our house and wonder how much money is here.
No, gross. Don’t do that. Bad enough everyone else is trying to monetize us. These are our memories—not collectibles for strangers to paste into their morbid little scrapbooks. Our lives shouldn’t be for sale.
The pile of envelopes looms by the front door.
Maybe… maybe if I only listed junk we were planning to get rid of anyway.
I’ve been meaning to clean out the house, get it ready for sale—or foreclosure.
Inside the sideboard drawers are papers that were ripped off legal pads, notebooks with only the first few pages written on, crumpled-up receipts.
I pull out the first one and start reading: “To-Do List (Wed): Take out trash, make dentist appointment, build easels for Nic’s classroom…
” I slide the page off to one side. Next come bills for my graduate school program, all paid by my father.
This is why we’re in debt, why we’re going to lose our house.
Because he was willing to do whatever it took to support me. I rub my shirtsleeve across my eyes.
Interred in the back of the drawer is a Polaroid photo from last year: the three of us—Dad, Greer Woods, and me—sitting on the duct tape–patched couches at Striker’s bowling alley.
A basket of fries wilts in the center of the table, watery ketchup seeping into a paper plate.
Her chin is propped in her palm, and while you can’t tell in the photo, her rental shoe’s tapping against mine like a pendulum.
The memory echoes through my bones, and my toes clench, as if reaching for something that’s no longer there.
Now that the show’s airing, now that we’ve all become minor celebrities, this photo would probably net the most profit.
It goes back into the drawer.
In the end, I assemble a pile of around seventy items that could be sold online.
If I throw them away, there’s no guarantee that one of our neighbors won’t break open the bag and loot our trash.
They’ll end up on eBay anyway, and I’ll be just as broke as I am now.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I snap photos of each item and type up brief descriptions.
I pull a blanket off the couch and over my head before pressing the upload button.
This shouldn’t be a big deal, but it feels like the most brutal kind of betrayal.
The following morning, I check to see how much money’s waiting in my bank account. I find an email in my inbox instead:
Your listings were removed: Offensive material policy.
Hello Nicola, We had to remove your listings because they didn’t follow our offensive material policy. Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t permitted.
A quick search for the listings I browsed yesterday, posted by other sellers, reveals most of them have been removed as well.
I sift through the papers piled next to me: a napkin sketch of a shelving unit, a patient wristband from Oliante Memorial, a menu from the Country Club Family Restaurant.
Nothing about the murders, just the jetsam of an ordinary life.
So then what makes these materials offensive?
Is it my father? Has his very existence somehow become offensive?
Has mine?
I consider the comment posted on social media thousands of times since the arrest: “Kill yourself.” What else is there to do when the world has decided your very presence can no longer be tolerated?
I toss the papers back into the sideboard drawer.
So much for that plan to stave off the creditors.
Cautiously, I lift my fingers to the edge of the curtain and push it aside.
The news vans are still parked outside. Two reporters lean against ABC 7’s vehicle, chuckling; another sits in the back of NBC 4’s, scrolling through her phone.
I could always talk to them. An exclusive interview. There have been more than a few offers slid under our front door—thousands of dollars if only I’d be willing to answer their questions: When did you know something was wrong with your father? What was it like being raised by a serial killer?