“The foot, genius.”
“They said that?” I was surprised. Like I said, I assumed it was a man’s foot.
“Those guys? No. But I spoke to Mastrangelo.” This is a cop who eats in our pizza place all the time. “One of the victims was wearing Air Jordans when she went missing.”
I had been watching the wide road going past, as we crossed from the copied-and-pasted strip-mall wasteland into the first layer of “real” Oakwood, the poor part, apartment blocks and smaller stores, the closed-down entertainment places, BASEBALL LANES 24/7 over shuttered-up windows, endless stop signs. “Someone cut her up? Ugh.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think she was whole when she was dumped out at sea.”
“What?”
“Thing about shoes that come up over the ankle—they protect the foot inside. The ocean’s violent. It throws the body around, takes it to pieces. At the joints, you know. Knee, ankle, elbow. Like pulling apart a chicken.”
“Dad …”
“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, the ankle separates and other parts disintegrate, or whatever. Clothes don’t help at all. But the foot in the shoe, it’s kept intact, and eventually it washes up.”
“How do you know this?”
He looked at me, then tapped his shoulder.
Oh.
His shoulder is where he has a shiny, puckered scar—a bullet went through from one side to the other, in the caves at Zhawar Kili, fired from a Taliban AK-47 when I was three years old. Dad was a Navy SEAL, until he got shot anyway. The other bullet pretty much vaporized his knee. They rebuilt it—the Navy has good doctors—but he wasn’t going to be jumping off a landing vessel again, or diving from a Zodiac to check for mines, so he was discharged.
But his tapping his shoulder, that was also code for the Marines. As in: I know that when people drown at sea their feet often wash up in their shoes because I have seen it in the Navy.
Weirdly, it made me feel close to him that we had both seen the same thing. Even if that same thing was a rotting foot in a shoe. I know, it’s not exactly a sitcom bonding moment.
“You told them?” I said. “The cops, I mean?”
“Yup,” he said. “Told Officer Fat and Agent Thin when you were in the bathroom. I think they knew already though. Oh, this is hush-hush, by the way. They don’t want publicity yet. Till now they’ve never had a body; all the women have just disappeared.”
I was silent for a moment.
Then …
I mean, we take what we can, right? Life is not a sitcom; life is not a movie.
“So … Dad … You’ve seen … what I saw?” A foot in a shoe, washed up on shore.
“I’ve seen a lot worse than that.”
He didn’t say this proudly or anything. Just straight. Ex-military guys can be jerks, I’ve met plenty of them, but he wasn’t like that.
He didn’t speak much about the things he saw, or the things he did. I only knew the name Zhawar Kili because Mom mentioned it once, when he wasn’t around. And since she died, I don’t have any way of knowing more about it.
“Were you scared?” I asked.
“Back then? Yeah. I was scared a lot.”
“Dad—” I started, but then I stopped.
“Yeah?”
I wanted to ask him, Did you kill people? It was something I was always wanting to ask him. But how do you ask a person something like that?
And also: What would be the point?
Because I knew the answer already.
The answer was:
Yes. A lot.
So instead I just shut up. We were turning onto our street, cruising past the lights from the front windows, all of them identical. Slowing as we reached the drive into the garage. Turning, our headlights briefly illuminated the mobile home in the front yard of the neighbor’s house, on its cinder blocks, rusting. It takes up the whole space and has been there forever; you would think the garden had been planted around it.
That was when the voice spoke again. The voice of the woman I couldn’t see. It said: “Ask me if I was scared.”
I must have jumped in my seat because Dad hit the brakes and grabbed my arm, hard. “What the ****?” he said.
“N-nothing,” I managed to stammer out. It was like the voice was in the car with me. “Just the shock, I think.” I sensed it right away: that this wasn’t something I could tell him about. Dad frowned and eased the car into motion again.
“There’s Coke in the garage,” he said. “Bad for your teeth, but I guess you need it.”
I nodded.
“Ask me if I was scared when he killed me.”
That was the voice again, not Dad.
I tried to control myself so Dad wouldn’t freak out. Kept myself very still. But inside it was like I was falling from a building, gravity lifting my organs into my mouth.
I gripped the door handle very tightly as Dad pulled up. There is no woman in this car, I told myself. There is no woman in this car. I even took a peek at the backseats, and it was true: there was no woman in the car.
“I’m dead and you did nothing. Are you happy now?”
Take deep breaths, I told myself.