don’t watch these shows because they’re good. They are, in fact, some of the worst journalism you can find. I watch because my father is on trial for the murder of his ex-wife, Carla, and there are reporters in the courtroom. These so-called reporters from 48 Hours and 20/20 and Dateline have tried to talk to me. I watch to prepare myself for when my own family’s tragedy shows up as entertainment on prime-time TV.
The shows are terrible—even if the topic is riveting. They repeat everything a minimum of five times (I’ve counted), and after each commercial break they review the tale from the beginning, in case someone has decided to tune in mid-show. They flash the same pictures on the screen, over and over—the woman, beautiful and happy, smiling with her children. Family portraits where you’d never dream someone was thinking of killing someone else in the photo. And then there are the graphic crime scene pictures—blood-soaked carpets and mattresses, a body on the laundry room floor. They interview friends of the deceased who usually say something like, The minute I heard she’d been killed, I knew it was him. Sometimes, if the producers of the show are lucky, the friend is able to provide a letter in which the woman wrote those very words: If ever I turn up dead, he’s the one who did it! I fear for my life every day. That sort of thing.
Lots of the people who commit these crimes do so because they have fallen in love with someone else and think the only way out of one marriage and into another is to kill the spouse who stands in the way of the new, improved model. Again, this stuff seems obvious to me, but who would want to become the new wife of a man who just offed the first one? What’s to stop him from later doing the same thing to you? And how is it that people get married to someone they’re later going to want to kill? Why does a woman ever stay married to a man who makes her fear for her life? And why, as in many of these badly televised cases, does the husband think the only way out of a marriage is to murder the wife? Hello? People! Ever heard of divorce?
My parents had been divorced for two years and separated for four. My dad had no other lover, not that she would’ve cared if he did. She’d fooled around for their whole marriage, and, to use Dad’s saying, would not have had a leg to stand on. She’s the one who wanted the divorce in the first place, and their split was what they call “amicable.” So it doesn’t add up. Everyone you talk to in this town is pretty much of the mind that they rushed to accuse my dad, because when there are gory-ass murders of gorgeous women, people want someone behind bars—now.
I don’t go to court every day like my dad’s brothers do. At least one of them is there at all times—they do shifts. I’ve gone twice, and that was enough. Everyone thinks I don’t go because it’s a horrible thing for a kid to see and think about. But 1) I am not a kid. I’ll be a junior next year. And 2) I’m not so delicate that I couldn’t face it if I wanted to. And 3) Hard as it is for people to fathom, I am over the initial shock of all this—the murder was a year ago last month: June 12th. A year is a very long time. I don’t go because I hate all the whispering about the poor daughter, and because I get tired of dodging those nosy reporters, but mostly because it seems like a waste of a summer, and I already lost last summer to this whole ordeal. I’ve got stuff I want to do. Besides, I think it’s more helpful to my dad if I visit him, when we can have conversations, than it is to see him during the trial, when even smiling at the defendant from across the room is discouraged.
Among the many horrible things about this situation is all the therapy that gets forced on you, and I’m not even opposed to therapy in general—I think it’s great and necessary and everyone should try it at least once. But enough can be enough. Pretty much everyone thinks I should be in therapy for the rest of my supposedly ruined life. I’m supposed to turn out a whack job. The relatives on both sides of the family are concerned: if I’m upset, they worry about me; if I’m not upset, they worry about me. There are only so many times you can rehash the story with a therapist, telling her how it all felt every step of the way. It starts to be as boring as Dateline.
Probably the worst of the aftershocks was when my boyfriend, Jasper Finch, broke up with me. His parents put me up for the first month after it all happened. The Finches are good people. But it freaked them out—I mean, who wouldn’t be freaked out by a murder in their neighborhood? Everything that had been great between me and Jasper got overshadowed by it. Nobody wants to date a girl who has 1) mandatory therapy, 2) a mom in the grave, and 3) a dad in jail. I give people the heebie-jeebies. I’m a walking reminder of the whole mess. Ruin.
Here’s a story about the kind of dad my dad is. When I graduated from 9th grade, the last year at the junior high, we were driving home from the ceremony and Dad said he had a surprise for me. (My mom had been at the ceremony, too, but we weren’t getting along so I didn’t say anything to her. I noted she was there, though.) I knew if there was a graduation present forthcoming, it would be from Dad, and sure enough, he started acting all sneaky on our way home. He wanted me to guess. He is very big on guessing games, and never considers that I might’ve outgrown them.
“A car,” I said. This was a joke, because 1) I was not old enough to drive, and 2) we didn’t have that kind of money.
“Right,” he said. “Hot Wheels, how’d you know? Those little speedsters—and I got you the race track, too.”
“Sweet,” I said, going along with his joke.
“Guess again,” he said.
“A mountain bike.”
“Ah,” he said. “We’re doing the transportation category. Next you will guess boat or plane.”
“Boat wouldn’t be bad. One of those kayaks that you can take out on Lake Travis or Town Lake?”
“Well, Tate, I apologize, but it’s not a boat. Nor an airplane. And not a choo-choo train, either.”
“Just tell me already,” I said.
“I want to see if you can guess. Come on, use your ESP.”
He and I used to believe we had mental telepathy together. We could send each other telepathic messages. What color am I thinking of? Which number between one and ten? Guess what we are having for dinner. If I concentrated hard enough, and really envisioned my thoughts merging with his own brainwaves, I almost always got what he was thinking. He would brag about this to his colleagues.
“I’m rusty,” I said. “How about giving me a hint?”
“It’s something you want so badly you can’t even think of it, because if you thought of it and voiced that guess and then it was wrong, you wouldn’t be able to stand the disappointment.” He looked at me then, for emphasis. The signal light we were stopped at went from red to green. “I’ll go so far as to say…”
“Dad,” I said, motioning with my chin toward the light. “Go.”
The green light registered and he drove through the intersection before finishing his sentence.
“I would go so far as to say you probably think it’s impossible that I would give you this particular gift at this particular time,” he said.
There was only one thing he could’ve been talking about.
“You better not be lying,” I said.
“I have never lied to you, you know that.”
“Well, the only thing that I can think of that I have really, really wanted, like since I was thirteen, that you have always said was out of the question, is the guest house.”
“Hmmm…”
