The Unquiet

I reached into my pocket and removed the photograph that I had taken from Raymon Lang’s album. The little girl’s face was almost hidden by the body of the man who knelt above her on the bed, and he himself was visible only from the neck down. His body was almost absurdly thin, the bones visible through the skin of his arms and legs, every muscle and sinew standing out upon his frame. The photo had been taken more than a quarter of a century before, judging by the age of the girl. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Beside her, jammed between two pillows, was a doll with long red hair and dressed in a blue pinafore. It was the same doll that Rebecca Clay’s daughter now carried around with her, a doll passed on to her by her mother, a doll that had given Rebecca comfort during the years of her abuse.

Rebecca looked at the photograph, but she did not touch it. Her eyes grew glassy, then damp with tears, as she stared at the little girl that she once was.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“In Raymon Lang’s trailer.”

“Were there others?”

“Yes, but none like this one. This was the only one in which the doll was visible.”

She pressed her hand against the picture, blotting out the form of the man who towered above her younger self, covering the naked body of Daniel Clay.

“Rebecca,” I asked, “where is your father?”

She stood and walked to a door behind the kitchen table. She opened it and flicked a switch. Light shone on a set of wooden steps that led down to the basement. Without looking back at me, she began to descend, and I followed.

The basement was used for storage. There was a bicycle, now too small for her daughter, and assorted boxes and cartons, but there was nothing that looked as if it had been moved or used in a long time. It smelled of dust, and the concrete floor had begun to crack in places, long dark lines extending like veins from a spot in the center. Rebecca Clay extended a bare foot and pointed its painted toes at the floor.

“He’s down there,” she said. “That’s where I put him.”

She had been working down in Saco that Friday, and there had been a message on her answering machine when she got back to her apartment. Her babysitter, Ellen, who looked after three or four kids each day, had been taken to the hospital following a heart scare, and Ellen’s husband had called to say that, obviously, she would be unable to pick up any of her charges from the school. Rebecca checked her cell and found that the battery had run down while she was in Saco. She had been so busy that she had failed to notice. For a moment, she felt utter panic. Where was Je

“Your father collected her,” she said. “Seems the school found his number in the book and called him when they heard about Ellen and couldn’t get in touch with you. He came by and took her back to his house. I saw him at the school when he came to collect her. She’s fine, Rebecca.”

But Rebecca thought that nothing would ever be fine again. She was so scared that she threw up on her way to the car, and threw up again as she drove to her father’s house, coughing up bread and bile into an empty convenience store bag as she waited at the lights. When she got to the house, her father was out in the garden, raking dead leaves, and the front door was open. She rushed past him without speaking and found her daughter in the living room, doing just what she was doing now: watching TV from the floor, and eating ice cream. She couldn’t understand why her mommy was so upset, why she was hugging her and crying and scolding her for being with Grandpa. She had been with Grandpa before, after all, although never alone and always with her mommy. It was Grandpa. He had bought her fries and a hot dog and a soda. He had taken her to the beach, and they had collected seashells. Then he had given her a big bowl of chocolate ice cream and left her to watch TV. She’d had a nice day, she told her mommy, although it would have been even better if her mommy had been there with her.

And then Daniel Clay was at the living room door, asking her what was wrong, as though he was just a regular grandfather and a regular father and not the man who had taken his daughter to his bed from the age of six until fifteen, always being gentle and kind, trying not to hurt her, and, sometimes, when he was sad or when he had been drinking, apologizing for the night that he had let another man touch her. Because he loved her, you see. That was what he always told her: “I’m your father, and I love you, and I’ll never let that happen to you again.”

I could hear the bass notes of the television vibrating above our heads. Then it went silent, and there were footsteps as Je

“It’s her bedtime,” said Rebecca. “I never have to tell her when to go. She just heads up to bed all by herself. She likes her sleep. I’ll leave her to clean her teeth and read, then I’ll kiss her good night. I always try to kiss her good night, because then I know that she’s safe.”

She leaned back against the brick wall of the basement and ran the fingers of her hand through her hair, pushing it back from her forehead and exposing her face.

“He hadn’t touched her,” she said. “He’d done just what she said he’d done, but I understood what was happening. There was a moment, just before I brushed past him and took Je

“Why didn’t you tell someone?” I asked.

“Because he was my father, and I loved him,” she replied. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “I suppose that sounds ridiculous to you, after what he did to me.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing sounds ridiculous to me anymore.”

She worried at the floor with her foot. “Well, it’s the truth, for what it’s worth. I loved him. I loved him so much that I went back to the house that night. I left Je

“So he just kept breaking the floor while I screamed at him. He wouldn’t listen. It was as though I was making it all up, all the things that had happened to me, all the things that he’d done and that I believed he wanted to do again, but this time with Je

“And when he said that, something fell apart inside of me. He had a pickax in his hands, and he was trying to lever up a slab of concrete. There was a hammer on the shelf beside me. He had his back to me, and I hit him on the crown of the head. He didn’t fall down, not at first. He just bent over and put his hand to his scalp, like he’d smacked it against a beam. I hit him again, and he fell down. I think I hit him twice more. He started to bleed into the dirt, and I left him there. I went upstairs to the kitchen. Blood had splashed on my face and hands, and I washed it off. I cleaned the hammer too. There was hair caught in it, I remember, and I had to pick at it with my fingers. I heard him moving down in the basement, and I thought he tried to say something. I couldn’t go back down, though. I just couldn’t. Instead, I locked the door and sat in the kitchen until it got dark, and I couldn’t hear him moving around any longer. When I unlocked the door, he had crawled to the bottom of the stairs, but he hadn’t been able to climb up. I went down to him then, and he was dead.