Girl at the Edge

My father is a murderer.

When I say it out loud, it sounds like a set of dishes thrown on the kitchen floor—all that porcelain clattering, all those shards and slivers arranging themselves against the cool tile, an exploded mosaic. If you look long enough and hard enough, you can put them back together in your mind's eye. If you look long enough and hard enough, you can see where all the pieces fit.

Six months before I was born, my father walked into Ponce de Leon Mall in St. Augustine, Florida. When he walked out, eleven people were dead.

My father is a murderer.

When I say it out loud, something inside me gets bigger. I let it move around my insides until my entire body is swollen with it, my arms and legs inflated with the words. My father is a murderer. I feel my rib cage expand, as if I'm breathing in as deeply as I can, only it's not air that I'm full of—it's something else. Sometimes it feels cold, and I imagine mercury pooling inside me, liquid that makes me heavy and dense. Other times it feels hot like a grease fire, flames running through me until I'm bright as the Burning Man.

I don't know my father, so I don't know if murder fits him, the way a certain type of clothing fits a certain type of body. I do know that my father was married to someone else when he met my mother. When my mother became pregnant with me, his wife found out about us—my mother and unborn me—and she left him, and so he moved in with us.

When I was a kid, my imaginary friend was actually a father I'd invented. His name was Calvin, and I'd named him after a scented slip of paper I smelled at the perfume counter at Dillard's. I decided that Calvin sounds like the name of a father who isn't on death row at Raiford, the Florida State Prison, which is where my father is.

Old Sparky used to be kept there, but they don't use the electric chair anymore. It's all medical now, a shot in the arm, a syringe of sodium chloride that stops the heart. Inmates can still choose electrocution if they so desire, but no one has done that since Tiny Davis was put to death in the electric chair in 1999, blood appearing all over his white T-shirt, streaming from his death mask as he shook violently, his arms and legs trembling against the leather restraints as he moaned.

On death row in Florida, it's mostly men, and they're mostly murderers. I think of my father on a ship with many oars, and the men are lined up, shoulder to shoulder. My father is rowing, the muscles in his arms tensing and pulling with each stroke. My father is rowing toward death. He began rowing the morning he kidnapped his wife from the jewelry store in the mall where she was working, forced her into his car, and started driving south. At some point during the drive, he shot her in the head. Before he drove off with his wife, he killed eleven other people in the mall, but that, as my mother says, is another story for another day.

Where was my father going when he got into that car and began driving? Everyone knows you can't escape Florida by heading south. You'll drive through deep swamp, through the Keys, until eventually you'll hit water with nowhere else to go. When you reach the southern end of Key West, there's a large concrete buoy painted red and black and yellow. The buoy says 90 Miles to CUBA, and it's considered the southernmost point in the continental U.S.A. Tourists have their pictures taken with it, handing cameras over to strangers so they can pose with the cement slab. But my father didn't make it that far, to the crystal-blue waters of the Florida Keys, those little islands dotting the ocean just beyond the tip of Florida on the map we studied in elementary school. The police apprehended him near Crescent Beach, a place named for a sliver of moon. They tracked him by helicopter and barricaded all the roads until he had no choice but to stop.

They had been talking to my father on his cell phone, trying to convince him to spare his wife's life, promising him that everything would be okay if he would just stop the car and let her go. Everyone makes mistakes, they told him. We can help you, the police told him. But my father didn't believe that. He knew they wouldn't help, couldn't help. He knew that no one could help him but himself—he just had to finish what he'd started. He couldn't ever turn back, would never turn back.

By my sixth birthday, my mother and I had moved west, to the other side of the state, to Pass-a-Grille, a small beach town on the southern end of St. Pete Beach, three and a half hours and two hundred miles from the yellow stucco apartment in St. Augustine, which is the oldest city in the United States and my first home on earth.

What I remember most about the yellow stucco apartment is the front door, which was painted dark green. My mother liked to take photos of me in front of the door, and my favorite is a picture that lives inside a photo album that lives inside my mother's closet—a candid shot of my mother holding baby-me in one hand as she unlocks the dark green door to the apartment with the other. Written on the back of the photograph are the words Evelyn comes home in my mother's small handwriting. In the photo, I could be anyone's daughter. You can't tell what my father did just by looking at me. I'm just a tiny figure swaddled in a hospital receiving blanket, white with the patented pink and blue stripes, just like all the other babies born in the year 2000, a leap year, and the start of a new millennium, the hysteria of the Y2K bug safely behind us.

What my father did is public knowledge so I'm sure that many people know more about it than I do. My father is famous in his own way, his name a part of the permanent record of the world. Anyone with an Internet connection can sift through the police reports describing the gun he used, the ammunition, the clothing he wore, all the way down to his socks and shoes. Anyone online can watch videos of survivors sharing their accounts of the deadly events of that day. Anyone online can read the names of the victims or listen to recordings of the multiple 911 calls made from inside the mall that afternoon. In the vast electronic archive, that invisible wireless cloud, lives a maze of articles and timelines, my father's name scattered to the digital wind like seed—in court transcripts, beneath mug shots, recorded on prison medical logs.

I'm sure there are people who maintain websites about my father, people who edit his Wikipedia page, people who write to him in prison, searching for his side of the story, desperate for his words. They catalog the evidence, replay the testimony, assemble the crime scene photos, the markers laid down by police to track where the shell casings fell, where the blood splattered to make abstract patterns on the floor.

I'm sure they are fascinated by his power—the power of the murderer. They paste hyperlinks at the bottom of the page, clickable pathways to the killings, the trial, the sentencing, the profiles of the victims, who were mothers and fathers and brothers and nieces and cousins, all people who were alive once, until my father decided they shouldn't be alive any longer.

These Internet groupies are just trying to make sense of the senseless, or maybe they admire the audacity it takes to simply walk into a space and claim twelve souls as your own. Maybe they envy him not asking for permission, not asking for forgiveness, but rather just going out and taking and taking and taking until there is nothing left, like Templeton, the greedy rat in Charlotte's Web, who will work only for the promise of reward, scavenging for food, his belly inflating as he eats his way through the fairgrounds after dark, feasting on anything sticky or savory or sweet.

They are using my father's full name when they refer to him—always first, middle, last, the way most murderers are known in America. Does it bring some sort of satisfaction, using all three names, like reprimanding a disobedient child? Does it make the victims' families feel better—to ignore the preference of a nickname, to take away a person's power over how they wish to be known? Do we feel safer when we execute Allen Lee Davis instead of Tiny Davis?

I can't pinpoint the exact moment I started to know about my father, the precise hour I learned what he did. There is no sit-down-and-have-a-serious-talk-with-my-mother memory in my mind, like the sex talk or the period talk.

How do you know how you know anything? It's difficult to trace the origins of knowledge, the beginning of learning. Do you remember learning the color blue or the number seven or the difference between hot and cold? Do you remember learning about pigs, pencils, butter, sneezes? Can you recall when you understood that rain was wet and cold?

Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his pioneering work in child development. We learned about him in child development class in junior high, when I was still going to regular school. Child Development is a popular elective that many kids take for the famous end-of-term parenting project in which you carry a sack of flour around with you all day long, wrapped in a receiving blanket, a little knit cap on its flat head. Your task is to keep the "baby" safe and alive. So you bring it to class with you and tend to it regularly. You keep of log of how you care for it. You record all of your activities: when you pretend to feed it, when you change its diaper, when it lies inside its makeshift crib at night. You clean up after the pretend child, the thin coating of soft white flour it leaves behind, a trail of dust that appears everywhere the child has been, a kind of map to trace its movement around the house.

Piaget considered himself an epistemologist, meaning that he was interested in theories of knowledge—the ways in which justified belief is distinguished from opinion. He wanted to know all there is to know about knowledge. He wanted to learn about how we can really know things. Piaget understood that knowledge isn't something we're born with. He knew that the truth can't be seen all at once, even if we believe we've found it. Knowledge is slippery, a fish you try to hold in your hands in spite of its desperate wiggling, the slick scales that slip through your fingers.

We're lucky if we can ever truly know anything, lucky to glimpse, even if fleeting, that flash of smooth fin as the body breaks the water, like an older couple on the ship deck of a whale-watching expedition, a certain thickness of mist surrounding them.

We are born without knowledge—our brains just vessels open for programming, clean slates waiting to be muddied with the dirt of cognitive development, the nutrient-rich soil of knowing. I wasn't born knowing anything about who I was or where I came from. I was spared all of that, a trick of human nature, the ability to be born into blissful ignorance, for how awful would it be to come into this world with all of the knowledge of what came before you?

But then again, there are some things that we know without remembering how we arrived at that knowledge. Siblings separated at birth can still grow up to have similar interests, similar methods for making their way in the world. That's where genetics comes in, that complex system of what makes us who we are in the first place. And sometimes, in the dark of night, when I'm trying to fall asleep, my body remembers what it is I fear the most, what I won't allow myself to consider during the bright light of day—those inescapable molecules, the acids, the substances that remain a mystery to most of us, in spite of the fact that they are the building blocks of life.

This is what I've gathered so far: a collection of anecdotes, found receipts, a piece of an old photo, his name written inside an otherwise empty notebook under my mother's bed, a mix CD with my mother's name written on the mirrored surface in thin black Sharpie. A kid who sat next to me in reading group in first grade who whispered in my ear, My dad says your dad killed people, a kid in third grade who pinched my arm in the lunch line and got scared when I became angry and turned around to glare at her. Don't kill me! she said loudly, and some of the kids looked at me and laughed, and others pretended not to even notice. My mother drunk and crying in the bathroom, her girlfriend, Shea, begging her to open the door, and my mother screaming in a guttural voice I've only heard her use that night—fuck him, fuck him! She screamed until Shea finally picked the lock with a bobby pin and joined her inside the echoes off the bathroom tiles, and I ran into my room and played The Lion King soundtrack, which was stuck inside my purple CD player at the time, the little tray frozen and refusing to open.

I've carried this information with me, this unraveling archive that has never reached an end, for my father is still alive and his story continues, even as he rows toward death. His actions are a rock thrown in the water, creating a wake, circles of motion emanating from the center out, ripples in the surface. His actions ended ancestral blood lines, tore lovers apart, left children without mothers and fathers, made orphans and widows with each squeeze of the trigger. And now his actions overshadow him. He's reduced to a mug shot, a name on a list—of mass murderers, mall murderers, death row inmates.

Over time, I moved beyond what happened at Ponce De Leon Mall on April 4, 2000, and I started moving toward why it happened. When my father was dressing himself in what would be the last items of clothing he'd wear as a free man, when he was preparing the gun and the ammunition, when he was doing all these mundane and awful things, did he feel some sort of trip wire activated, like a mouse stepping toward the cheese and triggering the mousetrap, that mechanism of death, the animal's skinny neck snapped in an instant?

The question resounds within my body. It lives and breathes and moves inside me. It always has. Sometimes the question is fluid and travels down my throat to my stomach and then down to my legs, pulsing toward my feet, all the way down to my toes. Sometimes the question is released from my body, but it inevitably returns, usually in the cooler air of dusk, approaching sunset.

The question remains and remains, tumbling like sea glass in salt water. I'll ask myself, and I'll ask myself, even though there is no answer. But every now and then, I hear a response in the distance of my mind, an answer that is really just another question, another voice from another room. Why don't you ask him?