Page 81 of The Family Plot
“How can you do these?” I ask. “Not just Andy, but—god, every doll you make is another person Dad killed. How can you bear it?”
Tate lowers her head. “It’s the only way Icanbear it,” she says faintly, and it’s a while before she continues. “It’s like, when I’m making a diorama, I’m bringing the victim back, in some small way at least. And the whole time, I’m refusing to ignore how they died. Or who killed them.”
She runs a finger along the credenza, in front of Andy’s crime scene. “You said last night that I never told anyone. And on the one hand, you’re right. But maybe my dioramasweremy way of telling. Not who did it, of course. But the horror of it. The brutality.” She throws up her hands. “The inhumanness.”
“Instagram posts are hardly confessions,” I say.
She snaps her head my way, looking at me like I’m so naïve. “That’s exactly what they are. People serving up their souls for publicconsumption. Andmysoul”—she rips her eyes from mine, shoving them onto the diorama—“is full of dead bodies.”
I startle at the comment—how gruesome it is; how it shivers with suppressed rage.
“So I kept doing it,” she adds. “Extra posts, series like BehindTheCrimeScenes, just so I could keep showing more of it. My sketches. The process. And I did it because it was never enough. A finished diorama was never enough for me to convey how”—her voice grows pinched, as if her throat is shrinking—“how repulsive, excruciating, how fucking unbearable it is, what Dad did.”
She shakes her head, squinting at Andy in the hole she dug for him. “But I don’t know. Now I’m thinking maybe… Maybe I won’t put this one on Instagram.”
I hesitate in surprise. “Why not?”
“Because you were right, he’s our brother, he—” She clamps her lips together before she continues. “I want people to know him, to remember him. But why should they remember him in his worst moment, at the end?”
In the diorama, Andy’s hand clings to the soil, almost like he’s trying to push himself up. I tear my eyes away to watch Tate’s face, how rapidly she’s blinking.
“Because isn’t that what I’ve really done with the Blackburn women? I thought I was memorializing them. I worked so hard to get every detail right—even begging Charlie, torturing him really, to tell me what he remembered of each scene—all so it could seem as real as possible. So people would remember that the women themselves were real. Human. More than just a murder. Only now, I don’t know anymore. How are people supposed to see them as more than the murder when the murder is all they can see?” A tear slides down her cheek. “I guess it was all I could see.”
She reaches toward the diorama, fingers hovering above Andy’s body before she pulls her hand back.
“This was always how I coped with what Dad did. But I think it just kept me stuck in it. Like Charlie is. Yesterday was only the second time I’ve heard that story in its entirety, but he told it the exact same way I remember him telling it on your sixteenth birthday. With the same gestures, same big pauses. Almost like it was scripted that way. Like stage directions in a play.”
“You’re saying it seemed rehearsed? You think he’s lying?”
“No,” Tate is quick to reply. “I just mean, he’s stuck in it. He relives it all the time. But—how could he have ever moved on from it? It’s not like he can”—she raises one shoulder in a feeble shrug—“get help. Or go to therapy or anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” She scrunches her brow, like the answer is obvious. “He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone why he’s so messed up.”
“He wouldn’t have to explain it all,” I suggest. “He could just tell them he was”—I search for an appropriate word—“abused.”
As I say it, I know it’s the correct term for what our father did to our brothers. I think of Charlie, crouched on the kitchen floor, tears slipping down his cheeks—and how I didn’t go to him. Mom and Tate surrounded him with their arms, building him a safe place to fall apart, and what did I do? I ran away. I refused him even the tiniest acknowledgment of his trauma.
“No,” Tate says. “It’s too risky. Because what if—”
She stops, turning to the right at the sound of footsteps, Charlie coming toward us from the back hallway. He holds what looks like a checklist, focusing on the paper as he steps into the foyer. Glancing up at me, he stiffens.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey, Dolls,” Charlie says, slow and timid. At first, he seems afraid I’ll lash out at him. Then his face changes, as easily as sliding on a mask. His features harden, and he holds up his list. “Glad to see the two of you enjoying some sisterly bonding time. Meanwhile, I’m actually working—ever heard of it?”
His hair is slicked back, recently showered, and as he glares at us, it’s as if he’s scrubbed away his vulnerability, watched it swirl down the drain like dirt.
He’s so good at pretending. It makes my skin prickle, makes me attempt a final appeal to call off the museum.
“This doesn’t feel right, Charlie. After what you told us last night, how can we just—”
He whips a hand into the air. “To reverse course now,” he says, “when everyone knows the LMM is happening, would only make us look suspicious.”
“Wearesuspicious! Dad was a serial killer!”
“If this is your way of telling me you’re going to the police, you might as well spit it out.”
