A Second Chance

Grant had every right to ignore the shrilling phone. He steeled his will and shuffled in his seat, intentionally turning up the volume and bearing down on the television. The ringing didn’t stop. Every rattling bell of the old landline sounded more and more like the tear stained wails of a hurt or desperately upset little girl. One who needed her father. Tammy was the only one that used the line anymore. She was the only reason he had ever kept it. Who knew when or if she would have a cell phone, or if she would be able to remember any number other than the one from her childhood. Grant refused to stand. He would not walk over to the side table. He would never pick up that phone to her again. She had made her choice. But it just kept ringing. Grant kicked himself for not cancelling the service. He withstood it for an eternity, but eventually, the dagger of sound in his ear forced him to stand and storm over to where it sat on the table. Snatching it up, ready to launch into a tirade, he was cut off before he could even speak.

“DADDY! Thank God! I need your help! I really messed up this time…”

Tammy pulled straight into the garage and lowered the clattering door to the ground behind her. Grant watched from the lounge window. He sighed, downed the last of his coffee and stepped away from the glass, ready to face whatever she had brought to his doorstep this time. He shuffled through the kitchen, rinsed his mug and opened the interior door to the garage. He found his grown daughter standing with her hands on the trunk of her beat up old VW hatchback. It was a miracle that the thing was still running. He doubted she looked after it. She treated very little in the world with the respect it deserved. Tammy looked up at him, blinking over the same big brown eyes that he remembered from her childhood. The ones that used to beg him for another cookie or just one more story before bed.

“Hi Daddy. Thank you for letting me in.” She said, looking curiously sincere.

“What do you want Tammy?” He asked, tight lipped and bypassing any potential word games.

Instead of speaking, she simply popped the trunk, stepping back to let the door rise and pull the parcel shelf up by its strings. Grant narrowed his eyes and carefully, slowly, stepped around to look inside. What he saw, sucked the last of the life he had remaining, out of his body and into the cold concrete of the garage floor.

There was so much blood. More than Grant would expect of such a slight framed lad. She hadn’t even laid down a tarp. Fighting the urge to wretch, he managed to raise a shaking hand and close the trunk. He rested his wide palms against the rear window of the car, as if pinning it closed. His hands looked too big for his body. His arms too long. The walls of the garage seemed far away and everything wavered in dizziness. Tammy’s voice snapped everything back to its normal size.

“I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t!” she wailed, “oh God! What am I going to do!?”

“You lost the right to plead to Him a long time ago” Grant said, shaking his head. He sighed deeply and walked slowly back toward the kitchen door on unsteady legs. With his fingers wrapped around the handle, he turned and looked back at his only child. Her hair was dyed midnight black, her nails scratched with old black polish, her clothes unkempt and dark to match. He could see the tattoos peeking from beneath both her sleeves. They looked like they wanted to know if it was safe to come out in front of him yet. It was not. The metal ring she had mutilated her lip with remained lodged in place, and thick makeup covered the beautiful face he wished he could see as it used to be. The paint was smudged and streaming below her eyes from weeping. Her brown irises caught him watching her and locked with his. Whatever else she had ruined about herself, they remained, and the agony of adding even more pain to their gaze was what eventually swayed him.

“Come inside,” he said, “make us some coffee”

Grant stood in the kitchen, his arms bracing his weight against the counter-top, trying to hold himself upright. He stared out the window into the dark of the evening. Every shadow behind the pane was already known to him. He had looked at the same garden for the past thirty years after all. It was his favourite way of organising his thoughts, looking at something that never changed. Tammy boiled the kettle and bustled her way around the kitchen efficiently. She knew where everything was because like the garden, it had remained constant. When she finally stilled, her tasks complete, they both stood in silence and watched the bubbles violently assault the glass pot.

“Are you going to help me?” She asked, while watching the water fight itself.

“I shouldn’t,” Grant said, his voice calm and steady. He had given up shouting years ago, “I told you what would happen. You still walked out the door with…him. You chose the drugs and the boy over your family. I gave you every chance. Every damn chance and you knew that you were not to return here. Ever. Yet here you are and dammit if you haven’t done both the best and worst thing for yourself to date.”

“I wouldn’t blame you, Daddy. If you need to turn me in,” her voice broke on the suggestion, her perfect eyes welling with more tears, “It would make it easier for me in a way. Take the choice out of my hands. Because right now I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. I’m so scared and it’s all fucked. Every thing just got so FUCKED UP!”

“HEY!” Grant snapped, “You will watch your language under this roof!”

Tammy laughed. It sounded like tragedy. The same laugh her mother would cackle when she was completely lost for words at their daughters behaviour.

“Don’t you think we have more pressing concerns?!” she yelled.

“Maybe. Or maybe this is your chance. I can tell you are still using. I can see it in the gauntness of your face and the thin of your scarred wrists. You dress yourself like a miscreant, smell like a gutter, curse without thought and who only knows where you have been sleeping?”

“Alright Daddy, don’t hold back or anything.” She said, making a weak attempt at a smile.

“I’m done treating you like a child. Smiles and fluttered eyelashes will get you nothing here, Tammy. You made your decisions and look at where it's got you.” He sighed, again, and slapped his hand down on the counter-top with a sharp crack. “God help me…If I get you through this, if I make this go away, you need to make me some unbreakable promises.”

“Oh! Anything! Daddy, please, if you get me out of this mess, I’ll do whatever you say!”

“You will go to a rehab centre of my choosing and kick the drugs. You clean yourself up, shed the make-up, piercings and clothes. Start acting like the responsible child I raised and when they release you, you will come here. For one year past that date, you do not leave these walls unless I say so. You will live a life of respectability from this moment onward. You will look back on this night and shudder to think that you were once this person. If you fail on any of these points, if you drag me back into this world of pain, so help me I will march you down to the precinct and hand you over myself with a full account of what we are about to do. My life be damned. Is this acceptable to you!?”

To Grants horror, his daughter took a moment to consider the offer. The pause was far too long and told too much of what she still valued most.

“Yes, Daddy. Please, just help me get rid of him. I’ll do whatever you want.” She said, staring at the ground and incredulously, looking upset by the agreement she had just made.

Grant put two dirty coffees cups into the sink and turned to his little girl, the murderer.

“While I prepare, go out the back gate and down the garden alley to the start of the street. Walk back up and make sure to move slowly past Mrs. Cuthbert’s front door. She is the only one with a doorbell camera in the neighbourhood, but it only reaches the kerb and struggles to focus on quick movement, so go easy and make sure it sees you. Then let yourself back in the front door, making as much noise as you can so that the curtain twitcher’s opposite take a look”

Once she had left to see to her task, he pulled a long-handled spade from the garage wall and collected two short lengths of scrap wood from his stash. He smacked a single nail through the centre of both to form a cross. He dug out a marker pen, a can full of gas and an old zippo lighter, then dumped the handful of items on the back seat. Since the trunk was full, he covered the collection with a couple of old blankets. A trick his father had taught him, to keep wandering eyes from valuables left in a car. When Tammy arrived back, he snatched the keys from her hand and took a deep breath, before getting behind the wheel.

Halfway down the street, Grant pulled up to the kerb, left the engine running and opened the door.

“Stay here.” He instructed Tammy, who looked up in confusion.

He walked casually over to the Robertson’s fence, noting that all of their lights were dark. They were early risers. A jingle of chain signalled that Benny had noticed him, and sure enough the dopey spaniel came trotting down from his favourite spot on the porch. Grant unclipped the dog from his leash without eliciting so much as a quiet bark. Benny liked him, trusted him. All the petting when he passed their house daily was paying off in a way he could never have predicted. Grant bundled him into the back seat, next to his gear, and after closing the door, allowed himself a single forlorn look and moment of guilt. Another deep breath steeled him, and he returned to the driver's seat to pull away down the street.

“Tomorrow, you are going to submit a police report. Your car was stolen, three days ago. You waited this long because it was lover boy that left you, took it and you thought he’d come back. When he didn’t, you came to me tonight, to have a coffee and talk about turning your life around. You walked from town. I convinced you to call in the theft, forget about him and move back in with me. Are you following?”

“Yeah, stolen car, came to talk. Got it.” Her eyelids were growing heavy. The adrenaline of her situation fading now she had passed it on to him. Only a junkie could care so little.

“Hey! Get it together! I need you to focus, you can sleep when we are done!” Grant snapped.

She sat up straighter and Grant clamped his hands on the wheel. He did not want her to see how much they were shaking. Only one of them could afford to be a mess.

They drove on in silence, Tammy picking at her sleeve and sniffing constantly, in between letting the dog lick her fingers through the gap in the seats. They quickly left civilisation behind and entered the sprawling expanse of woodland that bordered the town. Everyone called it the Lonely Forest, since it cut them off from the rest of the world with its leafy belt.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what happened?” she finally blurted out, her face shaded by the canopy above.

“Do I want to know?” Grant asked.

“I suppose not. I guess it's enough to say that you were right about him. When I saw it for myself, it was too late. I was in too deep. I couldn’t escape and I snapped. Stabbed him with his own knife trying to get away.”

Grant chuckled in satisfaction. He couldn’t help it.

“You protected yourself. Like I always taught you. There’s nothing wrong with staying alive, Tammy, at any cost. Where’s the knife?”

“Still in him” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

He drove them forward through the night, until eventually, they pulled onto the unmapped dirt track that he had been searching for.

The car scraped its way through the branches that reached across the old secret way. Each one snapping back to where it had been before Grant’s incursion, the dry ground leaving no evidence of their passing. He remembered the forested track from his jaunts with his wife. Even back then, before the world got busy, it was impossible to find anywhere private for a teenage couple to enjoy each other's company. It was the most rebellion the two of them had ever reached for, and since they married early, it seemed a small transgression. Now that she was gone, leaving him alone to fail their daughter, he was the only one that would even know it existed. When they reached the end, he left the lights on, but cut the engine, and told Tammy to get the tools.

Digging a hole large enough for a body is far harder than it looks. But Grant had a feeling that not digging deep enough was the biggest mistake people in his situation always made. Every cut of the spade made him question what he was doing, the blisters forming on his hands stabbing at his conscience. Yet he continued to slam the old tool down into the earth for another pass. The mindless rhythm helped to calm his grated nerves. In the end, it took several hours to get to where he was happy with the depth. The hardest part came next. He had his daughter bring the blankets around to the trunk and paused to meet her eyes, before nodding and opening the compartment. Pointing his nose away from the smell, and grateful it also kept his eyes from the worst of it, he wiped down the knife handle that stuck from the body and wrapped the young lad in blankets. Not touching him directly and treating him like a bundle of fabric made things…easier. When he dropped him into the hole, he thought perhaps his once sweet daughter might show some regret. Instead, she spat down onto the body and picked up the spade, avidly launching dirt down onto where his face would be. He must have done something to her that was far worse than what they were doing to him now. The anger at the thought, steadied his hands for the first time all night.

Grant left Tammy shovelling, moving away to complete the part he was dreading. He ushered Benny out of the car and tied him to a sapling at the edge of the path. He smoothed his ears on last time, told him he was a good boy, got in the car and reversed straight over him. He closed his eyes and swallowed his pain when he felt the impact surge through the car and into his feet. Grant buried the dog in a shallow grave, directly on top of the deep one he had carved. He used his marker pen to scrawl ‘Rover’ in a child’s handwriting on the makeshift cross and stuck it into the churned-up dirt. Two lives for Tammy's. And counting.

They drove away in silence, both of them exhausted, sweaty and mud smeared. Grant pulled them into an abandoned industrial lot on the edge of town. All that was left of it was a wide open space of concrete surrounded by fields. He checked that the timber handled spade was lodged firmly in the back seat, tucked the marker pen in his shirt pocket, doused everything in petrol and handed his daughter the lighter. As they stood watching the billowing flames for a few minutes, he realised they hadn’t spoken a word through the entire ordeal.

“Will anyone come looking for him?” he asked.

“I doubt it,” she said, “and if they do, they would not be surprised to find him gone. I think he had already been lost for a very long time.”

“Good. With all we have done, combined with the intelligence level of old officer Caius, you should be safe.”

“Thank you, Daddy. I think I am starting to understand everything you have always tried to do for me. I know I don’t deserve it-”

“No. You don’t.” He said. Her mouth hung open mid-sentence, showing she was expecting a very different answer, “But I do. I deserve the daughter you denied me. I expect you to give her back.”

“I haven’t forgotten our deal. I know what I owe you.”

“One day, I hope, you will consider this the lesser debt. Perhaps you will come to thank me more, for what comes next.”

“I guess we’ll see’ she said.

“Come on, we have a long walk home and we still need to shower and bleach our clothes.” Grant said, and turned away from the blaze that would burn out long before anyone would notice it. Silently, he thanked the lord for small towns, their lack of surveillance, ageing cops and sleepy residents, all of which had allowed him and his delinquent daughter, to get away with murder. He just hoped she was worth it.