There is a monster that lurks inside me.
There must be. No one can kill their husband without something evil somewhere deep inside their soul…
With all the chaos of the last couple days, the missing girl and the bloody scene, I’d forgotten to lay flowers on Annie’s grave.
It was a tiny marker, just a small wooden cross at the base of the property. Along the tree line, where the sun cast a narrow pocket of shadows between the trees and the field. This was where Annie liked to play when she was alive. She’d bring her dolls and her ducks, and she’d sit in that shadow, pretending no one could see her but me.
There was a reason she enjoyed “hiding” so much. Like me, she was afraid of her father. Andy had never laid a hand on the girl during those first couple years of her life, but she had often seen us fighting. She’d seen the way he’d laid into her sister, Krissy, screaming and whipping her whenever she’d done something he didn’t like.
Despite everything, I still loved my family. I’d wanted Andy to change. I’d thought that if he just quit that drinking, he might be a better father. A better husband. There were moments—moments when he seemed like the man I married…seconds within the day, like when we were watching Seinfeld reruns and we’d laugh so hard our bellies hurt. I’d glance over at his laughing side profile and there he’d be—eighteen-year-old Andy, reincarnated, cutting up and having fun. Or sometimes, I’d expect him to get angry about something, like when I popped a hole in my tire, but then he’d stay perfectly calm and know just what to do.
He stopped drinking for a while, but that was only after it was too late. After he’d killed my Annie.
By all accounts, what happened that day was just a freak accident. Horses are wild and sometimes they get scared. Annie was too young to ride. When the horse got spooked, the fall was just too high. That girl held onto life for a few hours, but then her tiny body couldn’t sustain those types of injuries.
While I held my daughter’s cold, broken body in my arms at the hospital, Andy was down at the pub, that bastard.
He swore it was an accident, that he was holding her up there gentle-like around the waist, and then the horse saw a fox and took off…that was his story.
But I know the truth. He was angry that day. Angry at me for calling him a bad father and determined to watch after Annie all day on his own to prove me wrong. I tried to come out, tried to watch them, to take care of my child, but he yelled for me to go back inside the farmhouse. I can watch my own daughter, dammit! Better than you can, you mean old bitch—those were his words that day. Made me nervous, leaving her alone with him, but then again, there was this niggly, nasty part of me that wondered if he was right. I didn’t give him enough credit. I never let him watch the girls. And he blamed me for his drinking. Blamed me for how the farm was going under. You’re not the girl you used to be, he said. You changed. You made me depressed. You drove me to drink, you terrible woman.
I was standing at the kitchen sink. Krissy was sitting on the floor by my ankles. Such a needy child, she was just like Annie, always desperate to be close to me even though she was almost ten at the time.
Krissy was coloring in that book of hers, hair swooped around her face like a shield. That’s when I heard Andy outside yelling. Not screaming for help but shouting in anger. I recognized that sound. Had heard it before. Heard it so many times…Little Annie was throwing a tantrum again. She was only three, and any time she would go near the barn, she’d cry and scream to ride the horse.
By the time I made it to the back door, I saw him yank her off her feet and toss her on the horse’s back. I couldn’t hear his words. But I imagined him saying exactly this: “There, you little brat! Just ride the damn thing! Are ya happy now?”
Time slows down. It flexes and bends. It taunts me in my sleep. Oh, how I fucking hate time.
I ran. Hard as I could, I took off across the field toward that horse.
Here’s the strange thing: Annie wasn’t screaming on the back of that horse. She was laughing, wild and excited. Oh, how that girl loved horses…
But then her face changed. That look—that look, I’ll never forget…it haunts me when I’m asleep. It haunts me when I’m awake.
Eyes wide, her mouth in a troubled O. For a second, her eyes met mine. They were confused. Pleading. Please help me, mommy, that’s what those eyes were saying…
Her eyes begged for me to save her. But then she fell, and her body shattered when it hit the ground.