2 LET ME GET THE CHILDHOOD CRAP OUT OF THE WAY FIRST
Put yourself in my shoes. I was twelve years old. My family was wrecked. I was seeing a shrink. And my mother up and changed my name. Didn’t ask me. Didn’t warn me. Just left the decree for me to find on my pillow—a goodnight kiss-off from her and the Great State of Double Whammy. All because Dad killed a couple of people. Okay, a bunch. But still.
I pulled up my pajama bottoms and stormed into the hall, shirtless, barefoot, batshit. I’d show her. I’d rip up that stupid paper and throw it in her face. Damn right I would.
But she wasn’t in her bedroom or the living room or the kitchen. She was way ahead of me, as always, across the yard in the cottage in her studio at the rear, doing God-knows-what to God-knows-who for God-knows-why. The hours she spent holed up in there, year after year, week in, week out . . . And since Dad had been removed from the picture, her hours had quadrupled. Just when I needed her most.
No shocker. More than once I’d heard her tell my father, “He was your idea. You know how I feel about children.” My wicked stepmother was my own mother.
I paced the porch, the planks soft and cool underfoot, the air warm and serene, and my mother’s court-sanctioned betrayal of me and my dad toxic in my fist.
I’d show her. Damn right I would.
I started, stopped, stewed, as the flash of Mom’s camera strobed blue-white through the cracks of the shutters and into the night. Or were those lasers blasting from her eyes? I wouldn’t put it past her. Wouldn’t put anything past my mother.
The photography was for her business. Her website. There was truth in this. A half-assed truth. It was the whole-assed truth I worried about. I had witnessed enough by then to fear enough.
To hell with it. To hell with her.
Down the wooden steps I went.
Across the dewy lawn I charged.
By the hand-painted wooden sign I wavered.
BLESSING’S CHRISTMAS COTTAGE
ORNAMENTS, GIFTS & BRIC-à-BRAC
HEATHER BLYTHE-BLESSING, PROP.
My legs were banana peels.
My heart was a grenade.
Maybe changing my name was a good idea, after all. Considering.
I let the paper slip from my hand and onto the stoop.
I retreated the way I’d come. Back to my bedroom and the 24/7 shuffle-play of my brain.
I buried my face in my pillow, did what I often did, steered my dreams to another family, another life. Pretty much any other family, any other life.
Mom greeted me at breakfast, her smile off-the-rack, her empathy a level teaspoon. “Sleep well?” She tipped the box of Grape Nuts into my bowl, passed the milk for me to pour. “You’ll get used to it, same as everything else. If anything, I should have made the change sooner. We need to move on.”
I conceded nothing. Not to her face.
For twelve years I was Bobby Dickens and then, overnight, Bobby Blessing.
Blessing was a goddamn awful wussy way to go. Too churchy. Too sibilant. At odds with the badass I had worked so hard to be. Not that Dickens had been a piece of cake. Put a Dick anywhere near a kid’s name and you’re asking for trouble.
My mother was looking out for me. In her own way, I suppose. Couldn’t have been easy: Dad busted and holding on Banrum’s death row, while she trawled the fallout with me in tow.
Change of name changed nothing.
Wasn’t a soul in town who didn’t know what my old man had done. What he might’ve done too. If he hadn’t already been tagged with every unsolved murder in America, he would be soon.
Wasn’t a soul who hadn’t looked at me and seen a chip off the old block. The shame I carried. The humiliation. The death wish. There is little upside to having a murderer for a dad. Unless you expect to write about it someday, cash in on the infamy, make yourself come out spanking clean.
Wasn’t a soul who hadn’t pointed a finger at my mom, bandied about how much she knew and when she knew it. It wasn’t shame with her, it was defiance, a compulsion to rub her tenacity in their faces.
Thus we did not move on as Mom had said. We toughed it out in Hillsdale for three more god-awful years before she relented, decided she’d had her fill of the town. Her fill of me too, as it so happened. Because she also decided it would make my life easier if she was no longer a part of it.
She didn’t pussyfoot. “People disappoint, Bobby. None more than family. The less family in your life, the stronger you will be. And you, more than most, need to be strong.” She was relocating to Europe, which was as specific as she got. She would be dumping me somewhere near Boston.
She was bringing her pioneering approach to parenting to bear once more. She might as well have pinched my nostrils, stuffed a sock down my throat, run duct tape across my mouth.
I was fifteen. I wasn’t ready to be on my own. A boarding school, no less. As if the Hell of Hillsdale had been my warm-up. “I don’t mind being disappointed, Mom. Honest.”
“Alas, sweetheart, I do.”
“You think I’ll disappoint you?”
She glanced at her watch. She had a flight to catch.
“What if I get hit by a truck or something? What if I need to talk to you?”
“For heaven’s sake, darling, we barely talk now.” She rummaged in her purse for a scrap envelope, scribbled a name and number on the back, and pressed it to my palm. “The lawyer, the one who’ll be sending the money, he knows how to reach me. Do not abuse the privilege, Bobby. Genuine emergencies only. Episodes of teen angst do not qualify.”
“But summer . . . Christmas . . . I’ll see you then, at least, right?”
“The school has an excellent program for students who remain in residence during vacation periods. You’ll be well cared for.”
“But what about when they, you know, when Dad gets, well, you know?”
Word was, my father’s bromance with Death had grown personal, their intimacy blushing, a mutual admiration society grounded in the arbitrary, extending to both victim and methodology. Adopting Death’s model, Dad was more than open about his guilt, while more than vague on motive. The best the profilers could come up with was eeny meeny miny moe, as near to perfection as a killer, serial or run-of-the-mill, can hope for.
Dad was also bored to death with death row. The pleas for commutation and subsequent delays annoyed him to no end. Given the chance, knowing him, he would have taken an axe to the meddling do-gooders and abolitionist junkies who petitioned on his behalf. He was pushing to meet his Unmaker, and the powers that be were looking to oblige. While we’d been more Darth and Luke than Mufasa and Simba since his arrest, I’d been counting on Mom to be there for me when he finally got his wish. “I mean, what’ll I do when it happens?”
“Oh, surely you will think of something, darling. Write a poem. Isn’t that what teenagers do? Or spend more time with what’s-her-name, that therapist of yours—that Cutcheon person. I must warn you, however, do not expect closure. In my experience, the concept is woefully overrated.”
Mom could live with being single, single mom not so much. She was burying me alive. For my own good.
Her façade faltered as she moved to hug me, repressed affection on a longer lead. The offer was too late. I broke her grasp, ducked beneath her goodbye kiss. “Yes, well,” she said, “if this is the way it must be. Not your doing, Bobby. In no way your doing, sweetheart.” Were those tears in her eyes, on her cheeks? Europe beckoned. She was gone before I could verify one way or the other. Just as well. I had my own tears to contain.
I muddled through the gauntlet of high school, the preppy B&B she had surrendered me to in the wastelands of Worcester. I made no friends, did not try, rebuffed all who attempted otherwise, and held my own against the privileged pricks who mistook me for a whipping boy. I will spare you the boarding school drama. You’ve seen the movies; you’ve read the books. Take the brutality, eliminate the triumph, and call it Bobby Blessing’s Schooldays.
Come time for college, I fluked my way into an institution that favored the aggressively average. I proved the point by dropping out spring break of senior year. Eight weeks later, May of 2012, I resurfaced in Syracuse and stumbled into a career jerking sodas and riffing hot fudge at Frosty Freddo’s on Erie Boulevard.
Freddo showed me the ropes, ordained me with his wisdom: “There’s no better environment in which to learn the ways of the world than the frozen dessert industry. Anybody who’s ever been up to their armpits excavating a tub of hard-frozen Butter Praline will say the same.”
I did not tell Freddo I knew better, that one education trumped ice cream: having a serial killer for a dad.
They say he murdered twenty-seven innocent people. Do not believe it. The real number is higher. I don’t know how much higher, but probably a lot.
According to Dad, he didn’t murder, either. He killed. There is a difference.
Murder is a crime of pleasure or vengeance or passion or impulse or happenstance or stupidity or negligence or insanity. Killing is a service.
You might think my father was a bad man. He was.
You might think you know the whole story. You don’t.
You are not alone. I didn’t know the whole story either.