Tell Me Who I Am

A short story about a serial killer facing dementia, the daughter of one of her victims bent on revenge, and mothers who don't know when to stop.

Photo by Almada Studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-laying-down-on-ground-1877803/

Look at me, escaping the winter blues. Normally, I’d be hiding under blankets in the midst of some existential crisis or knee-deep in nostalgia to the point of absurdity. Thinking life is much like an Edward Albee play minus all the laughter. But I started a new story, about a character I can’t shake, and I’ve learned to stop ignoring what grips you. I wrote this draft within a month, which is record time since I write fiction at a glacial pace. And this story is new for me because I’m seeing my voice evolve. No longer do I have the noose tight around the story, rather, I’m letting it go. Mixing voice with language to see where it goes. If it comes off.

I still struggle with the usual no one cares. No one will read this. Why do you bother? But then I remind myself I bother for me. I bother to challenge myself to go to places I haven’t been before.

I remember Zadie’s Smith’s brilliant essay in The Believer, “That Crafty Feeling.” Every two-bit writer tells you to read Stephen King ramble on about prose, but I tell you that’s coming from people who’ve rarely developed a full-length work. It’s cute for beginners, but it doesn’t give you the gristle and meat you need. It satiates, but doesn’t sustain. But Smith’s essay stuck with me because I was always trying to figure out the type of writer I am and it turns out I’m all the types.

I’m obsessive at the line level but I have no grand plans about plot. I don’t know where the character goes until I write the damn thing, which makes fiction so much harder for me because there’s always a surprise.

And I hate surprises.

I remember watching Barbarian, and I thought it was one the smarter films I’d seen in a while. It takes you off guard, removes the ground beneath your feet because who you thought was the monster isn’t. And there’s a scene where Justin Long’s character encounters a prisoner trapped in a basement. He thinks they’re similar, they being held by an inbred woman. Yet, when he watches some of the videotapes, the horrors this man inflicted on women, he becomes enraged, disgusted. Possibly seeing who he could become while the prisoner sees a younger version of himself on the way to his becoming. I thought about that scene when I wrote this story of two disparate women at different stages of their lives, different paths, but wounded in some way.

I wanted to know if they were mirrors of one another. I wanted to examine a victim of a new kind of abuse—mothers who shamelessly profit off their children in the form of family channels—and how her grapples with her mother’s demise. Wondering whom in her life is the monster.

I also wanted to show how monstrous people are often small.

I’m sharing this new draft (very raw, first draft with minor edits, not any structural or plot changes) with you. It’s long. You probably won’t read it and that’s cool. But if you do read it and like it, let me know. If you don’t, don’t let me know.

Elsewhere, I’m reading Nell Zink’s latest novel, Avalon. I’m also selling clothes on the internet because I can’t seem to care about working in marketing anymore and a woman has to eat, etc., etc.

Okay, here we go…

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Tell Me Who I Am

Kitty had dementia—she was sure of it. But how could you tell? Could you feel your brain shrink and millions of neurons packing their bags before their departure? Dementia was the rude houseguest because here you were, flashing vacancy signs for all your organs to take up residence, free of charge, and then one of them decided it was time to torch the joint. Because maybe it was bored. Maybe it didn’t like your cooking all those years and revenge was best served decades cold with a heaping side of plaque and loss of executive functioning.

Kitty had no means to evict. No way of fighting back. All she could do was get a hose and temper the flames. When the hose ran out of water and the fire spread, all she wanted to do was cry in a sink of water. If only she were the crying kind. If only she could remember where the fucking sink was. A year later, she’d also forget how to bend her head down to the sink and immerse herself in the water. Bu she wouldn’t forget how to die because that’s the one thing the brain remembers.

Dementia is losing yourself, by degrees. Your mind on the lamb with no place to go. So, it wanders lost without a guidebook or map—never reaching its destination.

But when did it start? Was it when Kitty couldn’t remember where she put the grocery bags filled only with gallons of orange juice even though she’d made a list—she knew she’d made a list. She was sure of it. Although she was tempted to turn her house upside down to find the juice if she had to, something gnawed at her. Made her stop. Told her the bags were in the car.

That was two years ago.

Kitty had long since forgotten about the day with the missing six bags of orange juice in the trunk because now she sometimes couldn’t remember where she’d left the car or whether she had one at all. Did she even know how to drive?

Kitty knew she had dementia when someone finally told her. But that was another conversation she’d soon forget. Vaguely she recalled the tests taken, the words, we should’ve gotten this sooner (the doctor), followed by, well, it’s not like there was a neurologist on call in prison (Kitty’s mother), followed by, this is…her? (Everyone in a five-mile radius.)

Now, she’d lost all control of the situation, and she was fuming, on the verge of frenzy, because if someone had the decency to sit her down and say, brace yourself, this fucker’s coming, she could’ve done something. Fixed it. Now, her memory became a glass hurled at a wall and the shards were a scattering of moments, random details so specific it hurt to stare, and faces devoid of names. But she knew she was a fixer. Somehow, she knew this. She eliminated problems. Knew how to clean them up. How to make them vanish from sight.   

It never occurred to Kitty what breed of fixer she was. What sort of repairs she made. How she got so good at cleaning up, making problems disappear.

Kitty had many questions, and no one seemed to have any answers other than try these pills, let’s schedule a new scan, let’s explore this new experimental therapy, we have to think long-term strategy, a place for you. What she remembered changed daily—sometimes, it came careening back with such a ferocity she gripped the edges of counters and chairs to keep her balance. Other times, it was people she remembered, the interiors of homes she’d lived in, the beaches and ruins in the few countries she’d visited. And sometimes, it was knowing her hatred of mushrooms. That’s it. On Tuesday she was a woman who hated mushrooms.

On Wednesday she saw the face of a woman she’d once packed in a suitcase. A body broken, bruised, and blue, Kitty had dug a deep grave in the backwoods of Virginia and buried the body there. She didn’t recall how she body got there (she must have driven but with what car?) or who the woman was, she only saw the face, eyes closed. Mouth opened wide, terrified.

On Wednesday Kitty realized she liked doing terrible things to people.

But on Thursday, all she knew was the color of her older sister’s hair. Her sister’s name. Where’s Jenny? Kitty asked this of her mother, June, every hour, all day. Every time Kitty’s mother told her that Jenny had moved across the country and changed her name after the “messy business,” which loosely translated to Kitty being on trial, imprisoned, and released (due to legal technicalities, witnesses who recanted their testimonies, and compromised DNA evidence) for the torture and murder of a famous YouTuber, Kitty asked about Jenny’s new name. And what woman? What torture? What murder?

June Lister was inching toward 80 and she was the one holding the penitentiary brochures. And this put Kitty to thinking how she had been in a real prison, four walls closing in, no light and shouting in the dark. She saw herself sitting on the floor counting her fingers, hands, arms, toes, the weeds in the plot of land between her legs, the scratches on the wall—anything to will the passing of time.

She remembered arms lifting her up and then she was in a car and her mother was chain-smoking with the windows rolled up because people were spitting and throwing rocks through it. Their rage amounted to pounding on the car door. How could any judge release her? They shouted, Killer! Murderer!

And Kitty smiled because she knew they were talking about her, and how good had it felt to have the sun on her face and her mother sobbing in the front seat because Kitty had not, and never would, get better. No matter how many doctors she had lied to, how many medications she flushed, how many prayers her mother made to a god that ceased to exist. In the car, on the long drive home, Kitty clamped her hand over her mouth and laughed at June’s quiet desperation. 

Then, the incident with the cat when Kitty was a teenager. A mangled surgery June had initially brushed off because maybe Kitty was reacting to her father’s arrest for being part of a ring that kidnapped and raped six Lithuanian girls instead of what it really was—a doe-eyed, pink-cheeked Ted Bundy in the making.

When Kitty’s fresh out of prison and sitting in the kitchen of the childhood home she’d always wanted to burn but was too bored to do it, June had the nerve to bring up the cat, to which Kitty responded, “Why are we talking about the cat? The cat has nothing to do with this.” After a brief silence, her face re-arranged itself. Confusion. “Which one? Which cat? Does it matter?”

“Yes, Kitty,” June said. “It matters.”

Was dementia’s arrival not knowing which cat? There were no megaphone announcements. No flares, pom-poms, or helicopters. Perhaps the coming was more like a whisper, a taxicab crawling to the curb and cutting its engine. Shutting off its meter and lights. June gave Kitty a phone with her number and 911 programmed in. She showed Kitty how to use the recorder.

“What about my friends?” Kitty said, seeing only two numbers on a screen.

“You have no friends.”

“That’s disappointing.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Anyway, keep a diary to make sense of things,” June suggested. “Maybe it’ll help you remember. Or at least keep track.”

“My name’s Katherine,” said says. “This is what I remember.”

*

Mackenzie Perry remembered everything. She remembered her mother and her camera, a piece of machinery that was an extension of her hands and eyes. Machinery that had become another watchful member of the family—capturing, judging, and analyzing her. Mackenzie remembered the camera documenting her every waking moment, following her from room to room, to her closet, under her bed, under her sheets. “Smile for me. Smile until it aches,” her mother would beg. “You’re not showing me happy,” her mother would warn, and Mackenzie would smile harder, wider, showing off all the teeth once caged in metal and bleached white for the cameras. Relief came in the form of her mother’s pregnancy, when there was another wad of cute to capture and monetize.

Her mother called herself a “creator” of content, of children, of lives. Each week, she broadcasted the last goings-on in the Perry house on the Merry Perrys, a postage stamp of real estate on the internet where over two million people witnessed fights and first kisses, diaper, and tampon changes. Mackenzie’s first period was a rehearsed three-day production complete with suspenseful, copyright-free music and Proctor & Gamble as a sponsor. Products that captured her bleed and cleaned up the mess. Ditto with Baby Anjelica and diapers.

When she was fifteen, her mother withdrew Mackenzie from school to help with the family, which entailed caring for Anjelica, cleaning the house, doing the laundry, and editing the family videos. Mackenzie would watch herself on screen, and she was unrecognizable. She knew all the pixels and pieces made up an image of herself, yet she couldn’t touch it, connect with it, feel anything other than was I smiling enough? Was I showing happy?

Once, her mother leaned over her shoulder and said, “Is there any way you can make yourself look a little smaller? You’re getting big around the middle.” Mackenzie considered placing a life-sized cardboard image of her likeness in every room, because honestly, would anyone even notice?

Sometimes, strange older men would stop her mother in the store. “I saw your daughter on your show, and she sure looks pretty.” Any normal mother would pummel these men. Hose them down with Lysol. But Mackenzie’s mother wasn’t normal, and she would only smile and through gritted teeth and say, “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” which scared men more than if she had attacked them with household cleaners.

In Mackenzie’s darker moments, she wondered how her mother would react if one of the weird men kidnapped, raped, and killed her. Who would be the funeral sponsor? How long can you milk sympathy tears before a new baby enters the brood, replacing Mackenzie completely?

But if you asked Mackenzie what she remembered most, she’d tell you this—

It was summer, a Sunday, and she could feel the hot sun on her face. She laid down on the grass in her backyard when she heard the phone ring. The house was quiet save for Anjelica in her crib. Her father golfed while her mother highlighted her hair and removed every inch of hair from her body. Mackenzie knew she was supposed to be in the house, near her sister, but she was fifteen, tired of having been an adult straight out of the womb. Imagining what a normal life might look like.

On the phone was an old friend from high school who told her they’re all driving to the creek with coolers and bacon sandwiches, and did she want to come with? Mackenzie looked down at her sister sleeping soundly and then at her calloused hands and couldn’t remember when she had last slept undisturbed. Mackenzie didn’t love her sister, she saw her as another obligation, another task assigned to her, another thing to take care of.

“So, are you coming?” Lila said. “Or does your mom have you on house arrest?”

Mackenzie grabbed her keys. “Fuck my mom,” she said and bolted out of the house.

If Mackenzie could hold on to those final few hours of joy, she would. Wet to-the-bone shorts, grass and gravel between her toes, the sour taste of beer and the sweet cherry wine coolers. The salty taste of Matt’s lips and how everyone chorused Mac and Matt! If only she could remain in the hours when Mackenzie slipped off her shorts and ran through the forest half-naked and not photographed before her mother stormed their makeshift picnic and grabbed Mackenzie by the hair.

Everyone shouted and screamed, and Lila took out her phone and filmed it because I’m calling CPS and Mackenzie’s mother yanked the phone out of Lila’s hands and hurled it into the creek. Mackenzie’s friends screamed they were witnesses while she was shoved into the car, careening down the road until they were home and then there was Mackenzie shouting why do I always have to take care of Anjelica? Why can’t you ever be a mother?

“You want a mother? I’ll show you mother.” Then came the belt and the hot curling iron on her back and upper thighs. There was Anjelica howling and her father quietly closing the door to Mackenzie’s room behind him because he believed if he didn’t see the pain the pain didn’t exist, but his daughter was throbbing in every way a child could throb. 

Later that night, Mackenzie opened her bedroom window. She jumped, twisted her ankle, and ran through the heat and the pain to a neighbor. She banged on the door. Covered in leaves, dirt, and blood, she said over and over, “You have to help me. Help me hide.” The neighbors were shaken. One of them called the police. They wrapped Mackenzie in a crocheted blanket and gave her hot tea.

“My mother. She’s not. Who you think she is,” Mackenzie sputtered out. “I don’t know who she is. Or how I’m still here.”

It’s then when her mother rushed over, and Mackenzie could feel the beam of the game-show smile from inside her neighbor’s house. She could hear the words psychological problems, attention, and she does this sometimes. She could see the police offers come in and escort her back home. She could hear the door close, and latch shut. She could see the shadow of her mother approaching with her father’s belt. A man only known as “hot husband,” who rarely left their bedroom.

Her mother whispered, “Now that’s not showing me happiness, is it?” Before the room went back, she could feel the slap of leather across her back.

A day later, Mackenzie delivered a note of apology to her neighbors for “disturbing their peace.” A note her mother had dictated, and Mackenzie dutifully wrote because what else was there but this house, this woman, and all this pain?

It was summer and she wore layers because the wounds were still raw, and her back was scabbed and bleeding. She came home and prepared Anjelica’s bottle, cleaned the toilets, prepared dinner, and responded to the Merry Perrys fans on social media with a string of blue heart emojis.

Mackenzie sat at the dinner table when her mother once again removed her plate and made her watch the rest of them eat because she wasn’t “living in truth,” as her mother liked to say. For dinner, she had a single glass of water and bits of baby food Anjelica hurled to the floor that she captured with her toes.

Mackenzie imagined she was in a television show where everyone’s lives were resolved in thirty minutes. You couldn’t even get a pizza in thirty minutes, yet you could be made whole and complete by the end of an episode. She pictured parents who slept in the same bed and rushed to their children in the morning to pack their lunch and ruffle their hair. Cameras were only brought out on special occasions to savor the minor moments and major victories. Her life wasn’t one where the only signs of light were from an aperture widening.

On the television a woman announced she had just the gadget that would solve your dryer problems. Forget static cling and shrinkage—I have your solution! Mackenzie longed for a life where her biggest problem was a sweater shrunken beyond repair. 

In her room, with the lights out and the doors shut, Mackenzie gnawed at her pillow. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Then the doorknob, the door, her mother’s footsteps. Mackenzie pressed her eyes shut as her mother stood over her. All she could feel was a paper bag draped over her face, which clung to her mouth with every inhale and exhale. The bag was wet with her cries, and it was lifted as swiftly as it was placed over her head. All she could see was her mother standing over her. Perhaps to let her daughter know she was never completely safe. As Mackenzie finally managed to fall asleep that night all she could hear was the shutter click of the camera.

Always the click. Always the flash. Always the constant glare in the dark. 

*

Kitty liked sitting in the Perry’s living room while the family slept. She’d finger the soft tassels of the cashmere throw pillows and dig her heels into the rug under the coffee table. It was easy to slip into a house when everyone in town still left their back doors open. Even now, even after years of movies, true crime shows, and news reports prattling on about home invasions and killers creeping into windows.

Homes were often crime scenes, even in the smallest of villages and tree lined streets. Wasn’t it only a week ago when a former accountant came out of his home, dressed in a bathrobe and bear claw slippers, holding a 12-gauge shotgun that he used to remove an entire family off the census because they played his neighbor’s music too loud, the kids stomped all over his lawn with their frisbees and footballs soaring overhead. After, finally, some semblance of quiet, the man scooped up his morning paper and read it on the porch when police stormed his property.

While the man was down on the ground and hearing the familiar staccato of his Miranda rights, he turned his head to one side and asked if it was possible for someone to fetch his glasses. His wife howled and screamed on the porch as the man repeatedly shouted for his glasses.

A few blocks away lived the Perrys. Lila Perry with her collection of Chanel bags, $300 highlights, and a Lexus, preaching family values and sprinkling the gospel all over the pies she baked for her seemingly catatonic husband and two children. The eldest, Mackenzie, appeared to be on suicide watch yet smiled wide for the cameras. The baby, a Bubonic bundle of spit, didn’t hold Kitty’s interest beyond how Lila paraded her child in front of the camera and used her image in the thumbnails of the videos she posted.

Videos that would garner millions of views. Videos depicting a wholesome, Bible-thumping family when, in reality, the mother was a sociopath, the father was a drunk who liked to look at teenage girls a little too long, a little too much, and the daughter was a ticking time bomb of fear and rage. Baby Bubonic solely existed for the clicks and views.

This was Kitty’s kind of family.

For months, she followed the Perrys in her car and on foot. Collected their trash and dug through it. Hacked into their computers and phones. Lately, she became bolder, creeping into the house after dark while the family lay sleeping. It was impossible to get in during the day because since Lila pulled Mackenzie out of school someone was always home. So, Kitty got creative. She bought nanny cams and hid them around the house because it was important to not only hear and see them, but she also had to feel them. Know them better than they knew themselves.

At first, it was Mackenzie who Kitty craved. But watching her flee her house that one time, face the color of first-degree pain, it reminded her of the four girls below the floor. It was summer too when her father and five respectable men—men with families, picket fences, the whole smear—were convicted of keeping five teenage girls captive in the woods. Seeing Mackenzie run stirred something in Kitty, a nostalgia for first kills and her family coming undone. And it wasn’t empathy she felt because she didn’t indulge in, or entertain, emotion, but it was more like hunger for the one of many mothers who failed to protect their children.

If you’re going to bring a screaming mess into the world, you’re obligated to take care of it. Yet, children were getting molested, kidnapped, beaten, neglected, and forgotten. Always it was the mother who failed the assignment. You have one job, and you can’t even get that right. And it disgusted Kitty, this failure of duty, the lack of discipline, which made her consider Lila. Lila, who carted a camera everywhere she went. Lila, who did nothing but ignore and abuse the family from which she profited. Lila, who was a little too smug and try-hard cruel for her own good.

Kitty couldn’t wait to get her hands around Lila’s neck.

*

Who was that woman? Mackenzie wondered. Who was the woman who watched their house from across the street? The woman who followed her mother to the mall and their father to the job he was fired from. No one knew Mackenzie’s father spent his days in the Walmart parking lot tapping away on his laptop until she followed him on her ten-speed bike because she wanted to talk to him about her mother.

At first, she thought he was running errands before work, but after two hours of watching him in his car while he typed and nibbled at the sandwich, which she’d made him that morning, Mackenzie knew something was wrong. And for the rest of the week, she tailed him. It was then she saw that woman again. And she watched the woman watch her father until her father pulled out of the parking lot and drove to Applebee’s. Mackenzie was used to fans stopping them on the street, sending ornate packages and long letters to their P.O. Box, but no one ever watched them with a calm interest.

No, it felt like this woman was studying them.

Years later, she’d wonder why she didn’t say anything. Why she never told her parents about a woman who watched her family, particularly her mother, for months. Why she never told the police about the woman who approached her a few days after her mother placed a plastic bag over her head. The woman who stood in her backyard while Mackenzie stood in front of the window. The woman who said, “I know what she did to you. Wouldn’t it be easier if she wasn’t here?” The woman who knew Mackenzie wasn’t going to call the cops or her parents or the neighbors she stopped trusting next door. The woman who crept closer until she was right under Mackenzie’s kitchen window.

The woman who smiled and said, “Wouldn’t it be better if you were free?”

Two weeks later, police would find Mackenzie’s mother, or at least parts of her, in two duffel bags. Months later, detectives would arrest Kitty Lister for her mother’s murder and dismemberment. Two years later, when the case went to trial and the cameras followed the Merry Perrys to the courthouse, her father pressed the heel of his hand on her shoulder and whispered, “Show them said.”

But was she really? Sad? Or was she relieved?

*

In the car, Kitty stroked her hair while Lila slept.

After an hour-long drive, Kitty pulled into the edge of a forest. She didn’t have much time before Lila woke, so she zip-tied her wrists and ankles.

Kitty would have to drag her seventy feet to the cabin and her body would collect leaves, gravel, dirt, and rock. Kitty would wear shoes two sizes too small until her heel bled. And Lila would surprisingly be heavy, and she’d keep thinking this only gets harder as she gets older.

She kept thinking she used to enjoy this. Killing used to be easy when we didn’t live in a surveillance state. When her back didn’t ache from the disposal, but this was part of the work. It wasn’t not about driving a knife into someone’s neck and fleeing the scene—this was about her process and the process meant something. Meant more than the life she took and the body she spent her time with for the hours after. Her process was what calmed her, what made her whole, but the process had been draining her.        

But just because something’s hard doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing. So, she reduced Lila Perry’s life to a piece of cargo, a set of coordinates. Move the cargo from point A to point B. Move the cargo from life to death to disposal to clean-up. Kitty considered the list of tasks she’d done over forty times in the past twenty years, but somehow, it had gotten harder, tiresome.

Lately, she was forgetting things. Minor things that anyone would attribute to being sloppy or tired, but Kitty had been a woman who prided herself on the details. Now, the details had become her undoing. Like how Lila’s wallet fell out of her purse without her noticing, how Kitty removed one glove, how she took photographs of Lila with Lila’s own camera. It was as if Kitty wanted to get caught, but she didn’t. She just kept forgetting steps in the process.

Kitty made it to the cabin, tied Lila to a chair and sat across from her. Waited until she woke up. And then she sat silent as Lila screamed, cried, and pleaded for her life. Her face was a river through which Kitty could wade, smile, and swim. Her silence rattled Lila. Kitty pressed her hands in her lap when the pleas invariably turned to rage, and Lila called Kitty the names men called women. The names women hated to be called. Kitty was a whore, a cunt, a bitch, a psycho. Nodding her head, Kitty agreed. She was all these things. Your point?

Kitty stood and got close to Lila, and she kept shouting, no longer seeing her. The dryness on the sides of her mouth infuriated her. Lila’s mouth widened when she saw the blade and how it cut and cut and cut until the cuts were the loudest and only sound.

There had been a time when Kitty wanted to be better. To stop washing the blood off the knives and the gloves, even though you never really do get clean. Not completely. The people you’d killed had a habit of seeping into your nails, the cracks in your skin, places you couldn’t see. You broke all their fingers and shattered all their bones, and you even took bites of them. Bits of flesh you burrowed away in your coat pocket to reminded you what you’d done, who’d won.

But then what? What happened after they died, and you were still hungry? Famished down to the meat, the bone.

You know what you do? You left the torso of the woman you’d just stabbed nineteen times and burned the cabin to the ground. You packed the rest of her in garbage bags bound with duct tape and discarded them throughout a fifty-mile drive. You kept the memory card from the camera because we loved our trophies and souvenirs.

Kitty wanted to be better once. Decent. But maybe it was better, easier, to be honest.

*

At the trial, after Kitty Lister had been found guilty of capital murder, abuse of a corpse, and a pile of other charges that were icing on the death row cake, Kitty stood up during her sentencing hearing and said Lila’s murder was a public service. “That woman was a virus—just ask her daughter,” Kitty laughed, turning to wink at Mackenzie. And as they hauled her away, she sang Edith Piaf’s “No Regrets” on volume ten, and Mackenzie couldn’t decide if she wanted to kill or kiss Kitty. Or possibly both.

After Lila’s murder, there was no rest, no closure, no drawing of the curtains—rather, it was a constant fielding of local and national television interviews, somber photoshoots for People magazine—complete with Baby Anjelica sporting a black bonnet—and conference calls concerning the fate of the Perrys, because while Lila was indeed dead, there were still contractual obligations to fulfill and content to shoot.

Perhaps her father could take the reins? The suggestion was as swiftly shot down as it was raised because Dick Perry had the personality of burnt toast. And while Dick was heavy on the pieta, he couldn’t help but wonder how to keep the money train moving.

So, it was decided that Mackenzie, the chaste dutiful daughter, would replace the honey-haired matriarch. She would be the glue that bonded their brood together. Mackenzie’s aunt Donna would fly in for the transition because the family needed numbers even though everyone, everyone, hated Donna. Donna with her three divorces and botched breast job. Donna, who considered the Bible a riveting piece of fiction. Donna, who, seeing dollar signs, would become a convert, washed in the blood of the lamb, cooking lamb, calling Baby Anjelica her little lamb.

All Mackenzie could think about was slaughter.

And when Donna clawed her way into her father’s bed, Mackenzie threatened to walk. It had been two years since her mother’s murder and the Perrys found a new audience of teens who swarmed to watch Mackenzie applying make-up, fixing dinner, and talking about college applications.

Mackenzie’s star was on the rise, and she felt resentful of her family digging through her wallet. They knew she was months away from her eighteenth birthday and her father was apoplectic because he’d finally have to get a job. Donna would have to dial down her bikini waxes and Louis Vuitton bags. What they feared most was actually raising Baby Anjelica, who was now a plump, cherub-cheeked toddler, with her own sponsorship deals and adoring fans.

Fans cleaved to the two surviving sisters, saw how their faith weathered them through a horrific tragedy, and fell in love with them. Millions of viewers gave their views and dollars to support them. Dick Perry continued to be toast and Donna provided awkward laughs with her culinary hijinks, which mostly amounted to occasionally setting fire to the kitchen, but it was always the sisters they returned to. The girls who resembled the mother America loved. And everyone knew it. The money was in Mackenzie, but the bigger, family-friendly dollars remained with Mackenzie and Anjelica.

Once, Donna suggested Mackenzie delay going to college. “Maybe you can stay home for a couple of years until Anjelica’s in kindergarten,” she said to which Mackenzie replied with, “I hear Walmart is hiring middle-aged, try-hard cashiers.”

“You’re nothing without Angie, and you know it.” Donna glanced down at her new gel nails. As usual, admiring someone else’s hard work.

“And how long do you think you and my idiot father will last? Face it, you’re not my mother and you’re not me. You’re filler. Background music. A pathetic whore hitting her best-by date,” Mackenzie laughed as Donna raised her hand to slap her but paused mid-air. “Do it,” Mackenzie taunted. “It’ll make for great child abuse content. Don’t you know the number one rule of social media? Everyone needs a villain.”

“Clearly, you’ve learned nothing from your mother,” Donna said.

“I’ve learned everything from my mother,” Mackenzie said. She glanced down at the hot mug of coffee in her hand and didn’t think twice about hurling it in Donna’s face. “And you’ll learn to respect the hand that feeds you.” Donna screamed and ran for Dick Perry’s quickly closing bedroom door. She pounded away while Mackenzie walked over to her mother’s camera, lifted it, and took her aunt’s picture.

It felt good to no longer feel afraid.

Donna was easy to manage, but Anjelica, the titan tot in the making, was challenging. She was filled with the kind of love Mackenzie never experienced, and this wide-eyed, pure heart unnerved her. Mackenzie hated it when Anjelica called her mommy. She would say, “I’m not your mother, I’m your sister,” and Anjelica would shake her head, point to her chest, and say you’re my mommy. And while Mackenzie knew she shouldn’t fault Angie for the love a child needs and craves, nor could she blame her for how Lila robbed her of what this three-year-old took for granted, part of her, a secret part, a part of herself Mackenzie hated, wished Kitty Lister would’ve taken her sister too.

Even though her mother was dead, Mackenzie still edited the Perry family videos. Only now she realized she’d become unrecognizable in a different way. She wondered if she had ever recognized herself because it seemed as if she only existed in the space between her mother living and her mother dead. A brief life defined by the actions of two women—Lila Perry and Kitty Lister.

Why had Kitty chosen her mother? In court, Kitty would only sit silent, staring ahead at the walls of the courtroom and beyond them to something on the other side. What confused everyone, including the jury, was how soft spoken she was. How small she was. Her fingers were practically miniature. Newscasters and pundits wondered how so much rage and hate could fit into such a small body. She’s too small for this world, a journalist wrote after Kitty’s conviction.

Even now, when films and true crime shows profiled women murderers, people still couldn’t get understand it. Especially when we would all learn that she not only killed women, but she also had a taste for stocky men. The challenge of broad shoulders and towering height excited her. Kitty was a woman who didn’t discriminate and when interviewed in prison she would smile and say in that cashmere voice of hers, “I don’t discriminate; I like all kinds.”

Crime analysts would talk about Kitty’s past—a childhood stained by the actions of her father, a social worker, who took part in torturing five teenage girls in a basement one summer and by a mother who fell spectacularly to pieces after. A girl who would grow into a woman who would go to Adelphi and Columbia. A woman who become a social worker in Bed Sty, Brooklyn, beloved by the women she counseled through addiction, abuse, and a life steeped in poverty.

When Kitty was first arrested in her twenties, dozens of women took the stand at her trial and said it couldn’t be our Kitty cat. This woman saved my life. This woman got my husband locked up for trying to kill me, and then she go out and kill a fuckload of women? Nah, not Kitty. You got the wrong girl. 

For years, everyone always said you got the wrong girl. Until DNA evidence and a prosecutor would tell a jury we got the right one. 

Mackenzie would read about Kitty’s sister, Jenny, who changed her name and moved across the country because the press had gotten too much. She would hear whispers from other women—you have to wonder about a woman who never marries or has children. Mackenzie wondered what these women would think of a teenager who’s been a mother since the womb. A teenager who had her childhood filmed and stolen from her. A teenager who didn’t know how to be a teenager and had mixed feelings about the death of the woman responsible for all of it.

If you asked Mackenzie how she felt she would say devastated but think relieved.

Throughout the trial, Mackenzie kept staring at Kitty, studying her in the way Kitty had studied her family, only Mackenzie didn’t have any answers. The woman who sat at the defense table sketching all of the people testifying against her until her attorney laid his hand over hers. Mackenzie couldn’t understand how and why this seemingly demure woman tortured and murdered so many people. Kitty had no modus operandi; she kept no trophies. She changed tactics and victims with the ease in which one changes clothing. I like all kinds.

When journalists asked Kitty why Lila, why snuff out the life of an innocent woman?

Kitty said, “Innocent? You’re kidding me, right? That woman was a predator posing as a house pet and making millions from it. I’d have more respect for her if she punched her kids in front of the camera because at least she’d be honest. But she needed everyone to think she was mother of the year, and I couldn’t tolerate that. I did her children a favor. They may not see it now, but one day they’ll thank me. Stop focusing on who I am and think about who she wasn’t.”

When Kitty asked how she felt after stacking parts of Lila in nylon bags, hurling the limbs out of an open car window, she sighed and said, “Relief.”

Mackenzie couldn’t remember her life before her mother, before Kitty, and she wasn’t sure whether there would ever be an after.

*

Kitty craved pizza. Forget the gourmet nonsense with shrubbery for toppings and a microscopic crust, no, no, Kitty preferred square frozen slices in the supermarket aisle. The pizza of her childhood with cheesy crusts, toasted bread sticks, and orders that arrive in thirty minutes or less. She vaguely recalled landlines. Phones in cradles and the curly cord she used to wind around her fingers.

The memory quickly faded as she saw her mother yanking the phone straight out of the wall and shutting off all the lights in the house because of the parade of people outside. People whose cameras would light up an entire neighborhood. People who called non-stop about Russian girls, maybe? Kitty couldn’t remember.

Normally, her mother would be home to phone in a delivery or cart her to the store, but June Lister’s softened in her old age and instead of raising Cain in the neighborhood, she played canasta on Tuesday afternoons. This was the moment when Kitty thought about pepperoni and the simple pleasure of sliding hot slices out of the oven.

Although Kitty had lived in this house for years, the home of her childhood and the area she once expertly navigated when she was small, she needed a phone to guide her to the market. As she walked, she didn’t understand why people kept crossing the street when they spotted her—was it her unkempt hair? Nonetheless, she appreciated the space and quiet, how the streets were so expansive and clean, and the air crisp, cool, and smelling of woodchips and burnt things.

On her walks, glimpses of a former life would resemble a storm that assailed, hailed, and departed swiftly. She’d see a version of herself carting canine teeth and a dead raccoon in a backpack. Other times, it would be her sister sobbing in a closet. News vans parked on their lawn and her mother singing in a lace slip dress, sipping the vintage scotch her father had loved to drink. Jenny screaming, you ruined us. You ruined everything.

What had Kitty ruined?

When she arrived in front of a large market with its overhead blaring lights and bleached white linoleum, Kitty momentarily forgot about why she was there. What did I need, she thought, as she cruised the aisles staring at cereal boxes and cookies in plastic cartons. In the freezer section she stood in front of the door. Yes, this is what she’d come for—pizza.

She filled her cart with boxes of pepperoni and some mushroom—wait, didn’t she hate mushrooms? No matter, she spent over three hundred dollars on pizza and for the first time she could remember, she felt happy thinking about a table covered in slices of pizza until a woman stood in front of her. A woman who wouldn’t move. A woman who said her name as if it were a question, as if the name hadn’t belonged to the face of a woman pushing a cart of frozen pizza, “Kitty Lister?”

“Katherine Lister,” she responded.

“It’s really you,” the woman said to which Kitty responded, “It’s really me.”

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” The woman’s grasp on her bag of groceries was slippery, precarious. It looked as if it might collapse at any minute, so Kitty offered her cart as a refuge because maybe she knew this young woman. Maybe she was her sister, a friend.

“Should I know you?” Kitty said. Now, they were in the parking lot. Had Kitty driven there? If so, where was her car. Did she have a car?

“Are you lost?” The woman said. Scanning Kitty’s face, she looked for signs of recognition but found none. Kitty was a blank page—she really didn’t know the woman who had traveled all this way, moved to this town, parked across the street from her house studying her in the way Kitty had once studied her family.

“I can’t remember if I have a car. I have this phone here and it tells me things. How to get to places. How to find my way home. I’m sorry. I forget things sometimes. Should I know you?”

“You should. You killed my mother,” Mackenzie Perry opened her car door, gesturing for Kitty to get in. Mackenzie wheeled Kitty’s cart to the back and filled her trunk with frozen pizza. “Mushrooms? You hate mushrooms,” Kitty waved a pizza box of the vile fungus and pepperoni over her head.

Kitty recalled her hatred of mushrooms. And maybe she should’ve run. Should’ve screamed. Here was the daughter of a woman she’d supposedly killed although she couldn’t remember the woman or having killed her.

Kitty should’ve felt fear, but all she felt was calm. Fear wasn’t an emotion she’d ever experienced though she recognized it in other people—the quickening of the heart, the sweat and the shaking, the face drained of its color. She was a steady hand, a pulse that wouldn’t break seventy. She was a child who broke and reassembled animals, who grew into a woman who broke people. Anyone else would’ve fled, but Kitty slid into the passenger seat. Closed the door. Mackenzie eased into the driver’s seat next to her, inches away from the woman who kidnapped and murdered her mother, spreading her body across hundreds of miles.

Kitty folded her hands in her lap. Turned off her phone. “So, are you going to kill me, or do you want to talk?”

*

A journalist sat across from Kitty. Cameras and hot lights filled the room. Kitty’s hands and feet were shackled, and the producer asked if they could remove them because it would make for better television. They talked for hours—this doe-eyed, berry-mouthed woman who hosted a popular true crime show and Kitty with her black eyes and small stature.

The journalist showed photos of Kitty’s kill kit, and Kitty laughed remembering how many times she had to buy new tools at Home Depot because she had to keep dumping the evidence. “The stock for duct tape and zip ties must’ve gone up that year,” she said with that sly smile commentators talked about on the talk shows. One juror said in a 20/20 interview: that woman is pure evil.

The room fell silent, and the journalist inhaled a mouthful of air. She wanted to know why a woman would commit the ultimate betrayal by killing another woman.

“What betrayal? I didn’t know any of those people. I should owe them something because of what’s between our legs?”

“They felt safe with you, and you took advantage of that. Melanie Turpin got in a car with you because she was stranded, needed a ride, and she ended up in a ditch, strangled to death. Lakesha Carter stabbed with a screwdriver in her own car. So many women trusted you.”

“Melanie and Lakesha were grown women. Even children know not to get into cars with strangers.”

The crew signaled to take a break and Kitty and the journalist got touch-ups. Soft bristle brushes on the face and a spritz of hair spray. Kitty leaned into the journalist and said, “You’re doing just fine.” The journalist bolted back in her chair, frightened of getting too close.

The prison guard barked, “Lister.”

Kitty smiled and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be a good little girl. Best behavior and the whole nine.”

Before the interview ended, the journalist asked Kitty what she remembered most about her last victim, Lila Perry. The beloved social media star found in parts off the 101 freeway.

“You want to know what I did with the head, don’t you? You want me to give the family closure. What can I tell you other than I got sloppy in the end.” Later, in the editing room, a voice over would deliver a chilling line about a brutal killer who showed no remorse. A producer would cut to Mackenzie Perry weeping in the family living room. Baby Anjelica wailing in the background. The room heavy with pieta.

“I’m asking what you remember,” the journalist said.

“Her hair. Brushing it out of her eyes. Her hair was thinner than I thought. It reminded me how easy it is to break a woman. They rarely give me the thrill that men do.”

*

For a woman who caused so much pain, Kitty was slight, small, a negative of a person. Her body caved in on itself; her hands were spotted with age. No longer was she the smirking killer that intrigued and frightened Mackenzie as a teenager, rather she was a woman nearing sixty who couldn’t find her way home. A woman devouring herself from within as she loses more of her memory, herself, with each passing day.

At first, Mackenzie thought the dementia was a ruse, a clever way of dodging guilt. Mackenzie watched her for weeks as Kitty had once watched her family from a car, from a distance.

At night, she’d sometimes creep past their windows and sit in their backyard knowing the mother often used a hearing aid but removed it at after dinner. Kitty never looked out her window. She just sat in the living room staring at the television, staring through it and it was if they were jettisoned back to the courtroom where Kitty glared at the wall, appearing to know what was on the other side.

“You look like my sister, Jenny. Do you know her, my sister?”

“I heard you had a sister.”

Kitty fiddled with her wallet, pulled out cards, read and returned them to their neat little slots. “I don’t know why everyone calls me Kitty. My name’s Katherine. See,” Kitty said, showing Mackenzie her expired driver’s license. “Katherine.”

“Your father used to call you Kitty when you were a kid.”

“Did you know my father?”

“I know he’s dead,” Mackenzie said. “A heart attack fifteen years ago.”

“There’s so much death around me. I can even smell it on my mother—the decay. It’s medicinal, sour, and old. Like milk gone off. Once you get a whiff of it you can’t shake it. Sometimes, I want to throw bleach on it, on her, but that’s a crazy thing to do because you don’t like the smell of someone. Because you don’t like things unclean.”

Overhead, a flock of seagulls swallowed the parking lot. They surrounded the garbage bins and an old man who tore off pieces from loaves of Wonder Bread and flung them in every direction. Kitty watched the man swarmed by hungry birds and the music of their wings furiously flapping. Kitty didn’t like birds—filthy things—but she marveled at how they descended upon them and wondered what the man’s fate would be if he didn’t have enough bread. Would they devour him too?

“I imagine death would circle you. You killed 22 people, Kitty.”

“That’s what I’ve been told. My mother showed me clippings and video tapes of the things I’ve done. Are you related to any of them? The victims?”

It occurred to Mackenzie that Kitty had forgotten the conversation they had only moments ago, and she wondered if this was worth it. She wasn’t going to get the answers she needed—were there anything to get? And what other question could she ask but why—why my mother?

“Do you remember any of it?”

“Sometimes. But it feels more like a dream than something I’ve done.” June Lister had shown Kitty an album of photographs of the victims she’d collected. June asked her what she remembered. Kitty pored over the pictures—the boys in baseball caps, mothers holding their children up to the sky, graduation pictures and photographs of weddings in sepia and Kitty realized she had none of these things, these moments her victims held and celebrated.

And as her mother talked about the terrible things Kitty had done, she didn’t feel disgust or anger or sadness. She couldn’t feel anything, really. Perhaps desire for a sandwich. Or a tsunami of rage. Or confusion—she’s confused often. It was as if she walked through a life in monotone. Registering how people showed their emotions, how their faces would re-arrange themselves and the gesticulations their bodies made. Kitty could recognize an emotion, but she couldn’t feel it. Now, this woman seated beside her asked the question her mother had always asked. Why?

“I don’t know why. Maybe I had all this anger, and I didn’t know where to put it. Or maybe there is no “why,” there’s only what I did.”

Mackenzie showed Kitty a picture of a woman on her phone. “That’s my mother, Lila. You took her from our home, tortured her for three days, cut her throat, stabbed her a bunch of times, cut her up and dumped parts of her on the side of the freeway.”

“That sounds exhausting. Just hearing it makes me want to take a nap,” Kitty said. She thought about her pizza boxes, defrosting in the trunk. How long would this interrogation take? There were slices to heat up and television shows to watch. Kitty searched Mackenzie’s face for signs of anger, rage, or even sadness, but the woman was a blank canvas. A sky painted black. She just sat there, scrolling through images of her mother.

Mackenzie laughed, perhaps shocked by Kitty’s response. She set down her phone. “I hated her, you know. My mother.”

“I can tell,” Kitty said.

“How?”

“I’m still alive in your car.”

“You’re not scared?”

“Should I be?”

“You used to get women in your car. Women stranded at bus stops. Women who didn’t have money for a ride home. Women who didn’t have a home. Sometimes, you’d hit them with a crowbar. Other times you’d hand them a bottle of water that would knock them out. Either way, they’d wake in a cabin or in your basement and they’d leave in trash bags in pieces.”

“Why not just drag them out and dump them whole?”

“You tell me, you’re the killer. You know, the newspapers called you the female Ted Bundy.”

“Well, that’s sexist. Ted Bundy? He was an no mastermind, no genius. The only reason he got away with it for so long is because the cops were idiots. He couldn’t get away with biting his way through a sorority house,” Kitty said, shaking her cell phone like it was a maraca. Getting worked up for a reason she couldn’t fathom or understand. “Someone’s always filming.”

They sit in silence for what felt like hours but was only minutes when Kitty said, “You seem to know a lot about me.”

“I’ve spent the past ten years of my life on you.”

“Why? I’m no one.”

 “Everyone is someone. Everyone matters even if they’re terrible people.”

“How Christian of you.”

Mackenzie felt drained, exhausted. This wasn’t going to plan. She was supposed to tower over the old woman, feel confident and strong but all she felt was pity. Pity that she didn’t have a life worth remembering, that her greatest moments amounted to destroying the lives of others. Her triumph was shining a light on people who were loved when Kitty had never experienced an emotion that bonded people.

Kitty looked light, untethered, and weathered, beaten by sickness and old age. Emptied of a life she never had or pursued. Mackenzie wondered why she couldn’t see this Kitty years ago in the courtroom. How had she thought the smirking killer was confident and strong when she was small. She’s too small for this world.

“How about I take you home,” Mackenzie said, rolling down the windows and turning on the engine.

“Okay, but I can’t seem to remember…I don’t where… maybe it’s in here,” Kitty said, turning on the phone, her lifeless lifeline.

“I know where you live.” Mackenzie pulled out of the parking lot and drove the mile back to Kitty’s home. When they arrived, Mackenzie helped Kitty with her pizza boxes, carrying them into the house she’d always longed to see. But it was nothing like she’d thought. It was clean and neat, but also weathered with its peeling, jaundiced wallpaper, and pea green bowls on the counter. It was a seventies style resurrected in the 90s. Few pictures scattered the mantels and side tables.

But there’s one of Kitty holding a cat close, a fat tabby yawning for the camera. Kitty couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen, a child slowly marching to her adolescent years. But even then, Mackenzie could see the black eyes, the smile that seemed a little too forced, touch too neat, and a cat struggling to escape her tight grip.

Kitty asked if Mackenzie wanted a slice of pizza, she had many. Kitty pre-heated the oven based on the dozens of post-it notes placed around the home, reminding Kitty to do the things we took for granted. Flush the toilet, shut the lights, turn off the oven after use. Set a timer so the food doesn’t char and burn. Kitty asked if they were friends. How did Mackenzie know her again? Mackenzie shook her head. “We knew each other only slightly.”

“Her hair was so thin it surprised me. It was brittle, split at the ends. Somehow, up close, I thought she’d look different,” Kitty said. “But she looked like the rest of them—quiet and unclean. I had to fix them. Make them clean again.”

“Did you make them clean?” Mackenzie said, her face a river.

“I like to think I did, but I don’t know.”

Mackenzie turned and gently closed the door behind her. She walked down the steps she’d observed for months. Yanked a handful of grass from the lawn—a trophy, memento?

As she made her way down the street, she still had the grass, clumps of dirt and rock, in her hand. She held the grass when she closed her eyes for only a moment, a second, and she still held it when a little girl on a bike rode in front of her. Still, when the girl disappeared beneath her car and one of the wheels of the bike she rode still spinning. Even still when she got out of the car and a pool of blood eddied around her head. And even more still when June Lister, walking home from the market with pizza boxes in hand, screamed.

“What have you done?”