Page 23 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

Here was what my brain allowed me to remember—what I allowed myself to remember. Was there a distinction there? I’d always struggled with the distinction between the conscious and unconscious selves, the things that I told myself that I wanted versus what I actually wanted.

“My dad was murdered,” I told Aidan in the hotel room on the night that Noah and Molly admitted their affair.

“Oh,” he responded. What else was there to say?

“In prison,” I continued. “He was murdered in prison. I hadn’t spoken to him in ten years when it happened.

I don’t think I’ve ever processed it. Apparently talking helps, but who am I supposed to talk to?

People look at me differently when they find out what happened.

It’s like I’m diseased. No one would willingly mark themselves like that. ”

Aidan held my hand. He had neatly trimmed nails, and I wondered if he got professional manicures. He wanted to ask; I knew he did. What did your father do? Most people, especially those who claimed otherwise, loved to hear about disgusting things.

“It was both of them—my mother and my father. They killed people. You’ve probably heard of them. Their names are Peter and Lydia Schwartz.”

“Yeah,” he replied. With his other hand, he produced a bottle of tequila.

Where had it come from? I lost track of the words as they came out of my mouth.

What had he just told me? My brain had stopped processing things correctly.

It did that sometimes, when I felt too much pleasure or too much pain.

“They’re the serial killers, right? The ones who picked up women in bars? I know all about them,” he said.

If only I could transmute notoriety into gold.

We were living in my favorite house the first time it happened.

It was a remodeled historic building located in the downtown of a small Southern city.

Somehow my parents had negotiated with the owner to allow us to stay there for free while a buyer was sought.

That was the only way we would be able to live in a place like that, as my parents wouldn’t have passed a credit check or been able to afford a deposit.

The ceilings were tall, and sound carried easily throughout the structure.

I knew when my father was in the kitchen, eating a late-night bowl of cereal to feed his perpetual hunger.

I had memorized the sound of my mother’s makeup bottles clinking against one another as she got ready for the day.

I took comfort in such things, though neither of my parents were particularly nurturing.

They liked to go out at night. By the time I was six, they’d decided that I was old enough to stay home on my own.

I thought it was a compliment to my maturity.

I didn’t consider the possibility that it was neglect until I enrolled in psychology classes in college.

When they’d left, I liked to raid the pantry for sweets.

Each of my parents had a sweet tooth, so although the refrigerator was frequently empty, I could usually find a package of cookies or a carton of ice cream to indulge in.

I would take my loot and scroll through channels on the television, looking for a movie.

That was before streaming networks existed, so I caught small portions of a lot of films. Because my parents never mentioned my junk food consumption or television viewing, I thought my endeavors were subtle, sneaky.

I buried deep in the trash can the remnants of whatever container I’d eaten out of so they wouldn’t see it, and I was sure to be in bed before they came home, which wasn’t difficult, as they often came back late in the night.

Eventually, I developed an understanding that they probably knew what I was doing but they didn’t care as long as they were able to go out and do what they wanted to do.

They’d been bringing women home for a while.

It never occurred to me that there was anything weird about that.

My parents were always making friends wherever we went.

When we were kicked out of one housing situation, or they lost their jobs, they talked their way into another one.

I assumed that was how the world worked.

The women, at first, were just more friends who my parents had brought home.

The initial few were the lucky ones, because they were the ones who lived.

One of the features of my favorite home was a second-floor balcony that overlooked the living room.

When my parents brought the women home, I’d sneak out of my room to watch them.

They would put a CD on the stereo, make drinks.

Everyone was having fun! The women were always exceptionally beautiful, exuding a kind of sexuality that was obvious to me even as a child.

I understood why my parents had picked them. They’d always had good taste.

Later, what they did became a meme.

Hey, we saw you across the bar and we really dig your vibe. Can we buy you a drink?

None of the shared images captured the kind of people my parents were, because photographs were incapable of capturing that.

They were good-looking, of course, but their appearance was the least of their charms. They could get anyone to do anything, at least up to a point.

Their spells had expiration dates, at which time they were fired, or we were kicked out of our house, or they were expelled from yet another social circle.

People frequently judged the women whom my parents picked up for choosing to go home with them—strangers—to engage in group sex acts.

Surely, people said, they’d known it would end badly, and that decision was indicative of who the women were.

I doubted, however, that the women they brought home with them ordinarily made decisions like that.

Probably, they’d gone to the bar to have a fun night out, and when my parents approached them they thought it was an innocent encounter, because what could two married people want with them?

By the time they were dancing in my living room, they were fully bewitched.

Because sound carried so easily in the house, I’d heard numerous types of moaning before I ever heard screams of pain.

I asked my mother about the noises once and she’d told me that the sounds were part of what grown-ups did when they felt especially good.

I knew she was referring to sex. My parents didn’t believe in parental guidance on movies, and I’d seen a number of R-rated films. However, the details were murky.

The moans were common enough that I often slept through the noise, the way that people who grew up near train tracks got used to the horns.

The screams woke me up.

My initial thought was that the monster had finally arrived.

See, I was convinced that a vicious beast was residing somewhere in the remodeled house, a leftover from a previous era of the home’s existence.

The primary thing that the monster wanted was to kill and eat us, and as I fell asleep I debated whether I wanted him—because he was certainly male—to eat my parents first, giving me a chance to escape, or I wanted to be consumed quickly, so that I wouldn’t have to witness the carnage.

When I heard the screams, I thought my mother was being consumed by the monster.

It never occurred to me that the monster might be her.

I was so frightened that I failed to enact any of my previously thought-up plans.

I didn’t run away, or hide in the closet.

Neither did I try to save my parents. I just lay there, paralyzed by fear.

Whatever was happening, I knew the screams were the sounds of someone dying, even though I’d never heard anyone die before.

There were some types of knowledge that were passed down through the blood.

Eventually the noise stopped, and I waited for the monster to come after me.

I was awake for the rest of the night, my heart pounding.

I was tempted to check in on my parents, but worried that the monster was hiding out in their room.

I wasn’t totally wrong. Had I opened the door, I would’ve found them attempting to dismember the body for easier disposal.

It wasn’t going well, as they didn’t have the right tools.

During their trial, I’d learn that my father went to the hardware store to buy a saw the next day.

It wasn’t until my mother came into my room in the morning, to tell me that I was going to miss the bus if I didn’t get up soon, that I finally moved.

“You’re alive,” I gasped.

She laughed airily.

“Of course I’m alive. I’m never going to die,” she told me.

Eventually I made the connection between the women and the screams. Rather than eating my parents, the monster was eating the women they brought home.

I started to think of them as a kind of sacrifice, and while I felt bad for them, I was happy to remain intact myself.

I didn’t yet understand that there were ways to be dismembered that weren’t physical.

At some point after that I realized that the monster didn’t exist, or at least not as I’d imagined it.

Still, I tried to rationalize things as I struggled to consider the possibility that my parents were bad people.

They were my parents, which meant that they were good.

If they weren’t, what did that say about me?

Even then, at the start, I knew that I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening.

I worried that my parents would go to jail, yes, but more than that, I worried that it would reflect poorly upon me.

I was a good girl, a smart girl. Everyone said so.

I didn’t want to see the looks on people’s faces when they realized that I lived with two monsters.