Page 39 of Matchmaking for Psychopaths

“How’s your fiancé?” my mother’s voice drawled through the phone.

I’d spent the day bleaching the town house. Now that he’d been reported missing, the search for Noah had ramped up. There was a grainy photo of him from the last night he’d been seen alive—the last time we’d had sex—and I recognized the background as Molly’s apartment building.

It might be easy to assume that I was most haunted by the screams of the dying women, but one thing about ghosts is that no one gets to choose who they’re haunted by.

The thing that really kept me up at night was my parents’ arrest. They didn’t see it coming.

Of course not. They thought they would get away with killing forever.

My father had been caught in his crimes before.

We’d been evicted from homes, kicked out of restaurants.

I’d seen him screamed at on the street. But there were no lasting consequences.

He ran out of money; he got more. Someone punched him in the face; the bruises healed.

Everything that he did built up his idea that he was infallible.

I’d watched him talk his way out of numerous traffic tickets, including once when we were in a stolen car.

He started to let his guard down like the tiger’s keeper who forgot that it had teeth.

I saw the whole thing. Probably someone should’ve made sure that I was out of the way, but the police were too distracted by the body. My parents came home earlier than expected. No one was prepared, least of all me.

“What are you doing in my house?” my father demanded when he saw the police.

It wasn’t his house. It belonged to someone he and my mother had met in a bar and murdered. It wasn’t in the kind of neighborhood where anyone noticed or cared about new neighbors.

The police pulled out their guns. For a moment, I thought they were going to shoot my parents in front of me.

“No,” my mother said. “We don’t mean any harm. We haven’t done anything to anyone.”

Another obvious lie.

They feigned cooperation until the police tried to cuff them.

“I’m a mother!” my mother cried. She didn’t seem to notice me standing there. I wanted her to look at me, to really see me. Strangely, I thought she would apologize.

Viewing the arrest was like watching a nature documentary in which a beautiful beast was finally beaten by the elements.

My father never stopped believing that he would somehow escape the charges.

He acted as his own lawyer, which didn’t go the way he’d hoped.

He was lucky that we didn’t live in a death penalty state, though he died anyway.

My mother tried to claim police brutality.

They’d hurt her wrists, her neck. She wore an oversized brace for part of the trial.

People might’ve cared more if so many bodies hadn’t been found.

I was happy that she’d never really mastered using the internet, so that she didn’t have to see how many people made rape jokes about her.

Two simultaneous truths were that they deserved to go to prison and that seeing it was traumatizing to watch.

I used to fear the monster that devoured women in the house, but my new nightmare was the police who took my parents away.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that the officers were going to come back for me.

It broke my heart that Noah was dead. It broke my brain that his dismembered parts kept showing up at my house. I felt like the worm on the hook of a fishing line waiting for law enforcement to come take a bite. I hadn’t killed my fiancé, but I wasn’t sure that mattered.

“He’s dead,” I told my mother. “Someone is delivering him in pieces to my house.”

She laughed.

“You’ve always been so dramatic, my darling.”

“It’s the truth. I think it was a psychopath that I work with. He brought me his heart, and I buried it in the woods.”

“It sounds like he loves you.”

“That’s not what love is. You don’t know what it means to love.”

“Don’t dump your teenage melodrama on me, Alexandra. I know more about love than you could ever comprehend. Your father and I had one of the greatest romances of all time. People have written books about it.”

“They wrote those books because you killed people. Your life wasn’t a romantic comedy.”

“No. It was better than that. Your father and I are going to be remembered forever. No one is ever going to forget our love. I can feel his presence still, you know. He’s always with me. He always will be. What we have lasts for an eternity.”

“Why couldn’t you love me like that?” My voice came out as a wound.

Another laugh. I couldn’t figure out where the jokes were.

“What is this ‘woe is me’ act about, Alexandra? We gave you culture. What more could you want?”

“Sometimes you forgot to give me food . You left me alone for days on end. I was a child . I was your child, and you never cared. You were more worried about what you looked like or that you were having fun. Now my life is ruined. I’d almost gotten away from what you did.

I was going to have a different life. But I can never escape, not really.

People don’t make themselves; they are made by the things around them.

I was formed by you and Dad, by what you did.

Why couldn’t you just be normal parents?

Get a stupid bob, wear frumpy clothes? Would that have been so bad? ”

There was quiet on the line. After years of conversations, I’d finally silenced her.

I hoped that she might apologize. You’re right, Alexandra.

Your father and I were bad parents. We should’ve cared more.

Better people would’ve suppressed their murderous urges for the sake of their child.

We were weak. We took pleasure in brutality.

We only really knew how to love each other.

Then my mother’s voice came through, sharp and poisonous.

“You greedy little bitch. You never wanted me to have anything for myself.”

I recognized the beginning of a rant. My time to speak was over. It was her time now. She was letting me know that I’d gone too far—or, more likely, she hadn’t heard me at all.

The way that I felt now wasn’t entirely different from how I’d felt when I held the heart in my hands. I knew now that it belonged to Noah, but it had felt like mine. I just hoped that if—when—the police brought me in, I wouldn’t end up in the same prison as my mother.