Page 52 of The Six Murders of Daphne St Clair
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The next morning, the care attendants found Daphne St Clair dead in her bed.
She had taken an overdose of pills in the night and passed away in her sleep.
The attendants who found her had seen many dead bodies, even a few possible suicides among the elderly.
But this one unsettled them. It might have been the way the shadows fell on her face, but it almost looked like she was smiling.
And life repeated itself, the story coming full circle. Once again, a body was carried out of the Coconut Grove care home. But instead of a lone girlfriend, the parking lot was packed with TV journalists breathlessly reporting the breaking news, tipped off by someone who worked there.
When news about Daphne’s death was broadcast on the nightly news, most people shrugged and scoffed, making throwaway comments about saving the taxpayers’ money and how only the good die young.
But throughout the country, women found themselves standing there, rhythmically drying the same dish, or staring unseeing at their dusky backyards, feeling a strange mix of sadness, guilt, excitement, and regret.
Only women could understand the anger Daphne felt, the rage that gets jammed down and compacted like an overfull garbage bag. Only women could recognize how a single crack widens into a fissure that splits you in two. In men, anger is an explosion. In women, it’s an abscess.
They understood that Daphne had lived her life in frustration.
And maybe that was what these women could relate to.
The submerging of your own dreams and desires, whether that was out of fear or simply because it was expected of you and so you expected it of yourself.
There had been so many times when a woman had sat in a chair with a baby asleep on her, wishing she could move, to shake out her limbs and run through the streets as carefree as she’d done as a child.
There had been so many times when a woman had stood in a brightly lit kitchen, alone in a sleeping house, her eyes filling with tears and feeling unbearably sad, yet knowing that this sadness would change nothing.
And then there were the darker parts of womanhood, hidden below the surface like murky forms in a flooded quarry.
The violence, the threats the first moment you feared being raped, a terror that bloomed into consciousness at some point in girlhood and never left until you were dying, when it was too late for the fuckers to get you or get you again.
To all these women, Daphne felt both familiar and also like a revelation.
She had existed in constant agitation, trying to dodge all the predatory men of her childhood, trying to find a place where a girl who grew up poor on a Dust Bowl farm could be celebrated.
Until finally she had absorbed all that pain and fear that women ate like bread and butter, and she had become it.
And none of these normal, good women would admit it, but learning how Daphne had torn through life, ravaging everyone, a force as violent and terrifying as a tornado, made it easier for them to breathe.
It awakened something that had lain dormant inside of them for so long, made them hungry again.
Not for murder necessarily, but to be the kind of woman who could do anything , the kind of woman who could walk down a dark alley at night with no fear because she knew that the shadows shrank away from her.
And maybe, if the world was a little less demanding of women, didn’t spend all its time keeping them in line with a carousel of violence, and judgment, and cognitive distortions, then there wouldn’t need to be women like Daphne St Clair.
But knowing that she had lived, and that she had found the darkest kind of freedom, made the long evenings at home just a little easier to bear .