By Teri Carter
The first thing he shows me is his ID badge, his authenticity. The badge hangs around his neck on a new blue lanyard but the ID itself is hidden inside a thick plastic case with white spots where his eyes are supposed to be. He holds up the badge. “I’m showing you my badge,” he almost whispers. And when I don’t acknowledge the badge, don’t acknowledge that he is who he says he is, he holds it higher, closer to my face. “This is my badge, see.” And I say yes, yes I see it, yes I see you, sure, come on in, even though all I can really make out is the worn plastic case. The evil-seeming, white, rubbed out, ghost spots for his eyes. How many times, I wonder, do I let a strange man — a man I don’t know, a man I’m not sure about, feel odd about, a man who strikes me as not-right-to-be-here-with-me-alone – into my house?
I am reading The Burning by Jane Casey. The story of woman detective after a serial killer. I have not read a book like this in more than 20 years, and I still remember the exact moment, the exact night, I knew I could no longer read books like this. I was in my bed in my apartment under a flowered navy blue bedspread. It was after midnight. The lamp beside me cast a round shadow on the ceiling above as I read the true crime story of Jeffrey MacDonald murdering his family. I remember thinking, ‘what dad butchers his entire family?” I remember setting Fatal Vision down, forever unfinished, and turning out the light. And sometime that following week, I buried that book in the bottom of my trash and took the trash out. I could not read it, but even more I could not even have the story of this man in my house. Continue Reading…