He Started It

by Samantha Downing

You want a heroine. Someone to root for, to identify with. She can’t be perfect, though, because that’ll just make you feel bad about yourself. A flawed heroine, then. Someone who may break the rules to protect her family but doesn’t kill anyone unless it’s self-defense. Not murder, though, at least not the cold-blooded kind. That’s the first deal breaker. The second is cheating. Men can get away with that and still be the hero, but a cheating wife is unforgivable. Which means I can’t be your heroine. I still have a story to tell.

No, I’m not a psychopath. That’s always a convenient excuse, though. Someone who has no empathy and has to fake human emotions. Why do they do bad things? Shrug. Who knows? That’s a psychopath for you. Or is it the word sociopath? You know what I’m saying.

That’s the thing about family. Despite what they say, it’s not a single unit with a single goal. What they never tell us is that, more often than not, every member of the family has their own agenda.

One day, those pictures and videos may be all that’s left of someone. Pick and choose with care.

Sleep. It’s the only real way out of a hangover.

Maybe it’s weird I’m enjoying this, or maybe everyone feels this way about their siblings. A little competitive. A little vindictive.

You can’t fight every battle. Otherwise you end up bloodied, drained of energy, and unable to go on.

That’s always the way, isn’t it? The threat of physical violence eclipses everything. As a child, you know it, and as a woman, it’s always in the back of your mind. The slam of a fist can change everything.

Men who raised their voices, who showed any kind of violence, repulsed me. I wanted the quiet guy in the corner, the one on his laptop or reading a book, or just standing around being awkward.

But that’s the thing about being handed a small fortune: You start to rethink everything. Money gives you options, and the more options you have, the freer you feel.

If you’ve ever been on a long road trip, you know how it goes. On the first day, everyone is excited to get going, happy about leaving their everyday life behind. Everyone is nice to one another, even family members. That excitement flows into the second day. Not as intense, but still there. The third day, fatigue sets in. There’s a happiness hangover from the first day, plus the realization that you’re stuck with these people for a while. You’re too tired to pretend anymore, so you become who you really are because you can only hide it for so long.

Arguing about every little thing is what makes people hate you, especially when it comes to family. They’re the least forgiving of all.

You knew about her. Even if you didn’t consciously know, you knew because it’s how these stories go. It’s a law. Maybe even written in stone by now. There’s always a missing girl.

“There’s another reason why they call it Devil’s Rope.” He turned to us, one eyebrow raised. “The harder you try to get out of it, the worse it gets.”

Grandma used to say the firstborn had it the worst, because parents had no idea what they were doing yet. They had to experiment. “I’m your guinea pig,” Nikki used to say to our parents. “Firstborns are always the guinea pigs.”

We wait, because that’s what you do when you call the police and they have your name, phone number, and location. They have it before you even say a word, and this is true everywhere, even Oklahoma.

“I mean, how many of those ‘so-and-so was shot here’ places are there in this country? Why do we memorialize this? How come we don’t have markers that say ‘so-and-so was conceived here’? The way we stigmatize sex in this country is an abomination.”

Anyone who claims they never gaslight their spouse is lying.

Sometimes we are a family of assholes. You can blame that on Grandpa, he started it.

Everyone gets lions wrong, too. They always said the female lions hunt while the males just kick back and wait for their meal. When people went out to study lions, that’s what they saw—the females hunting while the males stayed back—so it had to be true. It’s not. Once they got better cameras and better lenses and people started filming them from above, like from helicopters, they saw the male lions hunting, but only in the tall thick grass where they can stay hidden. Mom was the one who told me that, and then she said that nothing is ever what it seems.

The best, but not always the truth. It’s important to know the difference. If my family hadn’t played Risk so often, it would have taken me a lot longer to learn that.

It’s spooky, though. Spookier than I remember as a kid. Now I can imagine the people who used to be here, can envision them walking, working, growing food, and praying at the little church. What I can’t imagine is the same thing, day after day, without any relief in sight. Not so different from life now.

It takes a second, but everyone starts to laugh. A big laugh, the kind you feel deep in your belly, the kind that makes you double over and try to catch your breath.

The first was the air. Nothing like it, at least not that I’ve experienced. This is pure clean air, high up enough to avoid any smog, exhaust, or any other sign of the modern world. If you’ve never smelled that kind of air, believe me when I say it’s different.

Because I could. I wonder how many bad things have been explained by such a simple phase, a simple idea. Because I could. Because no one stopped me. Because it was easy. All the same answer, and it really means because I wanted to.

The desert sun is the strongest I’ve felt, like I was being baked in a pan under the broiler. Day in and day out, the desert will wear you down.

Fires are loud. The cracking, the breaking, the sound of the flames being whipped up, the small and large explosions as everything that could burn did. I had to scream to be heard.

If I were the tortured soul of this story, I’d wake up screaming because of a nightmare. Inevitably it would have pickup trucks, cigarettes, evil tree carvings, and a dead grandfather wearing a Clemson shirt. Instead, I sleep through the rest of the night and wake up feeling pretty darn refreshed. Invigorated, even.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, wondering if you become something like that just because someone tells you to. You don’t. You don’t become a murderer because someone says “Kill that guy.” That’s not how behavior works.

Liars that good are hard to find.

I spent a lot of time watching him, trying to figure out how he charmed people into giving him free stuff and, usually, becoming his friend at the same time. He did have a formula. One, make fun of yourself. It makes you nonthreatening from the start. Two, smile. Especially when you’re asking for something. Three, mix your lies with the truth. Four, remind them how silly/stupid/forgetful you are, this is all your fault, and won’t you be an awesome person and lend a hand?

I still remember how that felt. It wasn’t disappointment; it was something big and sharp and it hit me like a fist. It felt the same as finding out Grandpa had abducted us. At the time, I didn’t recognize it as betrayal.

This is how marriage feels. Being in it is one thing, looking at it from the outside is another.

“I swear to God,” Portia says. “The lengths men will go to memorialize themselves.”

Hells Canyon. Of all the places in Oregon to go, of course Grandpa took us to Hells Canyon. Oh, and the name of the river that runs through this ten-mile-wide gorge? Snake River. Of course.

Violence always starts with the slam of door or a fist. It never ends there.

Greed is a real, palpable thing you see, smell, even hear, and it’s all around me now.

It still doesn’t stop me from going into the dark woods alone. Because at some point, we have to know. We have to find out.

It’s almost another job checking in on things. Social media, especially. It’s all fine when I have something good to share, otherwise it’s just post after post of everyone else’s life. Yes, yes, yes, I’m so happy for you—Yay! Living the dream!—but I have nothing good to post about myself.

Real talk. Sometimes assumptions are wrong,

Side note about driving across the country: It’s impossible to understand how big it is unless you see how much nothing there is.

The endgame is when all the secrets come out.

Either you die or you move on, because life does.

This, apparently, is what we do in our family when we feel threatened. We get violent. Or at least some of us do.

Have you ever wanted something so much, you go ahead and pretend you have it?

You always know when you’ve lost, even if the game isn’t over yet.

“I’m talking about Ruby Ridge, Waco, Columbine, the Central Park Five . . . All of them have one thing in common. In every single one of those cases, the media got it wrong. Completely wrong. The story you think you know isn’t the story at all.”