Fiction: My Mother Said My Father Was Ted Bundy

By David Brazil

 

My mother, Kathy, was assaulted and raped by Ted Bundy near Ocean City, New Jersey, on Memorial Day weekend 1969, according to the third version of the story she told me about who my real father was, and at this late date I have no specific reason to disbelieve her, although you ought to keep in mind she was a habitual liar all through her life and practiced duplicity up to the very end, not to mention self-dramatization especially as it pertained to assertions impossible to verify.

 

For example, Kathy maintained that she met John Lennon and Yoko Ono shortly after my birth, and that I was held as an infant by John, which is of course a great story and one which I myself have retold on many occasions. But is it true? Kathy, being dead, cannot submit to cross-examination, and obviously I can't ask John. I don't have Yoko's number. Does she even have a phone? She has to, right? And, even if Kathy's story turned out to be true, would Yoko Ono remember some lady with a baby she met once in Manhattan in the late seventies? I kind of doubt it.

 

Hi Yoko, I'd have to say into the phone. Then what? I don't know if you'd remember me?

 

I always thought my father was Monroe, who was around from before I could remember, who I grew up calling dad, and who I therefore inferred, not unreasonably, was my actual dad, which is to say my biological father, an idea of which neither he nor Kathy chose to disabuse me. The thunderclap came one winter day in middle school, when this social worker I 'd started seeing on account of behavioral problems foolishly left me alone in proximity to confidential files which, of course, as an early and avid reader with unquenchable curiosity and budding anti-authoritarian impulses, I seized the opportunity to scrutinize.

 

That afternoon, I was like, Mom, what does father: unknown mean? I made a little glottal stop sound to stand for the colon.

 

What's the context? she asked, without turning from her episode of Flamingo Road.

 

I was standing on my head on their bed. The context is my fucking school file. That grabbed her all right. She sighed, turned off the TV, and took a seat on the midnight blue bedspread.

 

I knew this day would come, she said, and then unspooled the first recension of a story I would hear again, intermittently, with amplifications, ornaments and variations, over the next three decades. This version was, of course, tailored for an eight-year old, but Kathy was never long on the niceties.

 

First off, you should know that Monroe is not your dad, she began. 

 

I could hear the man strumming his guitar in the next room.

 

What do you mean, I said.

 

I mean he is not your father, she said.

 

Of course he's my father, I said. What the fuck are you talking about?

 

(Parenthetically, I do not cuss like this any more, having found the Lord, but it seems only correct to report events exactly as I think they happened, and to speak the truth in love, like the apostle says, I mean the apostle to the gentiles.)

 

Kathy said she knew Monroe could not be my father because I was born before she started going out with Monroe.

 

The second time I mean, she expanded. Because we went out for a while in high school. But nothing ever happened back then.

 

What do you mean nothing ever happened, I said.

 

Oh Jeez, she said, having backed herself into a corner. I mean we weren't having sex, real sex I mean. You know what I mean by real sex? 

 

Believe it or not, this is also how I got the birds and the bees!

 

Yeah, I said.

 

Okay then, she said, obviously relieved not to have to go into any further detail. With no real sex there ain't no baby, honey.

 

So who's my real father, I said. I forgot to curse because the gravity of this revelation was finally hitting me. I'd also already seen Star Wars so saying the sentence so who's my real father made me feel important, like Luke Skywalker, and I didn't think Luke Skywalker would curse.

 

I went to visit my aunt Helen in New Jersey for Memorial Day, Kathy said, and unfolded a narration that made it sound like I was the virgin birth. According to her, something had happened on this trip and she came home feeling unwell, but she didn't know she was pregnant until months later when she started getting morning sickness and went to the doctor to confirm it.

 

The rabbit died, she said. And six months later there was you.

 

This was the first version of the story.

 

OK, I said. So who'd you have real sex with? 

 

I don't know, she said.

 

You don't know, I said. How can you not know?

 

I don't remember, she said. And that was the story she stuck with through the rest of my childhood and adolescence.

 

Monroe wasn't around too much longer after that. He and Kathy split up and he moved out and got a job at the Pepperidge Farm outlet store in the old mall. Kathy took me there to visit him once and rolled her eyes when he gave me a free pack of Milanos. I was already too old to be very impressed but I still said thank you courteously, as I would have to a stranger, and ate all fifteen cookies myself on the longish and silent drive home. Kathy didn't even ask for one, and she loved sweets.

 

And come to think of it, I never had a taste for that type of cookie again.

 

Not long after Monroe moved out of state someplace, or so Kathy related. He vanished.

 

Ted Bundy, however, makes his first appearance, at least from my perspective, in the form of Mark Harmon, who my mom already had a little crush on from watching Flamingo Road. This was obviously way before NCIS, which my mom would have loved, but she was dead by then of course. NBC got Mr. Harmon to portray Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger, of which I know I only saw the second half. And this is how. I spent that Sunday afternoon shopping for a Mother's Day gift with my two friends Rhonda and Joy (I got Kathy a watch, since she was always late for everything), followed by an extended hangout at Hardee's since, I remember, Rhonda liked their shakes. This was actually at the same old mall, now even older, where Monroe had worked at the Pepperidge Farm outlet, although the store wasn't there any longer, and obviously neither was he. We had all already started smoking, mostly cigarettes we stole from our moms, and while we were sitting around in the food court, Rhonda on her second vanilla milkshake if you can believe that, puffing Virginia Slims or whatever, since you could still enjoy tobacco indoors in those days, Joy dared me to burn myself with my cherry. I did her one better and stubbed it out on my left wrist without making a sound, to the mingled awe and horror of my pair of spectators, and you can believe I still have the scar.

 

Anyway, what with all this, and also being at Rhonda's mercy when it came to transport since she was the only one with a car and a license, I didn't get home until after sunset. The porch light wasn't on and from outside the house looked totally dark.

 

I walked through the front door and said hello, like it was a question. There wasn't an answer, but I saw the bluish glow from the living room to my left, where as my eyes adjusted I perceived Kathy curled up on the couch in total darkness, swathed in her afghan, watching primetime something.

 

Hello again, I ventured.

 

All right, said Kathy, by which I knew from long experience she meant shut up.

 

Okay then, I said, and took myself upstairs.  

 

The next night, being a school night, I was home after soccer practice and after dinner we sat down to watch the second part of the series together. 

 

About a half hour in I asked, is this for real?

 

Shh, she said, and then, after a minute, yes, I remember all this. He killed those girls in Florida.

 

Then, a few minutes later, that's a good-looking man.

 

Mark Harmon is a good-looking man? I asked.

 

She sighed. Yeah.

 

I never gave her the watch, by the way. I kept it for myself, and in fact I'm wearing it right now. It's real silver and the band covers my scar so that's handy.

 

I probably would have forgotten all about this, since after all it was just another TV show I watched when I was a teenager, except for a peculiar call I got from Kathy on my nineteenth birthday. It was early evening, it was Tuesday, it was the first week of spring semester my second year at college, and I was getting ready to head down to the dining hall when the phone rang.

 

(I say college to avoid saying state school, which was all I could afford, but at least it was the best of the state schools, or so everybody told me, maybe as a form of consolation.)

 

(It was also five hours' drive from my hometown, which was far enough to be far, and I was pretty happy about that too.)

 

(And at least I got to go to college. All the people in this world haven't had the advantages that I've had.)

 

Hello, I said.

 

It's me, said Kathy. Happy birthday.

 

Thanks Kathy, I said.

 

There was a pause.

 

I sent you a card, she said.

 

Mm-hmm, I said. I was looking out my window at a fistfight that was getting started out on the quad. 

 

Did you get it? she said.

 

Sure didn't, I said.

 

There was another pause.

 

I heard from Monroe, she said. Totally out of the blue.

 

Oh wow, I said. A few people had gathered to break up the fight, without success that I could see. Where's he at?

 

Someplace in Wyoming, she said, I forget the name. Wyoming or one of those places. Selling ... furniture, I think? He was a little vague.

 

He always was a little vague, I said.

 

There was yet a third pause. I started drumming my fingers on the chipboard desk.

 

They killed that guy, she said at last.

 

What guy, I said, surprised by the turn in conversation.

 

That guy who killed those girls in Florida, she said. You remember, we watched the movie. Bundy. Remember?

 

Fuck, I said, I thought they killed him years ago. What took them so long?

 

Lawyers, I guess, she said.

 

Well fuck them for helping that scumbag, and fuck him too for not being dead before now, I said.

 

Is that how I raised you, she said, to talk in that way?

 

Sure is, I said.

 

Well, she said.

 

I don't remember what I ate at the dining hall that night. I can't remember a single thing I ate for dinner the whole time I was in college, actually.

 

My culinary habits didn't improve after school when I moved to the city either. I'd eat nothing during the day and then get up in the middle of the night to steal my roommate's food until she asked me, did you eat my granola bars and I was like no, what do you take me for.  Actually, our co-tenancy came to an end over the whole granola bar fiasco, in which I was, I can now admit, totally in the wrong, and we haven't spoken again to this day. In a panic, I moved in with my boyfriend, by which I mean the guy I was sleeping with at the time, which wasn't much of an improvement, although to his credit he didn't flip out when I raided the fridge. Thus passed my early twenties. I didn't go home and I never called either. Kathy wasn't much better, although she was religious about getting in touch on my birthday. I moved around so much back then though, she didn't always have my new phone number.

 

I feel a little silly saying this at such a remove of time, but Kurt Cobain's death really got to me. I wasn't doing heroin, but I was drinking too much, doing an occasional bump, and sleeping around in a way that didn't make me feel great. I was, in other words, a mess, and in this tangle of feelings I somehow got the idea that it might make me feel better to get a Mother's Day gift for Kathy. The watch I'd gotten her and then not given back in high school was the last one I'd ever bought.

 

On days when I was hungover I used to take the train down to the Battery and walk all the way home up Broadway, and on impulse I ducked into the Waldenbooks that used to be there, right near the Stock Exchange, to see if they might have anything suitable. Kathy always had books around, though I never saw her reading. On the front display I noticed a new hardcover written by the woman who had been Ted Bundy's final appeals attorney, with a picture of the schmuck himself on the cover, the one you always see where he's going nuts in the courtroom, and I thought, that's the book, and brought it to the counter. Can you gift wrap that, I said to the clerk. Then I walked over to the post office in Chinatown and got the thing in the mail. You know how you can always remember your childhood address? Anyway, I've never been able to unremember mine.

 

A week later I had just finished smoking a joint when the phone rang. I wouldn't have picked it up except I was expecting my boyfriend to call, but of course it was Kathy.

 

I got the package, she said, first off. No hello.

 

Hi Kathy, I said. This isn't a great time.

 

Did you read that book, she said.

 

Of course not, I said. It was a present for you.

 

You should read that book, she said. It'll give you nightmares.

 

I already have nightmares, I said.

 

Did you know, she said, that Bundy was in Ocean City? In 1969?

How could I possibly know that, I said. How could you possibly know that?

 

He told his defense attorney, she said, right before they gave him the chair. It's right there on page 282.

 

Okay okay, I said. An ambulance went by, fast, along the street eight floors below. He was in Ocean City in 1969.

 

Sweetheart, she said. I was in Ocean City in 1969.

 

What are the odds, I said.

 

It's more than that, she said, and sighed. When I told you this story the first time there were things I couldn't tell you because you were too young.

 

This, then, was the second version of the story.

 

She told me she had come to, in a hospital, with no memory of how she had gotten there. The doctors said she was bruised as if she had been struck on the head, and there were marks on her throat as if she'd been grabbed or even throttled. They didn't check for evidence of rape, but nine months later there was me.

 

And I didn't go to bed with anyone on that trip, she said, I promise you. I can tell you now, you're old enough to understand these things now.

 

So you knew all this back then but didn't tell me, I said.

 

Yes, she said. How do you tell it to a kid?

 

So why are you telling me now? I said.

 

Because, she said, I think it was him.

 

It was him? I said.

 

He was just getting started back then, she said. He didn't know how to do it right. He told this woman Nelson, his attorney, he told her that he tried it but it didn't go the way he meant it to. There was a pause. He could have been talking about me.

 

I was starting to feel a little less high. When did you figure this out? I said.

 

Just today, she said. Thanks to the book you sent me.

 

Okay, I said. Well then, you're welcome.

 

We didn't talk again for a long time after that. One day at work, around seven years later, the front desk told me I had a call. A voice I didn't recognize asked me was I the next of kin for Kathy, and I said sure. The voice (a woman's voice) said you might want to come up to White Plains to see her. I said, is she dying. You can guess there was a pause before the voice said yes.

 

Do I need to get there tonight, I said, or is this weekend good enough?

 

You can probably wait until the weekend, said the voice. But I wouldn't wait until next weekend.

 

On Saturday afternoon, I came in to the room the nurse at the station had pointed me to, with a bouquet of flowers from the ground-floor gift shop, and there was Kathy in her hospital gown in the adjustable bed. Wheel of Fortune was playing muted on the TV mounted in the corner.

 

Oh, she said. It's you. Her voice was weird and high, like she'd just inhaled helium.

 

I turned on my heel and walked back out to the nurse's station. The flowers were still in my hand.

 

What's wrong with her, I said.

 

Her neurons are demyelinating, said the nurse. She's losing a lot of faculties fast. She might not recognize you or remember the things you mention to her.

 

Thanks, I said, and then went back.

 

Hi Kathy, I said.

 

Hi there, she said. You must be that baby I had with Ted Bundy.

 

I guess I must, I said.

 

That was such a nice trip to visit aunt Helen, she said. The beaches were so beautiful.

 

I bet, I said.

 

Too bad he had to screw that all up, she said.

 

Yeah, I said.

 

But now I have you, she said.

 

You sure do, I said.

 

And that's just great, she said.

 

I couldn't agree more, I said.

 

And that was the third version.

 

 

 

 

 

David Brazil is a poet, novelist, and translator. He lives in Spain.