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Kate comes to see him a week after the trial.
She looks a mix of broken and put together, like life – like Doug – tore her apart and she had to painfully staple herself back in one piece. She looks devastated and beautiful. Doug can’t look at her so he stares at her shoulder instead. It’s covered in the sleeve of a yellow shirt right now but he knows the tattoo she has under it and the scar underlining it, and he imagines it.
He tries to block out whatever she’s saying. She didn’t have to come and see him. She just did because she’s still nice, and caring, and maybe she even still loves him. That’s what she’d said, when she’d left. She’d still loved him, and that was why she was leaving.
He wishes she’d fled much farther away.
The buzz in his ears pops abruptly when she mentions Anne, and suddenly Doug has to grip the phone tighter to keep himself from crying, from leaving the room right away and going to hang himself in his cell. She woke up, Kate says. She woke up and she’s fine, she’s okay, their baby girl is okay.
But.
There’s always a but.
She can’t hear anymore.
Doug wants to take the pen sticking out of Kate’s purse and drill it in his ear until he reaches the brain.
He hurt his baby girl. He hurt her, and she’ll know her daddy hurt her, was careless enough to hurt her, to permanently damage her life. She’ll know and she’ll be hurt and it will be Doug’s fault.
He wants to die.
He wishes it would solve anything.
Doug tells the therapist he has to see twice a month he doesn’t remember anything from the accident. He was too drunk, too out of it to remember anything.
Right?
He doesn’t tell her because if he does he knows she’ll want to know, to hear about what it felt like. Why he didn’t turn back when Annie told him she was scared. How she screamed when the car hit them.
How it had stopped by the time Doug realized they'd been in an accident.
He tells her he doesn’t remember because if he doesn’t he might drown.
Kate comes every week. In a detached part of his brain, Doug realizes it’s because she cares, still. She cares about him, she cares about Annie, she wants to do the right thing.
She’s just a good person. Amazing, just as she was when Doug met her for the first time. Nice, brilliant, and always, always caring. It’s why Doug loved her. Loves her, still, maybe. His heart is so used to the acidic burn of panic and self-depreciation these days it doesn’t react to love or kindness anymore.
Doug doesn’t want to love her anymore. She’s too good for him, and he no longer deserves any of it. Doug deserves to be stripped away from anything else than the punishment he brought upon himself.
He avoids Kate’s eyes until she can’t stand it anymore. She curses at him, then yell, until the guard has to ask her to leave the room. She exchanges hushed whispers with him while glaring at Doug, and when she leaves she doesn’t come back.
It’s better this way.
Nobody calls Doug by his first name in prison. In here, he is Eiffel. It doesn’t quite feel like him, more like someone who spontaneously appeared in the closed off world that constitutes the facility. Doug feels himself dissolving into it. He isn’t Doug anymore, the scrawny, stupid kid who drank too much and accidentally had the most wonderful kid in the world. Doug who fucked up with a smile until it came biting him in the ass and destroyed everything he’d ever loved. Doug who didn’t get quite as much as he deserved when he got sentenced. In prison, he is just Eiffel, a criminal like any other, a simple name on paper, a person that is a bit less than a person.
It’s better this way.
The therapist – Eiffel doesn’t bother remembering her name – doesn’t seem put off by Eiffel’s silence. She seems to care about him - about his sorry, ugly self - but he blocks that train of thought because it reminds him of Kate, and she doesn’t push despite the fact that he’s sure she could crack him right open and leave him bleeding on the floor.
He almost wishes she would.
Instead she talks. She talks about depression, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, suicidal ideation and how to cope with it all. She talks about the rate of suicides in the state, in the prison, about the way it’s so easy to destroy yourself because you think you deserve it, because you don’t know who else to blame, because the world is so wide and vast and there’s nothing you can do against it when you’re also an insignificant speck in the universe.
She looks at him with deep grey eyes that seem to see all of him, that brush over the scratch marks on his arms and the purple bruises under his eyes, and Doug almost wants to ask her where she was when he was young and stupid and his only medication was the bottom of a bottle.
He’s too busy watching her carpet and wondering how it would look if he were to bleed on it.
Eiffel doesn’t look for trouble in prison, not really, but he never was quite able to stay put, and when the other inmates try to roughhouse him he can’t quite resist using his quip. It’s stupid, and risky, because even though this isn’t the highest security prison there are still pretty dangerous guys in the crowd. But Eiffel is feeling untethered, and he wants blood in his teeth and to feel something again. If he gets fucked up enough maybe he can pretend he was hurt in the accident. Maybe his damned luck will run out and he can finally pay for his crimes and his stupidity.
He gets two black eyes and a strike on his record but he can’t regret it, not when his whole body is aching and he spits blood while washing his teeth.
Prison is its own world of emptiness and silence, and after a while it isn’t quite enough anymore to make Eiffel numb to anything and everything. He gets into fights by not backing down soon enough, and sometimes the creepiest of the prisoners get a bit too close to him, but even the violence and the detached disgust isn’t enough to let him forget who he is, who he was, what he did. After the second month, Eiffel starts having nightmares again, and he sees Annie’s face in them, crying and not hearing him when he tries to say he’s sorry. She’s saying it’s his fault over and over, and when Eiffel wakes up he finds himself regretting the loss of his belt.
When his therapist mentions sign language for the first time, Eiffel is surprised by his own anger. Even drunk, he was never violent. Irresponsible? Sure. Stupid and impulsive? Absolutely. But he’s never, ever been violent. Not with Kate, not with Annie, not even with the other rowdy patrons at bars. So when he realizes he’s broken his chair on the woman desk and trapped her behind it, it feels like someone suddenly dropped a bucket of ice cold water on his head, and he doesn’t struggle when the guards restrain him and throw him in solitary.
He’s grateful for the reprieve for all of two minutes, and then his thoughts start to circle round and round and right then he would kill to spray his own blood all over the grey walls.
Coming out of solitary after two weeks is nearly as bad as being put there has been in the first place. Eiffel isn’t surprised to find his pillow has been stolen while he was gone, along with his change of shoes, and he is more grateful than ever that he was paranoid enough to put Annie’s picture where no one could steal it from him.
Four months have passed since Eiffel has been incarcerated.
Today is Annie’s birthday.
She’s five.
Last year Doug and Kate had gotten together to make her a lunch party, and then they’d gone to a small county fair when she’s tasted cotton candy for the first time. Kate had shown off her gunslinger skills and won a plushie for her daughter and Doug had had to talk Annie down from trying the gun for herself.
This year, Eiffel is in prison and he’s the reason his daughter can no longer hear her mother sing her happy birthday.
He calls anyway.
Kate answers after the third ring, late enough that Doug has feared she wouldn’t.
“Doug.” And she sounds happy, and sad, and tired.
“Hey. I… I know you probably don’t want to talk to me again, and Annie either, but can you wish her a happy birthday for me? I know she doesn’t want to hear from me or get any messages – I know I didn’t-“
“Doug.” Kate says, and she sounds nice and reasonable and it makes him feel ashamed. That he wasn’t who she wanted, wasn’t enough, wasn’t better. “She will be happy that you called. She misses you.”
Something crumbles in Doug’s chest.
He knows he should be happy, but it only feels like there isn’t enough air in the room, and he’s pretty sure he’s crying.
Kate is saying something, that she tried to explain to her daughter where her father was, what had happened, but Doug can’t hear it, he can’t-
“I’m sorry.” He says, and it sounds wet and miserable and crackly so he repeats it, to make sure Kate heard. “Kate, I’m so sorry.”
“Doug-“
He hangs up.
Eiffel starts to think about the future.
It’s the scariest thing he’s ever done.
When Doug was just a boy that didn’t care he spent most of his week wasted, future had already been a big, hulking beast that growled in his ear, and Doug drank and drank because it was easier than to wonder about who he was and what that meant.
When Doug became a father and met his daughter, a bundle barely bigger than his hand at the time, the future felt like it stretched to the rhythm of her little body growing and growing, of her smile becoming wider and wider.
When Kate had decided he wasn’t fit to take care of Annie anymore, future had been a starless void and Doug had been desperate, filled to the brim with the knowledge that he was nothing once again, that he couldn’t even be who he’d already been, who he was supposed to be: Annie’s father.
These days, Doug is hiding and Eiffel is an empty husk, a shadow simply going through the motions. His future is an endless repetition of the same day over and over again, until he’s released or until he snaps and releases himself from anything and everything forever.
Doug doesn’t have a future but Annie still does.
It’s hard to think about, but when he pushes past the misery and the guilt and the self-depreciating, egocentric bullshit, he remembers that, despite everything, Annie’s growing. His little girl’s growing and probably learning to smile again, to be well again, despite her father having darkened her future. She’ll grow up and one day she might want to confront the piece of shit that dared take anything away from her.
He doesn’t dare hope, hope that she’d want to see him, to know him, but he knows what it’s like to have bad parents. Even if you don’t want to see them, to hear from them, to know them, it still hurts knowing they don’t care about you, knowing they lived their life with you well out of it.
If Annie ever grows up to spit in Doug’s face, he at least wants to give her the satisfaction. If there’s nothing else he can do, he can still do this.
He starts writing letters. They begin stupid and they finish with him soaking the paper with his tears and he rips them all but one, one that just begins with how much he loves her and misses her and finish with how sorry he is. He doesn’t send it, just keeps it next to her picture, and it hurts, but it doesn’t feel like a festering wound.
His therapist – still the same one, which probably speaks to her dedication – talks to him about sign language again and Eiffel doesn’t destroy her office.
This is what progress looks like, right?
He doesn’t respond, but also doesn’t protest when she sets him up for weekly learning sessions in the prison’s library. There is no teacher or learning group but they have some books and he could watch tutorials on their antic computers as long as he’s monitored by a guard of the prison.
Eiffel spends the first hour picking up one book and looking at its cover, trying not to break as memories of his daughter – she must have changed so much – flood his mind.
On the second session, he opens it, and tearfully learn the signs for “hello”, “how are you” and boring niceties. The amount he could be learning suddenly feels lackluster: Doug doesn’t even know how to begin to express the gaping hole that opens up whenever he thinks about talking to Annie. He doesn’t know how to talk about the guilt, and the pain, and the love already, how is he supposed to learn to sign it? It will never be enough, never quite, no matter how much he practices saying “I’m sorry” and Doug tries and fail to swallow his panic attack when he can’t get the sign for “goodbye” right.
Cutter finds him then, and there is never a third session.