I remember another man walking into my room. He spoke in a soothing voice, told me everything was okay now, I was safe. He picked me up in his arms, though I was nine years old and too big to be treated like a baby. He told me to close my eyes. He told me not to look.

I nodded against his shoulder, but of course I kept my eyes open.

I had to see. I had to record. I had to remember. It is the duty of the lone survivor.

According to the police report, my father was drunk that night. He’d consumed at least a fifth of whiskey before loading his service revolver. He’d lost his job with the sheriff’s department the week before—after being reprimanded twice for showing up for work in a less-than-sober state. Sheriff Wayne, the man who carried me out of the house, had hoped the termination would force my father to clean up his act, maybe join AA. I guess my father had other ideas.

He started in the bedroom, catching my mother next to her bed. Then he moved on to my thirteen-year-old sister, who’d stuck her head out of her room, probably to see what was going on. My eleven-year-old brother also appeared in the hallway. He tried to run for it. My father shot him in the back, and Johnny fell down the stairs. It wasn’t a clean shot and it took Johnny a while to die.

I don’t remember this, of course. But I read the official report on my eighteenth birthday.

I was looking for an answer that I’ve never found.

My father killed my entire family except me. Did that mean he loved me the most, or hated me the most?

“What do you think?” Dr. Frank always replied.

I think this is the story of my life.

I wish I could tell you the color of my mother’s eyes. I know logically they were blue, because after my family died, I went to live with Aunt Helen, my mother’s sister. Aunt Helen’s are blue, and judging by the photos I have left, she and my mother were spitting images of each other.

Except that’s the problem. Aunt Helen looks so much like my mother that over the years, she’s become my mother. I see Aunt Helen’s eyes in my mind. I hear her voice, feel her hands tucking me in at night. And I ache because I want my mother back. But she’s gone from me, my traitorous memory killing her more effectively than my father did, so that I was driven to look up police reports and crime-scene photos, and now the only image I have of my mom is a curiously slack face staring up at the camera with a hole in the middle of her forehead.