There are stalking charges on my criminal record. I'm guilty, and I'd do it all again

She doesn’t know I exist. And that’s how I prefer it, actually.

Anne is a bright soul, though tightly guarded.

After what she’s been through, I can’t say I blame her. It does make my work harder, however. She knows how to watch her back.

At least, she thinks she does.

For the past month, I’ve watched her every night. Despite her best efforts, I’ve memorized her patterns. I know exactly when and where she’ll be at her most vulnerable.

I’m no stranger to violence against women. I never have been. My father regularly drank his bodyweight in light beer. My older sister and I did our best to be invisible after sundown.

But on the nights he drank whiskey, nobody was safe.

You can guess the things I witnessed from my earliest memories, right up until the day the system put him away for good.

My mother, Rebecca, was patient and kind. My sister, Joan, was brave, strong, and protective. Mom would shepherd him to their room, and Joan would sing to me as soon as the door closed.

She did her best, but even her beautiful voice couldn’t fully rise over the muffled thumps and cries of pain from down the hall. 

Some nights, the door would fly open. Without fail, Joan disappeared into the darkened hallway, dragged by her hair. I’m guessing that was the reason she cut it so short when she was fourteen. But I never once heard her cry out. I think she would have died before giving him the satisfaction of knowing he had hurt her.

In fact, I know she did.

It was the night of January 17th, 2009. Dad had been working longer hours at the factory. You can guess how he coped. Although the routine started off the same as it always had, I had made eye contact with my father just before Joan closed the door. Instead of a volatile flame flickering beneath the thick glaze of alcohol we all knew, I saw nothing.

Dull, focused, and completely lifeless. The same gaze of a Great White Shark right before the eyes roll back to strike.

Joan had barely started her second song when we heard the first scream. Before she could begin the third, I heard something I hadn’t before:

We’ve all seen movies where a person chokes. The pained gurgles as every inch of their body struggles to breathe once again.

Well… not a single film does the actual sound justice.

Joan froze mid-verse. Her face drew tight as she listened closely. When the sound repeated, she sprinted from the room towards it, slamming the door behind her.

I stayed right where I was. Alone in the dark room, completely paralyzed by instinctual fear.

I’ll spare you the details, but I heard everything. Everything.

I’m not sure how much time passed before the house fell silent, or for how long it was before the world restarted with a single sound.

Footsteps.

Slow. Heavy. Deliberate.

Moving down the hallway towards my bedroom door. My eyes fell to the strip of light shining beneath the door, now broken by two dark lines as someone stopped outside.

The door opened slowly, and my father stepped into my room. Even in the low light, I could see the fresh blood on his knuckles. For a few moments, only the sound of his heavy breathing lingered in the air.

“I never should have married that bitch,” he muttered. “My life went to hell as soon as I bought that damn ring.”

He turned his head to face me. The same darkened gaze I had seen earlier bore straight into my eyes. I looked away. 

“A man ain’t nothing when he answers to a whore, boy. You take what’s yours, and you move on before they can chain you down and bleed you dry.”

He paused and clenched his fist, the motion forcing blood to seep from between his knuckles.

“Never fucking forget that a real man decides what to do with his life.” 

With that, he turned and left the room. I heard the garage door open, and the engine of his truck fading as it left the driveway.

I didn’t see him again until I testified at his trial.   

Photos of the aftermath hung on a massive bulletin board in the courtroom. The blood. The bruises. Skin tinged with blue, eyes red from the burst blood vessels of strangulation. Enough bones broken in their faces to leave them nearly unrecognizable.

Joan had attacked a man twice her size, trying to save our mother. Mom spent years painstakingly applying makeup, believing her patience wouldn’t be for nothing.

I left the courthouse knowing exactly where kindness and bravery will lead you. 

I went into foster care after that. I never found my “forever home” or a new family. After aging out of the system at eighteen, I had nowhere to go. Around the six-month mark of being damaged and homeless, I tried to end my existence.

Someone found me before I bled out, and I woke up in the hospital. The staff said that officially, I had been dead for two minutes during the ordeal. I didn’t need them to tell me that, though. 

I stepped out of that hospital with debt I could never pay. But in exchange, I was finally ready to embrace the desires I’d held since that night.

Within a year, I had three arrests for trespassing and two for stalking. Within three years, I had quite the record. Still, I was a free man. The justice system is laughable when addressing people like me.

But by year four, I had honed my skills. The girls never knew I was there until I made my presence known.

That leads me to Anne.

Slim. Sweet. And beautiful. Everything I could ever want. A familiar song inside the bar caused me to look her way that evening.

As soon as I saw her, I knew what I had to do.

Unbeknownst to her, I moved close enough to read the name on her credit card as she closed out her tab. Once I had her name, the rest was simply knowing where to look for the information I needed. Records showed her eight-year marriage, divorce, and an eventual restraining order against her ex-husband that had recently expired. The more intimate details required some legwork, but eventually, I had what I needed.

She was careful, but I was thorough.

She would meet with her best friend every Friday night. One night together at home, then one night spent on the town, stopping at two particular bars. Each week, like clockwork. The friend presented a problem, so that ruled out their “in” nights.

On their nights out, they always parked their cars in the same lot before walking the short distance to the bar together. 

But Anne’s reliability betrayed her safety. Each time I surveyed the lot, she often arrived fifteen-to-twenty minutes before her friend.

The opening.

I arrived at the lot before Anne did. Of course, I parked in a lot across the street. No matter how many times I had done this, my heartbeat grew faster as the time drew nearer.

As I watched her older gray sedan as it pulled into the lot, I tightened my grip on the extendable baton I carried for nights like this. If I hit the right spot, they don’t even have time to scream.

The song I was listening to grew louder as a white F150 slid in behind her.

I stepped out of my car and moved towards the street separating our lots. As I glanced at the traffic in search of an opening to cross, the door of the truck opened, and an agitated man stepped out and approached her window. Though I couldn’t hear the words, ‌an argument had clearly broken out.

Without warning, the song inside my head grew exponentially louder.

I didn’t hesitate. I broke into a dead sprint towards them, completely ignoring the cars as I ran through the busy road, extending my weapon with a flick of my wrist.

I slammed the baton down onto the man’s hand, sending the gun in it clattering to the ground before he could level it at her. The man staggered backward, clutching his injured hand.

For a moment, nobody moved. The man glared at me with the same sharklike gaze I had first seen in my bedroom as a boy.

But I’m a man now. I stared right back.

He lunged at me. I swung the baton, but I wasn’t fast enough. The weapon flew from my hand as he tackled me to the ground, driving the air from my lungs as I landed flat on my back. My skull bounced upon impact with the pavement, and again with each ensuing blow. 

The song grew louder with every strike. By the time the man had exhausted himself and stopped to catch his breath, it was absolutely deafening. So loud that I couldn’t hear Anne scream as the man got to his feet, snatched the gun from the ground, and leveled it straight at her. I watched as he forced her into the passenger seat of his truck at gunpoint.  

I guess he hadn’t noticed me crawling towards my fallen weapon.

As he hurried back around the hood towards the driver’s seat, I swung the baton. The impact shattered his kneecap and sent him sprawling straight into the ground, face-first. 

Still on my knees, I gripped my baton with both hands and brought it down with everything I had. It landed in the center of his back, breaking two vertebrae and severing the nerves within.

The instant his back broke, the song in my head finally stopped. I glanced at Anne, and for the first time, the battered, lifeless face of my mother didn’t flash before me when I looked at her.

I got to my feet without a word and unsteadily started towards my car. I think she said something to me, but I don’t remember what it was.

It didn’t matter. She would never see me again.

I’ve stalked women for years, but I disappear as soon as the song stops.

Anytime I hear Joan sing to me, I know what I have to do. It started while I was still in that hospital bed. In the middle of my third night there, I heard her voice. The same soothing melody she sang to me the night she died.

I snapped upright and turned towards the sound. The door to my room opened, and the song suddenly increased in volume. A night shift nurse I hadn’t seen before stepped inside to check on me. The moment I saw her face, the room vanished, replaced in an instant by the image of my mother crumpled on the floor, face-up in a pool of her daughter’s blood. I shut my eyes as though they were burning and turned away from the nurse.

“What’s wrong, dear?” she said. “Is it too bright out there? I’m sorry!”

When I turned back to face her, the scene before me was as it should be.

I knew what the vision meant. Still, I convinced myself I was having a mental breakdown. I did nothing. 

She didn’t come back. Two days later, I found out that her boyfriend had shot her before turning the gun on himself the same morning I had seen her.

The next time I heard my sister’s voice, I listened. When I saw Mom while looking at the girl behind the counter, I knew I had found another man’s next victim.

I can’t undo the damage my father caused, but I can do something about men like him.

As I sat on my couch, an ice pack to my throbbing head, I thought back to the one thing my dad was right about:

A real man decides what to do with his life.