Dr. Loomis shortly left the room upon the arrival of her father, whose head was still bandaged, and who's left eye was still swollen and ugly. But, Carmen couldn't say much for herself.

"I'm so sorry...My dearest…" her father bleated, immediately at her side and sobbing. "I'm so sorry."

Carmen, upon seeing his tears rolling down the discolored canvas of his skin, joined him in his misery.

"He killed her— he killed her, dad. Mom." She confessed, warbling words, incoherent to a spectator who would have no knowledge to the context of her hardship. "He made it look like a suicide. Strangled her."

"Shh..Shh…" Her father gently brushed a hand down the crown of her head, a movement only her mother had done to her until now. "Who else have you told?"

"Dr. Loomis."

"Did he believe you?"

"He said it would be hard to find him guilty of something like that, especially with mom buried…"

Her father suddenly pulled away with an air, distancing himself.

"I see."

Carmen's brows knitted together.

"D-Dad?"

"You're going to tell them it was a mistake," he ordered in a clear voice.

"I don't understand."

Her father sharpened her with a disparaging look. "You tell them you were delusional. Experiencing a lapse in reality. That you need professional help."

"But...But…"

Where had her father gone? The man she was so concerned for. The man she'd felt angry for when she discovered Adam had brutalized him. "

"It's true, daddy...I…Adam told me."

Then, he grabbed her arm tightly, like the cuff around her wrist restraining her to the bed. "Do you know what this could do to us, Carmen? Our family name? It's already enough that you called the police on Adam the night he came home."

Carmen was bewildered. "I...You were...hurt."

"Your brother has always had his issues but he's never meant true harm, Carmen." Her father intoned. "There was no reason for alarm. Don't you want to keep our family together?" A crack in his voice. "After all these years I finally have both of you. I've waited all these years."

Carmen shook her father's grip from her arm and he released it with sudden shame. A deep frown meant for him and only him came across his daughter's face as she looked upon the man, the man she thought she trusted, with only contempt.

She once envisioned those hands to tuck her into bed, to toss her a ball, to hold her steady as she peddled her tricycle. Those whimsical fantasies disappeared with the ripples in her memories.

"What are you talking about?"

Mr. Doe stumbled away from his daughter's bedside. His eyes searched beyond a time too far away for Carmen to recall.

"Do you know why your mother left?" He asked.

Carmen wiped her nose, feeling remorselessly bitter as though her mother's ghost spoke through her.

"She hated you."

Her father barked an empty laugh which vibrated emptily in her chest.

"She was a very hard woman to please, I told her that before we divorced," he said. And then he dared to look miserable, beaten— she could imagine her father being a sore loser.

"This whole town," he spat, "So superstitious, it's ridiculous. If it weren't for those crazy, rambling lunatics at the church," he trailed off with a shake of his head.

"I don't understand," Carmen said.

"Don't you?" Her father snapped back to the present, glaring at her. "Don't you know this town doesn't know how to shut up? They go on about fucking folk tales, they can't just let it go! They have to keep it alive. They have to keep talking about it."

"Talk about what?"

"If they didn't talk about it, maybe they wouldn't have jinxed it. Maybe they wouldn't have caused that boy to kill his sister. Maybe your mother wouldn't have been spooked."

Dr. Wynn had said madness was inherited. Carmen feared that maybe she'd one day sound as crazy as her father was now. Was that why her brother was a raging lunatic?

"Are you talking about Michael Myers?"

"Don't say his name." Her father hissed, and then he whipped a paranoid glance over his shoulder. "You'll call him here. Adam is innocent, he's always been innocent. He's just impressionable."

"Adam has killed multiple people," Carmen reminded gravely, assuming her father would know because of how in denial he sounded.

"Adam's not a killer," her father insisted. "He only feels pressured to be. But he wasn't chosen for it."

Inside of Carmen, violently was a snap, a busted rubber band ricocheting against the walls of her heart, disturbing with all the force of a tsunami, rippling against the bay that was her calm.

"No one is telling him to kill anyone!" Carmen shouted.

"But they are," her father said cautiously, "Can't you see? Can't you see the insanity that runs in all of them, in him? It's a disease of the mind. It's bedlam. This entire town is filled with taint. They want a mad man, now they have a mad man!"

Daddy…

Anger conceded to pity and pity made Carmen ache with tears.

This wasn't how she wanted to be reminded of her father. But, if all old dogs must be put down, then let it be him, in the most humane way possible, before he too becomes insane like the town he accused of being.

"Michael Myers is just a projection of several generations of a silly stupid wives' tale, you must know this!" Her father howled, hands anchoring on the drapes of the hospital bed divider and yanking it down with barbaric clumsiness. "They're all crazy!" As the curtain fell, so too did her father's bandages unraveled around the welt of his injury and revealed his greenish, yellow skin, like a bruised potato left out in the blazing heat of July. "All of them, Carmen! Run while you still can! Runaway before it takes you too!"

A nurse and the officer posted at her door came into the room, drawn in by the commotion, just in time for her father to bustle past them and sprint down the hall in a panicked frenzy. Several orderlies restrained him and Carmen hated hearing her father curse and spit and rage like the mad man he had become.