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It is just the two of us in the house the next morning, her moving through the rooms, doing her moving-through-the-rooms routine, wiping dust from the top of the TV cabinet, running the vacuum. I have just finished a shower, where the jets of water prickled against my skin and scrubbed away the grime left from the day before. The phone trills, and Leslie turns off the vacuum to answer. I can hear her from the bathroom.
“Yes," she says, then pauses to listen. “Of course. We’ll be right there.” Another pause. “Yes. I think so.” Pause. “Thank you, George.” She hangs up the phone and goes back to vacuuming, continuing her day, heedless of her promise to “be right there.” It isn’t long before we do head that way, though—“that way” being back to the police station.
She vacuums until I step from the bathroom, with my hair freshly combed and towel dried, wearing a too-big shirt I found in the closet over a bra I found still wrapped in its plastic. There are a variety of sizes of bras in the drawer and several unopened packages of underwear. It seems that Charlotte’s room gets a lot of us lost kids passing through it.
I feel clean, in a very foreign way. The shower at our old trailer never had enough pressure to even get the suds out of my hair, and even though the water pressure at the crime-scene apartment is okay, it shifts when other tenants use their water and the temperature fluctuates abruptly when someone starts a load of laundry or a dishwasher somewhere ahead of our line. Leslie’s shower has a million different holes in the nozzle and I feel clean like I’ve never felt before. Like a film has been washed away, my skin smelling like flowers, and my hair silky with conditioner, a luxury in my life.
Leslie turns off the vacuum when she sees me standing in the hall, just outside of the bathroom. “Good morning.” She smiles her wide, toothy smile, her lips tilting slightly to the left. “How did you sleep?”
“Okay. That’s a great shower.”
“It is. Isn’t it?” She begins to wrap the cord around the prongs on the back of the vacuum, her body bobbing up and down with the motion. “We have several options for breakfast.”
“Anything is fine,” I say, suddenly awkward, waiting to be fed, waiting for her to provide food for me. I think I may still be in shock. It hasn’t all settled in, the events of last night.
She leads me to the kitchen, opening the pantry and peering in, “Lots of cereals, I can make eggs if you’d like?”
A lump rises in my throat against the thought of food and even though my stomach is sour with emptiness, I fear that I won’t be able to swallow. “How about toast? Just something simple.”
“Toast, yes. We have toast. Do you want rye, wheat, white? I may even have some sourdough left.”
I smile. “So many options,” I say, overwhelmed even with the choices for bread.
“We like choices.” She draws out three loaves of bread from a bread box, which I never knew was actually a real thing. She lays them out on the counter and I choose the one that is dark and light, because I have never eaten bread that looks like that, and I feel like today should be full of things that are not what I grew up with. I am relieved when she shows me the toaster, draws out several jams from the fridge, and leaves me to handle the toasting of my own bread.
Rye is my new favorite, with the little seeds and the taste that is so different from the white bread I've grown up on.
***
We reach the police station and she holds the door open for me. I step inside, feeling the churning in my stomach accelerate. We enter a different door from last night and are in the back entrance to the station. Last night I couldn’t see any of this bustle happening in the station, sheltered as it was by the wall blocking the street entrance from view, but today, Leslie takes me right into the thick of the officers’ desks and offices. The county jail must be in a basement, which makes sense, so they can keep all those criminals close at hand, but not in sight.
“Good morning, Leslie.” We’ve stopped at the counter, and a youngish man greets her before looking at me. “Morning, Ms. Hayes.” I nod, glancing from him to around the room, wondering if I will see any of the policemen I have met over this last year. The one who came to my house the night my mother had her wreck or the one who was there when the trailer burnt, but I don’t see either of them. I try to pull their names forward in my mind, but the shadows around that time are too dark and I can’t find them.
“George called and said you all needed to talk to Alison,” Leslie says, smiling, putting her hand on my shoulder, protective and assuring.
“I’ll let him know you’re here.” He picks up the phone and presses a button. “Heya, George. Ms. Hayes is here.” He hangs up and says, “He’ll be right out.” Leslie and I go and sit on the chairs that line the wall, me studying the chewed up edges of my fingernails, and her just sitting, being patient, a woman comfortable waiting.
“You okay?” she asks in a soft voice and I nod. “They just need to ask you a few questions.” I nod again. I understand; of course they have questions. I have a few questions of my own. Primarily, why had that water bottle been plugged into my mom, and where had it come from?
***
George sits across the table from me. Leslie waits outside the door. She had asked if I wanted her to come in because as my temporary guardian, she said she could be there. But I don’t know what all this cop may have to say to me, and since she likes me right now, I don’t want that to change. So, I had told her I wanted to go it alone.
Sergeant Pence is maybe the tallest person I have ever seen. His wrist bones stick out past the cuffs of his shirt, and I swear his fingers are nearly five inches long. He looks like a grown-up sitting at a kiddy desk and I feel like Alice, shrinking in Wonderland. His face is long, all of him is long, but there are waddles at the base of his jawline where gravity has begun to pull his skin back to earth. His hair is salt and pepper and the bristle of a closely cropped mustache shades his lip.
“First, let me express my condolences for your loss.” I nod, feeling strange that I don’t feel what I know I should feel. I don’t feel sad, I don’t feel scared, I don’t feel happy, I don’t feel any kind of emotion. I certainly don’t feel a loss. I feel empty. “Are you comfortable? Is it too cold in here?”
“I’m fine. It’s not too cold.”
“Do you need anything to drink? Water, tea?” I shake my head, and he looks down at the sheaf of papers in front of him, closed in by the open edges of a folder. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“That’s fine. I don’t mind.” The room is small and gray. The walls are gray, the table is gray, the floors are gray. Only the ceiling is white, and that not perfectly so. There is a splotch of a stain where water has leaked at some time or another and my eyes keep drawing up to the stain, roundish and irregular.
“I understand you were the one to find your mother,” he says, and I hear the I’m diving in tone in his voice.
“I was,” I say, my eyes coming back to meet his.
“Can you tell me about that?”
I tilt my head at him. “I came home. She was dead.” It all seems very simple to me. This is the same conversation I had last night.
“Could you explain what you did when you came home?” His tone says, I understand, just doing my job here.
“I came home, and I think I called for her.” I’m not certain that I did call for her, but usually I do, so maybe I did. “She didn’t answer.” Saliva is building up in my mouth so I swallow, clenching my jaws together for a second before speaking again. “The lights were all off so I thought she was probably out. She’d been going to AA in the afternoons. She had a sponsor.” I feel the strangest sense of pride. She had been on her way to making it finally—she was going to get clean because somebody else believed in her. But I had smelled the vodka as soon as I entered the apartment.
“What made you think to look for her?” he asks, his eyes heavy on me.
“I just always did.” I stare down at my hands, my hands so like my mother’s. “The apartment smelled, I guess. Like vodka. I knew she wasn’t at AA.” I admit this to him, and I feel like a traitor saying it. But what difference can it possibly make now? She’s dead, regardless of whether she was drunk or sober yesterday.
“So you went into her room. Can you tell me what you saw when you went in?” I hear the apology in his voice. He is hating to ask, but he has to, and I give him a little bit of a pass because of it.
“It was dark.” I sniff, not because I am crying, or even because I need to, but to give myself time, a second to force my mind open and back into that room. I look up at the splotch on the ceiling, biting the inside of my lower lip. “There was a vodka bottle on the table there, beside her bed, and I picked it up to see how much was left.”
“Was there anything left?” I shake my head. “Had you noticed your mother at this time?”
“No. Not really. I saw her in the bed but hadn’t really looked at her. I didn’t look at her until I turned to leave.” I saw her face, vacuous. Her mouth hanging open, skin stretching across bones. “She was real still,” I say. “Her hair was all across her face and I pushed it back and felt how cold she was.” I heave a sigh and drop my head onto my arms on the table, my right hand coming up and over my skull, moving through my hair, my still-damp hair from Leslie’s shower. I can’t think about this. I can’t talk about this. I pull myself together and sit upright again. This is life. This is life. Shit happens and this is life.
“I’m very sorry to have to ask you these questions, Alison.” He glances down at his papers and proceeds. “So you say you touched her then?”
"Yes, I touched her," I pause, letting the moment stretch as I see her in my memory, "and she was so cold, I pulled down the blanket, thinking I'd wake her up, but she didn’t wake up.”
“Did you touch anything else then?”
“No.” It hadn’t made sense—it doesn’t make sense—what I saw under those blankets. “I just pulled the covers back up and sat on the floor trying to make sense of everything.”
“When you first entered the room, the covers were up?” he asks, clarifying.
“Yeah. They were.” I don’t look at his eyes, but stare at his Adam’s apple, large and pointed.
“Did you touch anything else in the room?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What did you do then? After sitting on the floor trying to ‘make sense’?” he asks, giving my words back to me from the notes he has taken.
“I went down the hall and asked to use the neighbor’s phone.”
“Did you return to the apartment?” There is a long silence between us, and he waits, being patient, while I relive those moments in that nice college girl’s apartment, with her watching, tears filling her eyes, and her hand reaching out to me when I hung up the phone and told her thanks and turned and left.
“No.” I finally manage to return his look. “You know what I don’t understand?”
“No. What?” He raises an eyebrow.
“That water bottle.”
He steeples his fingers in front of him and an old verse runs through my head: “Here is the church and here is the steeple, look inside and see all the people.” For the first time, I feel tears prick the back of my eyes, because the voice singing in my mind is my mom’s. “What about that?” he asks, and I blink to clear the moisture in my eyes, pulling my gaze away from his hands, refocusing on the present.
“That was odd, right? It didn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to me."
"That was odd,” he says, letting his words stretch with long vowels and soft consonants.
"It wasn’t new, was it? I mean it didn’t look new.”
His face stays impassive. “No. I don’t believe it was new. What does it matter, whether it was new or not?”
“Well, we didn’t have a hot water bottle. I mean, maybe we did once, but not since we moved to the apartment.”
“You’re sure about that?” He makes a scratch on the page without taking his eyes off of me.
“Pretty sure. I mean, that was pretty low on my list of things we needed to replace after the fire.”
He flips through some pages, stops at one, and does a cursory read-through. “Your house recently burned? That right?”
“Yeah. But, it’s just . . . What a strange way to kill yourself.” It’s the first time I have spoken these words aloud, or any variation of them. My mother killed herself. My mother is dead.
"Do you believe the fire was a suicide attempt, a call for help?” he asks, and a cold shiver runs down my spine because that hadn’t been a suicide attempt. That had been a murder attempt, and yeah, maybe it was a cry for help, but not from my mother. I shake my head, unable to speak for fear that my voice will betray my guilt.
“Yeah. It certainly looks odd. But according to the findings of the coroner, air to the heart isn’t the cause of death.” He has me, hooked and dangling.
“It isn’t?” Not that I understand what “air to the heart” means in terms of the water bottle. It’s for water, not air.
“No. The coroner says it was an overdose of opiates and alcohol. It may have been a near thing . . .” His pause spreads and lengthens as he watches me absorb the information, the slow march of the beginning of understanding stepping across my face, the air from the empty water bottle, taped to the syringe, may have been on the way to her heart to stop it’s beating, but her lethal cocktail did the job first. “Was she on pain medication?”
“She was. For her leg. But really, I didn’t think she had any left.”
“Well then, it looks like she must have gotten more without you knowing about it, because she definitely overdosed.” The word that he doesn’t say looms heavy: accidental. Was it an accident? Could it have been an accident? With that water bottle maybe something completely different? Did she not intend to die?
“Then, that water bottle really doesn’t make sense,” I say, giving voice to my thoughts.
“And you say you didn’t touch it? The water bottle?” His tone shifts, and for the first time, I feel like maybe this isn’t just a conversation. For the first time, I notice the small tape recorder whirring quietly beside his hand. For the first time, I think they think I did this.
“I didn’t,” I say.
I didn’t, did I? A small ridge of panic begins to rise and, I feel small beads of sweat breaking out along my hairline.
“Is it safe to say that you and your mother had a contentious relationship?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, feeling a cold spike in stomach.
“Did you love your mother?” It is such a complex question that I am instantly overwhelmed. Did I love her? I did, once, when I was little, when she was room mom in kindergarten. Even when we moved to the trailer, I loved her. I still love her.
“Of course I do,” I say, my voice too shrill. “She was difficult. We have a difficult relationship,” I admit, realizing only after the fact that I have used the present tense. We have, we continue to have, a difficult relationship. She is dead, and I am still torn up about how I feel about her.
“Do you feel like she took good care of you?”
I snort a laugh and sit back in my chair, ready to flee, wanting desperately out of this room. “She couldn’t even take care of herself.” My voice is cold and hard, and I know, because I hear his pen scratching, that he is making note of this reaction. I turn my eyes back to him and squint. “Do you think I killed my mother?”
“Maybe you were tired of her not taking good care of you, tired of her drinking, tired of her being who she was. Maybe you came in and found her passed out, like other times before, and you thought you’d just finish it, make sure she didn’t wake up this time so you could get on with your life.” He watches me closely, his eyes narrowed all through this speech, and I sit with my mouth falling more and more open. He sets his pen down, slow and deliberate, taking his time, leaning back in his chair, crossing his massive hands behind the back of his head as he tilts. The front legs of his chair rise off the floor, and his eyelids lower as he tilts, though his eyes do not come free of me.
“I did not kill my mother,” I say, quiet, the words are a whisper because it is not the same as saying I didn’t want her dead. Had this conversation come earlier in the spring, had she died in the trailer fire, then these questions would be legitimate, and I would be looking at years in prison for drugging her, giving her drinks until she was not coherent, setting a fire to burn in the trailer around her. I can’t be shocked that they would think such a thing of me; they are not far off the mark. I am no angel.
“No. I don’t believe you killed your mother.” His Adam’s apple bobs, and I slowly shake my head.
“I didn’t kill my mother.” I may have tried once, but I didn’t kill her. “I thought you said it was an overdose.”
“So it would seem. But then, there is that water bottle. And you’re certain you were alone in the house when you came home?”
“No. Not certain.” It was a lot to take in, her lying there not breathing, the damned water bottle, how cold she was, and the empty vodka bottle on the table when she’d been going to the meetings. A cold chill snakes down my spine again—because that water bottle means somebody maybe did that after she was dead, to make sure she was dead. Somebody could have been in the house when I arrived. But I never looked.
“Was she dating anyone that you know of?”
“She was dating Cal. But Warren said he’s missing.” He’d said that, right? That Cal was gone, they found his car on 57, but nobody knew where he was.
“Cal who?” I hear his pen scratching again.
“Cal Robinson.”
He nods—this is information he already knows. “Warren?” he asks.
“He’s a friend.” I feel a little sick that I’ve brought Warren’s name into this. I don’t mention that Cal is his brother.
“Does he have a last name?” I tell him the same name, Robinson, and he nods—again, information he already knew.
“What did Warren say about Cal being missing?” he asks, those eyes on me from up under his lashes.
“What does this have to do with my mother?” I am tracking back, trying to take the conversation away from Warren.
“Just trying to understand all the players. So, Warren said Cal was missing?”
I nod, but don’t want to say anything else. “He said the police found his car, so you probably know more than I do about that.”
He nods and his Adam's apple dances up and down his throat. He takes a swallow from the coffee that looks cold, with a layer of film skimming the surface. He grimaces, but swallows it down. “Were you aware of your mother having a gun?”
I shake my head. “She didn’t have a gun,” I say, looking at my fingernails, chewed and raw, angry. “A gun would have made sense at least.” Death by gunshot to the head makes sense. Death by water bottle . . . I think, how ridiculous. Even dead, she’s ridiculous. She couldn’t even do that right.
“You’re certain she didn’t keep a gun in the house?” I shake my head. “Did you keep a gun in the house?”
“No. We didn't have a gun, okay?” My irritation with him sticking on this point that I’ve already responded to, that has nothing whatsoever to do with the way she died, rings clear through my voice.
“Well, you see, that’s interesting.” His voice has gone very full of long vowels and soft consonants again, very good ol’ boy: just having a chat, you see.
“Why is that interesting?” I ask, ready to get away from him and his peering eyes and his bobbing Adam’s apple.
“Well,” he says slowly, taking his time, “because we found a gun in your apartment. I wonder who that will belong to?” He leans forward, watching me, “I wonder who that will belong to?” he repeats, his eyes boring into me.
“Well, that doesn’t make any fucking sense at all,” I say, hearing my mother’s voice in my head. “There you go again, using your big-girl words,” her voice dripping with sarcasm. “If she had a gun, why didn’t she just blow her head off? I mean what is with that water bottle?” I am stuck, a record caught in a groove. Stuck where it doesn’t make sense, not letting anything else sink in, not comprehending that if the water bottle wasn’t the cause of death, then why was it there and how did it get there?