Then
She looks at the body of her mother, sprawled in the hallway. If she turns her head, she will see her father, slumped in his chair by the fireplace in the next room, one fingertip still touching the side of a glass in which his whiskey, the ice long melted, still sits. She looks down at her hands to see if there is any spot or smear of blood, but they are clean.
She turns to her sisters. They stand apart from each other. She picks out details: the blood drying on the cuffs of the soft blue pajama bottoms, the wet hair hanging in stringy clumps, the hands rubbing together as if trying to get clean. She starts to speak, falters. She wets her lips and tries again.
“This is what we’re going to do,” she says, and when she tells them, they don’t argue. They don’t say anything. They simply obey.
Twenty-three minutes later, she picks up the phone from the kitchen counter and dials. When the emergency operator answers, she speaks in a level voice.
“My name is Emma Palmer. Our parents are dead. We need the police.”
She looks at the clock on the stove. It is 5:13 A.M.
She hangs up. They walk together to the porch and wait. When the cruiser pulls up in front, they are still standing there. The lights flash over them. Red, blue, red, blue. Hair dry. Faces each a study of numb shock. Dressed in clean clothes—there will be no blood found on them, no bloodied clothes found anywhere on the property. None of them look at the others. None of them reach out for comfort, for reassurance, or offer it in turn. They are each a world of their own.
Emma holds a hundred questions between her teeth, biting down until her jaw aches. She doesn’t ask. Will never ask.
It isn’t that she’s afraid of the answers.
She’s afraid she already knows them.
“Our parents are dead,” she says again, to no one in particular.
It’s the last true thing she says for a long time.