“Where’s your mother?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“When do you expect her home?”
When? she wondered. Her father had thought she might come home at any time, any day. In the days before he started to wrap his head up, he had said each morning, She might come home today, but she never had.
“She might come home today,” Elise said.
“What do you mean, might?” asked the man. “That also means might not.” They would have to arrange something, he was saying to a uniformed officer, somewhere for her to stay. Did she have any relatives nearby, anyone she could stay with?
“My aunt,” she said.
“Your aunt,” he said, and nodded. He went away and made some phone calls and then talked to the men who were loading the body into a zippered bag.
“Now,” said the man, coming back. “Are you O.K.? How do you feel?”
She didn’t know how to answer, so didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter.
“Can you talk?” he asked. Do you feel well enough to help us work through this?”
She nodded.
“It’s like this,” he said. “We need to know if your father did this to himself or if someone else did it to him. Can you tell me which?”
Did her father do this to himself? she wondered. Yes, he had put the bag on his head, but had he meant to die? No, she didn’t think so, he hadn’t been aware that he would die, didn’t seem to want to die. Had she done it to him? Yes, in a manner of speaking, by not loosening the bag the eighty-fifth time. But it wasn’t what she had done to him, but simply what she had not, finally, managed to do.
“He died,” she said.
“Yes,” said the man patiently, “but what did you see? Murder or suicide?”
It wasn’t exactly either, she thought, but a third thing she didn’t quite have a word for. She sat staring at her hands folded in her lap.
“Come on,” the man said, “either you know something or you don’t. You’re old enough to understand. Which is it?”
“He died,” she tried again.
The man shook his head. “We know he died,” he said. “We just want to know more about it. Are you afraid to tell me?”
“No,” she said immediately.
“There’s no reason to be afraid,” he said. “No harm will come to you.”
Harm? she thought, and only then did she begin to consider that some harm could possibly come. Was she to blame? Would they punish her?
“Were you in the house when he died?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“What did you see?” he asked.
“I saw,” she said, and then stopped. Was she to blame? She did not feel that she was to blame, hoped she wasn’t. Was her father to blame? She didn’t feel that he was, either.
“What did you see?”
“It just,” she said. “I mean, he just …”
“Calm down,” said the man. “No need to get excited.” But she wasn’t getting excited, was she? “I’m your friend. Can’t you see I’m your friend?”
She looked at him, his eyes glittering like the eyes of a doll. If he lay down, they would click back up into his head.
He put his hands, clasped together, on the coffee table between them, and leaned forward. It was an awkward position for him. His hands seemed huge and made of plaster.
“Let’s try another way,” he said.
“O.K.,” she said.
“Let’s just,” he said, then stopped. “Listen, did your mother have anything to do with this?”
“My mother?” she said.
He nodded.
Did she? Elise wondered. Her mother had left, her father was always talking about her. The mesh, the wire, the bag had all been, so he said, attempts to make him feel good again, as he had before the mother left. He always said that: before your mother left. Without the mother’s leaving them, none of it would have happened.
She nodded slightly.
“Yes?”
She nodded again.
“There,” he said, taking his hands off the table and settling them on his thighs. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
And thus began the period that Elise, had she been her own father, might have called the only truly lucid period of her life — though Elise, being only Elise and not her own dead father, did not know what lucid meant. It was a word she had heard only from the father, only three times, each time as an inauguration of what he saw as a new period of his existence, a step closer to his own death. Perhaps lucid had something to do with that.
Elise moved in with the aunt, her father’s sister, a large-boned and yeasty woman with a very red face. Elise liked her: she was a little like her father, but only in the best ways.
Each day the aunt drove her across town and to her school. Sometimes, instead of going straight into the school, she would instead hide just inside the doors and then go back out again. She would walk through the playground and the parking lot and down the street beyond until she reached her house, her father’s house. There was no one living there now. There was a yellow-plastic tape line over the door—Police Line Do Not Cross—and a plastic ball encasing the door handle. She would go up and stare in through the tall window next to the door, and then walk back to the school, go to class.
Her aunt fed her and took her places. They watched movies together. They went to the library and checked out books. Her aunt told her that she had always wanted a daughter and maybe if Elise’s mother didn’t come back she could adopt her? How would Elise like that?
Elise didn’t know what to say.
“But,” said her aunt, “even if she does come back she probably won’t get you after what she did to my brother. They’ll lock her away for it,” she said, nodding.
“For what?” asked Elise.
“You know,” said her aunt. “After all, it was you who told them.”
Me? thought Elise. What had she said? When she had said her mother had something to do with it, she hadn’t known they would be upset about it. She had meant something else, nothing specific, just something in general. They didn’t understand, nobody understood, it was better to keep quiet. They had phrased it all wrong, if they had asked her the right questions or if it had been someone else asking, then maybe, she thought. Someone like her aunt, she thought.
“They’d lock her up for leaving?” she asked.
“No, silly,” said the aunt. “For killing him.”
For killing him? “But she didn’t kill him,” Elise said.
The aunt came toward her, put her arm around her. “I’ve upset you,” she said. “Darling. I’m sorry. I can understand how you feel. She’s your mother, after all, but don’t forget about your father.”
“But,” said Elise.
“If it hadn’t been for your mother, darling,” said her aunt, “your father would still be alive today.”
She thought about it later, at night. Her aunt was right, she thought, but not exactly right. She shouldn’t have said anything to the detective, Elise felt, he hadn’t understood, nobody ever understood, her aunt didn’t understand either. Then she fell asleep.
In the morning she woke up and had oatmeal for breakfast. Her aunt drove her to her school and she went right in. All day long it was a good day and it wasn’t until late in the day, near the end of school, that she opened her math book and saw the hash marks inside the back cover and realized she had gone the whole day without once thinking of her father. In a manner of speaking, life without father was just beginning.