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Don’t cry! They’ll never take you seriously if you cry.
She rubbed her good eye with her bandaged hand.
“It was real,” she said to the sergeant, to herself. “He was real. You believe me?”
They don’t believe you.
The sergeant’s voice aimed for softness, but still came out crisp.“Look. You’ve been through a lot. Losing your husband, I mean. You haven’t been well. No one to talk to, not eating. You’d been drinking.”
“No, I hadn’t.”
“Fine. But even so.” He tapped his notebook. “Your blood alcohol doesn’t lie. Your ID of this person was way off. It makes it hard to trust you. Or, I guess I can say, it makes it hard to trust your memory.”
It unmoored her, the blood alcohol. That the café had never employed a man. It was possible the Corner had copied a key, but how had he vanished, leaving no tracks in the snow?
The sergeant could be lying about the blood alcohol. About the café. They can do that, can’t they? The police? To try and get you to say you made it up.
Her mind reeled through this possibility.
But these things…they’re so specific. They’d want to find the Corner. They must’ve talked to people at the café. And the blood alcohol. Why would they invent that? Maybe the hospital made a mistake? Mixed up your results with someone else?
She tenderly touched the side of her face. Adjusted the wrap around her hand. The pain reassured her that she was present. That her mind was registering the physical world.
You were hit on the head. Things slip through cracks. The psychiatrist said you might not be able to remember things right. To remember everything. He was here.
She knew she hadn’t had anything to drink. Could clearly remember the Corner, outlined in August sun, introducing himself as the café manager.
They don’t believe you.
But it happened. It all happened.Somehow. How? You need to think. To rest.
“You told me, back when your husband died, that you see things as you’re waking up sometimes. Hallucinate. Is that right?”
Her head snapped toward the sergeant so quickly a tight line of pain traveled from clavicle to hairline.
“No—hallucinate?”
“You told me back then you’d see a dark figure in your house. Of a frightening man.”
“That’s—no, that’s just a dream. A sleep condition. Not a hallucination.”
“You said you saw a frightening man.”
“In nightmares sometimes, that’s all,” she muttered. “I’m—I’m so tired. And my head. It hurts. Can we talk tomorrow? Can we do that?”
“No, ma’am,” the sergeant said. “I’m afraid we’re far from done here.”
She leaned her forehead into her good hand. Remembered her daughter saying, “He watches me from the Corner when he thinks I’m asleep.”
With a fingertip, she tapped the agony of her hurt eye to focus herself. To make the pain overwhelm the panicked thought that maybe the Corner had been in the house before that night. That maybe one of the shadow figures who had visited her after her husband’s death could have been real—the Corner watching her sleep.
31
The sergeant cracked each knuckle on his right hand with his thumb.
“You heard of Occam’s razor?”
She nodded, flinching at the noise of popping joints, at the condescension in his voice.
