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“I don’t understand,” she heard herself mutter.
You do understand.
The sergeant’s tone was low and calm. “There’ll be a letter waiting. You’ll get a call from the caseworker. I tried to tell you. She’s the one you should be calling about your kids. But it’s early days. Plenty of time to get the ship righted again. Near always, the mom gets the kids. And you’ve got a nice house. You’re well off enough.You’ll be okay. You’ll get them back. As long as you just think it over, like I said. See what makes sense.”
She kept her eyes closed, her body closed.
“You want some water? Anything I can get you?” the boyish officer asked.
Her stomach started to heave with panicked despair. She held herself tighter so they wouldn’t hear the start of her mourning, see her falling into nothingness.
“You think it all out, yeah?” the sergeant said. “There’s bound to be some answers, explanations, when you think it over.”
“Leave.”
“You sure? Nothing else you want to say?”
“Get out.”
Another sigh from the sergeant. “All right. We can talk later.”
She didn’t answer.
“You understand, ma’am? You’ll be all right? You get down, you can always call that shrink, or call us, yeah? I know it seems rough now, but—”
She looked up at him then, her fractured face twisting around all the anger she was never allowed to release.
Her voice cut out of her in a hiss. “Get. Out. Now.”
For the briefest of moments the sergeant’s eyes registered surprise. “Right,” he said. He gathered himself. Pulled something from the duffel. “Here. Your phone. I’ll set it right next to my card here for you. We’ll be in touch.”
The boyish officer eyed her with concern as he trailed the sergeant out of the living room. She overheard him say as they put their boots back on, “Should she be alone, you think?”
“Not on us. Psychiatrist’s the one who discharged her. Anyway, it’ll give her a chance to think.”
She heard the door close. Heard their car roar down thedriveway. She turned to scream deep into a pillow. Frustrated by the way she’d been trained to suffocate herself to silence even when alone, she threw the pillow across the room.
She wailed, mouth opened to an animal sound, a deep, primordialreverberation.
32
After all this time, you could finally scream.
She was hoarse. She wasn’t sure what would happen next, but had the nauseating sense she was riding a wave that would lift her up and crash her down without her getting a say in the matter. She drifted, exhausted in the way only an explosion of emotion could make her. Yet every time she’d start to fade, she heard the Corner. Would click her eyes open, look for ragged claws, a forked tongue wrapping around a doorframe.
You’re scared because it happened. You’re scared because it was real.
She stared at where the police had tracked ashes along the floor, grinding them deep enough to stain the rug. It reminded her that her husband’s ashes were in a box in the closet. A flame of fury began licking at her throat, and in her anger her thoughts rattled disjointed.
Children gone, husband ashes, ashes everywhere. Everything important burned after all. He thinks you lied. Are crazy. Blames it on drinking you didn’t do. He doesn’t understand how it was. How was it? How was it really? “Female obstacle” the Corner called you. And that’s what you are to that sergeant. Inconvenient, insisting on your own sanity. This happening here makes him look bad. The strangeness, the awfulness, makes it even easier for him to dismiss.
Her anger burned brighter as the sergeant, the Corner, theforgettable murderer in the courtroom, the ones who defended him, who failed to defend her mother, intertwined.
That murderer hadn’t been able to rein in his worst impulses. The Corner was proud of his own disregard for the rules. And yet both were protected by the same institutions and mores they so clearly disdained, so clearly felt themselves somehow above. The same written and unwritten codes that the sergeant and the others like him upheld.
“All these things they do to make you soft, to make you a sheep,” the Corner had said. “But I step over.”
The fact that the Corner was in the world and her mother, her grandmother, her mother-in-law, her husband were all gone was a rock in her heart, a furious understanding of unfairness and responsibility.
