AT THE FRONT door, one of the officers tells Kate that there’s been a fire. Their breath streams in the porch light. Kate thinks of the small fire at the ice cream shop earlier, the acrid burnt sweetness. Smoke. How it is hardly worth the drive over to tell her this.
“Where are my girls?” she asks.
“Can we come inside, Ms. Ulrich?” the second officer asks, his body hunched against the cold, but also against something imminent. Something that hasn’t happened yet, she thinks, but will when it leaves his smoking mouth. She resolves not to listen.
“Who’s at the door, Kate?” her husband, Ray, the girls’ stepfather, yells from the bedroom. She can hear the jangle of Ray’s belt buckle as he lifts his pants from the foot of the bed and pulls them on. In his pockets, the keys to the ice cream shop, where he’d stopped by just after closing to pick up the night deposit. A movie, he’d said when he got back home late and crawled into bed. The girls were headed to a midnight movie after locking up at eleven. “Didn’t you ask them which movie?” Kate had said, because you always ask which one, always. Good old feckless Ray. She lay there beside him, blood drumming in her head, listening to his raspy breathing, thinking, I will go away. When the girls finally leave home, I will leave home too. Then, a little later, after she’d tried their cell phones and gotten their chirpy voice mail greetings, Kate woke startled from a dream in which her dead mother was combing her hair with an ear of corn. She couldn’t smell the girls in the house.
At the front door, the first police officer tells her something brutally quiet and small about her daughters. Something so dense that it makes everything—the cold, smoking air, the officers’ ashen faces, Ray’s raspy breathing—constrict to a singular point.
Past the officers framed in the doorway she can see the squad car outside, its headlights illuminating the cedar tree beside the driveway. In the fogged back windows, she thinks she can make out Elizabeth and Zadie, their bare feet propped on the metal grill between the seats. Cocksure, dismissive. Playing the parts assigned to them. Certain they can talk their way out of anything.
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