Everything was lost inside my mind, all the jitter-jitter of the morning cutting away the things that made sense. I wanted Emma.
Everything became too bright. Voices were pinpricks in the ear. My hands ached from resting under my knees. I pulled them out from underneath me, saw a small cut on one of my fingertips, blood dried around the openings. I put it in my mouth and I shifted in my seat.
The officer looked at me with little eyes. ‘Now, did your mother . . .’
‘Stepmother,’ I told him.
The officer held his pen in the air. ‘I thought . . .’
‘Mrs Borden is Father’s second wife.’ Facts need to be stated. I smiled.
‘I see.’ He flung his pen back into the inkwell and pounded his fist against the yellow-white paper. I tried to look past his fingers to the notebook. He guarded his thoughts well.
‘After breakfast, your stepmother, Bridget and yourself were home alone, correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you remember details relating to the time after you found your father?’
I shook my head. No, no, not I.
The officer said, ‘Let’s try. Where was Mrs Borden at the time, Lizzie?’
I thought ever so hard. ‘She had been sent out to a sick relative.’ The walls knocked together around me, made all the red and blue and green of the wallpaper swirl. I felt nauseous. I threw my hands across my eyes and waited for the rush to leave me. There was too much to remember. I blocked everyone out.
All I could see was a moment from a few days before, when Father, Mrs Borden and I had sat around the dining room table and sipped mutton broth. Mrs Borden slurped from her spoon, carnivorous pig, and I watched her tongue flick her lips, grey and thick. I imagined her tongue inside Father’s mouth. What they must taste like.
‘You must be missing Emma.’ Mrs Borden, jolly.
‘Must I?’
Father sat at the head of the table, peeled skin from an ink-spotted banana. ‘Answer properly, Lizzie.’
‘Very well. I miss my sister. I’d do anything to make her come back.’ I traced my fingers over the lace tablecloth, got snagged.
‘I miss my sister too. I wish I could see her every day.’ Mrs Borden’s voice hammered my head, just like her voice hammered my head this morning, keeps hammering.
I opened my eyes and stared at the officer. The sound of pigeon claws on the roof. Tack-tack. ‘Officer, I remember something from this morning. I came downstairs a few minutes before nine . . . I should say about a quarter before nine. My uncle had already left for his business outing.’
‘And your father?’
‘He was with Mrs Borden. They were speaking about things.’
‘What kind of things?’ His tongue lapped at his lips, sloppy.
My head ached. ‘Just common things. I asked them how they were.’
‘And how were they?’ The way he was trying to find meaning made me angry.
‘They seemed happy,’ I said. ‘We were looking forward to having dinner with Uncle tonight.’
The officer dipped his pen and lightly ran his fingertip over the nib. Above our heads the floorboards stretched as far as they could. The clock on the mantel ticked ticked.
‘Mrs Borden asked me what I wanted for dinner. I told her not anything. Then she said she had been up to the guestroom and made the spare bed, but would I mind taking some linen pillowcases for the small pillows because she’d just received a note from somebody sick and she had to go out. Then I think she said something about the weather. I don’t know.’
All the spaces between an hour, between life and death, came towards me. I could see everything clearer and I could tell the officer because it was right there in my head waiting to be told. I could tell him that I then went outside and stood under the pear arbour for a short time, took a pear off the tree and then went to the barn and ate it. I could tell him that I took another pear and ate it in the middle of the yard, and how hot the sun felt for early morning and how I could see small beads of sweat on the attic windows. I could tell him that I went back into the barn to look for a lead sinker, that Uncle and I had decided to take a fishing trip the next day like we used to. I ate pears again. They were delicious and dripped down my wrists, sticky and sweet-smelling. Birds perched in trees. Neighbours were outside talking. Then I went inside the house, to iron handkerchiefs in the dining room. I almost forgot, I could tell the officer, ‘I read a magazine in the barn. I was there for maybe half an hour reading.’ Everything was right there. I could even see myself speaking with Mrs Borden, how we talked about the time we found a frog in the basement and couldn’t catch it, how that was such a fond memory for both of us, though it is hard to remember everything I told her. Perhaps I would have asked her about the time she met Father and did they love each other immediately and, if they did, what did that love feel like and did she think it would ever happen to me? I could tell the officer all of this because it was the truth. All of this happened in the house at some stage.
Should it matter when it happened?
I leaned forwards and said to the officer in a whisper, ‘The more I think about it, I did speak with my father when he came home! I told him that Mrs Borden had gone to visit a sick friend. He smiled and said, “She’s always looking after others.” That’s when I left him to rest on the sofa and I went outside and then I found him . . .’
The officer reached out his hand and placed it on mine. He said, ‘It must have been such a shock,’ and I told him, ‘At first I did not think what had happened was real. I noticed he’d been cut, but I did not see his face properly because he was covered in blood. I was so afraid. Officer, I didn’t know that he was dead at the time.’
There was a cracking sound on the back stairs and I could hear men talking.
The low voice said, ‘It’s hard to say without confirming through an autopsy, but the blood has congealed and dried significantly. I would suggest Mrs Borden died earlier in the morning.’
I looked out the dining room window. The clock on the mantel ticked ticked. I wanted all things at once: for the questions to end, to keep talking, to be left alone, to be surrounded, to continue with the day as normal, to check Father, to make sure Mrs Borden really was gone, to have Emma come home and tell me everything would be alright.
SIX
BRIDGET
3 August 1892