Sam was staying with me that night. When she had finished brushing her teeth, and her two rag dolls were tucked up to her satisfaction alongside her, I sat on the edge of the bed and touched her cheek.
‘You warm enough?’
‘Yes.’
‘You feel cold.’
‘That’s because it’s cold outside, but I’m not cold. I’m warm inside.’
It sounded plausible.
‘Look, I think it might be best if you didn’t tell your mom about what happened tonight.’
‘About the pizza? Why?’
‘No, the pizza’s fine. I mean what happened after, when we went for ice cream.’
‘You mean about the two men?’
‘Yes.’
‘What part?’
‘The part about you saying that I would shoot them. You can’t talk like that to strangers, honey. You can’t talk like that to anyone. It’s not just rude: it’ll get Daddy into trouble.’
‘With Mommy?’
‘Absolutely with Mommy, but also maybe with the people you say it to. They won’t like it. That’s how fights start.’
She considered this.
‘But you have a gun.’
‘Yes. I try not to shoot people with it, though.’
‘Then why do you have it?’
‘Because sometimes, in my job, I have to show it to people to make them behave themselves.’ God, I felt like a spokesman for the NRA.
‘But you have shot people with your gun. I heard Mommy say.’
This was new. ‘When did you hear that?’
‘When she was talking to Jeff about you.’
‘Sam, were you listening when you shouldn’t have been listening?’
Sam squirmed. She knew that she had said too much.
She shook her head. ‘It was a accident.’
‘An accident.’ A spokesman for the Society for Better English too, it seemed. Still, it gave me time to think.
‘Look, that’s true, Sam, but I didn’t like doing it, and those people left me with no other choice. I’d be happy if I never had to do it again, and I hope that I don’t. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Were they bad people?’
‘Yes, they were very bad people.’
I watched her face carefully. She was building up to something, skirting the subject warily, like a dog circling a snake, uncertain of whether it were dead and harmless, or alive and capable of striking.
‘Was one of them the man who made Jennifer and her mommy dead?’
She always called them that: Jennifer and her mommy. Although she knew Susan’s name, she felt uncomfortable using it. Susan was an adult unfamiliar to her, a grown-up, and grown-ups had names that began with Mr or Mrs, Aunt or Uncle, Grandma or Grandpa. Sam had chosen to define her as Jennifer’s mommy because Jennifer had been a little girl just like her, but a little girl who had died. The subject held a kind of awful fascination for her, not simply because Jennifer had been my child and, by extension, a half-sister to Sam, but because Sam did not know of any other children who had died. It seemed somehow impossible to her that a child could die – that anyone she knew of could die – but this one had.
Sam understood a little of what had happened to my wife and my daughter. She had picked up nuggets of information gleaned from other overheard conversations and hidden them away, examining them in solitude, trying to understand their meaning and their value, and only recently had she revealed her conclusions to her mother and me. She knew that something awful had happened to them, that one man had been responsible, and that man was now dead. We had tried to deal with it as carefully yet as honestly as possible. Our concern was that she might fear for her own safety, but she did not seem to make that particular connection. Her focus was entirely on Jennifer and, to a lesser extent, her mommy. She was, she told us, ‘sad for them’, and sad for me.
‘I—’ Speaking of Jennifer and Susan with her was difficult for me at the best of times, but this was new and dangerous territory. ‘I think he would have hurt me if I had not,’ I said at last. ‘And he would have kept on hurting other people too. He gave me no choice.’
I swallowed the taste of the lie, even if it was a lie of omission. He gave me no choice, but neither did I give him a choice. I had wanted it that way.
‘So does that make it all right?’
Although Sam was a precocious, unusual child, that was still a very adult question, one that plumbed murky moral depths. Even her tone was adult. This was not coming from Sam. There was the voice of another under her own.
‘Is that one of your questions, Sam?’
Again, a shake of the head. ‘It was what Jeff asked Mommy when they were talking about how you shot people.’
‘And what did Mommy say?’ I asked despite myself, and I was ashamed.
‘She said that you always tried to do the right thing.’
I bet Jeff didn’t like that.
‘After that, I had to go pee,’ said Sam.
‘Good. Well, no more listening to conversations that aren’t your business, all right? And no more talking about shooting people. We clear?’
‘Yes. I won’t tell Mommy.’
‘She’d just worry, and you don’t want to get Daddy into trouble.’
‘No.’ She frowned. ‘Can I tell her about Uncle Angel saying a bad word?’
I thought about it.
‘Sure, why not?’
I went downstairs, where Angel and Louis had opened a bottle of red wine.
‘Make yourselves at home.’
Angel waved a glass at me. ‘You want some?’
‘No, I’m good.’
Louis poured, sipped, tasted, made a face, shrugged resignedly, and filled two glasses.
‘Hey,’ said Angel, ‘Sam’s not going to tell Rachel I swore at those guys, is she?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re in the clear.’
He looked relieved. ‘Thank Christ. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble with Rachel.’
While they drank, I called Marielle Vetters. The phone rang four times, then went to the machine. I left a short message to tell her that I’d be heading up there to talk with her the next day, and she should go over all that her father had told her in case she’d forgotten to share with me anything that might be useful. I asked her to give Ernie Scollay a nudge too, on the off-chance that he might recall something that his brother had said. I kept the message deliberately vague, just in case she had company or someone else, like Marielle’s brother, happened to hear it.
After an hour of conversation I went to my room, but not before looking in on the strange, beautiful, empathic child fast asleep in her bed, and I felt that I had never loved her more, or understood her less.