"I don't know where you think we're going," I say. "I'm staying here." Ferguson doesn't stop packing and continues to move about my room, his uniform making that distracting rubbery sound.
I try to get in his way but he asks me if I'd prefer to get hit, so I take a seat and watch him finish stuffing my pants into a canvas bag. When he turns and beckons, I don't move, so he grabs me by the shoulder and we struggle for a while. Then the radio on his shoulder begins to act up.
When he comes back tomorrow, he says, I'll be awfully sorry if I'm not ready. Ready for what, he won't say, and he's gone with my bag in his cruiser.
I don't know how people are supposed to feel when they're told they suffer from memory blackouts, but for me, it's like I'm a narcoleptic roused from knocking off in a busy intersection.
But what do you do when you can't very well commit these facts to memory anyway? Ferguson can't understand that it's just easier this way. Sarah can't harm me, and apparently I can't her.
In the kitchen: knife on the cutting board, faucet running, the hm-mph of her throat clearing.
'Car hit her. Killed her instantly.'
I move up to be behind her.
'The facts are what they are. Doesn't matter if you don't believe it.'
She wears this loose-fitting blouse with buttons down the back, which I start to undo.
'I was her brother. You don't think I know?'
Road rash starts at the base of her neck and digresses down under the shoulder blades. In the middle of her back are dark blue and purple depressions, the deepest of which are at the tailbone, which I can just about see.
I recover her marks and the kid's patter starts ambling about the house. The bolt to the kitchen door locks, and he scrambles to the front to bolt that one as well. We're not going anywhere, I remind myself.
The kid retreats down the hallway again, past our room toward the linen closet.
