shoves open the low metal gate, closing the latch with a silvery clang.
3:36 p.m. – She dashes up the steps – flinging the unlocked door open and closing it behind her with a resounding thud. God, it’s all so bright and warm in her memory; so filled with color. She calls out, ‘Mom, I’m starving.’ No one replies.
3:37 p.m. – She yells up the stairs, ‘Mom?’ She’s not worried yet. Humming to herself, she checks the living room, the dining room.
3:38 p.m. – She steps into the kitchen.
This is where her childhood ends.
There is more color here – not only the yellow of the walls and the tiny vivid jars and bottles of blue and gold and green paint. But red. Red everywhere. Splattered on the walls and counters. Pooling on the floor under her mother’s naked body.
Blood-red filling her memories with horror and leaving behind trauma that will never go away.
In her memory film, time has stopped now. It stays 3:38 for a very long time.
In the next frame she’s running in slow motion to her mother’s side, she’s skidding in the blood, losing her balance. She’s trying to breathe, but it’s as if someone has kicked her in the stomach. Her whole body hurts and there’s no air, no air, as she falls to the floor, blood squelching beneath her skinny knees.
This was the first and only time she was ever afraid to touch her mother. Her trembling hand reaches out to brush the smooth, pale shoulder. She recoils, yanking it back again.
She’s so cold.
Someone is sobbing far away. ‘Mom? Mom?’ And faintly, plaintively, ‘Mommy?’
She knows now it’s her own voice but the her on the memory film isn’t sure. She feels far away from her body.
In the next frame, she is scrambling to her feet – still no air to breathe, and she is gasping for it, but her lungs refuse to work – skidding across the kitchen and hurtling out the side door to Bonnie’s house. But the Larsons moved away after their divorce, and the new neighbors aren’t nice and they’re not home anyway, but she pounds on the door leaving bloody marks on the wood, and the pounding echoes in the emptiness.
She’s weeping so hard her breath begins to come back, forced into her lungs by tears, as she runs back to her house to find the phone. She picks it up only to see it fall from her nerveless, blood-slick fingers. Then she is sobbing and finding it on the floor, taking choking breaths, making herself slow down. She only has to dial three numbers. She can do this. She has to do this.
‘OK,’ she whispers over and over through her tears as she dials, hands shaking so hard the phone vibrates. ‘OK. OK. OK …’
It rings. A distant series of odd, mechanical clicks. A dispatcher answers – and that irrationally calm female voice, so inured to hearing the horrors of the world expressed through the panicked, disembodied voices of witnesses and victims, is a rope she can grasp.
‘This is 911. What is your emergency?’
She is trying to speak but her tears and breathlessness make it almost impossible. Only a confused scattering of words make it from her frightened mind to her lips.
‘Please help,’ she sobs. ‘My mom. Please help.’
‘What’s happened to your mom?’ The woman’s emotion-free voice is stern-friendly. Stern to help her focus. Friendly because she is a child.
Now Harper must say the word. The word she can’t even think. A word so distant from her until this moment in time it had no more bearing on her immediate life than Uzbekistan. Her mind doesn’t want her to say the word. Saying it hurts.
‘My mom … there’s blood … I think … someone killed her.’
It is all she has. She is sobbing inconsolably. The dispatcher’s tone changes.
‘Sweetie,’ she says with utter gentleness that disguises the worry beneath it and the absolute tension of the moment, ‘I need you to take a deep breath and tell me your address, OK? Can you do that? I’m sending help.’
Harper tells her. She doesn’t know then, but she knows now, that as she talks the operator is typing urgent things into her computer, motioning for her supervisor’s attention, setting wheels in motion that will turn and turn through her life for years to come.
Then the operator is asking if she’s safe, and that is the first time it occurs to Harper that someone very dangerous might be in the house with her. Her levels of fear and panic are off the charts now. And the operator is telling her to take the phone outside, and to stand by the curb and to run and scream if anyone scares her.
She does as she’s told, each step wooden and unreal, until she is at the metal gate again with its clanging latch, the phone clutched in one blood-sticky hand.
The dispatcher is saying calming things. ‘They’re coming, honey. They’re three minutes away. Don’t hang up, sweetheart …’
In the distance she hears the urgent wail of sirens and despite everything doesn’t realize they’re coming for her.
When the first police car screeches to a halt, blue lights flashing, she feels even more frightened as the officers climb out of the car with guns in their hands, and run past her into the house.
One of them shouts to her, ‘Stay there.’
She stays.
More police pull up and soon she is surrounded by men and women in official uniforms with guns and mace and Kevlar vests.
‘Are you OK?’ people keep asking her.
But Harper is not OK. Not OK at all.
Then a man, tall, with a deep voice and authoritative air appears at her side. He takes the phone from her hand and hands it to another officer, who places it, strangely, Harper thinks, in a plastic bag.
The man has a weathered face that has seen other children like her, bloodied and frightened. Many of them. There is kindness in his eyes.
‘My name is Sergeant Smith,’ the man tells her in a deep, soothing voice. ‘And I’m not going to let anyone hurt you …’
‘Harper.’
She gave a start, blinking hard.
The car had slowed to a crawl. They were on a dark street, surrounded on all sides by run-down buildings with boarded-up windows.
Miles was looking at her oddly, as if he’d said her name more than once.
‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ Her tone was brusque and she turned away, her eyes sweeping the sidewalk for trouble, out of habit.
She was angry with herself. Why had she been thinking about that stuff? It was ancient history.
Right now, she had a job to do.
‘Have you
