“I’m supposed to wait,” she tells Kateri.
“For what?”
The blood on the girl’s hands is so dark, it’s like ink, seeped into the creases of her skin, her fingerprint whorls, her cuticles. Her eyes are wet with tears, and she pokes her tongue at the worst crack in her lip so that it glistens with fresh blood.
“Sweetheart,” Kateri says. She hears Joel Hurt’s voice from the yard, directing techs to look farther along the trail. “What’s your name, honey?” she asks.
“Birdie,” the girl says, and Kateri says it back to her.
“Birdie, did someone put you in the closet?”
Her face is blank until Kateri asks her again. “Birdie, who were you waiting for?”
“Him,” she says.
Kateri waits.
“The angel,” Birdie says. “The angel was coming to get me.”
* * *
She doesn’t appear to be a flight risk, so Kateri lets her sit where she is, on the beanbag in the closet, with the door open, and goes to get her a cup of water and to step outside to find Hurt.
“I need medical,” Kateri says when she sees him on the edge of the yard. Hurt takes his phone out to begin, but Kateri stops him. “I’ll call,” she says.
* * *
She had a case with two young sisters. One had been killed. One had survived. Both had been raped. They were little girls, ten and twelve. It was the ten-year-old who survived. When they sent the ambulatory unit, with lights flashing and sirens screaming, the girl flew into a panic. She thrashed and reopened a wound on her belly. Her vagina was bruised and still bleeding. Kateri was covered in blood trying to keep her still. She ended up restraining the girl the best way she knew how, from behind, with her arms crossed over the girl’s and the girl’s head bashing backward into Kateri’s face, giving her a fat, bloodied lip. The medics were all men. The girl was traumatized all over again. All those blank faces. So many big hands. The roar from inside the moving medical unit, barreling down a highway to a hospital she’d never been to. Her sister, dead in a separate van.
Kateri was twenty-five.
She remembers the estranged father of the two girls, living like her own estranged father in a dark, dirty apartment thick with smoke. He had a ponytail. Was never without a lit cigarette. Sometimes he had two, one in the ashtray, one in his mouth. His eyes went from top to bottom and lingered at Kateri’s chest.
“Little-girl cop,” he said. “Give me a fucking break.”
* * *
Dispatch sends a small van, marked, but without its lights going, and two medics, a wiry woman in her fifties and a younger man, baby-faced and soft around the edges. Kateri meets them between the trees. The deputies have put police tape around the house, fluttering.
“Detective Fisher,” she introduces herself. “She may be in shock,” she tells the woman medic. “She’s almost certainly a witness to something brutal, quite possibly a murder,” Kateri says, “and she may be a victim as well. I can’t tell what condition she’s in, physical or mental. She might be badly hurt.”
She looks at the woman’s badge.
“Maggie,” the woman says. “This is Rick.”
“She goes by Birdie,” Kateri says.
“How old?” Maggie asks.
“No more than five or six,” Kateri says. “She’s small. She still has baby teeth. Please,” Kateri says, though she knows she doesn’t have to, “be very, very gentle.”
Kateri watches while Rick stays in the doorway and Maggie practically crawls through the gore of the kitchen toward the girl hiding in the open closet. She hears Maggie speaking slowly, quietly, like she’s luring an injured animal.
Birdie comes out with her eyes blank. Kateri is afraid of a potential fight, that she will protest being taken anywhere, will wail for her mother or thrash when touched, will need to be restrained or even sedated in the van. But she does just what Maggie asks her to do. She comes out and gets on a small stretcher that Rick brings forward, and she lies back, her little brown hand gripping Maggie’s wrist. Between Birdie’s fingers, Kateri notices a small blue tattoo on Maggie’s wrist, a crescent moon. Rick covers Birdie with heavy cotton blankets, tucking the sides in.
“I’ll meet you at Mercy,” Kateri says to Maggie. Her throat tightens and she’s afraid for a moment that she’ll spill. Girls are so tough, she thinks, watching this one, covered in blood, clinging to a moon tattoo on a woman she doesn’t know.
Behind the house, deputies have upturned rocks and carefully scattered leaf piles. Kateri sees the shape of some of them moving, far off in the trees, the shine of their lights, the flash of a camera. Hurt comes and stands beside her, watching the stretcher load into the van.
“She mentioned a him,” Kateri tells Hurt. “She said she was waiting for him.”
“Who?” Hurt says. “The son?”
“I don’t know,” Kateri says, but shakes her head as if she does. “She called him an angel,” she says. She looks past Hurt at the activity in the woods.
“Go,” he says. “I’ll let you know what we find here. You belong with her.”
She hesitates, because from someone else, it would feel patronizing, telling her to look after the child. But Kateri thinks he’s right.
* * *
Our Lady of Mercy Hospital is thirty miles away, in the next town over, Mount Snow. It’s just big enough to have a community college and a tiny women’s school, Creveling College, a Walmart, a Wendy’s, and a small Catholic hospital. When Kateri arrives, the girl is in triage in the ER and there’s nothing to do but wait. She can’t sit still on the plastic chairs in the waiting room, surrounded by sick or injured people waiting to be seen, so she walks.
She spends time in the art deco lobby, looking at the high windows and the inlaid quartz in the floors, the dark wood, the giant chandelier that hangs in the center. And then once she’s walked the perimeter, she ducks into a door that says CHAPEL.
It isn’t her thing. Even with her saint’s name and her Catholic grandmother, she doesn’t feel any truth to it. Her mother rejected the faith, and what Kateri knows at all was gleaned from her grandmother’s things, her little portraits of the Blessed Mother, the crèche she put out at Christmas, her Lives of the Saints. It all feels like a faraway myth. The room is dim and red and smells like candles and incense, like warm wood and spice. Kateri dips her finger into the holy water and crosses herself as she was taught.
She sits on one of the six pews, lulled by the warmth and closeness of the room, and feels herself welling up with discomfort and want, with an ache in her core.
She distinctly remembers sitting on one of the ladder-back chairs in her grandmother’s kitchen, having her hair brushed the morning of her mother’s funeral. It was November, and she wore a dress she hated, and stockings because it was too cold to go bare legged and her grandmother said it was disrespectful.
She liked the feel of the brush, pulling from underneath. It was eight in the morning on a Saturday, when Kateri wanted to be sleeping.
“I am never having kids,” she announced.