We ate ravenously at the round wooden table beneath the cheap brass chandelier with the florescent bulbs protected by the clouded glass globes by the window overlooking the parking lot. I did not realize until the scent of the melted cheese reached my nostrils that I was famished, and I supposed that Sarah was as well. I began my meal by sipping my soup from a stainless steel soup spoon but soon found myself dunking my sandwich into the soup and swallowing large tufts of melted processed cheese and bread dripping with broth. I polished off my bowl of soup by pouring the contents into my gullet straight from the white porcelain saucer. When I was finished I guiltily eyed Sarah’s remaining meal with envy but I suppressed my urge to steal her food until she had consumed all but a length of crust which she cast aside as unpalatable. I proved to her that the scrap she had discarded was in fact edible.

After I had sopped up the last of Sarah’s soup gravy with the crust I had stolen from her and absorbed the last of the buttery crumbs of our meal with the tips of my fingers, I tucked Sarah into our bed and laid down beside her and stared at the ceiling (it had become as familiar to me as I supposed the Mona Lisa was to Leonardo Da Vinci).

“Can we stay here Daddy? I had fun today.”

“We’ll see.” It was easier to be ambiguous than to engage her with an explanation.

“Can we go swimming again tomorrow?”

“Sure, if we get up early.”

“I wish Mommy could come here and live with us. We could go swimming every day.”

“That would have been nice.”

Sarah slid up next to me and put her arm over my chest. “But now I have you all to myself lover.” She said.

This statement caught me off guard. The knot in my stomach tightened just a bit, like a tourniquet on a gushing wound. Not, as one might suspect, because of Sarah’s reference to me as lover, but rather because she had found a benefit to Catherine’s death. Her words were a bit too Oedipal in nature.

The fact that Sarah called me “lover” might sound outrageous to the outside observer, but it was a term of endearment born of innocence. I have never and would never damage a child in such a way as her reference might suggest.

The fact of the matter was that one of my favorite, and therefore one of Sarah’s favorite, means of recreation was watching old black and white movies. Sarah would actually look forward to movie nights. Of course we made a major event of these frequent occasions fraught with healthy snacks such as popcorn soaked in real butter, bottomless colas, potato chips, pretzels, corn twisters and candy-bars. Sarah referred to these occasions as “dates” wishing apparently to duplicate the intimacy, of which she was obviously excluded. Sarah and I would cover the blue leather sectional couch, in our oak-shelved book-packed den that housed our twenty-nine inch television, with feather- pillows and quilted blankets. We would get comfortable with her on my lap and all of our amenities, including the remote control, on the wooden side table normally reserved for the jade chess-board. We would turn the lights off, of course, and we would watch what Sarah referred to as “black” movies until I slumped down deep into the sofa and dozed off and Sarah fell asleep on my chest.

Once, while watching an old musical, The Big Shakedown, Renee Whitney who played Mae Larue said to Richard Cortez who played Dutch Barnes “Hello lover” as Renee flared her thick eyebrows seductively. Sarah giggled and looked up at me. “Hello lover!” she said with just the right amount of flare and sass so that she tickled me to the bone. The way she flared her eyebrows when she repeated Renee’s line as well as at her ignorance to the meaning of what she had just said! Sarah looked so adorable. On subsequent movie nights, when we were alone, Sarah would say “Hello lover” just to get a tickle out of me, and I would chuckle and say it back to her, doing my best to flare my eyebrows as Richard Cortez would have done and doing my best to imitate his distinct gangster accent; a pathetic attempt I assure you but it made Sarah giggle and that is all that mattered. So, when we were alone together Sarah sometimes called me “lover” to make me laugh or to lighten my mood.

Sarah’s suggestion that she would have me all to herself caused a shortness of breath in my lungs and a tightness in my chest.

I knew that I would have little room to breath for a long time.

I looked over at Sarah who had fallen asleep at this point. Thank God for that; for my eyes began to pour all over her as I pulled her to my side and held her. I could not let her down. I could not let myself be weak. Not in front of her. I needed to be strong so that she bore none of the burden. She was a mere child and did not deserve to bear the massive cross that I was to carry.

Sarah would have me all to herself. If Sigmund Freud were with me he would have suggested that Sarah had killed Catherine to have me all to herself. Absurd, I know, but the thought did occur to me. But of course what would a seven year old child know of murder or its conveyance? Nothing, of course. But she would have possessed the naiveté to see the advantage in it.

5

Upon returning home the next day, I pulled into my driveway, the obvious signs of the intrusive blue invasion having mysteriously disappeared like water down a storm-drain, I felt as though spying eyes were upon me; in the wood surrounding my home or peering from behind parted curtains or peeping from behind parked cars in one of my neighbor’s driveways. I could hear a buzzing in my ears churning like the stir of bees in an agitated hive emanating from somewhere in the back of my scull.

I pulled Sarah, startling her awake from a sound sleep, across the console in preemptive defense from whatever was lurking whether real or imagined. She was still half asleep, tired no doubt from her morning swim. I made my way down the walk, stepping over, like a novice ballet dancer, an overturned skateboard and a landscape cinder, and opened the screen door with my free hand. I struggled to get my key into the front door latch while baring Sarah’s weight on my shoulder and darting my eyes from the lock to the bushes to the car and back to the lock. I really was a bit paranoid. But there was a killer on the loose, as far as I knew, and I didn’t want one of us to be the next victim.

I turned the key and nudged the door open with my knee and was welcomed by the odors of a house left unattended; the tang of dirty dishes still covered in globules of hardened grease and rotting chicken flesh, the remnants of our last supper; the once crispy residue of the soaking skillet left to soften overnight in an inch or so of water to decrust the leavings of our side-dish of potato pancakes; the musty smell of funky sweat-socks left over from a session of driveway basketball, one-on-one with a neighbor boy a third my age; and the faint medicinal smell of whatever trace forensic chemicals, imagined or real, that were left behind by the police investigative unit that had turned my house upside-down seeking clues with which to incriminate me. The living room was dark (the shades having been redrawn) except for what little light sifted through the white Venetian blinds that guarded our windows like flattened razors and the flicker of the florescent table lamp on the round glass table that sat in the far corner next to the entertainment center. The house was silent except for the hum of a cheap electric clock, simple and round with a gold rim and black letters on a white background, which sat atop the oak fireplace mantle.

I laid Sarah on the couch but she sat up, her sleep having worn thin. She patted the blue leather-covered cushion beside her, “Snuggle me.” She said.