The Cutting Season by Attica Locke

amount of blood on her clothes.
    “Did you hurt yourself?”
    “No.”
    “Did someone else hurt you?”
    “ You’re hurting me!”
    She snatched her arms free, scooting as far away from her mother as she could, pressing her back against the bed’s painted headboard and knocking it gently against the rose wallpaper. Caren asked her again, “How did you get blood on your shirt?”
    “Why are you yelling at me?”
    “I am not yelling,” Caren said, even though she was. Her voice had taken on that thin, high-pitched quality it did when she got really scared. And there, in her daughter’s bedroom, the bloodstained shirt between them, Caren was quite possibly the most afraid she had ever been in her life. “Did someone hurt you, Morgan?”
    “No.”
    Which left open another possibility, the thing that frightened Caren the most.
    She reminded herself to breathe.
    “This afternoon,” she said, speaking carefully and deliberately, drawing a line of emphasis under each word, “when the police asked if you saw or heard anything last night, you were telling the truth, weren’t you, ’Cakes?”
    Morgan mumbled something.
    “Morgan?”
    “I said yes .” She rolled her eyes, this new thing she’d picked up at school that Caren couldn’t stand. She wanted to swat her little legs to get her attention, the way she might have when Morgan was just a tot and danger meant something as real and present as a lick of fire burning on the stove. But her daughter wasn’t a preschooler anymore. She couldn’t put her in a corner or physically wrest the truth out of her. At this stage, the two of them, mother and daughter, were left with the crudeness of language, the imprecision of words. “What is going on, Morgan?” she said. “Why do you have blood on your shirt?” Her voice was shrill. She was yelling again.
    Across the hall, she heard Lorraine’s voice on the walkie-talkie. “Miss White Lady is looking for you, baby,” she said, speaking of Ms. Quinlan. “I do believe they are waiting for someone to call an official start to this thing.” The two-way sputtered in static, and then Lorraine was gone. It was after five, for sure. Caren was late and due in the main house. But she didn’t care. The world outside this room could wait.
    She started again, slowly. “Morgan . . .”
    And then suddenly her daughter had something to say, something by way of an explanation. “Maybe it’s not even my shirt,” she said, her tone hopeful, courteous even, as if she really was trying to help, to solve a mystery as benign as where her mother may have misplaced her car keys. But the more Morgan talked, and the harder she tried to sell it, the more Caren realized how much trouble they were in. “Sometimes our uniforms get mixed up in PE,” Morgan offered. “They’re all the same. And you said you would sew my name in the back but you never did, and so it probably just got all mixed up. I bet I just picked up the wrong shirt after gym class.”
    “ ’Cakes,” Caren said, swallowing hard, “I need you to tell me the truth.”
    “I am.”
    Caren could hardly look at her. She lowered her eyes, her gaze falling on the stain, lying face up between them. She saw its twin in her mind. She saw the open grave and the dead woman and the shock of blood that soaked the front of her clothes.
    “Did you leave the house last night, Morgan?”
    “No.”
    “Tell the truth, ’Cakes.”
    Not that Caren would have any way of knowing.
    For the cops, she’d already tried to recall anything odd about last night, and now tried again to divine her daughter’s movements after dark. Morgan, even at nine, still had bathroom issues at night, a partial explanation for why she refused even the few sleepover invitations she received. She used to come to Caren at night, cradling her wet sheets. But since the start of this school year, she often changed the bedding herself in the middle of the night, shamed even to tell her mother. And, anyway, Caren