I stand in the bathroom, staring at Meredith, lying naked in red bathwater. My hands are shaking, and I can feel warm tears dripping down my face. I look away. I look in the mirror, and I see these-

Firemen. Screaming to me, screaming at each other. Rain pours down my window. They’ve got these things, like giant metal scissors or something, I don’t know. It’s hard to focus. My leg hurts so bad. I look at it. Oh, no, I shouldn’t have looked at it. So much blood. The door is crunched and torn away, screeching metal under pressure. My head hurts, too. They pull me away from the wreckage of my Subaru and onto a gurney. I try to look for other cars, but I don’t see any. They put me on an ambulance. They ask if I’m drunk. I say no. I don’t think I am. They say I fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road. That I’m lucky.

I leave Meredith there and go to my daughter. Her blood is all over her light blue sweater. It pools on the floor she is broken and crumpled upon, soaking into the cheap beige carpet. Her eyes stare up at me, silent, still, judging me. I should have been here to protect her. This is my fault. I shut her eyes. I tell her I’m sorry. I am. I hear something outside, like-

Laughter. Steph had been too scared to touch the dolphin at first, she said it looked icky. But I talked her into it, and now she was having the time of her life. Then I see Meredith giving me this look, this look I haven’t seen since my accident, and it’s this perfect moment, where you know, you just know, that everything is going to be okay…and then I see my reflection in the water, only, it’s different…

There’s a stick on the ground, like in some Bruce Lee flick. There’s no blood on it. It’s wet, though. Weird. Those things say they tried to help. It must have belonged to the one who was dying on my floor. Useless fuckers. They couldn’t stop him. I should have let the little ugly one die. My family did. Why shouldn’t have he? I take the stick and put it in a closet, then I go back to Steph. Seconds later, the police knock on the door. I try to answer, but no sound comes out. They break in the door.

They ask me to step away from my daughter. I do. They pat me down, but I’m not armed. They ask me one question. I tell them I came home and my family was dead. I tell them this in as many different ways as they care to ask the question. It was true. I say that no one else was here, which isn’t. But I have to stay free, if I’m going to put that murdering fuck coward that thinks he’s me out of his misery, and I don’t have any way to explain the goddam circus that just left. They say I’m going to have to come in for questioning, that’s it’s simply routine.

They hold me for hours in that little room, asking me the same goddamn question. A man enters, finally, and tells me he’s my public defender. He says he’s sorry for my loss. He doesn’t seem like a bad guy, for someone wearing a toupee. He says that two of the lab techs assigned to the crime scene in my apartment got into a fistfight, trampled all over the physical evidence. Lucky me again. The police weren’t going to hold me, but I wasn’t to leave town. I tell them I have no intentions to leave town.

I don’t.