Tuesday morning, at twenty past six, I sat at my kitchen table and opened the seam inside the front pocket of that backpack with a seam ripper.
Put the recorder in. Switched it on. And sewed the seam back up by hand with the wrong color thread, because the right color was upstairs and he was asleep up there.
Lazlo brought her home at ten past four that afternoon, carrying her, with her shoes in his other hand.
“Nothing happened. She just fell asleep.”
“Okay,” I said.
That is all I said to that man. One word. Okay.
And he looked at me for about a second longer than he normally would have, and then he went.
I fed her. I sat with her. I waited until Rick was downstairs with the television on and a beer open.
And then I went up, and locked my bedroom door behind me, and plugged that recorder into a laptop.
The first twenty minutes of that file is a school playground.
Then it is Lazlo at the car door. Cheerful. Asking her how it went.
And she tells him about a girl called Opal and something that happened with a worksheet, talking over herself the way she does.
She is chatty with him. She likes him. You can hear it. That is on the recording and I have had to sit and listen to it.
Then there is a rustle — a straw wrapper, I know that now — and he says: “Here. That’s for you.”
And my daughter says thank you.
And then, for about four minutes, you can hear a child drinking something through a straw while she talks.
And then she gets quieter.
Her sentences get further apart. Then shorter.
She says something about feeling sleepy.
And he says it’s warm in here, isn’t it, and puts a window down.
And then my daughter stops talking altogether.
The recording runs two more minutes of road noise and an indicator going.
And then a phone call connects through that car’s speakers.
“She’s completely out again.”
“Good. Bring her over. Vonda’s already there.”
And my hands came off that keyboard.
Then Rick said: “And don’t do what you did last time. Don’t leave anything on her.”
And Lazlo laughed.
He actually laughed, in a car, with her in the back seat.
“It was one bruise.”
“One bruise is enough to blow the whole thing. Do it properly.”
