Free White Bird in a Blizzard by Laura Kasischke

morning, and my father had already left for work. “Dad,” I’d shouted down to him from the upstairs bathroom while he was huffing around in the hallway waiting for me, “just go. I’ll walk. I’m going to have to be late.”
    “Are you sure, Kat?”
    He said it generously, but I could tell he was annoyed. His voice sounded thin, transparent, like a piece of cloth stretched tightly over the mouth of a jar.
    Tardiness, in my father’s book, was a sin right up there next to homicide, although I knew he wouldn’t reprimand me for it. Always, we’d had a polite relationship, but since my mother disappeared, it had become even more so. It had become something formal, Victorian, lacking even the intimacy of irritation. When I said I didn’t feel well, didn’t want to go to school, or was going to be late, he never asked me why, and I suspected it might be because he was afraid I might tell him I’d gotten my period, and had cramps, or some other terrible embarassment from which neither of us would ever fully recover.
     
    That morning, I was running late for school because I’d spent too much time trying to decide what to wear. I was upstairs, standing in the bathroom with a pile of my own discarded clothes at my feet, naked except for a flowered bra and matching panties. It had been months since my mother left, and the last thing I expected was that Detective Scieziesciez would pull up unannounced in his unmarked car.
    I heard a knock on the door, and I peeked out from under the mini-blinds in the bathroom window, and I could see him pacing around down there on our front steps in a trench coat, smoking a cigarette, looking up toward the bathroom window.
    I dropped the blinds, grabbed a red turtleneck sweater and pulled it on, a plaid skirt and pulled it up—a kind of schoolgirl costume I’d never truly considered wearing to school—and I ran barefoot down the stairs.
    Detective Scieziesciez knocked, again, hard and insistently on the front door as I was opening it, and he lost his balance briefly, knocking on the emptiness, stumbling into the house, and looking like a handsome actor playing the part of a detective—dark-haired, maybe forty years old, five o’clock shadow dusking his strong jaw, though it was still only early morning.
    I was impressed by that shadow, that implication of unbridled beard. It made Detective Scieziesciez look like a man with such a surplus of virility he couldn’t possibly shave it off. I’d never actually seen him in the flesh, just listened to his husky voice on our answering machine, seen his letters lying on the kitchen table where my father left them—official messages regarding the ongoing investigation into Eve Connors’s disappearance, which was being handled with appropriate gravity and attention (although, in those letters, often her name was misspelled as Eve
Conyers
, or
Eva
Connors).
    He introduced himself, asked if he could have a look around.
     
    As I’ve said, I was impressed by the five o’clock shadow, the trench coat, the smell of fresh smoke on the detective, but I was also a little annoyed. It was almost spring. My mother had been gone since January, and it seemed crazy and unreasonable to want to search the house at such a late date. If there’d been a murder weapon on the kitchen counter—a big, bloody spoon—we’d had plenty of time to find it ourselves.
    Still, the detective looked damp and sexy wiping his muddy shoes on our rug. I looked down at those muddy prints, affected. Although I realized that I shouldn’t just let this stranger in without checking some kind of ID—a badge, passport, dog tags?—I stepped out of his way and let him pass me in the hallway. The idea of not letting him in seemed more foolish than letting him—as if, while standing on the deck of the
Titanic
, I’d been offered a seat on a lifeboat and decided not to take it because I was afraid it might spring a leak.
    I could smell deodorant soap under his coat, and