Whatever Remains

Hey there, all you fellow Dead Fish Afternooners!  I too have a short story that I've been working on since the workshop, and I'd love any feedback you'd be willing to give me (especially the constructive kind!).  So if you have some time to kill, please read and critique!  Thanks in advance and hope you're all having a great summer!

On the afternoon when my mother was found dead in her bedroom with a bullet in her head, I retreated under my covers and read my copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes until five o'clock the next morning.  By the light of my trusty Eveready flashlight, with my head tenting the sheets around Sherlock, Dr. Watson, and me, I took copious notes on every murder and attempted murder case: first, victim; second, culprit; third, method; fourth, motive; fifth, and most important for my purposes, how the case was solved.  I needed to educate myself in the science of deduction.  If Sherlock Holmes had taught me one thing so far, it was that the police could not be relied upon to solve a case properly.  If you wanted it done right, you called on Sherlock Holmes.  In the absence of Sherlock Holmes, a Sherlock-educated teenager had to be the next best thing.

            Unfortunately, upon reading my notes in the light of day, the irrelevance of the majority of the cases became quite clear.  My mother had not been set after with a poisonous snake.  She had not been trapped beneath a cellar floor while searching for hidden treasure.  She had not received any threats from any secret orders in the form of dried fruit remnants.  She had been shot in the head.  She had not even had any enemies, to the best of my knowledge, or any dark and clandestine ambitions.  She had gone off to work at the publishing firm every morning, Monday through Friday, without complaint, and come home every evening, Monday through Friday, with a sigh.  She had written birthdays in neat handwriting on the calendar and smiled for family portraits and baked gingerbread cookies on Christmas Eve, and I imagined that her life was content and unexciting.  Unlike those unfortunate Brits of Conan Doyle's invention, she did not have any detectable accent and she did not die an exotic death, thus leaving me unlike that consulting detective of Conan Doyle's invention, without any clues to go on.

            Luckily, I felt sure that my intense study session had taught me something of Sherlock Holmes' methods, and that therefore, if I could only get some data, I might be able to put my newly improved deductive powers to work.  However, my Sherlock marathon had also caused me to miss the window of opportunity for data-gathering; by the time I was prepared to begin my investigation, my mother's body had long been carted away to the morgue, and all evidence had long been sealed up in sterile plastic bags and removed.  Consequently, over the objections of my Sherlock Holmes purism, I was forced to rely upon the police's data, as given me in several phone calls to the local police station.

            "Hello, my name is Elise Patterson, and my mother Lorraine Patterson is in your morgue," I introduced myself each time I called, although I wasn't exactly sure if they even had a morgue or if my mother was in it if they did.  "I would like to know if you could give me some data on her case."

            Only the first time that I called did the secretary sound taken aback by my request and ask me to verify my identity.  After that, she would just say, "Hello, Elise," with a sad smile in her voice, and then she would put the police chief on the line if he wasn't too busy or out giving people speeding tickets.

            The police chief was strangely accommodating, considering how my investigation rather strongly implied how little I trusted that his skills were sufficient for the job.  In his eternally tired but sympathetic voice, he would answer all of my questions, and when I had exhausted my arsenal of questions for the day, he would wish me good luck in my endeavors and tell me to take care of myself.  He began including my father in his well wishes after one night when he unexpectedly asked to speak to my father and then proceeded to do so for approximately thirty minutes.  I had been reluctant to give my father the phone, as he was unaware of my investigation and most likely of the mentality that I should let the police do their own job.  However, I believe it is against the law to disobey a police officer, let alone the police chief, so if one asks to speak to your father, you hand over the phone straight away.  He didn't seem the type to arrest a fourteen-year-old for not putting her father on the phone, but I wasn't going to risk it.

            I lingered in the kitchen until the phone call was over, absently eating jelly beans from the candy dish and trying to predict my father's reaction.  I could see it going in any of several directions: angry, depressed, disappointed, or, if I was particularly unlucky, reproachful.  I did not foresee tired as an option.  But when he entered the room to replace the house phone on its charger, he looked like it was three o'clock in the morning and he had just awoken on the couch to discover that he hadn't yet gone to bed and he had to get up for work in three hours.

            "Elise..." he addressed me slowly, his tongue almost too exhausted to form the word.  I waited expectantly for him to go on, but he only repeated himself.  "Oh, Elise."  He sank down at the kitchen table still with its three chairs, even though only two of them were used now, and dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets uncommunicatively.  I took this as my cue to leave.

            Still, my father had not expressly forbidden my investigation or, indeed, said anything about it at all, so I continued gathering data from the kindly police chief and recording it in neat bullet points in a new marble copybook devoted specifically for this purpose.  Sadly, however, the section titled "Brilliant Deductions" was not filling up quite as quickly as those titled "Reliable Data" and "Tentative Theories."  In the deductive field, I had determined only one point of interest: the fact that the murderer must have somehow gained entry to the house by tricking my mother into trusting him or her and letting him or her in, as, in my frequent and numerous expeditions about the perimeter of our house, I had found no signs of a forced entry.  So the murderer was someone my mother had trusted and led, for some unknown reason, into her bedroom.  Or perhaps, for some unknown reason, she had been forced into her bedroom.  Either way, it didn't really make any difference, because I realized that I had no idea whom my mother had trusted anyway.

            To make myself feel more capable, I filled an entire page of the "Brilliant Deductions" section with very obvious facts, such as, "The murderer knows how to fire a gun," and "The murderer had a firm enough grasp of the floor plan of our house that he or she was able to escape."  I tore the page out a day later.  It all seemed a bit petty.

            Once, for approximately three glorious minutes, I thought that I had had a breakthrough.  I hadn't considered the placement of the bullet before, but in a flash of insight, it occurred to me that if it were on the back of her head, that could indicate that my mother had trusted the murderer enough to turn her back on him or her.  Conversely, if it were on her forehead, she saw her fate approaching by the time her murder was inevitable.  With this revelation in mind, I called the police station for more data, breathless with anticipation.

            The bullet wound was on the right side of her head.  I had failed to entertain this possibility.

            I had been trying to keep the details of my investigation under wraps, but at dinner on the day of my three glorious minutes of enlightenment and subsequent eight hours of disappointment and frustration, my woes needed a voice.  Perhaps talking through the facts and theories of the case, hearing everything aloud, would jumpstart my deductive reasoning.  With my valued notebook beside my plate of penne pasta and meatballs, I flipped through the pages, discussing every detail, from my mother's apparently too trusting nature to the murderer's possible motive.  My father, sitting across from me at the square wooden table, carefully monitored his fork as it stabbed his pasta with increasing violence.

            "I just don't understand what it means that she was shot in the side of her head," I rambled, reaching to turn to my "Tentative Theories" page and nearly spilling my glass of iced tea.  "Did she trust the murderer halfway or what?  It just seems unnatural that someone would stand next to—"

            My father's fist hit the table, catapulting his fork several feet above the table.  It clattered onto my notebook, marring the page with spaghetti sauce blood.  "She killed herself, Elise!" he shouted.  "Her fingerprints were on the gun, the gunshot residue was on her fingers, and the bullet wound was on the right side of her head because that's where right-handed people shoot themselves."  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath that rattled unsteadily in his lungs.  His voice softened, tired.  "I told you that a thousand times, Elise.  I told you it was suicide."

A menagerie of bright orange tigers, yellow lions, and blue elephants grins stupidly at me from the verdant wallpaper jungle of the therapist's office as she informs me that I have been deluding myself, creating an alternate reality because the real one was too difficult to face.

            "It's a common response to trauma among children and teens," she tells me.  "You shouldn't feel ashamed."

            I don't.  What I do feel is desperately confused.  Nothing seemed unreal or deluded about the time after my mother's death when I lived through it the first time, and it still doesn't now, as I relive it day after day.  The therapist's theory makes me feel like some mentally unstable child who can't tell her daydreams from reality, but I know that those weeks before my bubble burst saw me more rational and clear-headed than ever.  How could I have been deluding myself?

            I've been so preoccupied with figuring out what's real that I haven't even had time to ask myself those questions always asked by those swamped in the wake of a suicide: why did she do it, could have I stopped her.  I haven't even had time to grieve.

            "Your father says that you knew that your mother killed herself," the therapist is saying in her practiced sympathetic tone.  "Did you?"

            Did I?  I lie awake at night, staring at the crack snaking out from my ceiling fan and rifling through my mental filing cabinet, searching for some memory of being told that it was suicide.  I only ever turn up that night at the dinner table.  Was there some file before that, some file whose contents I removed, shredded, and threw onto the fire?  I don't know.  My own life, and I don't know what happened.

            "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."  So says the revered Sherlock Holmes.  But when I eliminate the impossible, I always draw up two conflicting and equally improbably truths: either I am insane, or everyone else is lying.

I cannot afford to sleep at night.  I stay up and study The Complete Sherlock Holmes.  My powers of deduction must be razor-sharp to track down whoever killed my mother and began this conspiracy against me.