Chapter 3 — THE BALCONY

Sarah was on the balcony.

Sarah Jenkins is my wife's older sister. Thirty-eight. She had been living in our house for three months and eleven days with her son Lucas, who is ten, in the two rooms at the back that we do not use.

She was in a long black coat over a pink sweater, and she was holding a yellow bucket, the kind you buy at a hardware store for four dollars.

She had her free hand on the rail and she was looking down at us.

I did not shout. I am told that I shouted. I have thought about it for a long time and I do not believe I did.

Mark: What did you do.

Sarah: She has been coughing for six days.

Mark: What did you *do*, Sarah.

Sarah: Six days. Six days I have been asking. Nobody listens to me in this house. Nobody has listened to me once.

And then she said the sentence.

Sarah: Take your burden and leave.

I have replayed that sentence more times than is good for a person. I have replayed the way her voice cracked in the middle of *burden*, which is a thing I did not hear at the time and heard later, on a recording, and which changed something.

Then she tipped the bucket over the rail.

I do not believe she aimed it at Sophia. I have never believed that, not even in the first hour, and I have been asked to say otherwise by three separate people whose job it was to ask me.

She tipped it at me. She was ten feet above and slightly to the left and she was not thinking about angles.

Most of it hit my shoulder and my back.

Some of it hit my daughter, who was already wet, already hypothermic, and already in my arms.