“I’m Mrs. Muller. I work in admittance. You told the paramedic your name is Sasha Porter, is that correct?”
I couldn’t remember telling anyone anything about myself. Maybe I had been talking in my sleep.
“My name is Sasha Fawne Porter, yes. Fawne is spelled with an e at the end. That was the way my grandmother spelled her Chinese name.”
“You said you were thirteen years old?”
“I’ll be fourteen in two months.”
She lowered her head and looked at me over her glasses as if I had said something outrageous. “What is your present address? Where do you live?” she followed quickly, as though I needed a translation.
Maybe I shouldn’t have let her know my grandmother was Chinese. She remained poised with her pen and didn’t look at me until she realized I wasn’t answering her question.
“Don’t you know where you live? What’s your address?”
“We don’t have an address.”
“What do you mean, you don’t have an address? I asked you where you were living.” She had a thought. “Was it on a boat?”
“No. We live on the street, sleep on the beach,” I said.
She stared at me and pressed her thicker lower lip over her upper one. It made the brown spot at the bottom of her chin look more like a teardrop. “How long has this been going on?” she asked, as if it was my fault.
“I don’t know the exact number of days. A year, I guess.”
“Where do you go to school?”
“I don’t right now,” I said.
She smirked and shook her head. “Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know exactly. We think he went to Hawaii.”
“Hawaii? So your mother and father are divorced?”
“No. He just left.”
“Just left?” She nodded, as if she knew him, and tapped the clipboard with her pen. “Okay. What about other relatives here?”
“We don’t have any here. My mother has an aunt and cousins in Portland, Oregon. My father’s relatives are in Ohio, but we don’t talk to any. I don’t even know their names. His parents died a long time ago. He has a sister, but she stopped talking to him a long time ago, or he stopped talking to her.” I nodded. Maybe these details were important. “Yes, Mama said he stopped talking to her.”
“So you have no one to take responsibility for you?”
“Just my mother,” I said.
“A lot of good that’s going to do us,” she muttered. She checked something on her clipboard and turned to leave.
“Where is my mother?” I called.
She paused and turned back to me. “Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“No.”
“Your mother is dead. She died instantly and was taken directly to the morgue.”
2
Alone