They kept the tin for six weeks and then Aguilar brought it to my mother’s house in an evidence bag and told me I could look at it if I wanted to, and that I did not have to.
I wanted to.
It was a Danish butter-cookie tin, the blue one everybody’s grandmother has, with a dent in the lid. Inside were forty or fifty photographs, a folded certificate, a child’s plastic hospital wristband, and a set of keys on a ring with a wooden fob shaped like a fish.
The photographs were all of the same house.
Not the same rooms — the same house across about thirty years. A kitchen with orange cupboards, and then the same kitchen with white ones. A back garden with a paddling pool, and then a back garden with a shed where the paddling pool had been. Two women on a step in 1994, one of them holding a baby. The same step in what must have been 2011, one of the women much older, in a chair now, and the baby grown into a teenager standing behind her with her hands on the chair back.
The step was our step. I had been standing on it that morning with a coffee.
I want to say something here, and I have thought about how to say it for a long time.
Up until the tin, what I felt was fear. Pure, uncomplicated, animal fear — the kind that gets you up the stairs in four seconds and keeps you sitting against a door until dawn. I do not apologise for any of it. There was a stranger above my sleeping child, and no explanation arriving afterwards makes that less true than it was at 2:40 in the morning.
But the tin was the first time I understood that there had been a person up there. Not a presence. Not a sound in the joists. A woman who had lost her mother in February and her home in May and who was climbing into a roof space in June because she had nowhere else to be and because everything she had ever been was inside those walls.
Both of those things are true at once. That is the whole difficulty of it. I have never been able to put one of them down in order to carry the other.
Aguilar told me the rest in pieces over about a month, because she was not obliged to tell me any of it and did it in her own time.
Marisol had been sleeping in her car in March and April. After the sale went through she stayed with a friend for two weeks and then that ended, and there is a gap of nine days that nobody has ever accounted for, and then she started coming to Mercer Street.
She had not taken anything of value. This was confirmed exhaustively, because it was the first thing everyone assumed. No jewellery, no cards, no electronics, nothing from Ellie’s room. What she took was food, and not much of it — cereal bars, applesauce, crackers, the things a person takes when they are trying to eat without anyone noticing that food is gone.
She had also, at some point, cleaned our downstairs bathroom. I had put that down to Dan. Dan had put it down to me. Neither of us had mentioned it because neither of us wanted to be the one who noticed.
They found her in the second week of August, at a bus station in Columbus, sitting in a plastic chair with a rucksack on her knees. She did not run and she did not deny anything. Aguilar said she seemed relieved, which is a word I have turned over about four hundred times.
She was charged with burglary and criminal trespass. Because of the food, it was burglary — entering a dwelling and taking property, and it does not matter for the statute whether the property is a diamond ring or a box of cereal bars, which I did not know and which I found, when I learned it, genuinely difficult to sit with.
The trespass charge was the one that carried the weight of what had actually happened. Twenty-two nights. Above a child’s bedroom.
Her lawyer asked for a competency evaluation and got one. The evaluation came back and I have never seen it and never will.
And about a week before the hearing, Aguilar called me and said that Marisol had asked, through her attorney, whether she could write to us.
Dan said absolutely not.
I said yes.