I try to think back, will myself to see the girl behind the door, but as hard as I try I cannot see Louise’s young face then. The image of Louise that most sticks in my mind was years later. I’d been called in to check out the death of Ernestine Chief Spear, a young girl who had choked to death in a fit, the nuns called it. Ernestine died at the Ursulines’. I took my time to check on the matter. I wasn’t up for it. I drove around back of the Ursuline building to park. I adjusted my hat and pulled out my mileage log. I tried to do anything to avoid the inevitable. I had wanted to sit there for a minute, breathe in the clean April air. I knew Chief Spear’s family up near Pistol Creek. I had to drive there, too, pull up as a policeman scattering their other kids to the hills, to tell her family she was dead. I was new to the job, thinking the nuns should have had the chore of breaking the news to the family, not me, but I had to be the one to tell Ray Chief Spear his daughter was dead. I had to punch that family with the news their thirteen-year-old girl had died. As I was driving up their road I knew I had to hide my own imaginings from them. They could see their daughter in my eyes, their sister dying in a dark room with floors so polished they gleamed like water. I couldn’t stop myself from seeing Ernestine choking to death in a night-black room while the nuns were probably singing or praying by candlelight.

When I told the Chief Spear family I was sorry I realized I wasn’t sorry like I should have been. I wasn’t sorry I drove a big official car because even the reservation problems began to look good from behind a windshield. I wasn’t sorry I had more food to eat these days than I ever had. I would never be so hungry I would choke on the food I was eating as, I suspected, their daughter had. I wasn’t sorry the whites treated me better when I put on the badge and that sometimes I thought I was better too.