What you leave out, when you tell the police about it, is how the woman reminded you of your mother—charismatic and brash, with short-cropped black hair greying at the temples. The woman had dark eyes that flashed when music played, and she drummed her fingers against whatever surface she could find to mimic bass—just like your mother, who played snare drum in a college marching band, who taught you to play drums when you were five with no ability for rhythm, but with such a slavish, abiding love that you did anything she asked. Anything. You filmed her walking across the ridgepole of a house during an electrical storm. You timed her holding her breath in the bath. You hunted snakes under railroad crossties and learned how to hold a copperhead so it couldn’t strike. When your mother died, there was no one who understood your need for lightning or calculus or percussion. No one who understood that your mother’s secret name was Viola, the name she gave herself. No one understood why that was important.
What you leave out is that you liked giving the woman money. It felt normal to be part of someone’s scheme again. It felt safe.
The detective says the woman felt sorry for you. He says that she would have taken more money, but she felt sorry for you. You can tell by his moist, dark eyes that he feels sorry for you, too.
You feel like a traitor when you pick the woman out of a lineup. You know she isn’t your mother, but you feel like she is. You feel like you’re making your mother very small when everything she did was big, so very big and so very bright, that you would have paid anything to hold her hand while she stared the world in the eye again. You would have paid anything.