When Elizabeth was just a girl I would grasp her in my arms and tell her I loved her. I would tell her I would do anything for her. I would tell her I would never leave her. I would watch her run into the grassy opening of our backyard beside the tranquility of the Columbia River that our house laid next to. She would rush through the garden and kneel beside her mother sitting against the fabric of her floral gardening gloves placed below her dirty blue jeans. I would stop and gaze upon my little girl as she watched her mother cover the plant in dirt.

“Mommy?” she’d ask with a glimmer in her eyes, “What will this plant be?”

Her mother would smile and brush tiny strands of hair behind her little girls ears, “This will be a big beautiful flower, an orchid if we take care of it right.”

Elizabeth would suddenly grow a little frown upon her chilled and puffy cheeks, “What if we do not take care of it right?”

Her mother would grab the sides of her daughter's smooth face and whisper, “We will try our best, that is all we have left in us, our effort. We will not leave this flower, we will not abandon it. I will show you. We are going to fertilize it so it will grow into a big beautiful flower just for you my dear.”

Her mother would stand up and walk around the corner of the house that she planted the seed next to, trailing her fingers along the cream horizontal siding of the house. Elizabeth’s little grin would sink once more as she watched her mother walk away. I would grasp her tiny hand and softly say, “Elizabeth, she is coming back, but I am here until then, I will not leave you, I will not abandon you.”

I will not leave her. I will not abandon her. But now I have lied to her, for I do not know where my darling Elizabeth is now. I believe she took a little train up the very same stairway her mother ascended on years prior. She opened the gates and never came out. Elizabeth was no longer my little girl. The little corner where she once sat on my lap as I read her books, she now sat in alone. She was no longer the same little girl I once tucked into bed each night with her mother by my side. Now, when I knock on her door to say goodnight, she is already fast asleep on her pillow, dreaming of her mother I assume. She is not the same little five-year-old girl anymore. She is eleven years old now, but she scared of the light, scared of the sun shining down on her world. She locks herself in her room and does not come out till I call for her at dinner, sometimes she won’t even come out for that. Once her mother was gone I could no longer hear the music blasting from the speaker her mother bought her for her room, now there was only the faint whimper of tears streaming from her eyes. I know she misses her, I miss her too. Each day grows longer and longer even as the sun sets sooner over the horizon.  

Elizabeth did not bring friends over anymore. She did not try to whine her way into ice cream on a school night. She simply sat and stared at the wall. It’s like the cracks in the wall were speaking to her, whispering little shivers down her crooked spine.

“Elizabeth,” I croak under my hoarse voice, “Elizabeth?” She continues to stare at her wall, the one in her room where a family photo once hung. Her center of vision locked into the hole where the nail once punctured its way through. I jittered my hand against the sandy wood of the door frame. She silently sat with her legs crossed as if the black hoodie she wore could isolate her from my words. I begin to grow a deep heat from my feet to my cheeks, sizzling under a pot of overcooked meat. I begin to boil in the depths of my skin before shouting out, “God Dammit Elizabeth answer me!” I said, slamming my fist against her dresser.

She crept her head at the pace of a setting sun ever so slightly over her slumped shoulders. I peer into her eyes, they are bloodshot, like veins tearing through her deep blue in a cloudy sky. She still does not speak but only glares.

“Elizabeth, you need to come out of your room, you have not left for days other than for school,” I wanted to be kind with her and I wanted to be gentle and caring, but it was as if my attempts to be a father were only falling away.

Elizabeth was a mere 6th grader, she did not have many friends at all, she never spoke of school or spoke in general. But for the first time in weeks she pulls me into a trance and quietly chants, “I did a bad thing,” I walked closer to her and she repeats verbatim, “I did a bad thing.”

“Elizabeth what happened?” I reach for her hand but she pulls it away, allowing me to only briefly see long cuts and scratches along her arm. I lower my head as I take an uncomfortable distance of space from her on the bed.

She twists her head over her other shoulder to look at my hands which sat balanced uneasily at my sides. She gradually moves her other hand to cover mine but quickly removes it to reveal a cold and weary residue of blood now dripping down my hand. I gasp, “Elizabeth,” I feel something holding my breath towards the back of my throat, “Elizabeth? What did you do?”

She raises her head back to the cracks in the wall and rapidly throws a pointer finger toward her closet door. I rise from the indent in the bed and take one tiny step at a time to the closet door. Elizabeth still stares blankly at the wall. As I grow closer, a stench increases, musky and rotting almost. I creek open the door, struggling to get it open due to the heavy barrier held against my strength. I soon yank it open and large bag falls to an echoing thud on the carpet floor. I unzip it and there in the middle of my darling Elizabeth’s bedroom lies a pale, fatigued corpse, covered in the same blood stained into the creases on the darling Elizabeth’s hands.

I turn my body to face hers, hoping, praying, even begging for the good Lord’s mercy that this is all a dream I will wake up from. But then without a creek from her footsteps, Elizabeth rises from the bed and stands small behind me. “I did a bad thing, Daddy.” She tilts her head and glares at the rotting corpse.  

But my Elizabeth was not that same little girl planting an Orchid with her mother anymore. Because her mother was gone, the wind of pneumonia blew in and out her gasp for air until her lungs were consumed and could no longer breathe the same mortal breaths, but only breath from beyond the heavens. Now my Elizabeth had taken this breathless body to the same sky her mother had flown to.

I am sitting here for a long time and then even more, in such proximity that my thoughts are not only comprehended but disputed against themselves, “Elizabeth,” I whispered, “What happened?” I felt my knees shaking, nearly buckling in on each other. She sat in silence, “Who is it?” she sat in silence once more, “Do you expect me to help you?” I quivered and suddenly for the first time Elizabeth was not mine, but I was hers. My entire body broke down, nervous sweats from beneath my lips and skin, and a small spasm erupted in my knee cap. I had never cried over anything as a child, I only cried after my wife had died and after that, it was nothing but a silence that I held in. Until now, the Nile streamed full of my regrets, my regrets of not connecting myself to her more, for not trying to get her help, for not helping her deal with the loss, for not ever telling her I loved her. Now because I never acknowledged my love for her, somebody else lost the love of this child. Did I paramount the reputation of my family over the happiness of another? No, I did not, yet yes I most certainly did. My child had a far greater value to this world then that child which laid stagnant on her bedroom floor. Now the cracks in the wall were whispering in my ear and through the axis in which my head sprung upon. “Elizabeth,” I could feel my voice growing deeper unintentionally, “What happened, how, who, when, where, why?” My new persona no longer contained a disappointment or a regret, it only contained the ability to wrongfully prosecute this little girl on my carpet floor to save the condemnation of my daughter. But my daughter was still a bloody killer. Did I still love my darling so? “If you want me to help you,” I paused. I wasn’t going to actually help her was I? She was my daughter, yes, but a murderer is a murderer regardless of who they are. But what about why they are. I am the why. I did not care for her. I did not give her the love and attention she prowled after. Therefore I was the butcher or at the very least my home was the shop and I had ordered the meat. I had committed this murder but the police would not see it that way. To them, she was the criminal and for now a murderer was a murderer regardless of who they are. She was no killer, she was just the executioner of a greater deed undone. “Elizabeth please?”

She raced even closer to the dead body like a magnet being yanked by her chest. She glared into the dead soul from deep within her eyes which still reflected the speaking cracks in the wall. She whispered as she slowly crouched down beside the body, “They took Mama from me, so now I took someone from them.”

“Who?” I trembled under my skin, “Who took Mama away from you?”  

She began to stroke the ashy hair of the dead girl. She appeared to be only a day at most dead, she was only barely decaying but she still was too lifeless for me to recognize. I tried to stop Elizabeth from marking up the body even more but my breath stuck to my throat and I could not speak but once again she did, “The angels, they took Mama from me,” She swirled the dusty hair on her finger, “I was walking home from school and her Mother called her an angel, I wanted to take her from the other angels.”  

I sat silent. Hours could have passed through my head for quite some time now, but all I was consciously aware of was that I needed to clean up the body before they took my angel from me. I felt a tear begin to form in the glass of my eye, she was still my angel, she had to be.

I picked up the pace of my thoughts, one after another my breath became nothing more than a driving force, crying out for me to stop. To stop as I scooped the body up into my arms. To stop as I grabbed enough garbage bags to hold her body weight. To stop as I pushed her through the plastic. To stop as I pretended Elizabeth was nothing more than a bystander because she was, I had committed this crime, it was my fault, I had not been there for her when she needed me. And that is what I keep telling myself as I pack her into the trunk of my car and drive off. I drive and drive, each car passing me by, I felt that they knew, but how could they.  

I stood in front of the storage space, it was nearly abandoned, I hadn’t been there since she died, when I wept, packing away all of our memories together. It was one thing to lose someone but it was another to lose your best friend. Before I lugged the bag out of my car I placed the skin of her coat against my palm. It was warm, and though the entire unit wreaked of dust and must, I could still smell a faint hint of the perfume that tickled my nose three years ago with every hug I gave her.

I had left Elizabeth at home, I did not want to put her anymore over this dirty wrongdoing. Maybe it had been a mistake to do so but I needed to rush my way through this maze. I sorted through stacks of her old magazines, clearing room amongst the garbage bags of clothes to place the body. I pulled them on top of one another, stacking high over the dead girl. Now she sat in the home of all the other angels, especially mine.

Three weeks had passed now. The innocent neighbor girl who had mysteriously disappeared was now the talk of the whole town, her name being whispered from ear to ear gingerly, careful not to upset the ones who had taken her disappearance too hard. Elizabeth still did not speak to me, but every once and awhile she would sit in the rocking chair next to mine and stare blankly at the living room walls. I could stare with her too, the walls seemed to whisper to me now too, but I did not like the things they were saying. To escape their taunts I pretended to watch the news, so much so that I actually did watch.

The newscaster was slim and fit, her dress was skin tight attached to her body and as she stood in the middle of an empty yard her hair blew gracefully in the wind. And as I listened I brushed my hand against her coat I had brought home with me from the storage space. I wished I had listened to Elizabeth like her mother would have wanted me to, but instead, I left her alone in the dark along with everything else that reminded me of my wife. But now as I gazed off into the cracks on this wall I heard a name spoken from the screen. The name of the diseased angel that now sat in the storage space along with my wife.

I jolted my head towards the screen but Elizabeth still sat and stared at the wall completely unaware. Then there on the screen was the neighbor woman, her brown hair was lightly brushed over but the roots appeared to be turning gray. There were dark circles under her eyes and tears glossing over her pupils. I could almost feel her as if she was whimpering against my shoulder through the screen. “Please,” a quiver in her voice erupted, “Please bring her back, wherever she is I want my baby girl back.” I glanced over at Elizabeth, I wanted my little girl back too. “Haven’t you ever lost someone you loved before? Someone your life depended on, I wake up every day and just wish she would come back, come home, come give me one last hug.”  

I had. I missed her dearly, but now she was gone. “Elizabeth,” I grasped my wife's jacket, “Elizabeth do you see what we’ve done?”

She turned around from the wall and glared at me. When she did not speak I gestured the jacket toward her and she grabs it with a full embraces. “Will you leave me now Daddy?”

I grasped her hand, “You will not leave, I won’t let them take you from me.”

“They will take you from me just like they did to Mama.”

I shook my head, “Don’t you see Elizabeth? Don’t you see that you made this mother hurt just like you and I were hurting?” She was silent. “Elizabeth I’m sorry that I have failed you. If I just would have talked to you more.”

“No,” she interrupted, “They took her from me. I will take one of them now.”

“Elizabeth this poor innocent girl you ... you killed,” I paused. I hadn’t said it out loud yet. Things were a lot scarier once you make them real. “She wasn’t the one who took your mother from you, the angels didn’t do that to you.”

She nuzzled her head into her knees and whimpered, “Yes they did. They are happy. Mama and I were happy. Then Mama and I were not happy and then they were even happier. But now she is alone and she is sad, just like I am.”

I picked up the phone, placed on the kitchen counter. She would be gone now. I would not see her again after this moment. I whispered into the phone the words that would one day keep me from my daughter, “I did it.”

The chains around my wrists were heavy, but not as heavy as the weight I will forever carry on my reckless shoulders. Elizabeth was alone now, she couldn’t get away with it again. Not without me, and that's why she won’t. I had broken my promise to Elizabeth, I could not stay and protect her anymore. But I had broken that promise long ago, from the day the orchid died and oh how I wished I could go back and watch it bloom.