Sam tries to get Sookie talking with some "dead bodies are a drag" routine, and she won't even look up from the scene, with her eye still black from the big fight three weeks ago. She's troubled by the control, and the cruelty, of the injury. Rene killed a lot of people, but he did it in a rage: blood everywhere, terrifying and brutal. This was the act of someone who wanted Miss Jeanette to suffer, who cut out her heart and placed her tenderly in the backseat of a policeman's car.

"Every time I think I know what's what," Sookie says, "It turns out I don't know anything." Which has always been, to me, the mission statement of the show, after all: once you find the answer it stops being the answer. In this case: murder isn't always a case of repression, of the nighttime darkness coming out of people. Sometimes it's about abandon.

Tara approaches, and before she and Sam can work out the night's duties, Sookie blurts, "Sweetie, how did you know the woman that got killed?" Tara's offended because Sookie's lost control again, and read her mind. Tara's relieved because every secret is a burden. She chokes out a half-hearted angry retort that goes quiet at the end, as she relaxes into tears. When she tells Sookie what Miss Jeanette was, what she meant to her and to her mother, Sookie immediately throws her arms around Tara, gulping that way she does. "You're going to have to tell the police about it," she reminds her, and Tara stares at the sky. She worries briefly about getting questioned, but she's innocent. The tears only come back when she realizes Lettie Mae will have to find out that Miss Jeanette is a fraud now.

I like this show because it's a collection of the walking wounded, but it also makes it challenging for a lot of us, I think, because Sookie's hard to read. The entire point of Sookie, I would say, is that she's hard to read. There's a childlike part of us that would like to believe every story is really about us, and Sookie seems handpicked for that kind of Mary Sue-ing: she's beautiful, funny, kicks occasional ass, and everybody wants to fuck her. She gets the romance while everybody else gets fucked. But Sookie actively resists being a point-of-view character, in a way that takes a little bit of active understanding to comprehend because without visual clues you're supposed to remember that we're watching the story of a woman with a debilitating cognitive disorder, who cannot hear anybody talking to her because their thoughts are so loud, and can't communicate her essential normalcy to the world because of that same veil.