by Mindy Mejia
Hysterical laughter dropped me to the cot and turned into a half-bellow. I covered my face and strangled the sound so the deputy wouldn’t come back and threaten to beat the shit out of me for something I hadn’t done.
I did not kill Hattie Hoffman.
She had killed me, in so many ways, over months of guilt and obsession and need. She had taken everything I thought I was and destroyed it with a coy wink in the middle of a chaotic classroom. When I’d met Hattie in the barn on Friday night, I let her demolish me. I gave in to screaming temptation and lost myself in her, rejected every responsibility, corrupted every decency for the chance to fly away with her, to attach myself like a barnacle to her shooting star. I made love to her. I kissed her goodbye and went home. I did not kill her.
But who had?
For the last five days it had consumed me, imagining her ending, her brazen heart breaking open and spilling on to those coarse, cold planks. Tommy. Tommy, was all I could think. That hulking arm always wrapped over her shoulders like she was some prized football trophy. The baby fat that still clung to his giant frame, his sudden shouts in the lunchroom, the fanaticism on his face during pep rallies. I’d watched him closer than he could’ve ever imagined, the secret lover stalking the public one. She’d wanted to torment me with him, and God, she had. He must have followed her there. It had to be Tommy.
That’s why I kept going to school—to watch him, to see if his guilt would manifest in some physical way—but he hadn’t been in class all week and I hadn’t been able to confront him today in the overwhelming crowd. I needed to see his eyes when he looked at me. If he’d seen us together, if he’d killed her for it, I knew he couldn’t hide it from me in those big, dumb eyes.
I paced the cell, a ten-foot length that made my legs stiff with the need to stretch, to run, and waited for the sheriff to finish burying Hattie.
At least two hours passed before the deputy came back. He brought me to the same conference room from two days ago, although this time I noticed recording equipment had been brought in.
“I want my phone call.”
He ignored me, so I repeated myself.
“You’ll get it,” the sheriff answered as he strolled in. The suit from the funeral was gone, replaced by his uniform.
“Mary Beth already phoned here, if that’s who you were going to call. Everybody else on the planet is calling, too. Some of those news vans are sitting right out there.” He pointed at the door.
“I didn’t murder Hattie.”
“That’s not what we’re here to talk about.” He sat down across the table and fixed a piercing stare on me.
“Yes, okay, obviously I was having an affair with her. It was stupid and wrong. Believe me, I know how wrong it was, but I genuinely loved her. I could never have hurt her, much less stab her to death in cold blood.”
“We’ll get there, lover boy.” The sheriff leaned back and crossed his arms. “When did it start?”
I told him everything; how Hattie kept pursuing me after I’d found out who she was, how she started dating Tommy as a cover, the notes on her assignments, the trip to Minneapolis and every meeting after that. It was a relief to admit it, finally to be free of this secret that had hung over my life for the last half year. I told him how I found out Mary was pregnant from our only sex in months, how I’d ended the affair and withdrawn the last of my savings, hoping Hattie would use the money to go to New York.
“I wanted her to leave. I couldn’t bear seeing her and didn’t want her to have to see Mary pregnant.”
“Wouldn’t want her to talk to Mary, you mean.” He hadn’t said much throughout the entire story up to this point.
“No. I mean, yes, but I was thinking mostly of Hattie. I didn’t want to cause her more pain.” I dropped my head. “I took her innocence. I know I did. I thought the least I could do was help her realize her dream. I knew she’d find someone in New York who would make her happy and she’d forget about me.”
“That’s a nice little story you’ve got there. I’m sure your lawyer will love it.” He checked a piece of paper in one of his files. “Now, I’ve got one last pesky question for you. That envelope showed up on March twenty-first, three weeks before she died, when you wished her well and sent her on her way, so how is it that we’ve got your semen inside of her on the night of her death?”
“Friday . . .” I began, and took a deep breath. The sheriff leaned in.
“After the play, what happened?”
“I did go to Carl’s, like I told you. We had a drink, but afterwards I went to meet Hattie at the Erickson barn.”
“Thought you said you ended the relationship.”
“I did. I mean, I tried—”
“You lie to me one more time and I will have your balls. Do you understand me?”
A muscle twitched in his jaw and his voice was like shards of gravel. I nodded.
“Good. What time did you get to the barn?”
“After ten. I dropped my car off at the farm and walked over. Maybe closer to ten thirty.”
“And then?”
I laid my hands deliberately on the table and tried to gather my thoughts. “She wanted to give me my money back, she said. When I got there, though, I found out she’d already spent it. I didn’t know that until after . . .”
“After you had sex with her?”
I had a sudden moment of clarity, a premonition of how this interview was going to proceed, and saw exactly how guilty it would make me look. Hattie had told me about the money. She told me and then she threatened me.
“I want a lawyer.”
The sheriff didn’t seem surprised by my request to invoke my Miranda rights. He’d switched off the recording equipment and tossed me in the cell with hardly a word. While I waited for the county defender to show up, the deputy led Mary back into the holding area.
“You’ve got ten minutes. Don’t touch the bars. Don’t try to hand him anything. I’ll be watching.” The deputy nodded to the security camera and set a chair down for her before leaving again. Mary rested a hand lightly on her stomach. She must have played the pregnancy card.
She sat down and glanced around the room, her eyes flitting everywhere except to me. Eventually they settled on the security camera and she stared intently at its red blinking eye.
“I told Mom I was going to the grocery store,” she said to the camera.
“Mary.”
“She asked for peaches. She’s been wanting peaches all week and they’re eight months out of season. It doesn’t matter, though.” Her head dropped. “She won’t remember that she asked for them by the time I get home.”
I swallowed. The weight of Mary’s life smothered the already oppressive room. “Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m in here?”
“They told me.” She said it to her lap, while her hand made small, deliberate circles on her abdomen. “They said you were here for lying. It’s nice to know that lying is a crime, at least sometimes.”
“They think I killed her.” I tried to talk low, casting a glance toward the door and then the camera. They were probably listening to every word.
“Because you were sleeping with her.”
Shock jolted through me. There was no change in her tone or expression, no indication that she had any feelings one way or the other about the matter, except for the fact that she finally lifted her head and pinned me with her clear, passive gaze.
“They must know that by now,” she added, waiting for my reply.
I had no idea how to respond. I’m sorry came to mind, but it was ludicrous, unimaginable. Apologies were for spilled drinks and bumps in the hallway; they were the courtesies of people whose lives progressed along predictable, uncomplicated arcs. I’m sorry had no place between us anymore.
“How did you find out?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she got up and went to the door, peeking through its lead-glass window. After a moment, she came back to the bars and stood opposite me.
“I’m not a murderer. I didn’t kill Hattie. Christ, I couldn’t even kill a chicken.”
She ignored me and spoke again in that eerie, passive voice.
“I don’t know why I brought the knife.”
The words were so soft I almost didn’t hear them. Then I was sure I heard wrong. The blood in my head started pounding and I lurched forward. She automatically stepped back, turning away.
“What did you say? Mary, look at me.”
She wouldn’t. Her profile was stark, emotionless except for her concentration on the memory.
“I heard you drive up on Friday. I was in the barn, cleaning the knives. Always maintain your tools, Dad used to say. Clean them and put them away. I looked out and saw you walking away from the house. I followed you. I didn’t realize I was still holding the knife I’d been sharpening until we were crossing the Erickson woods. By then I’d figured out where you were going. And when I got there, I saw why.”
A dread too awful to name filled my chest. It was worse than when I’d first heard a body was discovered in the barn, worse than when Hattie hadn’t shown up to Saturday’s performance and I was seized with the knowledge of her death, worse even than when I thought Tommy had murdered her. Good God, it was Mary? The horror curdled in my stomach and broke over my skin in a clammy sweat.
“Mary . . .” I choked on her name. “What did you do?”
She looked back at me and there were angry tears in her eyes now, but not a drop fell.
“I saw you with her, Peter. I saw how she looked at you like you were hers.” The anger flashed and smoldered. Her hand pressed tight on her stomach. “How could you do it? After I’d worked so hard to build something here. Did you think you could hide it? That I wouldn’t find out in my own hometown?”
I stared at the bloodless fingers of her hand, like she was shielding her long-awaited baby from this conversation and all of its consequences for our lives to come. What would she do to keep it safe? To protect her family? I’d seen that hand do things I’d never imagined possible; I’d watched it slice through the throats of chickens and calmly hang their bodies upside down to drain their blood. She was pregnant, more emotional than I’d imagined possible. The rage seemed to burn right out of her. Oh, God.
“Mary, what did you do? Answer me.” I gripped the bars, desperate.
“You know exactly what I did. How can you ask me that?” The tears finally spilled over, glittering dangerously on her cheeks. “And I’m telling the sheriff everything.”
“Everything?”
“I’m going to walk out of this room and tell him I saw you together that night. That I dropped the knife outside the barn, ran home in shock, and haven’t seen that knife since.”
“What?” I didn’t understand. She was going to lie?
The deputy hovered at the doorway, talking over his shoulder to someone. He was coming in any second. This could be my only chance to find out the truth, but Mary didn’t even seem to hear me. She was seething now, months of silent rage finally overflowing and finding purchase inside these concrete and steel walls.
“No matter what happens, no matter what you do or don’t say in here, I’m keeping the baby. And you will never, ever see it. I won’t even put your name on the birth certificate.”
“Jesus Christ, how are you going to raise a child in prison?”
“Me?” She spit it out just as the deputy opened the door and walked in between us.
“Time’s up.”
Neither of us moved for a second, our eyes locked on each other for what might have been the last time.
“Ma’am?” The deputy put a hand out.
“No matter what happens,” she said again, just as the deputy pulled her away and shut the door, leaving me alone and shaking against the bars.
It felt like a long time before the sheriff came and got me, time enough for one life to end and something else, something much less lifelike, to begin. I sat on the cot with my head buried in my hands, unable to erase the image of Mary’s hate-riddled face, her revelation, and her vow. She was telling the sheriff she dropped the knife and left—an obvious lie from someone who had motive, opportunity, a murder weapon, no alibi—and she was admitting all this for what?
To put the knife in my hand.
It was the only possible explanation and I couldn’t even work up any anger about it. Maybe part of her even believed it, that I was the one truly responsible for this nightmare.
I imagined our baby in foster care while I tried to prove paternity to the courts and the shitty father I would undoubtedly be if I managed to get custody. I cried. I cried for the unwanted child of a lost marriage, for the life I had thrown away like garbage and the one I almost tasted before it was ripped away, even for the world Mary had fought to create, her savage phoenix struggling to rise out of the fields of the dead. And I cried for Hattie, knowing now, absolutely, that I had caused her death. Because of me, because I had been too weak to resist, she would never become any of the thousand people that had been quickening inside her.
Eventually the tears ended and a numbing calm seeped in. There was, at last, lucidity as a final choice unfolded before me. I had all the details I needed to know, thanks to Pine Valley: the crime scene had been recounted all over the school; the purse, Winifred told Elsa, had been pulled from the lake; and if none of that convinced them, I still had a final piece of evidence they didn’t even know existed, the coup de grâce.
After months of indecency, shame, and guilt, I felt an almost strangled joy when I realized I had this last chance to do something good. The child would be fine. This town would embrace it and Mary and take them for their own. My name would never be spoken to them. Walking slowly around the cell, I took deep breaths, filling my lungs to the bottom and feeling their elasticity, their wondrous capacity. This could easily have been Sydney Carton’s state of mind as the wagon carried him to his fate.
Later, when the sheriff opened the door, I stood calmly in the middle of the cell, hands at my sides, waiting. A stranger hovered just behind, a fat, hesitant young man that Hattie could’ve wrapped around her finger with a wink and a glance.
The sheriff nodded. “Your lawyer.”
“Good.” I looked straight at the sheriff. “I need to make a confession.”
HATTIE / Saturday, March 22, 2008
PORTIA WAS royally pissed off by the time she dropped me at home. I didn’t care. After the last day and a half, I had zero ability to listen to every stupid detail of her choir trip. I had threatened Peter, cried on my mom’s shoulder, gotten Peter’s hush money and breakup bombshell, run away to Minneapolis, almost gotten arrested by Homeland Security, had my truck die, and puked in a field. Her unbelievable chicken Caesar salad by the Country Music Hall of Fame? Sorry, Porsche. Not in my top ten right now.
She did take me into Rochester, though, and waited at the mall while I bought what I needed and stowed my new suitcase. I used one of Peter’s hundred-dollar bills to buy her a thank-you shirt and I also found a dress, the perfect dress, a dress that made me want to twirl and dance and start my new life. I was done wearing costumes.
When Portia pulled into my driveway, I was surprised to see Tommy parked next to the house. He had his hands shoved in his pockets and was leaning on the hood of his pickup while talking to Dad. They both looked over when I jumped out of the car.
“Thanks, Porsche!”
“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes and started backing her car up before I’d even slammed the door. It was strange, knowing she was angry and not trying to deflect or spin it the way I usually did, but the real Hattie Hoffman had just stood up, in a big way, and I wasn’t about to sit back down anymore.
I took a deep breath and walked over to Tommy and Dad.
“Where’s your truck?” was Dad’s first question.
“Broken,” I replied, grinning. I told them what happened and maybe I snuck in a few innocent lies ab
out the specific chain of events, but that part wasn’t important. They both grilled me on the exact noises and symptoms of the truck and decided the alternator might be the problem.
“I just replaced mine, same time I changed out the rims.” Tommy kicked his tire affectionately. “I could help you tow it back and take a look at it.”
“Sounds good,” Dad started to say until I cut him off.
“No, don’t worry about it, Tommy. I’m sure you’ve got plans.”
He looked at me like I was mental. “I thought we were going to watch the UFC fight at Derek’s house. Everyone’s going, remember?”
“Right.” I’d completely forgotten. We’d talked about it on Tuesday, which seemed like a lifetime ago. “I don’t think I can go. I’m still not ready for the play and I’m kind of freaking out about it. After Dad and I bring the truck back, I’m going to run lines.”
Tommy started to look like he was going to argue, so I gave him an awkward hug. “You should totally go. Tell Derek I’m sorry to miss it.”
After Tommy stuttered around a little, he eventually climbed into his truck and gunned it out of the driveway. Dad just kind of looked at me and I shrugged and said, “UFC sucks,” which wasn’t a lie at all.
He laughed, one of those big belly laughs that I’ve always loved, and we went to pick up my dead truck.
“Haven’t seen you much lately, kid,” Dad said as we pulled on to the highway.
“There’s been way too much going on.” Again, not lying.
“Tommy bugging you?”
I shrugged. “He’s a high school boy. I don’t think he can help it.”
He laughed again and we fought over the radio station for a while, a loud, bickering tradition we both loved. I told him where the truck was and when we got there we worked together to hook it up. If I’d been born in the city like Peter, I probably wouldn’t know how to connect a tow rope, or put boards down to haul a tractor out of the mud, or anything like that. They weren’t things I could brag about when I got to New York, but it made me happy right now, knowing I could do my share, that Dad didn’t need Greg or Tommy to help him. I’d made this mess and I was helping clean it up.
