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 grace.
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.