Everything You Want Me to Be

by Mindy Mejia

  On a completely different level from the nausea and slamming of my heart, I wondered how she’d found out. I started scanning the pages of my life, looking for the subtext that must have spilled over and given me away. Or maybe I hadn’t done anything. Maybe Hattie had already made good on her threat.

  “Where were you?” Mary finally broke the silence.

  “Out. Walking.” I didn’t admit anything yet.

  “Walking where?”

  “In the fields. Back there.” I swung an arm in no particular direction. “I wanted some fresh air and didn’t feel like a run.”

  Mary laughed without any humor. “You live on a farm and you had to go walking to get some fresh air. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s it right there.”

  “What’s ‘it’? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’s Elsa? I thought you were going shopping.”

  “She didn’t want me pushing her wheelchair around. I dropped her off at Winifred’s for a visit.”

  “Okay.” I waited for the accusation, the tears and the rage, but nothing came. She kept sitting there with that unreadable expression.

  “Is there something else?” I took a step toward the stairs, instinctually retreating.

  “Sit down, Peter.”

  My ass hit the chair immediately. Part of me even welcomed what was coming next. It was the end of my marriage—new paperwork to file in front of the old—but the end of the deceptions, too, the end of pretending I was anything good.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “You’re acting strangely.”

  She took a deep breath and looked at her hands.

  “I fainted at the doctor’s office.”

  “What?” Surprise rushed through my veins like some delicious drug. “What happened?”

  “It was silly. We just had to stay in the waiting room longer than I thought and we were sitting for so long and it was hot in there. When the doctor called our name, I stood up too fast and blacked out. I came around on the floor with a nurse and the receptionist standing over me. They helped me up and made me drink some water.”

  “Did you even eat any breakfast this morning? You’re taking care of everything around here except yourself. That’s why you fainted.”

  “I know. That will have to change.”

  “Do you still feel dizzy?”

  “A little.” She nodded. “The doctor asked me some questions and then gave me a test.”

  The thought of Mary being sick seemed impossible. She’d become Elsa’s guardian and champion; she’d singlehandedly reinvented the farm; she paid the bills, cooked the meals, and cleaned the house, all with that Reever stoicism. She was the fucking bionic woman.

  “What test?”

  “It was positive.” Her voice was small. Suddenly I wanted her to look at me; I needed to see her eyes.

  “What test, Mary?” I got up and crossed the room, dropping in front of her to make her look at me. When she did, I saw confusion and hesitation. I could tell she was working up the nerve to tell me. Whatever it was—and it was something clearly unrelated to the fact that she had a cheating, lying husband—was tearing her up inside.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “What?” I shot up and stumbled back. “What?”

  My brain stopped working. The room went black at the edges, like I’d read in scenes with certain heroines and always dismissed as sentimental, hyperbolic writing. How could she be pregnant? Was it even mine? Mary wasn’t the cheating kind, but we hadn’t had sex in months, we hadn’t . . .

  Then the living room came back into focus.

  “The day the window guy was here?”

  “It must have been. They asked about my last period, said I was six weeks along. The dates match up.” Her fingers laced over her stomach, holding tight.

  I ran my hands through my hair, wiped my mouth, trying to come to terms with what was happening.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Start eating breakfast, I guess.” She released a quick, nervous laugh. When I didn’t say anything, she continued.

  “I picked up some prenatal vitamins and some saltines. Mom said I needed saltines.”

  I still couldn’t speak.

  “I know we haven’t been in the best of places lately.” My bark of laughter only gave her pause for a second; she was picking up steam. “But this is what we wanted.”

  “You’re going to keep the baby.”

  “Don’t you dare suggest what I think you’re going to suggest.” Her voice, still low, was like steel now.

  “What am I going to suggest? How do you know what I think, when I don’t even know what I think?”

  “I know you, and I know we haven’t been happy, but this is my baby.” Her hands broke apart, spread over the small, flat plane of her abdomen. “This is our baby, our family.”

  “You’re raising it here.” All I could do was state the obvious, mumble each bald fact as it punched me in the gut.

  “We’ve already talked about that. I’ll need some help with the chickens. I can’t lift all the feed bags on my own anymore. The wheelbarrow should still be fine. I’m not sure about the ammonia in the excrement, but at the most it would be an hour of your day. I made an appointment with an OB-GYN.”

  She sat there on the faded couch with her gaze falling somewhere between us, outlining details I could barely comprehend. It all felt horribly wrong: Mary’s tightly controlled pragmatism, my monumental panic. We were a parody of what this moment should have been, what it would have been if it had happened a year ago. Instead of a celebration she was giving me an ultimatum, the second I’d been handed in as many hours.

  “You don’t seem overjoyed by the news,” I managed.

  “I was surprised.”

  I made a half-strangled noise that suggested agreement.

  “It’s been better lately, though, hasn’t it?” she appealed. “You’ve been spending time with Mom. The principal says you’re doing a great job with the play, that you’re working with some talented students.”

  “Jesus.” I couldn’t take any more of this, not when Hattie’s presence hovered at the edge of the conversation, threatening to spill into this nightmare. “I have to think.”

  “Peter—”

  “I just need some time to think.” I grabbed my keys and left the house, gunning the car out of the driveway and flying over the gravel road. I hit sixty, then seventy, and the rocks that pummeled the underside of the car sounded like a stampede, a hundred desperate, hoofed creatures running for their lives.

  Thirty minutes ago I’d been fantasizing about—why whitewash it?—the sexual torture and abduction of Hattie, and the abandonment of Mary in the process. Why hadn’t I gone? Why hadn’t I scooped Hattie up the minute she’d uttered the words and forced her in a car before she could change her mind? We’d be in Wisconsin by now. I could’ve sent Mary an email from Madison, blissfully unaware of this child. I could’ve escaped.

  Now there was no escape. Was there? Jesus, could I leave Mary, pregnant and alone, branded forever as the woman whose husband left her for Hattie Hoffman, that girl who was in the plays and not even out of high school? He was her teacher, you know. I could hear their whispers, picture their sympathetic looks.

  I sped toward Rochester. The melting fields blurred into rolls of white and brown, and then subdivisions gave way to the car dealerships and big-box stores that lined the freeways on the outskirts of the city. I turned toward Mayo Clinic and downtown, slowing the car as people spilled into the sidewalks for lunch hour, their faces lifted, basking in the unseasonable warmth of the day.

  It was warm the day I’d proposed to Mary, too. God, it seemed like a lifetime ago now, but it was less than six years since that day after graduation.

  I zigzagged up and down the streets of the business district and finally parked next to a café and started walking, thinking about the girl I’d proposed to, everything I prized about her. I loved her sweet, dependable perso
nality. I loved how loyal she was to the American classics, to Steinbeck and Cather and Thoreau. I loved how she’d shop the thrift stores twice a year, always on the Daylight Saving Time days so she never forgot, and she’d take back grocery bags of her old clothes and sell them for half the money of her new finds. She was so responsible with her money, not like me. I could get by on ramen and tofu for a week, but then I’d go to the bar on Saturday and blow two hundred dollars on drinks and cabs. I knew I needed a wife like Mary. It made sense on so many levels that I never wondered—like a lot of my friends did about their own girlfriends—if I could find someone better. To think that one day I’d long to leave her for a deceptive, brilliant actress would have been laughable.

  I planned to propose at Solera, the same tapas restaurant that I’d taken Hattie to in Minneapolis, but when I told Mary about the reservation, she balked.

  “It’s too expensive,” she said. “Thirty dollars for a bottle of wine? That’s ridiculous.”

  She suggested a picnic instead, so on the Saturday after graduation we took the bus to the Stone Arch Bridge and walked to the park on the north side of the river. Mary had prepared a cold feast—a fruit-and-cheese plate, crunchy baguette, and wine poured into grape juice bottles so the park police wouldn’t bother us. We lay out in the sun and watched the bikers and rollerbladers zoom over the bridge from our vantage point up on the bluff, eating and throwing our crumbs to ducks that became progressively bolder as the afternoon passed. As settings for marriage proposals went, it was absolutely ideal.

  Dessert was my cue. I’d brought Mary’s favorite chocolate cake from the bakery, but when I brought it out—while the jeweler’s box bulged conspicuously in my pocket—I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself say the words. Mary noticed my sweaty anxiety after a few bites and asked whether I was feeling okay. I lied and said I’d probably had too much sun. We packed up the picnic while I kicked myself, trying to figure out a way to propose now that I’d missed my moment. It wasn’t until we were walking back over the bridge that Mary unknowingly handed me a second chance. She stopped, leaned against the railing, and smiled at the small rapids rushing in front of Nicollet Island.

  “Isn’t that just perfect?” she asked, and even though the question was obviously rhetorical, I seized upon it.

  “Not quite.” I dropped the picnic basket, pulled out the ring, and bent to one knee. “You can make it perfect, though.”

  “Oh, my.” She breathed it, I remembered. Her hands came up over her mouth just the way I’d imagined. A few rollerbladers cheered and whistled as they shot past us.

  She blushed, dropping her hands, but then abruptly sobered and looked intently into my eyes.

  “Are you asking me something?”

  “Yes,” I stammered, finally spitting it out. “Mary Beth Reever, will you marry me?”

  “That depends.”

  Her answer caught me so off guard, I actually swayed. I remember the ground rising toward me for a second, then my standing awkwardly again, still holding the ring between us.

  “Depends on what?”

  Every nuance of her answer was still etched in my mind: her solemn tone, the careful set of her features eclipsed by the painfully perfect blue of the sky, the dignity of downtown and the spires of the Hennepin Avenue Bridge on the horizon. Every part of the cityscape seemed to sanctify what came between us right then, more so than even the minister did later at the wedding. He gave us someone else’s words to say to each other; these were the vows we found for ourselves.

  She asked me, “Do you want to have children? I can’t marry a man who doesn’t want to start a family.”

  “Yes, I do,” I answered instantly. I did want a family with Mary. She would be an exceptional mother.

  A smile broke over her face and tears glistened on her smooth, apple cheeks. “Yes. Yes, Peter Martin Lund, I’ll marry you.”

  Six years later she was pregnant. This Mary, who harbored little more than an echo of that glowing girl I’d twirled around on the Stone Arch Bridge, had managed to conceive her child.

  I felt sick. The wine I’d drunk with Hattie turned into a pounding headache as I kept walking through downtown Rochester. The sidewalk crowds died down when lunch hour ended, exposing me as an aimless wanderer. I had no destination and was incapable of forcing pretend smiles when strangers extended their Minnesotan niceties at stoplights. After a while, my pace slowed. Then it seemed pointless to continue. I stopped in the middle of a sidewalk, staring at the dirt-smeared puddles eating at the concrete.

  I didn’t have any choice in the matter, did I? There was no escaping the responsibility of what I had promised.

  At the same time I came to that sinking realization—knowing I was stuck in Pine Valley for the rest of my life—a woman talking on her phone walked out of a store, bumped into me, and apologized. I glanced up at the clothes in the store’s window display and stopped breathing. The ache in my head swelled to beat the very air around my body. Without the capacity to think beyond it, I went inside and bought the outfit in the window.

  I drove to the bank, withdrew the last thousand dollars from my savings account, and took it straight to the Hoffman farm, a place I’d only seen on Google maps before today. The house was sheltered by spruce trees and surrounded by wind turbines dotting the horizon. I couldn’t see any of the home’s windows and hoped no one was watching me as I placed a plain white envelope addressed to Hattie in the mailbox. Inside, I’d wrapped ten hundred-dollar bills in a note that read: “Mary’s pregnant. Go to New York. Know that I loved you.”

  Then I went home to Mary with the outfit from the store—a tiny shirt and pants covered in fuzzy farm animals—lying on the seat next to me.

  DEL / Thursday, April 17, 2008

  TWO HOURS before Hattie’s funeral, I walked along the perimeter of the high school checking security at the entrances in my best Sunday suit and a mud-splattered pair of galoshes.

  The high school’d canceled classes today, which they probably would have done anyway, but since the Methodist church couldn’t fit more than three hundred people, the funeral was set for 11:00 a.m. in the school gymnasium. We were counting on most of the kids, parents, and teachers showing up, the whole church congregation, not to mention Hattie’s theater friends from Rochester, both of Mona’s and Bud’s extended families, and the rest of the town, too. All told, at least a thousand people.

  A thick roll of clouds cast the town into a restless gray, but the forecast said no rain, so we likely wouldn’t have to deal with road conditions. The boys were well into their assignments. Shel had taken up station at the parking lot entrance to direct traffic and keep things orderly. Jake was on media duty and reported there were already two news vans sniffing up and down Main Street. The rest of the crew was checking out the other locations and keeping an eye on the closed businesses. After the service was over, we had to lead the procession to the cemetery and block off the cross-traffic, escort the family cars back to the fire station hall, where the church ladies would serve lunch, and then direct traffic and keep an eye on things there for the rest of the afternoon. If either of my suspects didn’t show up, I’d have to send a man out to locate them. I wasn’t letting anybody drop off the radar today. I just hoped to God there wouldn’t be any accidents on the highway, because there was no one to spare. Nancy would have to call in the state troopers.

  I’d been up since four and spent a good long while deciding whether to wear the uniform or civilian clothes, while the Nguyens’ cat looked bored in the living room doorway. I went with the suit and wore my gun and badge underneath the jacket. Jake had enough respect not to say anything about it when we made the call this morning to Dr. Terrance B. Standler, the forensic psychologist Fran had recommended. He answered right away and seemed polite enough, but tried to worm his way out of being helpful.

  “Dr. Okada said you have an excellent DNA sample for the perpetrator and two strong candidates.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I
usually reserve my time for cases that are more challenging for local law enforcement.”

  Jake had given me a look and mimed a gun at the speaker phone.

  “Did you look at the case file or not?” I asked.

  “Yes, I have it in front of me.”

  “Okay, then tell me if you have any useful information and save the snarky comments for later.”

  He sighed.

  “As you know, anger and power are the two primary drivers in most run-of-the-mill homicides, and there is evidence of both here. The abrasions of the sexual encounter are certainly power-based, but this is clearly not a case of erotophonophilia.”

  “Come again?”

  “Lust murder, homicides in which the killing itself is a sexual act. Here we have two separate acts. The sexual encounter, while aggressive, was clearly mutual although somewhat complicated by the presence of the condom. If it was used in this particular sexual encounter, the condom could be either a mark of respect toward the victim or an attempt by the male to keep his DNA off the victim. In any case, after the sex act, the victim got dressed again. There was a clear interlude.”

  “Intermission.” Jake muttered.

  “Excuse me?” Standler asked.

  “Nothing.” I shot Jake a warning look and decided he could use a few extra shifts babysitting the DWI drunks after this case was closed. “So it’s likely they had an argument between the sex and the murder?”

  “Yes, there was a decided turning point. The attack itself has a lot of hallmarks of a first-time killer, and first homicides are less likely to be planned. Statistically, we see a significantly greater amount of escalated arguments. Now, the wounds. The initial, fatal stab to the heart indicates strong momentum and precision. Although the attack was probably not premeditated, there is a clear presence of will. The postmortem cuts to the face can be indicative of one or two things. First, there is the spite motive.”

  “Spite?” Jake interrupted. “He’d already killed her. What more could he do to spite her?”