by Mindy Mejia
“January? You’ve been sleeping with him almost since we started dating?”
“Tommy, I started dating you so I could sleep with him.” That backed him up another step and her voice picked up volume and confidence. “He didn’t want anyone to find out about us, so I got a boyfriend. An all-American, football-hero boyfriend. It was the perfect cover.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” Tommy’s hands went to his head and he started rocking back and forth.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you, but I wasn’t trying not to, either. I really didn’t give a shit about you, Tommy. It was never about you.”
Next to me, Jake shifted in his chair and whispered, “What is she doing?”
Understanding came swiftly. “She’s trying to back him up. Every time she says something terrible, he retreats. See?”
I gestured to the space between them on the screen, the escape route she was clawing at the only way she knew how.
“You.” Tommy had gotten a hold of himself and pointed the knife at her again. “I thought you were good, that you liked me. I spent so many nights thinking that I was the bad one, because I wanted . . . but you’re just like tonight. Aren’t you? You’re just like onstage.”
“What?” All concentration fell off Hattie’s face, replaced by shock. Her eyes were white circles on the screen.
“You’re that queen. That evil bitch who makes men do terrible things. It’s you, isn’t it? You . . . manipulate people.” He fumbled for the word, but then spat it out like bile. “You use them to get what you want.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jake’s hand go to his face, and then everything happened quick.
Tommy took a step forward and Hattie tried to run past him in the space she’d been working to open. As she disappeared from view, Tommy lunged after her and his arm swung around in a vicious side hook. It was a crushing, instantaneous blow. A flash of movement, a yell, a cry, and it was all over. Hattie fell backward, and for the briefest second she was visible again, mouth open, eyes wide, before hitting the floor with a muted thud.
Tommy looked paralyzed for a moment, still half crouched, and then he dropped out of view.
“Hattie? Hattie? Hattie!” He pleaded and then stood again, rocking violently.
“No, no, no, no, no, no.” The rocking got bigger and bigger. His head started shaking in time to the words. “Not Hattie. It’s not Hattie.”
He chanted the same refrain for an age, swaying in that childish, dazed way and covering his face. Then he knelt on the floor, still denying what had just happened in a voice that became strangled and oddly punctuated.
He was making her face disappear.
When he appeared again, he had her purse and the knife was gone.
“Prom. The cabin. She wants to go. Everyone’s going,” he said as he passed the camera. His face was flushed, eyes glazed and seeing nothing. A full minute went by before he came back, muttering and crying, his words unintelligible now.
Leaning down, he grabbed the knife and backed into the center of the frame. He stood still for a moment, sobbing openly by this point, then spun around as if to flee. That’s when he spotted the camera.
His crying stopped and he stared into the screen like he could see us sitting here watching him, the living transfixed by the dead. He looked down at the knife in his hand and then walked forward with a sudden purpose. The view and noises turned to a jumbled mess before everything went black.
It was a long while before either of us moved. The room blurred out of focus and I didn’t stop it, letting the grief I’d held down for the last month finally rise up and grip me. When Jake eventually got up to turn off the TV, he was good enough to look the other way.
PETER / Monday, June 9, 2008
THE SHERIFF’S cruiser idled in front of the prison’s front gate, waiting for me. No one told me he’d be here, just like no one mentioned they were going to release me in the middle of the night, waking me from a sound sleep as my cellmate blinked dumbly into the guard’s flashlight.
Somehow I wasn’t surprised. After the DA had called with the news, I doubted anything could surprise me again.
They’d found a tape, a video recording of the murder from Hattie herself. Tommy Kinakis had killed her. And Tommy was dead, too. After a few weeks of paperwork, my conviction had been overturned.
I walked under the security lights of the entrance and passed the window at the gate, where an armed guard’s stare contemptuously summed me up. The suit I’d worn from the courthouse to the prison hung limply on my frame. Other than the wallet in my back pocket, I had nothing.
Quietly, I got into the back of the cruiser. The sheriff didn’t turn around or give any sign that acknowledged my presence other than to put the car in gear and pull out of the parking lot. The surrounding hills were black and only a few other headlights lit the freeway as we headed south toward Minneapolis. The time on the dash read 1:07 a.m.
“Where are we going?” I asked after ten miles or so.
It felt like he took another ten before replying.
“You’ll see.”
He was probably dropping me off on some shitty street corner on the north side, maybe in gang territory. It didn’t matter.
I had no idea what I was going to do now. For the last few weeks, the question had buzzed around my head like some inconsequential fly. I ignored it and ate my plastic-smelling lunch, or ran around the track, or fell asleep to the sounds of metal crashes and laughter echoing down the block. It was easier to exist that way, in the future of oblivion I’d planned for myself. But suddenly another future was here, an alternate reality for which I was completely unprepared.
I didn’t have a profession anymore. My teaching license had been revoked while I was still at the Pine Valley jail and even if it hadn’t been, I couldn’t pass a background check at any school in the country.
I didn’t have a wife anymore either. The divorce papers were my first piece of mail after I was transferred up to St. Cloud. I added my signature next to Mary’s, sent the forms back in the pre-stamped envelope, and assumed that was the last contact we’d ever have. Then I got the call from the DA, changing everything, and Mary showed up out of the blue during the next Sunday’s visiting hours.
She looked good—fuller in the cheeks again and a little more color in her lips. She wore a dress I didn’t recognize. It billowed softly in a pattern of delicate green leaves as she walked into the visiting room, not exactly a maternity dress but nothing like the tight-waisted vintage pieces she used to wear. The fabric settled on a slightly more rounded stomach when she sat down. I didn’t let my gaze linger.
Neither of us wanted to speak first. We stared at the empty table between our hands and it was a full minute before Mary broke the silence.
“You’ve heard?”
“Yes.”
Another lull, and then she cut to the heart of the matter.
“I thought it was you. I thought you were going to lie about it like you’d lied about everything else. That’s why I went to see you at the jail—to make sure you were going to confess.”
She spoke to her clasped hands and I noticed her wedding ring was already gone. There was no tan line on her finger.
“But you thought it was me, didn’t you?” she continued. “After we heard about Tommy, I went over our conversation again and realized how I must have sounded. You confessed because you thought it was me.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
She nodded and breathed deeply, as if letting go of something she’d been holding too tightly. I changed the topic, asking about Elsa and the farm, and we exchanged some stilted small talk before she stood up to leave.
“When will you be out?” Her glance flickered up and then around the room.
“I don’t know. Soon, I guess.”
“What are you going to do?”
The million-dollar question. I stared at the cracked and potholed pavement racing through the headlights of the sheriff’s car and remembered the cu
rve of Mary’s jaw as she refused to look at me. She’d smelled like wind and sun.
I’d told her I’d figure out a way to pay child support.
She’d looked embarrassed, nodded, and walked away.
I still had a few friends in the city who might let me stay with them while I found a job. As I started thinking about places to work, we drove through the suburbs and into downtown. The skyline, with its golden glow punctuated by Foshay Tower’s delicate spire, was an old friend after a long absence, familiar and yet awkward in its familiarity. The streetlights made my eyes water after so much darkness. It wasn’t until we crossed the Mississippi into St. Paul that I realized most of the bad neighborhoods were behind us and he still hadn’t kicked me to the curb. A few miles farther, when the cruiser turned south on a freeway that led all the way down to Rochester, another possible future presented itself.
Maybe he was taking me back to Pine Valley. In the middle of the night. With no witnesses.
My pulse leapt, creeping up the back of my throat as the situation became obvious. The sheriff was friends with the Hoffman family. Good friends.
“Can you please tell me where we’re going?” I asked again, leaning forward toward the partition this time.
The sheriff laughed, but it was a humorless sound.
“Seem a little nervous back there. Worried about your homecoming?”
“Mary and I aren’t married anymore. She doesn’t want me there.” I tried to keep my voice calm.
“Imagine that.”
His glance flickered toward me in the rearview mirror, then back to the road. The cities disappeared behind us like a mirage in the night. Was he taunting me with them? It struck me that this man had learned the most intimate details of my life and I didn’t know a single thing about him. He could be married, gay, Jewish, atheist, or all of the above, but none of that really mattered. It didn’t tell me what kind of person he was.
He wasn’t wearing his hat and I noticed his age for the first time. His gray hair was meticulously trimmed above his collar where sunburnt lines creased his neck. Even though his hands held the wheel in the proper ten-two position and he sat straight in his seat, there was no undue formality in him. He looked like someone set on a course of action, with decades of right on his side.
“Would it make any difference if I told you how sorry I was?”
The reflection of his eyes in the mirror turned dark. “I don’t see how.”
I shook my head, unable to disagree. Regret didn’t change a thing.
With every passing mile my resignation increased. It didn’t replace the panic and I couldn’t help that. My body didn’t want to die. My heart thudded painfully and it was hard to get enough air in, but I made myself lean back and pressed my palms steadily into the seat on either side of me. If this was my last car ride, I wasn’t going to spend it wallowing in fear. We climbed another hill, passed through a dark thicket of trees, and descended into a valley of fields where crops reflected pale lines of moonlight, zigzagging their way back to the sky. Even in the darkness I could identify the soybeans from the corn, and a little ways farther a field was dotted with what I recognized as dairy cattle. Strange, how the knowledge was there, unattached to any memory of receiving it. Then something occurred to me.
“Was Hattie scared?”
The sheriff must have seen the tape. He had witnessed Hattie’s last moments, which I had imagined a thousand times, my horror uncontainable for not knowing the extent of hers.
He sighed, and the heavy sound of it made my muscles tense, waiting for the blow. I held my breath.
“She was,” he finally said.
“What happened?” I managed to get out.
An eternity passed before he answered and suddenly I wanted to lunge through the partition and wring the information out of him. My hands had turned to fists. I was shaking.
“Please,” I added, squeezing my eyes shut. “Please tell me.”
When he spoke, his voice was quiet.
“He surprised her with the knife. Cornered her. She was scared, but she told him everything he asked. She told him the truth. Then she tried to run and was dead before she hit the floor.”
He sighed and I didn’t trust myself to speak. I leaned into the window, out of his view, and wiped my eyes as the murder scene unfolded in my head. I watched Hattie fall. She fell over and over, never reaching the ground, caught in that last moment for infinity. My mind couldn’t make her live and wouldn’t let her die.
“It didn’t sit right.” The sheriff spoke after a few more miles, breaking the silence so abruptly I almost missed it. “Most of the pieces were there. DNA. Confession. Everything in that locker.”
His tone had changed. It didn’t sound like he was talking to me anymore, but I answered anyway.
“I thought I was doing the right thing. For once.”
He nodded slowly, eyes never leaving the road. “I suppose you did. Damn near cost us the truth.”
“So it’s my fault Tommy killed her?”
“Tommy Kinakis was no murderer. The two of you tore that boy apart. Point two-five alcohol in his blood when he hit that semi. Now his folks put their home on the market and won’t even show their faces in town. And I think . . .”
The pitch of his voice rose suddenly before cutting off. Though I could only see fractions of his face, he seemed to be reining in a flare of emotion, and when he spoke again his voice was strangled.
“. . . I think Hattie’s to blame.”
He breathed deeply, steadying himself.
“I loved that girl—I loved every cheeky, smart-ass hair on her head—but the truth is she killed him as much as he killed her. And neither of them meant to. Just stupid kids.”
A flash of oncoming headlights eclipsed his profile as he shook his head. “Stupid kids who’ll never grow up and figure out they’re better than that. Never go see the world and realize what it means to come home. That their life’s only worth the friends they find in it.”
Long miles passed with only the sound of the rhythm of the wheels over the asphalt. There was nothing to look at except the dark, burgeoning fields, no distraction from the choices Hattie, Mary, Tommy, and I all made that had brought us to this place and time. I’d confessed to something I didn’t do, thinking I could trade it off for the wrongs I had committed. Now there was no avoiding the past. I rode toward it, heart thumping in sick anticipation of the reckoning I knew I deserved.
It was after three in the morning when the lights of Rochester began glowing on the horizon. The roads remained empty as we came into the commercial district.
When we passed the turnoff to Pine Valley without exiting, I sat up straight. Confused, I swiveled around to make sure I hadn’t misread the sign and then looked back at the sheriff, who was still calmly driving the speed limit. It wasn’t until the Mayo Clinic became visible on the horizon that he exited, working his way through the residential streets, and pulled into a nondescript gas station. He parked away from the pumps, letting the engine idle.
I waited and after a minute he slid open the partition between the seats.
“Don’t suppose you remember what day it is.”
I didn’t. I hadn’t thought days would mean much anymore.
He reached into his glove box and pulled out some pieces of paper, pushing them through the window. I unfolded them toward the gas station lights, reading, and my mouth fell open.
They were the bus tickets Hattie bought for us. A one-way trip to New York, leaving at 3:38 a.m. on June 9, 2008. I hadn’t thought about these tickets since I’d confessed to murder. The brief stolen giddiness Hattie and I had shared in that barn seemed like a dream now, a hallucination that couldn’t have been real. Yet here were the tickets in my hand, the paper creased and crisp, with both our names typed in neat black letters. Before I could even process what was happening he passed an envelope back, too. It had Hattie’s name on the outside, in my handwriting, and held a note and three hundred dollars.
&nb
sp; “That’s not evidence anymore,” he said, facing away from me.
“I don’t understand. I thought . . .” As I stumbled over what I had thought, a Greyhound bus lumbered into the gas station lot and parked with a grumbling whoosh of its engine. A few blinking, rumpled people climbed out and wandered into the building.
“Better get going.”
I looked at the tickets and money again and then the back of the sheriff’s head.
“Why are you doing this?”
He sighed and I didn’t think he was going to answer. Then he shut the glove box and cleared his throat.
“Bud Hoffman’s been my friend almost as long as you’ve been alive. I’m not going to let him do anything he might regret later. Better that you get gone.”
He turned around then and looked at me for the first time that night, not like a police officer looking at a criminal or a righteous man looking at a sinner, but with a strange kinship born of loss, like two men passing in a graveyard. There was something quiet and consuming about the sheriff’s look and several moments elapsed before I swallowed and nodded, folding the tickets in my palm.
As I climbed out of the car, I realized I’d just learned everything I needed to know about the sheriff of Wabash County.
Crossing the parking lot, I breathed deep, tasting the Minnesota air for the last time. I handed my ticket to the driver and boarded, then stared at the car across the lot until the bus revved into gear. Without any visible emotion, the sheriff picked up his hat and put it on, straightened the brim over his brow, and eased his cruiser out on to the road. As he passed my window, his fingers lifted an inch off the steering wheel. By the time I raised my hand in return, he was already gone.
The bus rumbled out of the city. The musty upholstery and hint of sweat from sleeping travelers confirmed that I was actually here—this was really happening. I leaned into the cool pane of the window and stared at the country. Hours passed and the sky lightened. The hills rose and fell like a silent soundtrack and it was only now that I’d been exiled from them that I fully appreciated their beauty. An ocean of plants flourished here, roots secure and leaves bathing in the dawn of a new day. I saw Mary in this land and Hattie, too, despite everything she had claimed; I saw her spirit and determination.