Page 84 of Everything You Want Me to Be
“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.
