Everything You Want Me to Be(95)

“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 My teaching license had been revoked while I was still at the Pine Valley jail and even if it hadn’t been, I couldn’t pass a background check at any school in the country.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 curve 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.”