Everything You Want Me to Be(96)
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.