Lies She Told(84)

The apology is a sign-off. I stiffen, expecting men to haul me to my feet momentarily. This is the end. I’m almost relieved. “They must be coming for me now, then.”

“They?”

I kiss Victoria’s head and pass her to her father. “I need you to be better, Jake. For Vicky’s sake.”

He holds her between his thick hands and brings his nose near her face. “I will. I promise. You’ll see. I’ll—”

I look at the cop pacing nearby. He seems to be watching us for a signal. “Is it that one?”

“What?”

“Is that the cop coming to arrest me?”

Jake takes a choppy breath. “No one is coming to arrest you. But they will one day soon. This is a cop murder, honey. The NYPD won’t let this lie. The best thing for us to do is to talk to a lawyer and prepare an insanity defense. If you turn yourself in, that will count for something. I think I can pull some strings to get the DA’s office to accept a plea of not guilty by reason of mental defect.”

For a moment, I think I’m filling in Jake’s open mouth with words that I want to hear. He can’t really be letting me off for murdering his girlfriend. “You didn’t call the police?”

He places Victoria in the crook of his elbow and grabs my hand with his free one. His blue eyes remind me of the sky today, clear and bright. I think back to the first time I saw those eyes in the courtroom, the way they lit up when he saw me. “I want us to be a family, baby. You were seeing a shrink for postpartum depression, so we have the record. I think we can win on mental grounds. You’ll have to do some time in a hospital, but you’ll get out.” He smiles weakly. “We can put this whole thing behind us.”

Jake and me and baby makes three. Is that really what he wants now? Can I want that again? “I don’t know.” I’m overwhelmed with emotion, crying so hard that I can barely breathe. “You don’t really want me anymore. This is to get me to turn myself in.”

“They’re going to find evidence. You know it. This is the best way for us to be a family again.”

A moan gurgles from my throat. I cover my face with my hands, trying to control myself. In the darkness, I see what I did to Colleen. The picture will always be with me. “I can’t forgive myself.”

Jake hugs me to his side, still holding Vicky. “I forgive you.” Victoria yawns as she rests in her daddy’s arm. Jake smiles at her and sniffs. “We made a beautiful baby, didn’t we?”

I have no idea what she will look like grown up. Her blue eyes may not stay that way. Her round face will become more angular, square like Jake’s or maybe oval like mine. But she is beautiful. She is ours.

My husband stares at me. Tears stream from his big blue eyes, water slipping over the edge of a sparkling dam. “Come on, honey. Let’s go to talk to that lawyer.”




*


Jake hires Lauren Dayton, one of New York’s big-name criminal defense attorneys, to represent me. He’s faced her in court and swears that she’s the best. Within an hour she’s in our living room, arranging with the district attorney’s office for me to turn myself in.

Both Lauren and Jake escort me to the precinct while my mom stays with Victoria. Jake’s position secures my humane treatment. The police pretend that I’m a run-of-the-mill crazy murderer and not a cop killer. Though I am fingerprinted, made to change clothes, and checked, naked, for contraband, I am not roughed up or left to rot in a holding cell for hours with other criminally insane people.

When I am done being “processed,” I enter a musty-smelling room with gray carpet running up the sides and a table in the center. It’s cold in my thin orange jumpsuit. Lauren sits on one of two chairs beside a metal table. She smiles at me in an encouraging way, as though I’ve been through the worst of it.

I slump on the metal stool, feeling as though my life force oozed out of my body at some point during my transformation from wife to inmate. “Where’s Jake?” I sound desperate. I’ve never wanted to see my husband so badly. His determination to stand by me has reignited all the loving feelings that I ever had for him, burning through my apathy and hate. I love him. I need him. He and Victoria are my everything.

Lauren tilts her head and grins. “Jake is outside. I want to talk through my strategy with you first. You’re my client. Jake doesn’t need to hear everything we discuss.”

I straighten up on the stool. She knows something that she believes Jake shouldn’t. Has she spoken to Tyler?

“I’ve interviewed some fertility experts,” she says. “They will swear that the hormone withdrawals that you experienced after giving birth likely played a role in destabilizing your brain and made you unable to control your actions.”

I breathe. “That’s good, I guess.”

“We also have an expert on circadian rhythms who will testify that the sleep deprivation you were experiencing from nursing an infant all night might have also contributed to you becoming divorced from reality, kind of putting you in a dream state while you were talking to the deceased.”

I think back to Colleen’s hand, how it had resembled a spider crawling toward the gun. Was I half asleep when I murdered her? Was I incapable of stopping myself?

“The pipe makes what you did look premeditated, but I think the sleep expert will go a long way toward convincing a jury or judge that you picked it up without being fully aware of your intentions.”