Melissa
“You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer?” Detective Marshall asked.
“I’m positive,” Melissa Garfield said. “I’m going to plead guilty to everything.”
“Then you have to sign here. And here.”
Melissa scribbled her signature.
“Okay. Now, why don’t you start from the beginning.”
“You see,” Melissa said, “instead of going shopping first, Mom decided to visit me. She’d do that once in a while, just drop by without calling or anything first. She’d say, ‘What, a mother can’t pop in and visit her daughter?’ She comes in and I’m in the kitchen, cutting up some celery and carrot sticks to put in a salad because I’m actually trying to eat the right things so the baby will be healthy, you know, even though I’d rather just be eating pizza and burgers, but I’m trying, okay? I’m really trying.”
“Sure,” the detective said.
“It’s like she was checking up on me all the time. She was always asking me these questions, like what’s happening with Lester and was he going to marry me and was he going to help take care of the baby and maybe I could move in with him and his mom and dad and she’d be able to help me look after the baby, like I was really going to do that, right? And then she wanted to know if I’d applied to the veterinarian school I was talking about because I happened to mention it, you know, and I said not yet, but I was thinking about it and she said what’s the holdup? Couldn’t I just go on the computer and press a couple of buttons and I’d be registered and if it was that easy I should just go and do it now and I said, Jesus, will be you just give me some room to breathe, you know? I got a baby coming in a few weeks and I got a lot on my mind and, okay, maybe I’m thinking about it, but do I have to do something about it right this very fucking second? And she said, it’ll take you like two minutes so why don’t you do it and I’ll cut up your celery and your carrots for you and she tries to take the knife from me and I don’t know what happened but I kind of snapped or something, you know?”
“I hear ya,” the detective said.
“So, like, I don’t know how exactly it happened, but the knife sort of went into her, and then I guess I must have put it into her a second time, and then she looks at me and she’s all like, what have you done, and then she falls down and she doesn’t move or anything.”
“So what did you do then? Did you think about calling for an ambulance?”
“I guess I went all crazy for a while, you know? But I managed to call my dad.”
“Okay.”
“I said, something’s happened to Mom, you have to get over here, and he said, is it a heart attack or something, and I said no, and he said I should call 911, and then I said that I’d kind of stabbed her, and then he was all ‘What?’ And he said I shouldn’t do anything and he’d be right over.”
“To help you out.”
Melissa nodded. “So he got over real soon, and he was kind of all freaked out, and he took one look at Mom and could see that she was dead, and he said he had to think. I asked him, was I going to go to jail, was I going to have my baby in jail? And he kept telling me to shut up, that he was thinking, and then he got this idea. He carried Mom out of the apartment the back way and got her into her car, and then he told me I was going to have to follow in his car, drive along after him. And I followed him up to this lake, and he put the car on the ice and it went through and I guess I already told you about that part.”
“And then what happened?”
“Dad came back to my place and cleaned up. There was blood everywhere. It was horrible. It took hours to clean up the blood. I couldn’t do it. I stayed in my bed, under the covers. I couldn’t stop shivering. When he was finished, he told me everything was going to be okay. He said I wasn’t going to have to go to jail.” She smiled sadly. “He said he loved me very much and he wanted everything to be okay for me. He said I’d done a bad thing but sometimes people make mistakes and he didn’t want my whole life to be ruined, you know? He’s a really good dad. He said the police would just think Mom ran away, or maybe she got killed by that carjacker guy, but they’d never really know what happened because they’d never be able to find Mom’s car. And if the police didn’t know what happened, they couldn’t really charge anyone.”
She shook her head. “He’s going to be so mad at me. Because he did all this to protect me, and now… well, here I am. But I just… I can’t do it. I feel bad about what I did. I really loved my mom.”
Detective Marshall reached out and touched her hand. “I know.”
“Is my dad going to be in a lot of trouble?”
“Well, I’d have to say yes. But with the right lawyer, and a sympathetic jury… A lot of them will understand the lengths a father might go to, to help his daughter. He might have to go to jail, but maybe not for a long time.”
“Not as long as me.”
Detective Marshall nodded. “You might be right about that.”
For the first time since she’d been in this room, a shadow of a smile crossed Melissa’s lips. “That’d be okay. Just so he doesn’t have to spend the rest of his life in jail. That wouldn’t be fair. He’s not that old a guy. He’s got a lot of time left.”