What Happened That Night

6 ~ p l e a s e

After my father came into the house, tossed his jacket on the back of a recliner even though there was a coat rack just a few feet to his left, and slipped off his black shoes, and dropped his briefcase on the stairs where it slid, slowly, down a step before stopping and leaning against one of the wooden rails of the railing, my father gave my mother a lukewarm kiss on the cheek, mumbled a remark about how the food smelled good, and then noted that my sister changed her hair. He didn’t compliment or insult it, just simply looked at her now bleached hair, which was almost shaved completely on most of her ahead aside from her bangs that flopped over side of her forehead, concealing her one of still brunette eyebrows, and said, almost flatly, “You changed your hair.” When she replied that she had, he merely nodded, glanced down at the floor, and said that he was going to his office until dinner, and then walked up the stairs, his black-socked feet leaving faint impressions on the carpeted stairs as he left.

Before Emily was arrested, my father was different. He had an obsession with ties—he had a device to connect to the inside of his closet so he could rotate his ties in the morning and decided between the red, white, and blue tie that Nora had given him for his birthday, which was on the Fourth of July, or the Scooby Doo tie that he bought from eBay with his Christmas bonus—and washed his car on Saturday evenings and grew vegetables in the summer and barbequed in the winter, as if to antagonize our New York winter weather, and shaved every morning. But after Emily was arrested, all of those things seemed to slowly grind to a halt. He stopped wearing outrageous and embarrassing cartoon ties to work—only solid dark colors, like maroon or black—and he stopped washing his car on the weekends—and altogether, basically—and the vegetables he planted earlier in the year rotted in his garden as he tried to find a way to bring Emily back home. He called his lawyer friends, pulled strings, and researched the internet about the law system. He met with attorneys, visited Emily almost daily, and decided to push everything else aside until she was home.

Sometimes, I wondered if he thought that maybe she was innocent. That Griffin’s death was somehow an accident or that someone was making Emily cover for them. I knew that Dad had been Wilson Westbrooke and emailing him. I think that in Dad’s mind, Wilson Westbrooke was the one truly responsible for Griffin’s death, not Emily.

I don’t think he would’ve believed me if I told him that Wilson Westbrooke had nothing to do Griffin Tomlin’s death.

That it was me who pushed Emily to murder Griffin.

.

The dining room was quiet and tense after the pasta had been boiled and Mom opened a package of bagged salad and dumped it into a wooden bowl, adding in a diced green apple because that was how my sister, Nora, liked her salad. I also noticed that she added Italian dressing to the center of the salad, beside my father’s half-finished bottle of Thousand Island dressing and a nearly empty bottle of ranch that my sister had been shaking for almost a minute, and I wondered if it was out of habit. Emily was the only one who liked Italian dressing. But her chair was empty and beside Nora, a faded baby blue cushion tied to the seat of the chair. I wondered if she might have been eating pasta too that night, whenever she was, or if they just gave her plastic wrapped sandwiches with soggy whole wheat bread and a bottle of water. My dad was the only one to ever visit her, and every time he came back from the prison, I never thought to ask him what she was eating or if she thought the food was so gross that she had started losing weight or if she ever mentioned the jumpsuits looking hideous on her.

She hated the color orange.

But then again, I didn’t even know if her uniform was orange.

“Bill called today,” my mother blurted out brightly and abruptly, disrupting the dainty chorus of forks touching and scraping against the surface of the glass plates or the occasional vibrating of my father’s phone within his pocket. Every time I heard it, I thought I noticed how he would pause for just barely a second as he stabbed his fork into one of the tricolored rotini or chewed his salad, but he ignored it. But I knew that once dinner was over, he’d excuse himself back up the stairs and into his office so he could recall whoever it was. I think he always hoped that it was the lawyer, who had suddenly found a way to bring Emily home in the middle of his supper or something. But now, as my mother grinned at him, her lips not quite reaching her eyes, my father seemed almost apathetic, as if nothing else concerned him anymore, maybe not even her. “He wanted to know if you wanted to go golfing this weekend. I told him that that was a great idea.”