Wish I May, Wish I Might

Chapter 8

The call came at 11:43 that afternoon. I was sitting at the kitchen table, unsuccessfully studying for the AP Psychology exam. Across the kitchen, my dad was cooking some of his "famous" macaroni and cheese to try to cheer me up. Normally, I would spend my Sunday afternoons volunteering (or as my parents and Cash thought, working) at the local homeless shelter. I pictured myself sewing new quilts and blankets and clothes and just giving the people company and someone to talk to. Sadly, my supervisors and I had agreed that I should maybe spend some time away from the shelter, given my Weekend From Hell. I was a little sad about it, but I could also understand where they were coming from. Many of the visitors in the shelter were unstable and a few seconds away from a breakdown. They needed calm and guiding presence to talk to, not someone who had been brought to a police station two days in a row, with one of those times being an arrest.

My phone buzzed on the charger. That wasn't anything unusual these days, so I didn't bother looking at it. Then my dad's phone rang, and he answered to the voice of the female detective.

"Hello, Mr. Moore," she greeted respectfully over the speakerphone. I stopped chewing on my pencil eraser and looked at the phone like the cop would suddenly be standing there.

"Hello, detective," my dad grumbled, stirring the pasta in the pot.

"We tried to call Carter, but she didn't answer. More evidence has come in regarding the Lewis case, and we'd like her to come in for a few more questions."

My dad looked at me, and we shared a silent conversation. He knew that I really didn't want to go.

When I was really little, I had a breathing problem. I don't know what it was or why I had the problem, but I meant that I was born prematurely and had to have a tube down my throat to help me breathe. I don't remember any of it, I was too young, but sometimes my parents will tell me about it. They'll sometimes put a funny spin on it - "you were so blue, you looked like a blueberry!"

But most of the time, whenever I mention it, their eyes become dark and sad.

"We thought you were going to die," my dad had said once, late one night when we were binging Star Trek together and drinking hot chocolate. There had been a lull in the episodes, and my dad started talking about it, unprompted. "You were so little, and we could tell that you were in such pain. But the worst part of it all was that there wasn't anything we could do to help you. We just had to sit there and understand that maybe you would die or maybe you wouldn't." He put down his mug of cocoa. "Every night I laid awake in bed, sure that we were going to get a call from the hospital saying that you didn't make it. And I always wished that I could do more."

He then told me that when I finally got the tube out of my throat and went home like a normal baby, he would sometimes walk into the nursery and just watch me breathe, as if at any second I was going to stop being able to take in oxygen.

It was strange how eighteen years later, that same man was trying to protect me from something else. We hadn't talked about the murder, really. We only talked enough to access that the killer wouldn't get me. But I wasn't an idiot. I knew that the evidence didn't look good in my favor. But I wasn't going to get out of anything by putting off answering questions.

So my dad ended up putting the macaroni in the fridge and my parents and I went to the police station. For now the third day in the row. This was a habit of I was getting sick of by this point.

You may have noticed by now that I had spent a lot of time with the police by now. But even still, I hadn't said anything to the police. I didn't admit that I had committed a murder. I also didn't admit to having not done the murder, the murder some people were trying to blame me for and some were trying to make me collateral damage for. And no, I had no intention of admitting to the murder.