I Thought Wrong

The lights are on and there’s a cup of coffee on the cold, table. This is a nice interrogation room. Why am I in an interrogation room? Am I the criminal? I see the shadows of policemen and women passing the door to this room but I can’t hear them. Sound proof? I haven’t really heard much of anything since they drove me here. The police. They rushed me here and not to the hospital.

William. He almost killed…

“Where is she?!” I scream at the woman sitting on the other side of the table, looking at me sympathetically.

She’s startled but maintains a calmness that both comforts and angers me. Suddenly, I can't see her clearly anymore as tears well up in my eyes. One tear hits my wrist and I stretch out my hand to find my baby’s sock. A blush pink sock about as wide as my four fingers put together. My shoulders drop involuntarily and I look up slowly at the woman. She hasn’t moved nor broken her gaze since I arrived.

“Is she okay? Please tell me she’s okay”, I whisper the plea.

I haven’t thought about anything else since it all happened. If these cops want to ask me questions they might end up thinking I’m guilty. All I see is her blanket and the trees outside the car. That’s it. I can’t recall anything else. I’m fighting to gather my thoughts when a man in a tight police uniform walks in. He’s tall and carrying a booklet or something, I can’t make out what it is. He nods at the woman who smiles at me lightly and stands to leave.

“Miss Waters.”

My wrists start burning up and…now I’m remembering things.

“Miss Waters?” he appears and sounds concerned.

I smile at him and tilt my head to the left. The tears haven’t stopped falling and I’m not sure if I’ve moved my legs since I sat in the plastic chair they led me to when I stepped in this room. There’s one extremely bright garage light in the corner of the room and it flickers every two minutes. I turn to look at it and the sound of the policeman’s voice grows feint, like he’s moving farther away from me as he speaks.

“I was tied up”, I move my head slowly to look back at him.

“He was angry about a bartender who looked my way and smiled while we were out. We argued, or he screamed about it all the way back to our house. My house. Apparently, a man can’t look at me and like what he sees unless I’m flirting with him in some way or the other”, my tongue starts feeling heavy but I force myself to speak on because if I don’t I’ll stay silent for the rest of the evening. I want to see my child.

“We’d had a lot to drink and the babysitter was frustrated because we were over two hours late to let her go. William didn’t want to leave. When he drinks, he doesn’t want to stop. I used to like that until we had Lilly a few months ago. Oh, I’m not breastfeeding, so she’s not in danger”, I defend myself poorly.

I’m curious what this man’s name is but I don’t bother asking. He hasn’t said a word but the page he rests his hand on is nearly full. I want to throw a fit about sitting here in narration mode when they should be out there, looking for this monster who…

“He doesn’t like that we have a child but he likes the money I make at work and I’ve been scared to leave. I know he’d kill me if I did”, I take a breath and it’s hard to exhale.

“Please tell me what happened from the beginning. How did you end up tied up and in the car? And your daughter, Lilly, right?” he sounds like a robot.

I choke on words I haven’t spoken and rub my sore wrists frantically. My eyes are wide open when I answer him.

“Yes. Is she okay? I know she was still breathing when you arrived and then I passed out."

“She’s in recovery, there was no damage to the rest of her body but she hit her head really bad where she landed”, he confesses.

My hands land over my mouth and I just cry for a few minutes. I whisper ‘thank you’ into the air about a dozen times before I flinch at the pain from my wrists. The policeman notices but hesitates and looks down at his notes, possibly working out another question to ask me.

I feel lighter now. The heaviness I’d walked in with has lifted and I want to go, but once again William is delaying me. He fled the scene and they obviously haven’t found him. I want to scream at them that all I want is my daughter and to go home to sleep but I know better. I should’ve done better. None of this would’ve happened if I'd just left the first time he hit me. But no, I married him instead.

It happened too quickly, actually. The morning after he’d punched me in the gut and left me rolled up like a fetus on my kitchen floor, he woke me up on the same floor with a ring in his hand and a sheepish smile on his face. There were traces of guilt here and there but that’s all I ever got. Traces. He was on one knee and he said ‘you know I love you Kat’. It wasn’t a question. I wasn’t allowed to answer questions when he asked them. He was telling me what I knew. So, I’d slowly nodded to that, feeling the weight of my head along with the aches in my belly, and stood up to let him slide the ring onto my ring finger. I knew it was a mistake and I think I wanted to die. But then came Lilly, and suddenly life was no longer about appeasing William. And now I know he hated me from the very beginning.

I sniffle as the policeman hands me a pack of tissues from his pocket, and I sit up to tell him the ending to my marriage.

“You know what he said to me, before he threw our three-months-old baby out of a moving car?” I’m certain that my stare is boring holes in his face but I just can’t see them.

He lifts his head as a signal to go on.

“Do you remember when you left me alone to be with your family and Lilly last year? That’s when I knew you didn’t love me anymore. But I can fix it now, I know what to do. And then he lifted my baby from the passenger’s seat and tossed her out through his window. I don’t how I did it but I opened the backseat door right after that and followed my child. You find that bastard and lock him up!”