And as her fingers fumbled across the yarn, they landed on something else. Something long, and narrow, and pointed. Like a stick, or a needle.
A knitting needle.
In the last second Keisha had before she blacked out, she grasped the knitting needle with her right hand and swung her hand up and over her shoulder. As hard as she could.
The scream was only an inch from her ear. And it was horrific.
As the grip on Keisha’s neck slackened, she tumbled forward out of the chair and collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath. She was on her knees, one hand on the floor supporting her, the other on her neck. Air rushed into her lungs so quickly it hurt. Her gasps would have been loud enough to hear from anywhere in the house, were it not for Wendell Garfield’s anguished screams.
Keisha, even as she struggled to get her breath back, had to turn and see what she had done.
The knitting needle was sticking straight out of Garfield’s right eye. Blood poured from the socket, covering the right half of his face. Judging by how much of the needle remained exposed, Keisha figured a good four to five inches of it was buried in his head.
But he could see her with his left eye, and, still screaming, proceeded to come around the chair after her.
Keisha struggled to her feet, moving in the direction of the door. But she hit her knee going around the corner of the coffee table and stumbled, allowing Garfield to get close enough to clamp his hand onto her arm.
“You bitch!” Garfield said, although there was blood leaking into his throat and it sounded as though he was gargling.
He yanked so hard on her arm that Keisha went down to the floor again. She landed on her back, and before she had a chance to roll away, he was on top of her, straddling her mid-section.
He didn’t have the sash any more. He was going to finish her off with his bare hands. He leaned forward, the knitting needle still sticking out of his eye socket, blood dripping-no, pouring-onto Keisha, and got his fingers and thumbs around her neck. She flailed about, but he had her neck pinned to the floor.
She started blacking out all over again. With her last ounce of strength she raised her hand and shot the heel of it straight up against the end of the knitting needle.
She drove the plastic spear another three inches into Garfield’s head.
There was another scream, and then, for a moment, he froze above her. His grip on her neck relaxed, his arms went weak, and his body collapsed on top of her.
Keisha didn’t even take time to get her breath back this time. She pushed frantically at his dead body until it was off of her, crawled a few feet away, and then, once she was able to breathe normally again, decided she had earned the right to take a moment and become hysterical.
Sixteen
“You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer?” Rona Wedmore asked.
“I’m positive,” Melissa Garfield said. “I’m going to plead guilty to everything.” Like a child saying she’d eaten all her vegetables.
“Then you have to sign here. And here.”
Melissa scribbled her signature.
“Okay, then 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. 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,” Wedmore 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 would I marry him and let him take care of us or was I going to move back in with her and Dad, like I really wanted to do that, right? And then she wanted to know if I’d gotten any more information about the veterinarian school I’ve been thinking about going to one day because I like animals, like especially dogs and cats.”
“I like dogs and cats, too,” Wedmore said.
“Yeah. And so she was asking me about that and I said not yet, but I was thinking about it and she said what’s the holdup? Why don’t I see if I could register now, even though that makes no sense because I have to finish all my high school stuff first, you know, and she knows all that, right? But she’s saying if I applied early it would show them that I’m really interested and I said Jesus, will 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 my future, 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 and she says I’m not cutting them up small enough anyway 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?”
“Sure,” Rona Wedmore said, nodding sympathetically.
“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 that she wasn’t breathing or moving or anything and then he was all ‘What?’ And he said I shouldn’t do anything and he’d be right over.”
“To help you?”
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 had this idea. He got Mom out of the apartment the back way and 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 all over the place. It was horrible. It took hours to clean it all up. It’s a good thing my roommate was away or she’d have seen everything that happened and that would have been bad. I couldn’t help my dad with cleaning up. My head had really kind of exploded by this point, and I was super tired. All that had happened, and then having to drive up to the lake. I stayed in my bed, under the covers. 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 made 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 or her 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.”
Wedmore reached out and touched her hand. “Of course you did.”
“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
