Well, you know this already. You saw those pictures, too. I was suddenly in different clothes. My flowered sundress was gone, and I was in shorts and a T-shirt. There were so many cars outside, and people—press, photographers, strangers. There was the flash of camera lights, the spit and sputter of police radios, sirens, and there were cameramen, and onlookers snapping photos with their phones. I rode to the station in a police car with Lila. We sat in the back. She held my hand, as if we were in this together, but we weren’t, not really. As soon as I’d spoken those words and as soon as she’d let me, we weren’t.
I had no idea what time it was. Detective Don Chambers was there again, and the police chief, too. I sat with Detective Don Chambers in front of a table of recording equipment. For hours and hours and hours I told my story. And then I said it again. I didn’t mean to do it.
Lila appeared much later, clinging to her attorney. She said something like, Baby, you’ll have to stay here, but only for the night. A woman came and led me down a corridor, to a holding cell with iron bars. It had a cot and a toilet and a sink. I had to remove my shoes, and the guard had to look under my clothes for weapons, and she brought me tea and a blanket and I looked right into her eyes and I repeated that lie. I didn’t mean to do it. Any dreams of IT, of largeness in the world, were gone, gone, gone. The summer had been life changing, all right, but in the way an earthquake was, and now I saw only rubble.
I sat on that bed and it wasn’t real, how I’d just been with Nicco in the rain and now I was there. I thought about Nicco and Meredith and Carlos and me on that tour of Alcatraz, and it seemed like a million years ago, because I was a different person now. I was older. The night had made me older.
I would never be Lila’s baby again. Anyone’s baby. And that was right and good, because I wasn’t one, and hadn’t been one for a long while.
My father had arrived sometime in the night, and by morning, so had Edwina. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to do it, I said. I was taken to an all-white room with a shower, a toilet, a high, high window, and another window in the door, from which I could see the faces of the other girls trying to see mine. My father moved like he could make stuff happen. There were new attorneys. I didn’t mean to do it. I started to believe my own story. It almost seemed like it had really happened that way. My father spoke in the loud, certain voice that some people use and others listen to. And Lila leaned on his arm.
Here is what you know. Here is what you saw: horrible headlines about Lila and me. Images of 716 Sea Cliff Drive—the orange stucco exterior, the maze of the stairwell, a body being rolled out of the front gate. That clip from Nefarious, again and again. My Academy yearbook photo, where I smile sweetly in that blue sweater. Somber people dressed in black on a sunny day, standing in a half circle as Jake Antonetti was put into the ground.
And then: new headlines, about ninety-four-year-old Doris Brawley, who’d shipped multiple crates of precious artwork to Giacomo (Jake) Antonetti but never got paid. You heard the interviews with the Brawley family—how Jake had every excuse. The pieces were gifts from the Brawleys. They were stolen by delivery drivers. The workmen at the storage facility mistook the art for building supplies and pilfered them. You heard that Aphrodite of Knidos, a marble statue from the fourth century B.C., had vanished. You watched as FBI agents eventually recovered the 46" x 46" Crying Girl, by Lichtenstein; the oil on canvas Jacqueline, by Picasso; Female Torso, by Kazimir Malevich; and four drawings and two paintings that were originally attributed to Willem de Kooning, though the authenticity has since been challenged. Other works came out of that warehouse too, origins yet to be determined. You heard the word fraud. It was such a true word. It was such a perfect word for big, important men with lots of secrets.
You heard about all that other stuff of Jake’s they found too: a pile of guns and ammunition; expensive gifts from Lila, including a Rolex watch; and a trove of photos of naked women, from Lila’s age to mine. There were reasons, many reasons, to feel uncomfortable without knowing why.
You also saw those pastel courtroom drawings from the coroner’s inquest, held to determine the cause of Jake’s death. You saw sketches of Lila on the stand, raising her hand and swearing to tell the truth. Me, doing the same. You saw photos of hundreds of pieces of evidence, from a picture of Lila and Edwina and me in Mexico, to aerial views of 716 Sea Cliff Drive, to the damage Max had done in the garage that night. You read that I had gotten the knife to scare Jake and that he had fallen into me as he charged forward. On every news channel and entertainment show and media outlet, you heard that “I didn’t mean to do it.”
And then you saw what the grand jury had decided: justifiable homicide. The district attorney would not be pressing charges.
But you would never see or hear what I saw and heard. When I closed my eyes, if I wasn’t replaying images of Nicco and me that night, or Jake spitting those words You disgust me, or Lila thrusting that knife into Jake as he lunged toward her, or Jake’s confused expression before he fell, or the blood inching up the hem of Lila’s robe, I was hearing Detective Don Chambers, who came to speak with me again before the hearing. It doesn’t make sense. The story is too pat. The guy wouldn’t just walk into a knife. The fingerprints on the handle were smeared, like maybe on purpose.…
I would hear him say those same things again and again in my mind. Again and again, I would shrug.
I would say, Lots of things don’t make sense, but they happen anyway.