Page 97 of Justice

It was Storie. And she knew my real name.

50

MELODY HARLOW

5 Years ago

The interview didn’t go well. I knew it the second the managing partner leaned back in his chair and started doing that thing they all do now. The polite smile. The careful language. We’ll be in touch. We’re looking at several candidates. Your qualifications are impressive.

He didn’t hire people whose names had been in the news for the wrong reasons. None of them did. This was the fourth firm in two months, and they all looked at me the same. Like I was a liability. Like they already knew the answer before I sat down but wanted to see if I’d come in and beg for it anyway.

I drove home with the music off. I was tired. Not sleepy tired. Tired in my bones, tired of being punished for something Roman did to me in that courtroom, tired of rebuilding a life that kept getting knocked down before I could stand it up straight. The kids were home with my sister. I just wanted to get in the door, take off these shoes, hold my babies, and figure out the rest tomorrow.

I turned onto my street and saw flashing red and blue lights. My heart sank when I saw the three squad cars. There was an ambulance with its back doors open but nobody moving around it with any urgency. That’s what I noticed first. Nobody was rushing. When somebody can still be saved, people rush. When they stop rushing, it means there’s nothing left to rush for.

Police tape across my front yard. Yellow tape, stretched between the mailbox and the porch rail, closing off my own house. Neighbors on the sidewalk. Faces I recognized but couldn’t process. Somebody’s hand over their mouth.

Aria was on the lawn.

My sister was on her knees in the grass in front of my house, crying so hard she couldn’t stand. A female officer was crouched beside her trying to get her up. Aria’s face was destroyed. Mascara everywhere, her body shaking, and the sound coming out of her was the sound of somebody who had seen something no person should ever have to see.

I left the car in the middle of the street. I don’t remember putting it in park. I don’t remember opening the door. I just remember running, in my interview heels, across the asphalt, and the police tape catching me across the chest before an officer grabbed my arm.

“Ma’am, you can’t go in there.”

“That’s my house. Those are my kids. Let go of me.” I was pulling against him. “Where are my children? Where’s Golden? Where’s Keenan?”

Aria heard my voice. She looked up from the grass and her face crumpled even further, which I didn’t think was possible, and she started shaking her head at me. Back and forth. No words. Just her head going side to side, saying the thing her mouth couldn’t.

“Where is my daughter.” I wasn’t asking anymore. I was screaming it. “Somebody tell me where my daughter is right now!”

A detective walked me to the ambulance. He said words. I heard some of them. There had been an incident. A firearm. My son. My daughter.

“Your son accessed a firearm in the home,” he said. “Your daughter sustained a gunshot wound. The paramedics arrived within six minutes of the 911 call.”

“Where is she.”

He didn’t answer fast enough. I pushed past him. Got to the back of the ambulance. Saw the gurney. Saw the white sheet. Saw how small the shape was underneath it. How small. Two years old. That’s all she was. Twenty-six pounds. Thirty-two inches. I knew her measurements because I’d just taken her to the pediatrician last month and she was in the seventy-fifth percentile for height and I’d been so proud of my tall baby.

I pulled the sheet back.

I don’t have words for it. I have tried for five years to find words for what my daughter looked like on that gurney and there are none. There is no language built for a mother looking at her dead two-year-old. I can tell you that her eyes were closed. That detail took my legs out from under me. She looked like she was sleeping. She was not sleeping.

I went down. My knees hit the pavement. I pulled her off that gurney into my lap. I held her. I screamed. I screamed until my throat tore. I screamed her name. I rocked her. I told her to wake up. I told her Mama was here. I told her I was sorry, I was so sorry, I should have been home, I should have been here, I never should have left.

People tried to take her from me. I wouldn’t let them. Somebody had to pry my hands open. I remember that. Somebody had to physically remove my dead child from my arms because I would not let her go, and when they finally did I felt something leave my body that has never come back. Some part of me that was alive before that moment died on the pavement next to her, and I have been walking around without it ever since.

“Where is my son.”

They had Keenan in the back of a squad car. Eight years old, sitting in the back seat with the door open, a female officer beside him. He wasn’t crying. His face was blank. He was staring at the floor of the car, not at me, not at the house, not at anything. Just gone inside himself, wherever children go when they’ve done something too big for their brain to hold.

“Keenan.” I got on my knees in front of that open car door. “Baby. Look at me. What happened?”

“I was playing with the gun,” he said. “I found it and I was playing and it went off.”

“You found it where?”

“In the box.”