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2
The color drained out of my face in an instant.
It was only a line I'd blurted out in the heat of the moment.
But a few hours later, six people in my house were really dead.
The detective asked again, "How did the two of them get along, day to day?"
The neighbor sighed.
"They fought all the time."
"Sometimes you could hear things breaking in the middle of the night."
"Once her husband even said out in the stairwell that one day she'd drive him to his death."
I rushed to explain.
"It wasn't like that."
"Last time our daughter had a fever, he was frantic looking for the thermometer and knocked the cabinet over."
"Another time he was drunk, and I was helping him up when we broke the vase."
"We just didn't get along. I didn't kill anyone!"
But at that moment my explanations sounded so thin.
The cold handcuffs closed around my wrists.
The detective said in a low voice,
"For now, you are the only suspect in this case."
"Please come with us for questioning."
The lights in the interrogation room were a harsh white.
I sat in the chair, still wearing that bathrobe.
The wound on the sole of my foot had only been roughly bandaged, and the blood had already soaked through the gauze.
But I couldn't feel the pain at all.
All I could see was that small hand of my daughter's, sticking out from under the white sheet.
Before we left the house, I heard the medical examiner tell someone to put her into a body bag.
I broke free of the police right there and threw myself back over her, sobbing.
"Don't zip it. She's afraid of the dark."
"Please, leave a little light for her."
But in the end that zipper still closed, inch by inch, right in front of my eyes.
The detective set a family relationship chart down in front of me.
"You and your husband didn't get along?"
I nodded, then shook my head.
"We'd been fighting a lot lately."
"He had a temper, and his parents never liked me."
"But if you don't get along, you can get a divorce."
"Why would I kill anyone?"
The detective didn't answer.
"And your parents?"
The moment I heard those two words, the tears fell.
"They were the best people to me in the whole world."
My parents only had me, one daughter.
When I was little we were poor. My mother wrapped dumplings at a breakfast counter, and my father guarded materials at a construction site at night.
They couldn't bear to buy themselves a single new piece of clothing, but they never once let a teacher throw me out of class over unpaid tuition.
The year I started college, I was still three thousand short on tuition.
My mother sold the gold earrings she'd kept from her wedding.
My father was afraid that if I found out I wouldn't go to school, so he lied and told me the site had handed out a bonus.
It was only later that I learned the truth.
For a whole month he hadn't let himself buy lunch, getting by on the two rolls he brought from home in the morning.
When I got married, my in-laws looked down on my family for being ordinary.
My parents took out half a lifetime of savings and paid for the renovations on our marital home.
My mother also secretly slipped me a bank card.
She said,
"A woman needs her own money, even after she's married."
"Any day you're treated badly, you come home. Your father and I can still take care of you."
When I had my daughter, the labor was difficult, and I was in the delivery room for more than ten hours.
Outside, my father was so anxious his blood pressure spiked, but he refused to see a doctor.
My mother stood by the operating room door, begging the doctors over and over,
"Save my daughter first."
"Whatever happens to the baby is fine. I just want my daughter safe."
Parents who loved me that much.
And now they were lying dead in my house.
Without even one last word left for me.
I cried until I couldn't breathe, and all I could do was clutch the handcuffs.
"How could I possibly kill them?"
"They gave me everything they had to give."
"Even if I had no conscience, I could never raise a hand against my own parents!"
The young officer taking notes stopped his pen and glanced down at me.
But the detective across from me stayed just as calm.
"Your daughter—was she your biological child?"
