What Happened That Night

1 ~ a r r e s t e d

No one knew why my sister Emily murdered Griffin Tomlin that night.

No one except for me, anyway.

My sister never hated Griffin Tomlin. She said never said one word about him that led anyone to think that one day his life would end at nineteen years old because of her or why she ever would. In fact, my sister and Griffin had always been kind of friends, the kind of friends who nodded to each other when they passed in the locker aligned hallways at school or handed red solo cups overflowing with beer to at the party, unasked, but not the kind of friends that called each other to hang out or walked into each other's houses, unannounced, and ambled right over to their refrigerator, grabbed the handle, and opened it, no hesitation in grabbing a yogurt or a jar of pickles. At the parties our parents would arrange, they would talk and hang around each other, slip away downstairs to the basement to watch a movie in beanbag chairs or play Mario Brothers on their PlayStation. Then, during those parties that normally celebrated events that we, their children, cared nothing about—anniversaries, the Oscars, Memorial Day barbeques, Super Bowl parties, although the latter had its exceptions—they would become friends, even if it was only until the party ended and we were all sent back to our neighboring homes and ordinary friendships.

My sister never hated Griffin Tomlin.

At least, she didn't always.

But then, because of me, she did.

And now he's dead.

.

Downstairs, I heard the sounds of my mother entering the house through the patio doors, the shwoop of the door gliding closed behind her, and the clomping of her thick, gardening boots with rubber, black soles and toes against the delicate tiling of our dining room floor as she maneuvered through the waxed table and matching chairs with floral cushions tied underneath the seats. I imagined her peeling off of her dirt caked gardening gloves as she walked into the kitchen, past a chair that no one said in anymore, and dropped them beside the ashtray that my older sister, Nora, had made for my father as a father's day present years ago, oblivious as to what smoking was or that our father didn't do it, and so the ashtray was converted into a makeshift key bowl, that also contained not only sets of jangling keys but mismatched buttons, a few paperclips, a hair scrunchie that no one claimed, and the white ball to a foosball table that my father sold when I was ten years old. I imagined her thumbing through the mail that had been slapped onto the counter beside our toaster oven, biting her lower lip as she scanned through the return addresses of the bills and the advertisements for department stores, but ultimately, she would just throw them back onto the granite countertops and sigh.

After Emily was arrested, my mother became obsessed with gardening, spending hours outside in the golden glow of the setting sun in the evenings as she tugged out weeds, planted flowers from crinkling black containers, and filled her watering can with the painted red flowers on the side with water and watching it trickle from the head. The head of her trowel was dented and white at the edges from colliding with so many pebbles in the earth as she dug, and the elastic of her floral gardening gloves was worn and the white overlay had been faded to a tannish white. The back of her neck would often be left sunburned and hot from spending so many hours there along the sides of the house where she had dug her narrow gardens that bloomed with vibrant hues from the petals but now, that it was January, there was nothing for her to plan, nothing for her to nurture. I thought maybe she would've tried to convince my father to buy her a greenhouse so she could continue with her newfound obsessions with botany and not focus on the fact that her daughter was awaiting trial for the murder of her best friend's son. Instead, though, she just goes outside, brushes the collection of glistening snowflakes off of the frozen dirt that was her garden, and stabs her shovel through it to crumble the solid dirt. A few our neighbors—who we used to call friends, not just neighbors—will peer out of their curtained windows and watch her crouch in front of our house, the denim of her pants dampening from the wet snow, her nose and ears reddened and her cheeks flushed, and the piles of snow accumulating at the edge of her gardens where she had shoved it with her hands, and in their eyes there's a glimmer of anxiousness bystanders bare.

They look at her and think, oh, that poor woman or they think children are only as screwed up as their parents allowed them to be.

But they never thought that Emily Porterfield was screwed up either. They thought she was perfectly normal in her cheerleading uniform with the cropped shirt and red, pencil skirt and her multicolored pom-poms that waved frantically in the air like plastic fireworks. She had babysat their children, warmed up the meals they had placed in the fridge for her to feed them, and then read them a bedtime story as their eyes closed. She had sold Girl Scout cookies to them in the spring with bright, green eyes and a faint gap in between her teeth that seemed almost endearing as she smiled at them, head tilted to the side. She had walked their dogs and even scooped up their poop in pink, plastic bags instead of just leaving it there like our older sister Nora would've—and had—done before for some unsuspecting shoe to step in later.

Emily Porterfield was someone who just wasn't screwed up.

In fact, out of the Porterfield Sisters, as the neighbors dubbed us, Emily was the normal one. She never went through a gothic phase like Nora had with two inches of eyeliner marking the skin around her eyelashes and chipped black nail polish gleaming on her fingernails and an assortment of black clothing—black skinny jeans, black hoodies, black beanies, even a black winter parka with a faux fur-line that she chopped away with scissors into a black mesh trashcan—and she was never withdrawn like me, wearing oversized sweaters and leggings just so she'll be overlooked, even though I didn't always dress this way, and she never just stared, silently and longingly, at the boy she wished she had the nerve to speak to. When she saw Wilson Westbrooke, she decided and just knew that this—that they—were going to happen, and marched right up to him that afternoon as she caught his eye from across the street as she lazily licked at her strawberry ice cream cone, a little ribbon of melted, pink ice cream running down the edge of her hand.

Downstairs, I heard the beep of our answering machine as my mother replayed the last message that came in half an hour ago, while she was still dusting off the snowflakes from her frozen, barren garden and I was still in my bedroom, gazing at the white glow of my computer screen as I read the Google search engine results for my search Griffin Tomlin murder, Shiloh, NY. Muffled, I heard our outgoing message being played—my father's cheerful, pre-Emily's-arrest voice greeting the caller, saying that they reached the Porterfield house and if they were looking for him, Eric, or, then my mother's cheerful, pre-Emily's-arrest voice chiming in, saying Samantha, and then Nora's reluctant, begrudging voice saying her own name, then Emily practically and bubbly sang her name with a slight giggle at the end, and then my own voice, shy and quieter, mumbling Clara, and then my father, again, telling them to leave a message for one of us—and I almost thought I heard my mother sighing as she heard Emily's voice so happily declare her name, it seeming so unbelievable that that voice actually killed someone—and not just someone, but Griffin Tomlin.

And then I heard my father's voice, exhausted and post-Emily's-arrest, apologizing to my mother for having work late again that night, mumbling that they should just eat dinner without him and not to wait up for him. He muttered something that almost sounded as if he loved us and then hung up with a deafening click. A moment later, I heard my mother pressing the DELETE MESSAGE button.

She asked me if I knew why Emily had decided to kill Griffin. She had asked if I knew if it was just an accident or something and that she was too afraid that the police or the lawyers wouldn't believe her. She had asked if I knew why Emily suddenly decided to sneak out of the house that night and crept across the street into the Tomlin's backyard. Every time she asked me a question about her, about them, about him, and I would turn away and tell her no, even when it wasn't always true. No, I didn't know why she did it. No, I don't know why she was there. No, no, no. Sometimes, I imagined Emily lying on a slender cot against a white, cinderblock room, adorned in a bright orange prison uniform instead of her red, yellow, and white cheerleader one, and her lips grumbling the word liar.

Because I knew why she did it.

Because I knew that Emily hated Griffin Tomlin the moment I told her something I never should have.