by Nicole Trope
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ says Anna, and then the laugh she had managed to suppress comes bubbling out. Walt and Cynthia look at each other, and Anna knows they think she is laughing because she’s hysterical and because it’s better than crying, but she does genuinely find it funny when she pictures herself and Caro at the clinic the first time they met.
‘I didn’t mean to laugh,’ she says. ‘I think if you’d taken a picture of the two of us that day, you would have seen two such completely different women that you would have automatically assumed that we would never even exchange a few words, let alone become best friends. I was already back in the jeans I had worn before I got pregnant with Maya—in fact, they were a little loose—and, while Keith held Maya, I had spent at least half an hour getting ready to go to the clinic. My hair was perfectly straight and I was wearing make-up. I’m sure I looked like I was on my way to a party but I was sitting there in the clinic, absolutely certain that if I relaxed, even a little bit, I would slip into a coma. I was completely and utterly exhausted. Not just tired but physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted.’
‘Babies can be hard work,’ says Cynthia. ‘My boys are five and nine now, but I remember what it was like at the beginning . . . especially when my husband . . . ex-husband . . . slept through the baby’s cries.’
Anna takes in Cynthia’s smile and her bright blue eyes, and she knows that if she were not sitting in a room with her being interviewed, and Cynthia were not a detective, she would yell at her. She briefly imagines the things she would say, the epithets she would hurl at smug little Cynthia, who knows how hard babies can be. Because if she has two average kids growing up doing everything they were supposed to do, then she really has no idea at all. Anna takes a deep breath before she speaks, and reminds herself that she knows nothing about Cynthia. It could be that the detective is struggling under the weight of her own problems as well. She has an ex-husband, as she has inadvertently told Anna, and it could be that her children are not average; it could be that she is just trying, as many mothers will, to form a connection with another mother, but Anna knows she needs to help her understand so that Cynthia will choose her words more carefully next time.
‘Yes, all babies are hard work,’ she says, leaning forward to engage Cynthia, ‘but Maya was harder than most. I lost all my baby weight in the first couple of months after she was born. I felt like I was on the stress diet. I never had time to eat, and when I did, I had to force myself to swallow.’
‘It can be a very hard time for a lot of mothers,’ says Cynthia and this time Anna sees Walt give her a quick look. He has heard something that Cynthia hasn’t—or hasn’t wanted to.
Anna doesn’t know why she needs Cynthia to recognise what she was dealing with. It serves no purpose now but the need to explain won’t go away. She wants Cynthia to know that while all mothers sometimes have to look deep inside themselves to find reserves of strength and compassion for their children, some mothers have to look deeper than that. Some mothers have to look past regret and dislike and fear, and find love for their child. It’s not an easy task. She wants Cynthia to understand it because she can never actually use words like ‘regret’ or ‘dislike’ or ‘fear’ when she talks about her child. When she talked about her child. She has to keep reminding herself to think in the past tense when it comes to Maya.
If you say the words, you are faced with the full glare of society. If you think the words, all you feel is guilt and self-loathing; but to say you are anything less than totally in love with your child, is considered almost criminal.
Anna tries again. ‘It can be, yes, but for some mothers it’s harder than you could ever imagine. Maya wasn’t your average baby. For the first two weeks after she was born, she was just an angel, slept all the time, hardly ever cried, and Keith and I even thought that she was already smiling, and then it was like she changed overnight. One morning, she woke up at around seven because the house next door was being knocked down. The sound of the bulldozers woke her and she started screaming; not crying, just screaming. We had no idea what had happened. I mean, I understood about the noise. I had expected it to wake her and I had planned to go out for the day, but the noise didn’t seem to just bother her, it seemed to terrify her. She screamed like she was in pain. I thought something had bitten her or she was sick. I undressed her and checked her whole body but I couldn’t see anything. I tried to feed her but she just arched her back away from me and kept screaming. I got her out of the house as quickly as I could, thinking she would be fine if I could just get her away from the noise, but it didn’t stop her screaming. I went to my mother’s house for the day, but no matter what I did or my mother did, she wouldn’t stop screaming. My mother isn’t the best with babies but she did try.’
‘What on earth have you done to her?’ was what her mother had said when she opened the door to Anna and a red-faced, screaming Maya.
‘I haven’t done anything. I don’t know why she won’t stop crying. Why won’t she stop crying?’
‘I don’t know if I can deal with this noise all day,’ her mother said after trying to bounce Maya up and down for ten minutes. ‘This is too much,’ she said after pushing her in the pram for an hour.
‘Help me,’ said Anna. ‘Don’t you know anything that can help me?’
‘Why would I know?’ her mother had yelled and, minutes later, Anna had heard the sound of her car reversing up the driveway.
‘Eventually, I got her in to see the doctor at around four in the afternoon, but by then she had exhausted herself into sleep and the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with her.’
‘Was something wrong with her?’ asks Walt.
‘Nothing that could be seen, not then. She never really went back to the way she had been. She stopped sleeping for more than a couple of hours at a time at night or during the day, and the only way she would stay quiet was if I bounced her up and down. I don’t mean that I just had to bounce her to sleep. I mean I had to keep bouncing her or she wouldn’t stay asleep, until she was really deeply asleep. And if she was awake and not feeding, I had to bounce her so she wouldn’t scream. One day, she screamed for sixteen hours straight.’
‘Wow,’ says Cynthia, and Anna sees the light of acknowledgement in her face.
‘Yes, wow,’ she answers.
Chapter Four
Caro rubs her nose. There is a stale smell and she wishes there were a window to open. She tries to focus on the pale grey walls of the room, which suddenly seems smaller than she first thought.
In her neat pantsuit, Detective Susan Sappington looks like a primary school teacher. Caro can just see her peering at a small child and reducing it to tears for some misdemeanour. She has her hair wound tightly in a bun, and is wearing glasses with red rims that keep slipping down her nose. Caro wants to laugh at her but can’t. Detective Sappington doesn’t look like the kind of woman you laugh at. She probably never leaves her kitchen in a mess at night or goes to bed with the washing up undone, or . . . or drowns her sorrows in half a bottle of vodka. She looks like a woman who has her life under control.
‘Okay, Mrs Harman,’ she says. ‘I know this may seem strange but, just for the record, can I get you to state your full name and date of birth.’
The reasonable way she says things irritates Caro. It would be better if the detective were a little aggressive, but she isn’t and Caro can feel her own irritation beginning to choke her. She should not have to be here in this small, stinking room.
‘But you’ve got all that in front of you. I gave them all my information two weeks ago. It’s already written down.’
‘I know but the interview is being recorded, so I just need you to state it for the camera.’
Caro pushes her hair behind her ear again, wishing she had tied it back properly instead of just using some of Lex’s hairclips. She can feel her hands shake and wonders exactly how long she is going to cope. She can see herself leaning forward and throwing up on the floor. It would no
t be the first time she has vomited in a public place; or the second, or the third. She has a humiliating vision of herself in the ladies toilet at the shopping centre last week. She had missed breakfast in favour of her vodka, and then she had gone to the shops and stumbled on a wine-tasting at the liquor store. Caro had made the young man doing the bartending pour her tiny glass after tiny glass of wine, making sure to remark on the taste and colour each time. She had imagined that she sounded like a connoisseur. She thought people were watching her because she sounded like she really knew her stuff. She pointed out to the elderly man standing next to her the wines she considered to be good, and was offended when he didn’t listen to her and instead turned and walked away. After an hour, the manager had come up to her and whispered, ‘If you don’t leave now, we’ll have to call the police.’
The shop was filled with people and Caro had straightened her shoulders to protest that she was being treated unfairly, and then seen the look in the manager’s eyes. It wasn’t aggression or anger, but pity. She had left quickly but, after about five minutes, the nausea hit and she had made it to the ladies toilet just in time. While she vomited, she had heard other women coming in and out, the tap of heels on the tiled floor, the whoosh of the hand dryer, and when she was done, a collection of voices whispering about something being wrong. She had wanted to call out to them that she was fine, but once she had finished throwing up, she hadn’t been able to do much for a minute except slump on the obviously filthy floor and rest her head on the toilet seat. When she had finally emerged, it had been to find two women in almost matching skirts and sweaters.
‘Oh, my dear, are you all right?’ one of them had asked while the other looked concerned.
‘Just fine,’ Caro had replied. ‘I’m in my first trimester; you know how it is.’
Yes, they had known how it was, and they had wished her luck and expressed their joy for her, and then they had left Caro staring at herself in the mirror.
‘Mrs Harman?’ says Detective Sappington.
‘This room looks exactly like the one on television, the one that they use in that show about a woman detective,’ says Caro.
‘Mrs Harman, please—we really want to just finish the interview, so that you can go home.’
‘Fuck, fine; Caroline Harman, fourth of July 1977.’
‘Thank you. Now, before we go on, are you sure we can’t get you anything? Some water or tea or coffee? I notice your hands are shaking. Are you all right to continue the interview?’
Caro clenches her hands into fists, hearing a slight edge of smugness in Detective Sappington’s reasonable tone. ‘Bitch,’ she thinks. ‘I’m fine,’ she says, trying to moderate her voice, ‘but I would like some water. This has been an awful couple of weeks, as I’m sure you’re aware.’
‘I’ll get it,’ says Detective Ng. He is dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, as though he’s just the intern. Caro likes his smile, but knows already that he’s not the one she has to worry about.
‘Thanks, Brian.’ says Detective Sappington. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she says to Caro.
‘Stop asking me that and just bloody get on with it,’ says Caro.
‘I’m not trying to upset you; I’m just concerned for your welfare.’
‘I’ve said that I’m fine. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Ask me your questions.’
Detective Sappington pushes her glasses back up her nose and consults her notes. Caro pushes her nails into her palms. She is pretty sure that Detective Sappington is trying to annoy her. ‘Surely you’ve read those already?’ she wants to say but keeps quiet.
If Detective Sappington wants to punish her for being rude, then fine—let her go ahead and do it. The silence grows in the hot room and Caro begins to understand why they don’t have windows in the interview room. She is sure anyone confronted by a person as self-satisfied as Detective Sappington would have smashed the glass.
‘Let’s just start with how you and Mrs McAllen know each other.’
‘We met at the clinic.’
‘The clinic?’
‘Don’t you have children?’
‘No, not yet.’
Caro nods her head. Now she understands. The detective in her neat, perfectly ironed pantsuit, still has the illusion of control in her life. Wanting children, having children, raising children makes most people realise that everything is random and chaotic and completely out of their control.
She feels a little more kindly towards Detective Sappington now. The woman has no real idea about life. No idea at all, and since she looks like she is well into her forties, it may be that she will never have children, and so she will most likely be able to continue with that illusion for the rest of her life. Caro thinks that her ‘not yet’ is a standard response that she must have been giving for years, and that there will be a terrible day when Detective Sappington looks in the mirror and realises that her ‘not yet’ has become ‘never will’.
Caro wonders if she has ever wanted children, yearned for them and been denied that joy. She may have no interest in children at all, but then why not simply answer ‘No’. ‘Not yet’ implies hope for the future.
‘Every neighbourhood has one,’ she says. ‘You take your baby there to be weighed and measured, and to talk to the clinic nurse about anything that worries you. I was there for Alexa’s twelve-month check-up and Anna was there for the same thing. Our daughters are . . . were . . . born just a week apart. We must have missed each other at the hospital by a day or two.’
Caro relaxes her hands a little, and takes a deep breath as she remembers those astonishing few days after Alexa’s birth. Detective Ng returns with her glass of water and Caro takes a cautious sip. She had thought she would literally die during labour, which went on for sixteen hours, leaving her so exhausted that Geoff told her afterwards she asked him to ‘Just let me die . . . please.’
She doesn’t remember this. She doesn’t remember much before the moment the midwife placed her squalling baby on her chest with the words, ‘Here you go, Mummy.’
At times during her pregnancy, Caro had been worried that she would not bond instantly with her baby, that she would fail to fall in love with the squirming alien inside her body, but then her daughter was there. She had breathed in the smell of her child, and Lex had stopped crying and opened her eyes to peer at her, and then, seemingly satisfied that her mother was in control, she had closed her eyes and gone to sleep.
‘Careful,’ Caro had admonished the midwife as she took Lex away to be cleaned and wrapped. The love she felt for Lex instantly consumed her and she felt high for weeks afterwards. It was a magical time, despite the sleep deprivation and the loss of control, or maybe because of it. She just gave into it, into everything.
‘So, you were both at the clinic on the same day?’ says Detective Sappington, pulling Caro away from her dreamy recollection.
Caro sighs. ‘Yes; you can just drop in on certain days and wait to see the nurse. I came in and put my name—well, Alexa’s name—on the board, and then I put her on the floor to play and saw Anna. She was sitting alone flicking through a magazine without actually looking at it. Mostly she was watching Maya, her daughter; just staring at her as though she thought she might leap out of her pram at any moment. Maya was watching a video on one of those portable DVD players, and every time she got to the end of it, she would press one of the buttons to rewind it, and another to make it play again.
‘I couldn’t believe it. I mean, Lex was trying to walk, and she already had two words—“star” and “cat”, I think—but Maya’s fine motor skills were amazing. She was just sitting in her pram, watching this video. At that stage, if Lex was awake, she was moving. She barely even sat still to eat. I looked at Anna and she looked like she’d stepped out of a magazine, like she’d just come from hair and make-up. She was even thinner than she is now . . .’ Caro stops talking. She hasn’t seen Anna for a couple of weeks. She may be thinner than ever now; thinner than when they first met. Anna s
tops eating when she is stressed or unhappy. It’s a wonder she hadn’t faded away altogether even before the . . . the accident.
‘Mrs Harman,’ prompts Detective Sappington.
‘Oh . . . yes, I was saying that she looked amazing. She was dressed in neatly ironed jeans, and a soft leather jacket and high-heeled boots. “Who dresses like that to come to the clinic?” I thought. I had barely made it out of my pyjamas, but Anna looked perfect. There wasn’t a blonde hair out of place but there was still something about her that looked wrong.’ Caro pushes her lips together. She has just gone on and on as the memory of meeting Anna assailed her. Her first glance of Anna had led her to look around the room for the nanny she assumed would be with the overly made-up mother and quiet, beautifully behaved child, but then she had looked again.
‘Wrong?’ asks Detective Sappington.
‘Yes, wrong. She was holding onto the magazine so tightly she was crumpling it and her body was so stiff it looked like she was trying not to touch the chair.’
‘So you started talking to her?’
‘Well, not at first. There were a couple of other mothers there with their children and I recognised them and smiled at them but they didn’t seem interested in getting into a conversation. I wasn’t really friendly with them. I knew a lot of the mothers in my community by sight. I went to a lot of stuff with Lex then . . . mothers group and Gymbaroo and music time . . . but I’d never seen Anna anywhere. I thought that she may have just moved into the area and that she must be lonely.
‘Geoff always says that I have a way of adopting lonely people and trying to help them, but I don’t think that’s true. I just felt for Anna when I saw her. I moved one seat closer to her and watched Maya, and then I asked Anna how old Maya was.’
Caro hadn’t immediately started talking to Anna. She had felt the unwelcome possibility of rejection from the yummy mummy in tight jeans, and so she had tried to smooth her hair and pull her shirt further down over her maternity jeans. She was usually able to tell herself, ‘Fuck it, I have other things on my mind,’ when she felt she looked like she had just crawled out of bed, but for a moment, Anna made her wish she had started her diet three weeks before and that the gym membership Geoff had given her for her birthday wasn’t lying unused in a drawer. But then Lex had pointed at a picture of a kitten on the wall and said, ‘Meee’, which was her version of ‘meow’, and Caro had smiled at her daughter and glanced quickly at Anna, and seen not another mother acknowledging how cute toddlers were but something else. Anna looked away from Lex, like she didn’t want to see her. ‘Odd,’ thought Caro and wanted to know more.