Blame

by Nicole Trope

  ‘So you started talking and you became friends.’

  ‘Yes. She told me that Maya was the same age as Lex, and I didn’t believe that because Maya was just calmly looking at the video and making it repeat every time it got to the end. I mean, the girls were both around the same size, but Anna was so thin and small that I thought her child must be a lot older, and just small, like her.

  ‘“Is she your first?” I asked her and she said, “Yes and you?” I told her that Lex was my first child and then we just sat in silence for a minute, and then, without thinking about it, I just said, “Fucking hell, isn’t it?” And she looked at me like she’d never even heard someone use words like that, and then she sort of sagged against the chair, like the air was slowly going out of her. “Oh yes,” she said, “it is absolute hell.” The thing is, I didn’t really mean it. I’d had a bad night with Lex, who usually slept from around eleven until six in the morning by then but had been up every two hours for no particular reason the night before, and I was tired but I was mostly happy to be a mother. I loved watching Lex changing every day and she made me laugh all the time, but for Anna, I think it literally was hell.’

  ‘Why, Mrs Harman? Why do you think that?’ asks Detective Sappington and she sits up straighter in her chair. It occurs to Caro that this is exactly the reaction she had wanted and exactly what she has come here to get. She wants to tell them all about Maya, so that they will understand that the child’s death was not her fault, was not her choice. Her death must be blamed on Anna. But, as she opens her mouth to explain, she remembers Anna’s pinched face on that first day and feels strangely protective of her—regardless of what she is now accusing Caro of.

  ‘You know about Maya, don’t you? I mean, you’ve discussed this with Anna?’

  ‘No, Mrs Harman. I’ve been briefed about what happened but I haven’t actually met Anna yet. I wasn’t there that night. Detective Anderson attended the hospital—do you remember him?’

  ‘Was he the tall one with dark hair? Yes, I remember him. I only saw him for a moment, after I had my blood test. I wanted to go up to Anna, but Keith didn’t look like he wanted me anywhere near them, so I stayed away.’

  She had desperately wanted to go to her friend, had wanted to wait with her for news of Maya, but she could see that it was impossible. Everything had changed, and she knew from the way Keith looked at her that she would never be welcome near Anna again.

  She thinks about how simple the words she has just uttered—‘so I stayed away’—are. They do not begin to cover what she felt that night. They don’t touch on the horror and the confusion, and on how hard it was to keep herself from running to her friend and throwing her arms around her. They don’t explain her own grief and guilt, or the shame that washed over her when Keith locked eyes with her and silently shook his head, warning her away. They are a few simple words that cannot even begin to describe that moment.

  Caro closes her eyes and sees Anna rocking in the thin plastic chair at the hospital. She smells the stringent antiseptic in the air and sees again the look Keith gave her. She had been able to taste his hate in her throat, to feel his accusing glare bouncing off her body. It was bitter, choking. Her skin felt burned.

  ‘I couldn’t hear what Detective Anderson was saying,’ she tells Detective Sappington, forcing herself to get on with what she needs to say, ‘but I could see that he was helping Anna, was helping both of them, and then I left. The constable drove me home. I wanted to stay but I didn’t . . . I had to get home.’

  Detective Sappington sits back in her chair. She folds her arms across her chest but remains silent.

  ‘He did seem nice,’ says Caro as she recalls the large detective sitting next to Anna, murmuring softly to her. “He’s very good looking, isn’t he? You probably think I’m a bad person for noticing that but I’m sure a lot of people do. It’s the black hair and the green eyes, I think.’

  ‘Mrs Harman . . .’ says Detective Sappington, and then she smooths her perfectly smooth hair and Caro knows that she has definitely noticed how good looking Detective Anderson is. ‘Someone has a crush,’ she thinks, imagining that police stations are like soap operas, with romances sizzling around every corner. She wonders how long Detective Sappington has been infatuated with Detective Anderson and if she has any chance of having her affections returned. Maybe they are in a relationship already but Caro doubts it. Knowing this secret about the person opposite makes her feel a connection with her. The poor woman is just like she is—wanting what she can’t have.

  ‘Look, you might as well call me Caroline, or Caro . . . I hate being called Caroline.’

  ‘Okay, Caro. We were discussing Maya,’ says Detective Sappington.

  ‘Yes, Maya. The clinic nurse came out—I don’t think I will ever forget her. Her name was Lucille. She was one of those women who’d been trained one way and refused to learn anything new. I think she was already in her sixties, and she wore a white uniform and had grey hair cut really short, and when she looked at you, you felt like you’d somehow done something wrong. She was very bossy with the mothers. She turned all of us back into children. Her favourite phrase was, “Well, I don’t hold with all this new rubbish.” No matter what I said, she always said that. I mean, she was very kind and really knew how to handle a baby, but when I asked her about introducing solids and told her that I wanted to wait until later, because Lex seemed to be doing fine on just breast milk, she gave me the “rubbish” line and told me I had to start solids that afternoon. I had this kind of love–hate relationship with her; she stuck to her own ideas but she thought every baby was just amazing. She loved them all, and would talk softly to Lex while she undressed and weighed her, and even sing to keep her calm. And she never forgot a child. She’d see a name on the board and look around the room, and recognise that baby or child immediately.

  ‘The day I met Anna, Lucille came out of her office and saw her there, and she kind of rolled her eyes and sighed, and Anna sat up again and then pulled her fingers through her hair, as though she were trying to make it look better. I had never seen Lucille react to a parent that way. She always said something like, “I hope you’ve been treating Mummy nicely, Alexa; shall we take her into the examining room?” But she didn’t say anything like that to Anna. She just nodded at Anna and wiped Maya’s name off the board. She looked really unhappy to have Maya in the clinic, and when Anna picked up Maya, she dropped the DVD player, and I found out why.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Maya started screaming—not crying, but screaming, like someone had physically hurt her. Anna picked the thing up and tried to give it back to her, but the video had finished, and when it dropped the screen must have changed, because Maya’s screaming only got worse. Her body arched backwards, and she went from behaving like a much older child to behaving like a much younger one. It was weird. Anna followed Lucille into the office with her head down, and Maya kept screaming and for the whole appointment, she just screamed her head off. By the end of it, I had a headache, and the two other mothers were looking at the door to the office, with their arms folded and that kind of smug, judgemental look that some mothers get. You could almost see them thinking, “That would never be my child.”’

  ‘Caroline—I mean, Caro—I’m just not sure what this has to do with—’

  ‘It has everything to do with it. You want to know what happened but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to believe me, so I’m going to tell you from the beginning and that way, when I get to the accident, you’ll actually understand what I’m saying . . . is that okay with you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s fine. But I’m going to ask you again if you’re okay. You really don’t look very well.’

  Caro feels her fists clench again. She would like to just get up and walk out, and keep walking until she reaches somewhere far away from here and the fucked-up mess her life has become but she knows—just like she knew that she would have to clean up the broken mug—she doesn’t have that choice.
She is a mother, and even though Lex hates her right now, she is still her mother and bound to her forever, and being a mother means that you can never run away or leave the mess for someone else.

  ‘Susan . . . can I call you Susan? Yes, Susan, you’re right. I’m not very well at all. I haven’t had a drink today and I really need one,’ Caro says, omitting to mention her vodka and orange this morning. She had showered and brushed her teeth before she arrived at the police station, so knows there is no trace of the alcohol on her, although Geoff tells her that it comes out of her skin. ‘You’re starting to smell like an old wino,’ had been the exact words he used to Caro the week before. ‘Sometimes I can smell you before I even walk into a room.’

  ‘Sometimes I hate you before you even walk into a room,’ Caro had replied. When she finally sobered up enough to remember them, she had hated herself for saying those words; but then, she always hated herself for the things she said when she was drunk, or maybe she just always hated herself.

  Before Susan can say anything else, Caro raises her hand. ‘I want to say this now, and I’m sure you know already, that I was not drunk on the night of the accident. I’d had a drink or two, that’s true, but I wasn’t over the limit.’

  ‘Caro—Mrs Harman—I don’t want to upset you, but I think you may need to face the fact that you were, indeed, over the limit at the time of the accident.’ Susan says this in her most reasonable voice, like she is explaining something to an eight-year-old having a tantrum, and Caro is back to hating her again.

  ‘You don’t know that!’ she yells, knowing that she’s basically admitting her guilt by getting upset. ‘Do you understand, you don’t know that! The blood tests haven’t come back yet. If they had, and if you had conclusive proof that I had been drunk, you would simply have arrested me, and you haven’t done that. I’m here of my own free will because this was no ordinary accident, and you need to let me explain it before you simply decide that I was drunk.’

  ‘Please don’t shout at us, Mrs Harman. It really benefits no one at all,’ says Susan.

  ‘I need you to understand, that’s all. Since the accident, I haven’t driven at all and I know that my drinking has increased. I know that but . . .’ Caro thinks about her car, parked far away from the station. It’s not really her car, it’s a rental. The police still have her car, although she’s not sure what they think they’re going to find. It was barely even dented and won’t need to be fixed. Geoff hadn’t wanted to get her a rental car but Caro had insisted.

  ‘What if I need to get to Lex? What if something goes wrong while you’re at work?’

  ‘Caro, your mother and sister are picking up Lex from school, and I’m dropping her at school. You need to just take some time.’

  ‘I need a car, Geoff,’ she had said, and so he had relented and rented her one. It has mostly sat outside the house, waiting for her to drive it. Today, she had wanted to drive Lex to school, to take back some control before heading to the police station, to try to restore some sense of normalcy, and she knows that if Lex hadn’t fought with her about it, then she wouldn’t have needed a drink this morning.

  ‘That’s not true,’ she hears someone say and looks around to see only the silent detectives.

  ‘It was a very . . . very bad night,’ she stumbles on, ‘and it’s been an awful couple of weeks. Geoff blames me and Lex blames me, and I know Anna blames me, I know she does, but no one understands, no one knows Anna like I do, and I know, I know, that the accident wasn’t my fault. I know it.’

  ‘If you weren’t drunk, Caro, can you explain to me why you refused to take a roadside breath test?’

  ‘I was upset. I didn’t refuse to take it, I just couldn’t concentrate long enough to do it. I didn’t understand what he was saying. Everything was crazy. There was so much noise, and Anna was just screaming and screaming. I couldn’t . . . I said I’d go to the hospital for a blood test with the policeman who was there and I did.’

  ‘Perhaps you did that in the hope that by the time the test was administered, your blood alcohol level would have dropped? It’s not the case, you know. If you were over the limit at the time of the accident, then it will show up in the blood test. Your blood was taken pretty quickly after the accident.’

  Caro stands up and pushes her chair back with her foot. ‘You know, I don’t have to take this crap from you. I know my rights. I can get up and walk out of here right now and you can just bloody wait for those results, which will, by the way, show that I was not over the limit. I am certain of that.’

  ‘Okay, Caro, okay; let’s just all calm down a little,’ says Susan. She has raised her hands and motions for Caro to sit down again. ‘I’m not trying to upset you. Please sit down, please. Have another sip of water.’ Caro picks up the glass and swallows the rest of the water in one gulp as Susan keeps talking. We will do this your way, okay? I want you to have the time to explain what happened. You’re right, I have no idea what the tests are going to say. I’m sorry I upset you. We’re going to take this one step at a time. If you need to tell us the story from the beginning, then that’s what you’ll do. Will you be all right without a drink?’

  Caro knows she is being handled. She can almost see Detective Sappington mentally flipping through the pages of her procedural manual and finding the page that says: ‘What to do when your suspect gets aggressive’. Caro knows what’s happening, but the detective’s voice is even and she speaks slowly and, without meaning to, Caro relaxes a little. She understands that she doesn’t actually have any choice about being there; knows that if she storms out of the interview room now, then the next time she’s here it will be because she has been placed under arrest. The only real hope she has of staying out of jail is to give her side of the story and hope that it trumps Anna’s side of the story. She doesn’t think about the possibility of her blood test coming back with the wrong reading. It is not something she can let herself think about.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she says as she returns to her chair, ‘just fine but I’d like some more water; a lot more water.’

  ‘That’s fine, Brian . . . can you?’

  ‘No problem, I’ll be right back.’

  ‘Just breathe, Caro. Just relax and breathe, and we’ll get through this,’ says Susan.

  Susan slumps a little in her chair while Caro watches her warily, waiting for the detective to say something that’s going to piss her off again. She is jittery and her eyes feel like they have small specks of dirt in them. She wants a drink. She wants to lie down. She wants to get out of this room shaped like a box. Susan takes a deep breath and then another, letting the air out slowly. Caro finds herself breathing in with her.

  Susan rests her hands in her lap and breathes deeply, and watches as Caro, unthinkingly, does the same. They breathe in sync for a moment and Caro feels some of her tension release. The detective sneaks a quick look at her watch.

  ‘Do you have to be somewhere?’ asks Caro.

  ‘No,’ says Susan. ‘I have as much time as you want. As much time as you need.’

  ‘I need forever,’ thinks Caro. ‘Forever.’

  Chapter Five

  Anna can see that she’s managed to make Cynthia understand what she’s saying. She knows that she could have said, ‘Maya was autistic,’ and Cynthia would have understood, but she feels the need to make the detectives understand exactly what that meant to her, to her life, to their life as a family. Everyone knows what autism is or, at least, they think they do. Say ‘autistic’ to someone who has never met an autistic child and they will automatically think ‘Rain Man’. Anna used to think ‘Rain Man’. But Rain Man was a movie and the actor in it was not autistic. At night, he could stop holding his head to one side and being afraid of cracks on the sidewalk, and go home to his wife. Even after eleven years of knowing that her child was autistic, Anna still had days when she would wake up and think that Maya would have somehow been cured overnight, that she would magically be able to stop playing the role she was playing and jus
t get on with being a little girl.

  ‘Maya was autistic,’ says Anna to the detectives, and sees the nod of recognition but is not grateful for it; only resentful that it comes with so little actual knowledge. She sighs, thinking about those first days after Maya was diagnosed, when she began researching the condition, and discovered everything that autism could mean and everything that it could not mean. What she remembers most was feeling overwhelmed and sad—very, very sad.

  In one hour-long appointment at the developmental paediatrician, she had all her worst fears confirmed and, at the same time, lost the child she thought she was going to raise. It was devastating.

  She has spent Maya’s whole life explaining her to people and, now, sitting in the small, stale room across the way from the man who put his arms around her when the doctors admitted that Maya was gone, she feels the need to explain one last time.

  ‘There are babies who cry more than others. I’ve read that you can go to any mothers group and always find one child who has colic or is really unsettled, but Maya was like nothing anyone had ever seen. I tried mothers groups a few times, but I think I made the other mothers uncomfortable. I had to bounce Maya the whole way through or she’d scream. And each time I went, there was one mother who said, “If you just put her down for a minute, she’ll be fine,” and inevitably I’d do just that because I could see the way they were all looking at me, and then Maya would start screaming and I could feel them judging me, judging her. They would turn their heads away from us and try to speak over the noise and eventually one by one they would get up and move away from me, from Maya. It was easier to get up and leave then, easier to be at home alone, so I could avoid everyone’s stares. I don’t think anyone really believed me about the screaming until they experienced it for themselves.