by Nicole Trope
‘Okay,’ says Susan. ‘And how many drinks had you had by the time Anna called you?’
Caro is silent. She unfastens one of her clips, smooths her hair and clips it up again. In the back of her throat, she can taste the chocolate she’s eaten. She cannot lie, she knows that, but maybe she can round down, as the test results aren’t back yet. The thing is, she doesn’t really know, but she assumes the fuzziness of her memory about that day means she’d had a lot. ‘I’d had about two or three glasses of wine,’ she finally says.
‘Over what time period?’ asks Brian.
Caro closes her eyes again—it’s easier not to look at the two detectives. ‘About two hours,’ she says and then opens her eyes.
Brian shakes his head a little but says nothing. ‘Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,’ she can see him thinking.
‘I prefer to drink at night. I don’t drink much during the day—at least, I didn’t until the accident. I have a child to take care of, you know.’
‘Yes,’ says Susan quietly, ‘we know.’
‘How far away do you live from Anna’s house?’ asks Brian.
‘It’s exactly seven minutes by car. We measured it once, just as a joke, because we’d been seeing so much of each other. I used to tell Anna that it was harder for me to come to her, because I had to cross a main road with a bit of traffic, but she could go the back way, down a one-way street, to get to my house. Of course, if she had Maya, I always went to her, because Maya liked to be in her own environment, but we did see each other during school days. So, one day we measured it. It took me exactly seven minutes to get to her house and it took her five to get to mine. Why am I telling you this again?’
‘Oh, no reason,’ says Brian, ‘just interested.’
‘Caro, why do you think this accident was Anna’s fault? I think you’ve had enough time to explain things and I still don’t understand why you think it was anything more than an accident.’
‘But don’t you see?’ asks Caro. ‘I’ve explained it all. She knew I was coming. She asked me to come over and then she was out in the street with Maya.’
‘Okay, so she was out in the street. Maybe she wanted to get out of the house for a bit? Or maybe they were taking a walk? People are allowed to be outside their houses, Caro, and sometimes they do walk out into the road. Kids run into the road all the time. That’s why we have speed limits,’ says Susan.
‘Yes, but Maya wasn’t supposed to be outside—’
‘Yes, Caro, but she was, and any other child in that street could have been outside as well. Now, you were not travelling very fast, according to our investigators, so you had to have seen Maya, to have seen them both. You could have stopped, so what I want to know is, why? Why didn’t you stop?’
‘I did!’ shouts Caro. ‘I did stop but I didn’t stop soon enough. I wasn’t speeding and I wasn’t drunk. I saw them and I slowed down, but suddenly Maya was right in the middle of the road.’
‘Did she jump out in front of your car?’ asks Brian.
‘No, she was . . . no, she . . . she did . . . yes, she did, she jumped in front of the car.’
Brian and Susan look at her. Even to her own ears, what she has said sounds like a lie.
‘Caro, I’m sorry,’ says Susan, ‘but I don’t believe you’re telling us the truth. You don’t even sound sure of the answer yourself.’
‘I am sure. She jumped out in front of the car . . . that’s what happened. It’s just because I’m not feeling well and I . . . I’ve been drinking a lot . . . and my memory . . .’ Caro leaves the sentence unfinished. ‘I really fucked this up,’ she thinks.
‘Shall I tell you what I think happened?’ asks Susan, and Caro finds herself sitting back in her chair. Susan’s tone is no longer reasonable. There is a hard edge to it.
‘You don’t know . . . what happened,’ says Caro and she tastes the chocolate again. She holds her hand across her mouth and swallows hard. ‘I need to go,’ she says, standing up.
‘Not right now,’ says Susan. ‘Sit down!’ It’s a direct order. Caro sits down.
‘I think,’ says Susan, speaking slowly and clearly, ‘that you were sloshed. You got a call from your friend, and instead of telling her that you’d had too much to drink, you got in your car and drove over there, because drunk people have a habit of making stupid decisions, and an inability to think through consequences. When you got closer to her house, you saw Anna and Maya outside, and maybe you even saw Maya run into the road, but because you had so much alcohol in your system, you couldn’t stop in time. Alcohol slows down reaction times. That’s an undisputable fact. It’s why you’re not supposed to drink and drive. It doesn’t matter how well you think you can drive when you’ve been drinking, because you’re not thinking straight.
‘So, you saw Maya run into the road and you pushed down on the brake, but because you were drunk, you didn’t push down hard enough or fast enough, and you hit and killed your best friend’s daughter.’
The words are a slap and Caro feels their violence. Susan’s lips curl and her eyes squint. She looks like she hates Caro, who can feel the change in the air. They are going to blame her, and they are going to send her to prison, and she will never see Lex again.
‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘No, no, no, that’s not what happened,’ she continues, beginning to shout. ‘You don’t understand how difficult Maya was. Anna was so unhappy, so sad. She was afraid of her own child. You don’t get it.’
‘Then tell us,’ says Brian. ‘Explain what we don’t get!’
‘I saw her,’ says Caro and she swallows again. ‘I saw them fighting, and as I drove towards her, I saw her push Maya into the road. I saw Anna push Maya in front of my car. I saw her push her—she pushed her.’ Caro stands up and looks wildly around the room, and then pushes back her chair and grabs the small metal garbage bin. She vomits everything in her stomach while the detectives watch.
She vomits and vomits and everything comes out.
Chapter Thirteen
‘Explain it again, Anna,’ says Walt.
Anna touches her wrist. She can feel the blood rushing around her body. There’s a pounding in her head. ‘Careful,’ she thinks. She would like to put her arms up over her head to protect herself.
Walt is leaning forward, pen in hand. He is waiting for her to slip up and then all of this will be over. Anna’s focus narrows; all she can see are Walt’s beautiful green eyes but they seem darker now. He doesn’t wear the gentle smile she saw two weeks ago. Now he is just a cop. Anna feels pursued. She fights the urge to leap out of her chair and run until she’s out of the building.
‘I think I’d like to come back tomorrow,’ she says. ‘I’m too tired to finish this today.’
‘That’s fine,’ says Walt. ‘But before you go, I need you to tell me again why you lied about calling Caro to come over.’ He has asked this question four times already, four different ways.
When he’d left the room Anna had heard him greet a woman. She’d heard them speaking but their voices were too low for her to hear anything. Now she knows that he was speaking to the detective interviewing Caro. Walt had come back from talking to the other detective and crooked his finger at Cynthia to join him outside. Anna had heard some urgent whispering but been unable to make out what Walt was saying to Cynthia. They had both come back into the interview room and he had said, ‘Oh, just checking, Anna . . . you said Caro just popped over to see you, right? You had no idea she was coming?’
‘No, I didn’t know she was coming,’ Anna had said. ‘She often just popped over for a chat.’ She had not been concentrating as she said the words. She hadn’t noticed the way Cynthia and Walt were looking at her.
‘Well, Anna,’ Walt had said slowly, ‘that’s not what Caroline Harman says. She says you knew she was coming over. She says you called her and asked her to come over, in fact.’
Anna had been unable to prevent a small gasp.
That small detail, that tiny detail, was something she had not tho
ught about at all.
She had tried to deny it at first, to turn it back on Caro, but that hadn’t worked.
‘No, I . . . I . . . I didn’t. I didn’t call her.’
‘She says you did, Anna. She’s very clear about that, and what I would like to know is why you told us she was just dropping over for a visit if you actually knew she was coming?’
‘She’s the one who’s lying,’ Anna had said. ‘She knows she’s going to go to jail for this and she’s trying to find a way to make it all my fault.’
But Walt had not accepted this. He had sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. ‘Try. Again. Anna,’ he had said and Anna had felt a chill at his words. She was fourteen again and trying to get out of detention for not finishing her homework. She was seventeen and lying to her mother about sleeping at a friend’s. She was a child caught in an adult world that she didn’t know how to navigate.
‘Maybe I forgot that I called her,’ she said and had been relieved when Walt nodded. She’d said the right thing, but then he’d continued to badger her about why she had forgotten, as though he’d missed everything she’d told him about that day. And now, ten minutes later, he was still asking the same questions.
‘Did you lie about calling Caro and, if so, why?’
‘Can you tell me any reason why you’d lie about calling Caro to come over?’
‘Is there some reason why you felt the need to lie about calling Caro to come over?’
‘Explain it to me again. Why did you lie?’
‘I told you,’ says Anna, frustrated still to be answering the same question. ‘I forgot! I didn’t lie, I haven’t lied, I don’t lie! I just forgot. It had been a long, bad day and I just forgot. Okay?’
‘Not really,’ says Walt.
Anna tries again. ‘I’ve told you what a bad day it was. I’ve explained about how difficult she’d been. I just forgot, okay?’
‘No, not okay, Anna. According to what you’ve been telling us, you forgot you’d called Caro to come over, and you forgot to lock the door behind you so Maya wouldn’t run out of the house. Are you usually such a forgetful person?’
‘I . . . no . . . it was just a . . .’
‘I know, Anna, it was just a bad day. But no matter how bad a day it was, some things are not adding up. If you knew she was coming over, you knew that a car would be coming and, judging by how close your houses are, you knew she would be coming soon. Why had you allowed Maya outside the front of the house if she didn’t understand that she shouldn’t run into the road?’
Anna opens her mouth to speak but Walt holds up his hand to silence her.
‘I don’t think you forgot. I think you’ve known all this time that Caro didn’t simply pop over for a visit. You wanted her there. What was the reason, Anna? Why did you want her there?’
‘I didn’t want her there. I never . . . I never asked her to come.’
‘You did, Anna, you called her to come over, and now you’re lying about that, even though you’ve just admitted it. Why are you lying?’
‘You can’t keep saying that!’ yells Anna. ‘It wasn’t a lie. I’m not lying. I just forgot. I must have made the call when Maya was quiet for two minutes, and then she went off again and I forgot.’
‘If she went off again,’ says Cynthia, ‘then why did you leave the front door open to go and get the post? Surely if she was hysterical, you wouldn’t have chosen that moment to go and get the post?’
Cynthia’s voice is still soft and her body is still relaxed. ‘Good cop, bad cop?’ thinks Anna. ‘How fucking stupid. I’m not an idiot.’ She feels a surge of anger—How dare they?—but behind that is her grief pushing forward. Always pushing forward.
‘She was . . . she . . . I don’t know . . . okay. I don’t fucking know because I can’t remember, because I’ve forgotten everything that happened that day except for the sound of the car hitting my child’s body. That I can remember. I can describe it for you, if you like. I can tell you exactly what metal hitting flesh sounds like because that’s the one thing I will never forget. I can explain about the crack I heard as her head hit the road, and how I knew even as I cradled her body that it was too late. I’ve seen what happens when a head hits the pavement, I‘ve watched on the news what happens. So, would you like me to explain that to you? Do you want me to describe it in every detail, because it plays over and over in my head all day long? I won’t forget that. Never, never, never!’
Anna puts her head down on the table and gives into the despair that always follows her around. She doesn’t care about keeping it together, she just wants this to be over. She doesn’t cry quietly, she sobs, and can hear herself almost howling. Part of her is ashamed of her lack of dignity but she can’t seem to stop. The agony goes on and on.
Cynthia and Walt sit in silence. They say nothing and do nothing, and part of Anna wonders at their cruelty. Surely they should be trying to comfort her, but neither of the detectives moves, and, as she grows calmer, Anna realises that they are waiting for her to lift her head and confess everything to them. They think they’ve broken through her defences, that they’ve found a way to get to the truth, but they’ve done no such thing.
When her tears have stopped, she keeps her head down, not wanting to look at either of them. ‘I’m going home now,’ she says.
There is another moment of silence. Anna can almost feel the conversation between the two detectives that must be taking place in gestures and signs. She knows Cynthia will be telling Walt to back off . . . she’s the good cop, after all.
She thinks about getting a lawyer. She sees herself returning tomorrow with a man or woman in a sharp suit, who will sit by her side and say, ‘She’s not going to answer that,’ every time Walt asks her a question. The thought is a comfort, even though she has no idea how to even go about finding the right kind of lawyer.
‘You’ll have to come back tomorrow,’ says Walt. ‘I’m sorry, Anna, but we do have to discuss this again. We do have to have the truth.’
‘Fine,’ says Anna and lifts her head. She is sure she must look terrible. She wipes her cheek and sniffs.
‘It’ll be all right, Anna,’ says Cynthia softly. ‘Get a good night’s sleep and we’ll start again tomorrow.’
‘Yes,’ says Walt, and he leans forward and pats her hand, like he hadn’t just badgered her until she cried. ‘Get a good night’s sleep and we’ll start again.’
Anna nods and stands up. She leaves the interview room silently. ‘That’s what I was trying to do,’ she thinks as she walks out into the late afternoon sunshine. ‘I was trying to start again.’
Chapter Fourteen
Caro lies in the dark, staring at the ceiling. She curses the fact that she is awake, sweating, shaking and nauseous. Her skin is itchy, and she is hot, and cold, and hot again.
She should never have chosen Roman blinds for the windows—they allow the light from the street to come in. She and Geoff have owned the house for twelve years, and decorating it, making choices about paint colours and carpets and curtains, made Caro feel like an adult for the first time in her life.
She had painted one of the spare bedrooms pink and one blue, in preparation for the perfect family she would have. It had never occurred to her that something as simple as having children would turn out to be so complicated.
‘Idiot,’ she sometimes says to herself as she walks past the empty blue bedroom.
Geoff doesn’t understand why she has a problem with the small cracks of light but Caro likes it to be too dark for her to see her hand in front of her face. She fantasises briefly about getting out of bed and ripping the blinds off the window, which would, she knows, be counterproductive, but she wants to rip, tear, shred . . . something.
She would like to smash her fist through the window, or pick up a chair and throw it through the glass. She would like there to be noise and turmoil, to hear the tinkling of broken glass and the crack of demolished wood. She wants something to happen that others can see—
something that would demonstrate what was going on inside her, something that would show the destruction, because that is how she feels: destroyed. She cannot fathom a way forward for her life.
She turns on her side, and then covers her face with her hands as she relives the horror of throwing up in front of the two detectives. The shame of it is unbearable. The lack of control, the churning of her insides and the smell come back to her. She moans.
It had certainly ended the interview. Caro had sat back in her chair, heaving and sweating, and seen the unmistakable disgust on both detectives’ faces. ‘Fuck you,’ she had wanted to say but had not had the energy. Detective Sappington had nodded at her and said, ‘We’ll pick this up again tomorrow.’ She had left the room quickly, leaving Brian to offer water and tissues, and organise for her to get home. Everyone in the station had turned to look at her as he led her out—everyone including a man holding a mop and bucket to clear away the evidence of her humiliation.
She hadn’t bothered saying that she could drive. She could barely walk.
A uniformed policeman had driven her home. Caro had not been able to talk to Lex or Geoff, who were sitting in the kitchen sharing a pizza.
‘I was so worried,’ Geoff had said when she walked in but he hadn’t moved from his place at the table. Instead, he had put his hand on Lex’s shoulder, as if to remind Caro that she was sitting there.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Caro. ‘I’m not done. I have to go back tomorrow. I need to sleep.’