by Nicole Trope
‘It’s getting late, Anna,’ says Walt, looking at his watch. Anna looks at the detectives and, for a moment, forgets what she was saying. Then she nods like she understands. She knows what he wants her to talk about, she knows where he wants her to go, but she’s not stupid. She’ll draw this out for as long as she can because she can’t explain what happened on her front lawn two weeks ago. She remembers what she was wearing, and she can feel the heat of the sun, smell the cut grass next door, but when she thinks about the last moments of Maya’s life, the back of her head pricks with pins and needles. ‘Was that me?’ she thinks. ‘Was that really me?’
Once Maya had stopped screaming, Anna had sat listening to the soft thumping sound for at least an hour. The whole house was silent, and even though Maya was locked in her room, far away from where Anna was sitting, the thump, thump, sound began to fill the house until it was the only thing Anna could hear. She felt it eating into her, taking her over. Thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump.
She had tried turning on the television but hadn’t found anything to watch that was distracting enough. She put her fingers in her ears but the thumping sound grew louder. It seemed to be taking over the whole house. She thought about calling Keith and telling him he needed to come home, but she didn’t want him to know how badly she had fucked up.
‘You can manage her yourself today, can’t you, Anna?’ he had asked when he was getting ready to leave that morning.
‘I manage her myself every day, Keith.’
‘Yes, but she goes to school and there’s therapy after school, and I know that, sometimes, if you have to have her for a whole day, it can be difficult.’
Anna had taken a large sip of her coffee and refrained from answering. Keith went to work every day. Yes, he came home at six and, yes, he helped whenever he could, but he got to escape every single day. He got to have a cup of coffee without worrying about someone knocking it over. He got to go to the bathroom without having to make sure Maya was occupied and the door was locked. He got to just sit and think, without having to always have one eye on his child. Anna had heard other mothers complain about this, about how unequal it was, but the difference, the enormous difference, between her life and other mothers’ lives was that by the time their children had reached the age of six or seven, the complaints slowed, and then they simply stopped and the children became ‘Easy to deal with,’ and ‘Busy with their friends, and ‘On their computers.’
Thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump.
‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ Anna had muttered in time with the thumping.
Thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump.
‘She’ll go to sleep soon,’ she thought.
Thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump.
‘Soon . . . soon.’
Thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump.
Thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump.
‘This is never going to end,’ she said aloud.
She had heard her voice on her mobile phone, asking Caro to come over.
‘I’ll come over,’ Caro had said, or something like that.
‘Yes, come over Caro,’ Anna had said because this was exactly what she wanted to hear. ‘Come over now.’ Then she had switched off her mobile and taken the home phone off the hook.
‘Seven minutes,’ Anna had thought.
Thump . . . pause . . . thump . . . pause . . . thump.
She had stood up and walked to Maya’s room.
‘It’s going to be fine,’ she had whispered, comforting herself, soothing herself. Her voice sounded different. Her body felt different.
She had leaned her head against the door, trying to breathe but feeling the air catch in her throat. She had watched her hands unlock Maya’s bedroom door. Her hands, but not her hands, as her voice, but not her voice, whispered into the air: ‘Fine, fine, it’s going to be fine.’
She had not stayed to see if Maya was okay. She had simply turned and walked to the front door, unlocked it and, leaving it wide open, had stepped outside and breathed in the warm early evening air. Everything shimmered in the heat.
She had only been outside thirty seconds when she felt, rather than saw, Maya. She was standing in the doorway, looking out at the front garden and the road. Anna turned a little to watch her.
‘Come on,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Come on.’
And, in an instant, Maya was off. She bolted forward, but before she could get very far, Anna caught her and held her tightly by the shoulders.
‘I knew you’d try to run,’ she hissed at the child. She could smell her own curdled breath from all the coffee she’d had that day.
‘Why do you have to be like this?’ she asked, shaking her daughter, ‘Why, why, tell me why?’
She started pulling Maya towards the road, yanking at her arms with all her strength as Maya pulled away from her.
‘Say something, Maya,’ she said, her breath coming in short bursts as they fought. ‘Say, “Mum”, Maya. Go on, fucking say the word for once in your life. Say, “Mum,” or say anything, fucking anything at all . . . say, “I’m sorry, Mum.” Why can’t you say it, Maya, why can’t you say it?’
Maya had tried to start screaming again but had already exhausted her voice, and a harsh squeak was all that came out.
‘You hate me, don’t you?’ she said, looking into Maya’s eyes and knowing it was true.
She pulled her towards the road, panting as her daughter fought being touched and held.
She heard a car turn into their road and knew it was Caro’s. She pulled Maya again, and then felt everything drain away so that, inside her, everything was still and quiet and peaceful.
‘Now go,’ she whispered to Maya, ‘Go.’
And she pushed Maya towards the road.
She pushed her hard.
Maya stumbled and turned, and fell right into the road as Caro approached.
Anna watched her.
She watched her stumble.
She watched her trip and then she felt herself start to move. She felt like she’d been slapped. The garden, the road, the car—everything—clicked sharply into focus.
‘What have you done?’ she screamed to herself. ‘What have you done?’
‘Maya, stop; Maya, no; stop, Maya!’ she shouted but Maya was right there as Caro braked, and Anna heard the sound of metal hitting flesh and of the crack as Maya’s head hit the road.
She watched the car hit her.
She watched Maya’s head hit the road.
‘Anna . . .’ says Walt.
‘Yes,’ sighs Anna. ‘I did resent her. I did, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love her and it doesn’t mean I killed her.’
She sits up and shakes her head. ‘What are you thinking?’ she says silently. ‘Get a fucking grip.’
‘Don’t think I don’t know what you’re trying to do!’ she says to Cynthia. ‘You tell me about your bad days, and how you understand how hard it is to be a mother, and then maybe I’ll tell you about my bad days—isn’t that the way this is supposed to work?’
‘Anna, I’m not—’ says Cynthia.
‘You’re not trying to trap me? Of course you are. I didn’t kill my child. My drunk ex-friend did and that’s all there is to it. So, why don’t the two of you just leave me the fuck alone?’ Anna stands up and pushes her chair back. ‘I’m done with this interview. I’m done with dealing with the two of you. Either charge me with something or let’s declare this over.’
‘You’re free to go whenever you want, Anna,’ says Walt.
‘Good, then I’m going.’ Anna pulls open the door of the interview room and stomps out into the corridor.
Anna hears Cynthia sigh and say, ‘Fuck,’ and she’s pleased that she’s pissed off the smug detective, with her averag
e kids and good-looking boyfriend. ‘Fuck her,’ she thinks. Fuck all of them.
Chapter Twenty
‘I’m going to ask you to repeat it one more time, Caro,’ says Susan. ‘Tell me what you saw.’
Caro has already repeated the story three, four, ten times. Her head is pounding, and her mouth is dry, despite the Diet Coke in front of her. She feels she could drink a river and still be thirsty.
‘What I wouldn’t give for a drink,’ she thinks but resists saying anything. She can’t stop now.
She takes another deep breath, ‘I drove up to the house, and saw Maya and Anna fighting on the front lawn, right next to the street. It looked like Anna was trying to drag Maya up the front path to the road.’
‘It looked like it?’
‘It . . . no, it’s what she was trying to do. I don’t know why.’
Caro closes her eyes and sees the violence. She had never really seen Maya hurt Anna, only heard about it afterwards. She has seen cuts and bruises, and sprained wrists and scraped hands. ‘She doesn’t understand what she’s doing,’ said Anna when she was explaining what had happened when Maya shoved her head into the bathroom mirror. ‘She didn’t want to brush her teeth and I pushed too much. I should have known that she was restless, that she’d had a bad day at school, and I should have left it.’
‘How will you cope when she’s older?’ Caro had asked. ‘What will you do?’
They had been sitting in a coffee shop at the time. Anna had a large bandage across her forehead because of the cuts from the mirror’s broken glass.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Keith says we’ll think about it later.’
‘And what do you say?’ asked Caro.
‘Sometimes I hope . . . sometimes I hope she kills me, so it doesn’t have to be my problem,’ Anna had said. Caro hadn’t been able to think of a reply. Anna’s tone was matter of fact and she was not trying to be funny.
‘I started to slow down, but I was watching them and wasn’t concentrating. I braked, I did, but I didn’t brake fast enough.’
‘Your reaction time was slowed,’ says Susan.
Caro sighs. ‘Yes, Detective,’ she says, ‘my reaction time was slowed, but it was shock that did it.’
Susan folds her arms across her chest and says nothing.
Caro hears herself and knows, really understands now, that what had happened came down to a matter of seconds, seconds she didn’t have because she wasn’t fully functioning. If she had registered the fighting and jammed on the brakes, she knows that she would never have seen the inside of this police station, but she hadn’t. Instead, she had stared, in horror, at her friend and her friend’s child wrestling on the front lawn and had kept driving until it was too late. Only when Maya’s body had bounced off her car had she pushed down hard on the brakes. Only then.
‘So, you drive up there, and you see Anna and Maya fighting, and then Anna pushes Maya into the road, and you brake but not hard enough, and you hit her?’
‘Yes,’ says Caro.
‘Do you think Anna was trying to hurt her child? Do you think she planned to push her in front of the car? That she actually planned to do it, and if so, would you swear to this in a court of law?’ asks Susan.
‘In court? Why would I have to go to court?’ A picture forms in Caro’s head of herself and Anna facing each other in court. She has never been inside a courtroom. She can’t imagine looking at her friend and telling a room full of people that Anna had killed her own daughter. It simply wasn’t possible. That’s not what was meant to happen, that’s not what she wanted. She tries to breathe slowly to calm herself but everything is going too fast. She wasn’t drunk, or was she? She saw Anna push Maya, or didn’t she? Her stomach churns and her hands sweat. What was the right answer? What had she done? What was she doing?
Her plan had been to tell the police and have all of this go away. Have all of it go away somehow . . . It had really been no plan at all. She can’t go to court and say Anna killed her own child. How can she do that?
‘No, I couldn’t do that,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t testify against her. She was my friend and she’s lost everything because of . . . No, I couldn’t do that, I just wanted you to understand that it wasn’t all my fault.’
Susan stands up and walks around the table to lean over Caro. ‘Where exactly did you think this was leading, Caro? Have you simply been wasting our time? How did you think you were going to change anything if you’re not willing to tell everyone, including a judge, what you saw, or thought you saw?’ Susan shoves her hands into the pockets of her blue pants. She looks as though she would like to hit Caro.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ asks Caro.
‘No,’ says Susan. ‘I don’t. We don’t . . . right, Brian?’
‘It is hard to understand, Caro,’ he says. ‘You were probably over the limit. I’m afraid I’m also finding all this a little hard to believe. Maybe you think it’s what you saw, but chances are you weren’t really able to judge the situation.’
‘Fine,’ says Caro, shrugging her shoulders. She has done her best. She’s told her story and no one has believed her. Even when she and Geoff had talked about it last night, he had expressed doubt that she had actually seen what she thinks she saw. She will be punished for Maya’s death and rightly so. There is nothing more to say.
‘What now?’ she asks Susan.
‘Now, I’m afraid, we need to charge you with dangerous driving occasioning death.’
‘But what if I wasn’t over the limit?’ asks Caro in a small voice.
‘You were driving the car that hit and killed a child,’ says Susan.
‘Can I call my husband before you do that? Can I call my lawyer?’ Caro knows that Geoff will have to work quickly. They don’t have a lawyer.
Susan and Brian look at each other. ‘You can,’ says Brian. ‘It’s your legal right.’
‘I should have come in here with a lawyer, shouldn’t I?’
‘What’s done is done,’ says Susan, and Caro can see her shuffling this case to the back of her mind. ‘This is my life,’ she wants to say. ‘Can’t you see it imploding as I sit here? Have you no sympathy?’ But as she opens her mouth to speak, she realises that she is not entitled to sympathy. She has killed someone, even if she didn’t mean for it to happen. She cannot go back, and she will not be allowed to get away with this crime. Her only hope now is to keep moving forward, to take her punishment, and hope that when all of this is over, she still has some sort of a life to go back to.
She drops her head into her hands. ‘What am I going to say to Lex?’ she whispers. ‘What am I going to say to my baby?’
But neither of the detectives has an answer for her.
Chapter Twenty-one
Anna marches towards the entrance to the police station, but as she does, the door of another interview room opens and Caro emerges with her own two detectives. She looks . . . broken.
Anna stops. She clenches her fists at her sides because her first instinct has been to put her arms around her friend.
‘If you could just give us a moment, please, Mrs McAllen,’ says the female detective, holding up a hand to indicate that Anna should stay away.
Caro lifts her head and looks at Anna.
Caro is not handcuffed, and the two detectives with her look relaxed, but there is something in the way she stands that makes Anna think of her as a prisoner. Caro’s body language makes her look trapped, her eyes are blank.
Anna remembers Caro on the day they met. She remembers her putting her arms around a woman she didn’t know and waiting for her to finish crying. She remembers her buying coffee and a ridiculously huge slice of chocolate cake for each of them, and letting Anna talk and talk and talk. Caro had thrown her a lifeline—one that she’s been holding onto ever since. And, as she stands looking at the person she regards as her only true friend, Caro, once again, throws her a lifeline.
‘I was over the limit, Anna; you don’t have to worry anymore,’ she
says. ‘I’m so . . . I’m so sorry, Anna. I shouldn’t have come over.’
Anna gasps and feels as though she is cemented to the spot.
‘Let’s just move on,’ says the male detective standing next to Caro, and even though she knows he’s just trying to shift the group out of the corridor, Anna thinks, ‘How can we ever move on?’
‘You killed my child,’ Anna whispers, trying the words out, feeling their rightness. She can feel the burn of anger feeding them, but underneath them, is another thread. She remembers the day Caro took her for the termination. She can see them sitting together in a cafe afterwards. Anna had sipped coffee and hadn’t even tried to stop the tears.
Caro had sat with her hand on Anna’s arm. ‘You’ll get through this,’ she had said over and over again, and what Anna remembers the most is Caro’s lack of judgement. Only months before, she had stood at Caro’s bedside and listened to her friend detail her baby’s last moments. She had listened to her cry and drink, and cry some more, over the months that followed, and yet, when she had told her she needed to have a termination, Caro had only asked, ‘Are you sure?’, and when Anna had nodded emphatically, she had said, ‘I’ll come with you. I’ll be there with you.’
Now, looking at Caro in the hallway, Anna is struck by just how much it would have taken for a woman grieving the death of her own baby to accompany another to a termination. She can’t imagine what must have been going through Caro’s mind.
The detectives begin moving away.
‘Wait,’ says Anna, and they stop and look at her.
‘It wasn’t her fault,’ she says.
‘Mrs McAllen, this is now a matter for the courts. Mrs Harman is going to be charged with dangerous driving occasioning death,’ says the woman detective, and it seems to Anna that she is almost relishing the words.
Anna feels Cynthia behind her. She recognises her perfume. ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ she says again. ‘I called her. I knew she was coming and I let Maya out, and then I . . . I pushed her. I pushed her into the road.’
Anna feels her legs give way and she sinks to the floor. Caro moves away from the detectives and crouches down beside her, holding onto her.