Blame

by Nicole Trope

  ‘No, Anna,’ says Caro. ‘Don’t say that. Take it back, please take it back.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Caro,’ says Anna. Her words come out as a wail. ‘I didn’t mean it, I don’t know what happened. I pushed her. I tried to pull her back, I did, but I pushed her first. I pushed her.

  ‘I pushed her.

  ‘I pushed her.

  ‘I pushed her.’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ‘Pick-up, pick-up, pick-up,’ says Gabe.

  ‘Not now, baby, Mummy’s not feeling well. Go to Lexie.’

  ‘Come here, Gaby, baby; Lexie will pick you up.’

  Caro watches as Lex reaches down and picks up her little brother, and then smiles when Gabe snuggles into her shoulder, as he has done virtually since the day he was born.

  ‘A fifteen-year-old sister, that’s useful,’ the nurse in the hospital had said. ‘I bet you’re going to help Mum out with this little one.’

  ‘I am,’ Lex had beamed. She’d been holding Gabe at the time, and Caro and Geoff had watched the two of them in wonder. ‘He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’ Lex had said.

  ‘Second only to you, my darling,’ Caro had replied.

  The blue room is no longer painted blue. Its walls are pale yellow and decorated with animal decals and it’s always messy. This morning Caro had watched Gabe march his dinosaurs across the carpet to attack his train set. He doesn’t like his teddies anymore, except for the small blue one he sleeps with at night. It’s the teddy he has always slept with, ever since Geoff brought it home from work and placed it in his cot. ‘Something that belonged to his brother,’ he said. And Caro had closed her eyes and thought of Gideon for a moment.

  ‘Mum, I’m hungry. I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting,’ says Gabe now.

  ‘Told you, you should have packed a snack,’ says Lex.

  ‘I know,’ Caro replies, ‘but I thought we’d get here and the gate would open, and then we could all go for lunch. I didn’t know we’d have to wait for so long. Let me check my purse . . . oh, great—here you go, Gabe—a muesli bar.’

  ‘Don’t wanna muesli bar.’

  ‘Then you’re not really hungry,’ says Lex. ‘Why don’t you and I go for a walk to that park over there? Mum, call me when she’s out.’

  ‘Okay, love, thanks.’

  Caro knows she should have left Lex and Gabe at home but she’d felt she needed her children with her today. Even though the presence of her children may cause some pain, even though they will be a reminder of what has been lost, she needed them with her. She turns to watch them walking hand in hand to the park, two beautiful copper-haired children. ‘My babies,’ she thinks, sending up a prayer of thanks, as she had done every day for the past three years since Gabe was born.

  ‘What do you mean you’re pregnant?’ Geoff had said when she told him. ‘Aren’t you too old?’

  ‘Women do have babies in their forties, Geoff. I didn’t plan this but we have been . . . you know.’

  Geoff had smiled and puffed out his chest a little.

  ‘Men,’ thought Caro.

  Since she’d been released from prison, it had felt like she and Geoff were starting again. They couldn’t seem to keep their hands off each other.

  ‘Gross,’ Lex said whenever she walked past them but Caro always caught a small smile on her daughter’s face. Parents who held hands were better than parents separated by prison gates.

  Caro had spent eighteen months in prison and was still on a good behaviour bond. She would never take another drink. Not ever. Her commitment to rehabilitation had meant she got out earlier than the three years she was sentenced to. The day she went into prison she had been clean and sober for six months. She had found herself tested every day during the long months of waiting for her trial to begin and then once that was over, waiting to be sentenced. When she looks back at those months now they have a surreal, dreamlike quality to them. They could have happened to someone else. Some days she knows that she attended two Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a day because the urge to drink was so strong that she felt like she couldn’t breathe. She had felt as though she were under attack. The media chewed over the story, and new articles appeared on the internet every day. Caro and Geoff had to re-mortgage the house to pay for bail and a defence lawyer. And Lex had refused to speak to Caro as she dealt with taunts at school and having her whole life exposed. ‘We’ll get through this,’ she can remember saying to Geoff over and over again but now she can remember little else about that time.

  Her final reading was 0.06. It was considered at the low end of the range but she had still been over the limit. Caro had written the number down over and over again, in notebooks and on the back of shopping lists and on scrap pieces of paper that she’d placed in the freezer where her vodka used to be. Eventually she couldn’t go anywhere in the house without seeing the number. ‘Just stop it, stop it,’ Lex had screamed at her one day when she found her compulsively scribbling the number on the pad of paper used for telephone messages. But Caro knew that she needed to see the number every day.

  ‘You’re torturing yourself,’ said Geoff. ‘Please stop.’

  ‘I can’t, Geoff, not yet,’ she had replied. When she went into prison she’d stuck it up on the wall of her small cell. The number looked at her every day and she looked back, realising that the line between where she was and where she had been was as thin as .01.

  Even though she had spilled the wine, even though she had remembered having only two shots, there had clearly been more or she wouldn’t have been over the limit. Blood tests could not be disputed but memory could be.

  She now has the number stuck to the fridge at home.

  When her prison sentence finally began she was relieved. She wanted it over but she also knew that the temptation of alcohol would be kept at bay by the prison gates. She had not been able to meet anyone’s eye for the first month of her sentence, believing that even in prison she was being judged for her terrible crime. She hated the routine of early mornings and all the sirens that chopped the days into pieces and head counts that made her feel like a child. But she was also grateful for it. Every morning she would wake up and counsel herself that all she needed to get through was breakfast before the siren sounded for work, and then all she needed to do was get through until lunch, and so on until the day was over. Then she could close her eyes and think about Geoff and Lex, worry about them and miss them. Once she was used to her surroundings she allowed herself to be drawn into conversations with the other women there and she found, not judgement, but understanding that there are mistakes people can make that change the course of their lives and the lives of others. Mistakes that had to be paid for but that could, eventually, be relegated to the past. She understood quickly that the only way she would survive her sentence was if she hung onto the possibility of a future where she could put her crime behind her.

  Caro had made up her mind to use her time in prison constructively. It was a low-security prison, which focused on rehabilitation, and she had taken advantage of everything. She’d worked in the prison garden and learned basic first aid and she’d taken courses on business administration and marketing and computers. And she had written Geoff and Lex emails every day. She’d had to get used to them being scrutinised by the guards but after a while she hadn’t cared. She just needed to stay in touch. First, she had apologised, then she had explained, and then she had simply kept writing. It had taken Lex six months to reply. Six months of Caro getting up every day with her heart in her mouth, wondering if today would be the day that her daughter chose to forgive her.

  The first email had been brief: Okay. I get it. They had gotten longer over time, though. Some of Lex’s emails were hard to read, like those where Lex told her how difficult it was at school because she was never allowed to forget that her mother was in prison. It made Caro’s heart break for her child and sent her spiralling into intense self-recrimination; but in other emails Lex talked about books she was r
eading and movies she’d seen. Caro would write down the names of the books she mentioned and try to find them in the prison library so she and Lex could discuss them.

  Geoff had never given up on her. He tried to write to her every day as well but was busy raising Lex alone and working. Caro tried not to let the guilt of being away from her family eat away at her, tried to see that her life was moving forward.

  She also wrote to Anna, but never sent the emails. She was afraid of what her reaction would be, and also didn’t know whether she would be allowed emails where she was.

  One day in computer class, they had been learning about blogging as a way of journaling and Caro had decided, on a whim, to start her own blog. She called it The Recovering Mummy. She hadn’t believed that anyone would ever read it and so had poured her heart out to the computer. She had talked about her appalling crime and about how she had let down her family, and about all the things that had led to her drinking.

  One week after she started the blog, she had ten followers. The prison warden had been unsure of what to do. ‘This may be seen as profiting from the proceeds of crime,’ she said.

  ‘But I’m not making any money. I’m just writing. I won’t reply if you tell me I can’t.’

  ‘We have to be able to monitor every post, but we’ll see how it goes,’ she said.

  Caro had been grateful for the chance and she had kept writing, hoping that her story might help even one person struggling to get through the day.

  One week later, the number had jumped to a hundred, and by the time she was released from prison, she had thousands following her. Now she talked to people all over the world, and worked to get them help. Out in the suburbs, there were so many women suffering and hiding their addictions, and because Caro was one of them, they trusted her. She’s had to learn about all forms of addiction and consult with doctors each time she writes about prescription medication or gambling or alcohol. Some posts are just about being a mother with two children, about getting through the laundry and the shopping and the cleaning but many are about the secret lives of those struggling to cope with the everyday world. Now, she was even making money from having advertising on her blog. Geoff liked to joke that he was on his way to being a ‘kept man’. Caro was wary of the possibility of accusation that she was benefiting from her crime but her parole officer had assured her that she’s in the clear on that. She funnelled a fair amount of money to halfway houses and charities that helped recovering addicts.

  Sometimes at night, Caro lay in bed in the dark and cried at her good fortune.

  The stigma of having gone to prison for drink driving and for killing a child would never leave her. At Lex’s school she would always be the mother who had fucked up so spectacularly. But now she was also the mother who had changed her life for the better.

  One week after her release, she had gone alone to pick up Lex from school. She could have simply stayed in the car, knowing that Lex would find her, but she had chosen to get out, chosen to go and stand right in the middle of the throng of mothers at the gate. She had stood on her own, and felt how the silence around her grew and grew and was then filled with whispers. She had lifted her chin and tensed her muscles. She repeated in her head, ‘I can do this.’ She imagined herself on top of a pile of wood and felt the whispers burning her. The muscles in her back tightened and a headache threatened but she didn’t move until Lex emerged from school.

  When Lex saw her, she stopped.

  ‘I’ll come out to the car,’ she had said the night before and Caro had said she would wait for her, but she knew that this needed to be done.

  For a moment, Lex had stared at her, and then Caro had seen her lift her chin the same way she had always done, and she had walked to her mother and kissed her on the cheek.

  After that, Caro had gone every day to stand by the school gates and had felt her presence become less and less interesting, until one day one of her old acquaintances, Leeann, had broken off from her huddle and come over to her.

  ‘You’re looking really well,’ Leeann had said.

  ‘I’m feeling pretty good,’ said Caro.

  ‘I’ve read your blog . . . it’s really good.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We’re thinking of starting a book club, so we can read all the books our kids are reading. It’s a bit silly but we want to be prepared. Did you maybe want to join us?’

  ‘Yes, what a lovely idea,’ Caro had said.

  It was not forgiveness for what she had done, but rather acceptance of how far she had come. Caro was humbled by Leeann’s choice to step forward and end her exclusion from the school community and she and Leeann had become, if not good friends, then at least close acquaintances. Sometimes Leeann would say something about her husband or about a bad day and it would make Caro realise again that few people were getting through the day without having to fight their own demons.

  The desire for a drink was still there, would always be there. She attended meetings once a week at least, and when she felt more stressed than usual, went twice, or even three times, a week.

  The day before her first scan when she was pregnant with Gabe, she had stood outside a bottle shop for an hour, fantasising about going in. Eventually, she had called Geoff at work. ‘I can’t move,’ she said. ‘Help me, I can’t move.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ he had replied. ‘Hold on.’

  ‘Can you see there?’ said the ultrasound technician, ‘there’s your baby’s heartbeat. It’s nice and strong, just what you want.’

  ‘It won’t last,’ she had said to Geoff in the car on the way home.

  ‘Maybe not, but maybe, just maybe it will. I know that you’re prepared for the worst and I can’t think any other way either but would it be so bad to include a few positive thoughts along with our worst case scenario thinking?’

  ‘No,’ Caro had agreed, ‘not so bad.’

  As her pregnancy with Gabe continued, she felt like she’d go mad. ‘It would almost be a relief if it ended now,’ she told Geoff one night when she was five months pregnant. ‘I’ve done this before. I can handle it. I don’t know how much longer I can handle holding onto hope.’

  ‘You can handle it just like Lex and I are handling it, Caro; just like they tell you to do at your meetings. One day at a time.’

  And she had.

  Holding a healthy baby in her arms had seemed almost too miraculous to believe but Gabe was here to stay.

  ‘Look, the doors are opening,’ says Lex, she and Gabe having returned from the park without Caro realising.

  Anna had agreed to be checked into a psychiatric facility for an indeterminate period. It was that or go to prison. Once she had admitted to pushing Maya in front of the car, she had not been able to stop.

  ‘I pushed her, I pushed her, I pushed her,’ she had wailed over and over again, and Caro recalled how nothing anyone at the police station said could induce her to stop or get up off the floor. Eventually, Walt had picked her up and put her on a couch. An ambulance had been called. Keith had been called. Anna had repeated her sin over and over, seemingly not even stopping to breathe until the paramedics gave her a shot of something that made her subside into silence.

  Before she went to prison, Caro had reached out to Keith but he hadn’t answered any of her emails or phone messages, and she didn’t blame him.

  Caro had read articles about Anna’s story on the internet. ‘Mothers in this situation often lack support from the medical community, or from their own communities,’ was a quote that made Caro wince every time she thought about it. ‘I tried,’ she would say to herself. ‘I tried.’

  Caro holds her breath as she watches a woman emerge from the building.

  It is Anna. She is as thin as Caro has ever seen her, but she walks with her shoulders back and, as she comes closer, Caro can see an uncertain smile on her face.

  She had been shocked to receive the first letter from Anna six months ago. She had nearly thrown out the plain blue envelope with the junk mail
until she looked at it more closely.

  I’ve been following your blog. I’m not allowed to send emails but I am allowed on the computer under supervision. I googled you and found your blog. I wanted to see how you were and I wanted to apologise. I can almost see the shock on your face because ‘sorry’ seems like such an inadequate, simplistic word. It’s taken me a long time to get to the place where I was ready to apologise. I read the words you write and I can hear your voice and I miss you. I can see why so many people follow you. You have a way of making everything seem . . . well, not fine but perhaps bearable? That’s what you did for me even when your own life was so not bearable. I don’t think you knew how much you meant to me, how much your words and your listening ear meant to me. I should have told you. I hope you know now. Every comment that says you are a ‘lifesaver’ is true. It’s what you do, Caro. You see someone hurting and in pain and you step in to see how you can help.

  I betrayed that in you. I betrayed your help and your kindness and your patience and your friendship.

  I betrayed my daughter and my husband. I betrayed myself.

  It’s taken me years to admit these things, to admit what I did. I should have asked for help. I know that now. You did your best but you had your own child and Keith did his best but it was all too much for me. I should have shouted as loud as I could that I wasn’t coping but I didn’t know how to explain it. You’re supposed to love your child no matter who they are or how much they hurt you. I still can’t really explain what happened but all I can say is that not every woman is meant to be a mother and not every child can be loved. It sounds terrible but I have to admit the truth if I’m going to build a life for myself when I leave this place in a few months. I don’t know if you heard but Keith filed for divorce as soon as I left home. I understand that. I don’t blame him. Our marriage was over anyway. My mother told me that he has remarried and has a child. Apparently she is fine, so maybe the faulty gene lay with me. I wish him well, I really do. My mother has visited me every month while I’ve been here and she is waiting for me to get out so I can come and stay with her. We have a lot more to talk about now. We both failed at being mothers. I’m not saying that for sympathy. It’s a fact. It’s a fact that I needed to accept about myself and now that I have, I feel as though I can move on with my life. I know that people have said that all I needed was more support from those around me but I’m not sure about that. I don’t know if there could ever have been enough support for me to be able to deal with Maya as she got bigger and older and stronger. There are some very special people in the world raising children with enormous difficulties but I wasn’t meant to be one of them.