Blame (8 page)

‘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 just 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.

‘One day, about two weeks after the screaming started, Keith's mother came for a visit. She's one of those women they call “earth mothers”. It's like she was born to get pregnant and raise a large family. Keith has five siblings, three brothers and two sisters, and they all have kids. Nothing fazes Estelle. She bakes every day, just like she did when her kids were little, and when they were at school, she was always the class mother, and she helped with homework and sang while she did the dishes.' Anna shakes her head. ‘It sounds ridiculous now when I say it, ridiculous that any mother could be so perfect, but it was the impression Keith gave me. He remembers this really idyllic childhood. According to him, his mother barely ever raised her voice. He and his siblings never fought, and the whole family just loved being with each other. They used to have game nights, where they all played Monopoly in teams, and they all went on holiday together for years and years, until the family was just too big. Like something out of a fucking sitcom . . . oops, I didn't mean to swear.'

Anna can vividly remember her third date with Keith, where they trod the well-worn path of their childhoods. They were in an Italian restaurant, and still wanting to tell each other everything, still excited to share every thought and feeling they'd ever had. Anna had started talking about her mother; complaining, really. ‘It's like I was never completely sure that she loved me,' she told Keith. ‘Even now, I'll call her to say hello and I'll get the feeling that I've interrupted her doing something more important. Do you know what I mean?' But Keith had no idea what she meant, and Anna could see that he was almost incredulous that she should ever question her mother's love.