Blame (11 page)

She thought about what happened like it had been someone else in the car, someone else who had felt the heavy thud of Maya's body against the metal. Someone else had watched Anna's mouth form a scream. Someone else had leapt from the car and stared down in stupefied horror at Maya lying on the road.

Caro had stepped away from it sip by sip and waited for it all to go away, but now they were talking about it at Lex's school and on the internet, which meant that it was everywhere. She had known that there would be an article or two but had assumed the story would disappear with the news cycle, but it hadn't. She could drink an ocean of alcohol and it still would not change the facts or alter the truth. There was no way to make it disappear. No way for it to somehow be someone else driving the car, someone else who'd hit a child. There was no way for it to be someone else.

Why hadn't she considered the internet? Whispers, rumours, speculation and accusations all found a home on it.

She understood now that she would never be able to walk through the school gates, or sit in a parent–teacher interview, or watch a school concert, without someone looking at her and judging her. There would be looks in the supermarket and at the petrol station, glances of recognition as people tried to place where they'd seen her face and what they'd heard about her.

She had been so wrapped up in the loss of Anna, and in her own pain and fear, that she had almost forgotten about the world outside her front door. That first night, she had left her car where it was because the police had told her she had no choice.

‘You'll have to come with me to the hospital to be tested for drugs and alcohol,' the policeman had said. ‘Is there anyone you'd like to call?'

‘No,' Caro had replied because she needed to keep it secret, thought she could keep it secret. The policeman had dropped her home hours later, and she had stumbled into the house to find Lex on the couch, clutching her childhood rag doll, all the lights blazing, and Geoff pacing up and down with the phone in his hand. She had turned off hers while she waited to have the blood tests. She knew her family would be worrying but she needed to sit and think.

‘Where have you been? What happened? You look . . . what happened, Caro?'

‘An accident,' she had said to Geoff over and over again, and even as she spoke, she was pulling the bottle of vodka
out of the freezer, filling a glass and drinking it down, trying to distance herself.

‘An accident,' she kept saying. But that wasn't what everyone else was saying.

Everyone was talking about it at school.
The accident had been on the news but she hadn't seen it, hadn't read about it. Geoff had passed on the details. Kindly? Cruelly? She had done very little since Anna screamed, ‘You killed her, you killed my baby!' at her before Keith pulled her into the car with him. Very little except drink.

‘I want to go with her,' Anna had shouted as Keith grabbed at her. He had arrived home at the same time as the ambulance pulled up outside their house. He always got home at six. He had pulled to a screeching halt behind Caro's car, the police car and the ambulance, and leapt out, leaving the motor running. Caro had been holding Anna, and she had watched the policeman pull Keith away from the paramedics and talk quickly, urgently, to him.

It was less than a minute later—less than, more than, Caro had no idea—that suddenly the ambulance doors were closed, and Keith was pulling Anna away and snarling at Caro, ‘Get away from us!'

‘I need to be with her, I need to be with her,' said Anna.

‘They need room to move, Anna; just get in the fucking car.'

‘I'll come with you,' Caro had said.

‘Get away from us,' said Keith. The ambulance started its lights, its sirens and its race to the emergency department.

Once Caro was home from the hospital, she had felt a creeping paralysis in her body. She couldn't move, couldn't think. But what she could do . . . was drink.

And now everyone was talking about it at school
. It shouldn't matter, it should be the least of her worries, but it did matter.

Caro had not wanted to continue the discussion with Lex. She had wanted her daughter to leave the room, so that she could pour herself another drink. ‘I can't . . .' she had thought, ‘I just can't.'

She had summoned the last of her energy, and stood a little straighter so that she could look down at her daughter. ‘Alexa,' she said, lowering her voice, so Lex had to take a step or two closer to her and had to be quiet herself to hear what Caro was saying, ‘I don't have to explain anything to you. It was an accident, and you'll get into the car with me because you have no choice.'

‘Dad can take me.'

‘Dad has to go to work; now, I'm not talking about this anymore. I'm the mother and I'm in charge! I'm fucking in charge, okay!'

And then Lex had sworn at her. ‘Fuck off and die. I hate you!' She had whirled around and run for the living room door, sobbing as she went.

‘What's going on here?' Geoff had said coming in from the kitchen, where he was cooking dinner. He hadn't even given Caro time to answer, running after his daughter instead.

The argument had tipped the balance in Lex's favour. Her father had driven her to school this morning.

‘Mrs Harm . . . Caroline,' says Susan, and Caro puts any thoughts of Lex away for now and continues with her tale. The story of her and Anna meeting is a different, better place for her to be. The Caroline she was then is so different from the Caro she is now that she's sure she would have laughed if someone had told her how her life would look ten years in the future. ‘That would never happen to me,' she would have said, ‘I'm not that kind of person.'

Now she's not sure what kind of a person she is. Not sure at all. She rubs her hand across her forehead and starts speaking again. She needs to get this done.

‘When Anna came out of the clinic office with Maya, she didn't look at me. I could see that she wanted to get out of there as quickly as she could. She put Maya in the pram—well, almost dropped her—and Maya screamed and arched her back, and Anna pushed her down and strapped her in. The other mothers in the waiting room didn't even pretend to be talking about something else. Their heads were together, and they were whispering to each other as they watched Anna. She was biting her lip while she forced the straps over Maya's body, and I could see she was going to hurt herself, or hurt Maya, but I didn't know what to do to help her. Maya was . . . was scary. She was so out of control.

‘Finally I heard the click of the straps and then Anna stood up. She didn't look at anyone. She pushed the pram
towards the double glass doors that led outside and then tried to use the pram to push them open. That obviously wasn't going to work but Maya was screaming so much that I don't think Anna could think straight. I don't think anyone could think straight with noise like that. Lucille called in the next mother, and I watched Anna bumping against the glass doors and got up and went over to help her. “Watch her,” I said to the other mothers and pointed to Lex.

‘Once Anna was outside, she turned around to, I guess, say thanks for the help or something but then she just burst into tears and,
voilà
, a friendship was born.

‘I felt so awful for her. It was like looking at a drowning person and knowing they were about to go under for the last time. “Wait for me, we'll talk when I'm done. Go for coffee or something,” I said.

‘She started to shake her head but then she started nodding. “I'll wait,” she said. “I'll walk her around and try to get her to watch the video again. I'll get her to calm down. I'll wait.”

‘I was the last one to go in to see the nurse, so Anna had to wait for me for at least half an hour, and when I came out, I was almost sure that she would have given up and gone home, but she was still there, walking back and forth in front of the clinic. Maya was quiet by then, watching her video like she'd never started screaming in the first place.'

‘Mrs Harman—Caro —I'm just trying to work out why you're telling us all this,' says Detective Sappington and, to Caro, she sounds bored.

Sucked in
, Caro wants to say,
you have to listen
. ‘I'm telling you,' she says in the voice she used to explain things to Lex when she was a toddler, ‘because, as I've already explained, you need to hear the whole story. You need to know that I was there for Anna from the time Maya was twelve months old and, believe me, it's difficult to be friends with someone who has a child like Maya. It's not as if we could just hang out in a coffee shop or a park, because she never knew when Maya was going to go off. Anna had this sleep machine at home that made a loud static noise Maya loved and that would instantly calm her down but it wasn't like she could take that out with her; and she had the DVD player but there was always a chance the battery would go flat, or that Maya would drop it and break it. She was only a baby. I think they must have gone through at least twelve of those things before she was two.

‘So, when I tell you that I love Anna and that, after a while, I even loved Maya, you need to know that it's the truth, and you also need to know there's no way I would ever have done anything to hurt Anna, never ever.'

‘And yet, she's blaming you for Maya's death,' says Detective Ng quietly.

Caro feels the weight of the words on her shoulders. She thinks about the bottle of vodka in her freezer. She swallows. ‘I can't,' she thinks but knows she has no choice. Oblivion is not an option right now.

‘I know, I know she's blaming me. Everyone is blaming me but I'm not the one who . . . who killed Maya. I was
driving the car, yes, but I'm not the one who killed her. I know that what I'm saying is strange, that you can't understand it, but let me explain, let me keep explaining, and then it'll be your job to figure out who's telling the truth—me or Anna.'

‘Yes,' says Detective Sappington. ‘That's exactly what my job is.'

Chapter Seven

‘Is Caro here?' Anna asks Walt.

‘I don't know,' he says, but then he looks at Cynthia and Anna knows that she is.

‘I bet she was late,' she says. ‘She always runs late. Whenever we met up anywhere, I'd tell her to get there fifteen minutes earlier than I was going to be there, and then she'd phone me frantically when she thought she was already fifteen minutes late and I'd say, “Don't worry, I'm just arriving.”'

Anna pushes her hand against her chest, where her heart is. ‘I miss her so much,' she says, and she knows that Walt and Cynthia will assume she's talking about Maya, but she's not.

‘Anna, would you like something to eat?' asks Walt.

‘I . . . don't know. I'm not really hungry. How long have I been here?'

‘Just a couple of hours but we can send out for some sandwiches, maybe take a break. You can come back tomorrow, if you like.'

‘No . . . I don't want to wake up again with this hanging over my head. I want to finish this. I'd like to have the time to . . . to . . . I don't know, grieve, I guess. I just want some peace and quiet. I don't want to have to talk to anyone anymore. I don't want to have to explain how I'm feeling or what happened. I just want to be left alone.

‘I never thought I would survive her funeral. I couldn't stand having to speak to everyone, having to say, “Thank you for coming,” to every single person. You're not supposed to bury your child. Everyone says that, and when you do, it feels . . . it feels like one of those movies where the characters realise they're about to die because a tsunami is on the way, and there's nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. It feels like it is literally the end of the world. You're not supposed to survive the end of the world, Detective. I'm not supposed to be sitting here.'

‘Anna, are you thinking about hurting yourself?' Cynthia asks quietly, as though she is making her way along a ledge towards her.

‘Hurting myself? You mean, killing myself, don't you? Every day. I think about it every day.'

‘Are you talking to anyone, to anyone who can help you?' she asks.

‘As I just told you, I haven't stopped talking. I find myself comforting others without meaning to. My mother, who never really had much to do with Maya, has been over every day, and every day she sits on my couch and cries all day long. I think she enjoys it. And she's joined by my mother-in-law and my sisters-in-law. I make tea for everyone. Black tea for my mother, and green tea for my mother-in-law, and chai tea for my sisters-in-law. Lots and lots of tea. And, of course, there's cake and biscuits as well. My neighbour, Merle, dropped off a chocolate fudge cake. It was really good. I ate it at two o'clock one morning. I ate the whole cake.' Anna stops talking because she realises she is rambling; talking about nothing so she can think about nothing.

She is about to apologise again but doesn't. She is so sick of apologising. ‘It's easier to be in the kitchen because when they see me, they crumble,' she says. ‘I don't know what to say. I want to scream at them all to leave me alone but I think Keith prefers to have people around. It stops him from confronting me with accusations and blame.'

‘Why do you think he blames you?' asks Walt. He had begun doodling again but now his hand stills. Anna can feel a change in the atmosphere. She has Walt's full attention now.

‘Well, I was with her, wasn't I? I opened the front door to go out and get the post, and I left it open. I knew she was upset. I knew she liked to run when she was upset but I still left it open.'

‘Why did you leave it open? I'm sorry, that's a hard question to answer, but I have to ask it,' says Walt.

‘Why?' says Anna and she feels hot tears on her cheeks again. ‘Here I go again. Just give me a few moments.