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Caro still doesn't know what to say to her, but it doesn't matter, because Lex has decided that she's not fit to drive her around anymore, and Caro knows that she is only a small step from deciding she's not fit to parent her anymore.

‘How did this happen?' she thinks as the nausea rises again and she is forced onto her knees once more.

When she finally returns to the interview room, Brian
and Susan are sitting in silence. She can feel the atmosphere is a little charged, as though they've had an argument.

‘I want to apologise again for my remark,' says Susan.

‘It's fine,' says Caro, even though the apology has been anything but gracious. She can see the long day is beginning to wear on everyone, not just her.

‘I'm not feeling very well,' says Caro.

‘I can see that,' says Susan, ‘but I think it's important that we keep going. You don't want to have to come back here tomorrow, I'm sure.'

‘No,' says Caro, but as she says it, it occurs to her that the detectives don't want her to come back tomorrow either, because she may come back with her lawyer and all their questions will remain unanswered.

‘Maybe I need a lawyer,' she says quietly.

Susan immediately scribbles something down on her notepad. Caro fights the urge to lean forward and rip the pad away from her so she can read all the things she's written about her. ‘If you would like a lawyer, Caro,' says Susan in a neutral tone, ‘you can simply tell us and the interview will immediately be over, but I have to tell you that bringing in a lawyer makes this a very formal situation, and formal situations lead to charges and trials. Right now, we're just talking but, as I said, it's up to you.'

‘I don't know,' says Caro, feeling hot and flustered and nauseous again.

‘I tell you what,' says Susan with a smile. ‘Why don't I get us some coffee and biscuits, and maybe even some
chocolate, and you have a think about it. I know I could really use some sugar and it will definitely help you feel better.'

‘Um, okay,' says Caro but she is not sure it is okay—not sure at all.

Chapter Eleven

‘I'm sorry I keep going on about this,' says Anna.

‘It's okay,' says Cynthia. ‘Take your time.'

Walt sits up straight and looks at his watch. ‘It's getting late, Anna, and I can see that you're tired. I think we need to get to the day of the accident, so we can work through what happened.'

‘I don't really want to—' says Anna.

‘Anna,' says Walt, interrupting her, ‘can you tell us why Maya was upset on the day of the accident?' He meets her gaze and Anna feels trapped.

‘I didn't say she was upset,' she says, looking away. She feels a chill run through her. She hadn't said that, had she? She's been so careful.

‘Yes, you did,' says Cynthia gently. ‘Remember you said that you knew she liked to run when she was upset but you still left the front door open.'

‘Would you like to see it on the tape?' says Walt, but Anna shakes her head. She doesn't know why she has let this slip, doesn't know how she is going to explain away the words.

‘She was always upset,' she says, ‘over one thing or another. She liked routine, but not just ordinary routine, strict routine. She preferred to eat the same thing every day, and wear the same thing, and do the same thing. Every morning, she woke up and had to have her toast cut into perfect triangles with the butter spread to the edges. She didn't like eating solid food but I'd managed to get her to eat toast for breakfast. If I didn't cut the triangles correctly, she wouldn't eat it.'

‘Is that what happened on the day of the accident?' asks Walt.

‘What?' says Anna. ‘Oh no, no; I made the toast perfectly that morning. It was Saturday, so she didn't go to school, which meant I had to be really careful to stick to the Saturday routine, and I did, I did stick to it, but in the afternoon, she . . . she was tired or something and she just . . . got angry with me.'

Anna leans forward and rests her head in her hands. She knows what she did to upset Maya. She had been raising an autistic child for nearly twelve years and knew exactly what she had done to set Maya off.

Breakfast had been easy, and then she had switched on the television and Maya had watched the DVD about space. It was the same one she had been watching for ten years. When she was three, Keith had bought twenty copies of the same DVD. They were down to two, but he was going to get a friend of his to burn many many more. As she cleaned up the kitchen, Anna had watched her child. Maya's whole body was relaxed, a smile playing on her lips. She could actually see her breathing slow, as though she were meditating, which, Anna supposed, was exactly what she was doing.

Anna had wiped her cloth across the kettle and then stared at the face reflected back at her. She looked her age. ‘Is this how my life will be ten years from now? Twenty years from now? Forever?' she remembers thinking. It was not a new thought. There had been many times since Maya's diagnosis when she had caught herself thinking the same thing. ‘Take it one day at a time,' her therapists all told her. ‘You can't worry about the future because it will drive you crazy.' But Anna had no idea how not to worry about the future.
Once Maya turned eighteen and left school, where would she go? What would she do? Who would take care of her if her mother and father weren't around?
She asked Keith these questions over and over again. ‘We're a long way from that,' he always said. ‘You never know what could happen. Maybe they'll find a cure, maybe we'll get through to her.'

The fact that after so many years, and so many failures, Keith was still hopeful usually gave Anna a level of peace.
It allowed her to hold onto her own hope for Maya's future; but that morning, as she stacked the plates in the dishwasher, she had realised that nothing would ever change for Maya. It was startling and shocking and it had stopped her in that moment, stopped her completely.

It had happened between her putting one red plastic cup into the dishwasher and reaching for the next red plastic cup. Anna had at least twenty of these cups, meant for small children with clumsy hands. Maya only liked to drink out of red plastic cups, and Anna thought idly that she would probably only like to drink out of red plastic cups for the rest of her life; and in that moment, she had stopped with the cup in her hand, unable to move and barely able to breathe, as she understood that this was, indeed, her life and always would be.

‘Oh,' she had thought, ‘oh no.' She had literally felt hope—the essence of it, the feeling of it, the idea of it—slip away. There was no more hope. There was only the reality of her life, this reality, this reality forever.

With this epiphany had come the understanding that she would never have a peaceful meal in a restaurant without worrying about how Maya was getting on with the family member who had volunteered to babysit. She would never be able to go back to work or to leave the country. She would never travel the world and see all the places she had dreamed of seeing. She would be tied to her child, her damaged child, until she, Anna, died. It wasn't as if she hadn't thought these things before but it was the first time she had understood
them as the absolute truth. There was no way out and no way forward.

She had made herself a strong cup of coffee and drowned four teaspoons of sugar in it. She thought about the school reunion she had attended when Maya was nine. She had stood in the hall, filled with her old school friends, and had nothing to say. Everyone had jobs and multiple children. Everyone was juggling families and work, and there she had stood with only one child, and nothing to do when she was at school but wait for her to come home.

‘So, what do you do when she's at school?' a woman named Marcie had asked. Anna remembered sneaking behind the gym with her for a cigarette when they were both in year twelve.

‘Well, the washing and, you know, just generally tidy up. I don't have time to do anything when she's home because I need to be with her all the time.' She hadn't wanted to say, ‘I prepare for her to come home. I sit quietly and get ready for what may come. I plan the whole afternoon and I try to rest, so that I'm ready. Sometimes I go out to a movie, and I sit in the dark theatre and eat popcorn, and check my phone every ten minutes in case the school is trying to get hold of me. Sometimes I walk around the block, just around and around, and imagine everything that could go wrong when my child comes home from school. Sometimes I get back into bed and cry for hours.'

What she hadn't wanted to tell Marcie was that mostly, even after all these years, she tried to find a way to be happy
with her life. She had tried going to gym and yoga and meditation classes, and she knew that she should have been able to find some way to feel better about things but, no matter how hard she looked, she couldn't find acceptance and peace; she just couldn't.

‘But she's nine,' said Marcie. ‘My oldest is ten and I've already got her helping with the laundry.'

‘Maya can't do that. She's autistic. She doesn't speak and she doesn't take directions. I'm working on getting her to bring her plate back to the kitchen after she's finished eating but . . .' said Anna, leaving the sentence unfinished. It was impossible to explain.

Maya had to be forced to brush her teeth because she didn't like the feel of toothpaste. She had to be forced into a bath because she didn't like to be undressed, and then, when she was in the bath and had finally relaxed into the water, she had to be forced out again. ‘She is on the extreme end of the spectrum,' their developmental paediatrician had told Anna and Keith when Maya was five. ‘As well, there are some other issues that are leading to delays in speech development and will always affect her learning.'

Anna had not had the energy to explain all this to the woman standing in front of her, holding out her phone with reams of pictures of her perfect children on it.

She had left the reunion early, placing her undrunk glass of wine on a table on the way out. She had called Caro instead and stopped by her house on the way home. ‘Fuck them,' Caro had said. ‘They don't understand. No one
understands what it's like but you. Don't judge yourself against them. They have it easy and they just don't know it.' Caro had already worked her way through a bottle of wine and her words had been slurred but they had been a comfort to Anna.

‘Maybe you should look into getting some medication,' Keith said every now and again when Anna tried to explain the gnawing anxiety about the future that gave her headaches and made her too wound up to sit still for long, but she was afraid of medication. She worried that it would dull her responses to Maya and she would miss something that led to a meltdown, or that it would make her feel tired or like her brain was filled with a fog she couldn't see through. But there was also something else, something she would never confess to a therapist or to Keith, or even allow herself to accept as a conscious thought. She hated the idea that medication would make it easier for her to deal with Maya, that she would be happy with her child and the way her life had turned out, because if she were happy and filled with gratitude and acceptance, then surely Maya would always be the way she was. If she just relaxed and accepted everything, it was possible that she would stop pushing Maya, stop searching for an answer, stop looking for a breakthrough.

That morning in the kitchen, she had realised that nothing she did or did not do would ever make a difference to how Maya was. In the same way that she had repeatedly gone back through everything she had done when
she was pregnant and been reassured by doctors, over and over again, that there was nothing she could have done to prevent Maya being affected by autism, there was also nothing she could do to change who her child was. She had not only finished stacking the dishwasher, she had felt her world shift.

If she thinks about it now, she knows that while the red plastic cup triggered her realisation, it was not just that cup, and just that moment, that had done this. The day before, on Friday morning, there had been a call from Maya's school. After her diagnosis, Anna and Keith had spent hours researching schools, and had finally settled on one with a reputation for pushing autistic children to achieve the very best they could. Maya had been on a waiting list for two years, and on her first full day of school, Anna had felt giddy in the few hours of freedom she was allowed.

At first, Maya's behaviour at school was nothing out of the ordinary for the teachers, but the tantrums got worse as she got older, and her attacks on other children became the focus of other parents' complaints. Physically, Maya had become a threat to those around her.

That Saturday morning, Anna had stood in the shower and tried not to think about her Friday phone call from Mary, who referred to herself as the head facilitator. ‘Anna, we would like you and Keith to come in next week so we can discuss Maya's progress here,' she had said casually. ‘Oh yes, fine,' Anna said, ‘but didn't we just have an evaluation?'

‘Yes, but we feel we need to cover a few more things.'

Anna had felt her skin prickle. ‘What things exactly, Mary?'

‘Let's leave it for the meeting. Does Monday at two work for both of you? Can Keith get some time away from work?'

‘I'll have to ask him.'

‘Okay, let me know as soon as you can, because we want to have all of Maya's teachers there and her therapist as well.'

‘I will,' Anna had said. ‘I'll let you know.' She had not been able to do anything else for the rest of the day. ‘They're going to ask her to leave,' she said to Keith when she called to tell him about the meeting.

‘Don't go jumping to conclusions, Anna. It's possible they just want to change the way they're doing things. They might have some new strategies they want to try.'