Blame (20 page)

‘I know, Anna, it was just a bad day. But no matter how bad a day it was, some things are not adding up. If you knew she was coming over, you knew that a car would be coming and, judging by how close your houses are, you knew she would be coming soon. Why had you allowed Maya outside the front of the house if she didn't understand that she shouldn't run into the road?'

Anna opens her mouth to speak but Walt holds up his hand to silence her.

‘I don't think you forgot. I think you've known all this time that Caro didn't simply pop over for a visit. You wanted her there. What was the reason, Anna? Why did you want her there?'

‘I didn't want her there. I never . . . I never asked her to come.'

‘You did, Anna, you called her to come over, and now you're lying about that, even though you've just admitted it. Why are you lying?'

‘You can't keep saying that!' yells Anna. ‘It wasn't a lie. I'm not lying. I just forgot. I must have made the call when Maya was quiet for two minutes, and then she went off again and I forgot.'

‘If she went off again,' says Cynthia, ‘then why did you leave the front door open to go and get the post? Surely if she was hysterical, you wouldn't have chosen that moment to go and get the post?'

Cynthia's voice is still soft and her body is still relaxed. ‘Good cop, bad cop?' thinks Anna. ‘How fucking stupid. I'm not an idiot.' She feels a surge of anger—
How dare they?
—but behind that is her grief pushing forward. Always pushing forward.

‘She was . . . she . . . I don't know . . . okay. I don't fucking know because I can't remember, because I've forgotten everything that happened that day except for the sound of the car hitting my child's body. That I can remember. I can describe it for you, if you like. I can tell you exactly what metal hitting flesh sounds like because that's the one thing I will never forget. I can explain about the crack I heard as her head hit the road, and how I knew even as I cradled her body that it was too late. I've seen what happens when a head hits the pavement, I‘ve watched on the news what happens. So, would you like me to explain that to you? Do you want me to describe it in every detail, because it plays
over and over in my head all day long? I won't forget that. Never, never, never!'

Anna puts her head down on the table and gives into the despair that always follows her around. She doesn't care about keeping it together, she just wants this to be over. She doesn't cry quietly, she sobs, and can hear herself almost howling. Part of her is ashamed of her lack of dignity but she can't seem to stop. The agony goes on and on.

Cynthia and Walt sit in silence. They say nothing and do nothing, and part of Anna wonders at their cruelty. Surely they should be trying to comfort her, but neither of the detectives moves, and, as she grows calmer, Anna realises that they are waiting for her to lift her head and confess everything to them.
They think they've broken through her defences, that they've found a way to get to the truth, but they've done no such thing.

When her tears have stopped, she keeps her head down, not wanting to look at either of them. ‘I'm going home now,' she says.

There is another moment of silence. Anna can almost feel the conversation between the two detectives that must be taking place in gestures and signs. She knows Cynthia will be telling Walt to back off . . . she's the good cop, after all.

She thinks about getting a lawyer. She sees herself returning tomorrow with a man or woman in a sharp suit, who will sit by her side and say, ‘She's not going to answer that,' every time Walt asks her a question. The thought is
a comfort, even though she has no idea how to even go about finding the right kind of lawyer.

‘You'll have to come back tomorrow,' says Walt. ‘I'm sorry, Anna, but we do have to discuss this again. We do have to have the truth.'

‘Fine,' says Anna and lifts her head. She is sure she must look terrible. She wipes her cheek and sniffs.

‘It'll be all right, Anna,' says Cynthia softly. ‘Get a good night's sleep and we'll start again tomorrow.'

‘Yes,' says Walt, and he leans forward and pats her hand, like he hadn't just badgered her until she cried. ‘Get a good night's sleep and we'll start again.'

Anna nods and stands up. She leaves the interview room silently. ‘That's what I was trying to do,' she thinks as she walks out into the late afternoon sunshine. ‘I was trying to start again.'

Chapter Fourteen

Caro lies in the dark, staring at the ceiling. She curses the fact that she is awake, sweating, shaking and nauseous. Her skin is itchy, and she is hot, and cold, and hot again.

She should never have chosen Roman blinds for the windows—they allow the light from the street to come in. She and Geoff have owned the house for twelve years, and decorating it, making choices about paint colours and carpets and curtains, made Caro feel like an adult for the first time in her life.

She had painted one of the spare bedrooms pink and one blue, in preparation for the perfect family she would have. It had never occurred to her that something as simple as having children would turn out to be so complicated.

‘Idiot,' she sometimes says to herself as she walks past the empty blue bedroom.

Geoff doesn't understand why she has a problem with the small cracks of light but Caro likes it to be too dark for her to see her hand in front of her face. She fantasises briefly about getting out of bed and ripping the blinds off the window, which would, she knows, be counterproductive, but she wants to rip, tear, shred . . . something.

She would like to smash her fist through the window, or pick up a chair and throw it through the glass. She would like there to be noise and turmoil, to hear the tinkling of broken glass and the crack of demolished wood. She wants something to happen that others can see—something that would demonstrate what was going on inside her, something that would show the destruction, because that is how she feels: destroyed. She cannot fathom a way forward for her life.

She turns on her side, and then covers her face with her hands as she relives the horror of throwing up in front of the two detectives. The shame of it is unbearable. The lack of control, the churning of her insides and the smell come back to her. She moans.

It had certainly ended the interview. Caro had sat back in her chair, heaving and sweating, and seen the unmistakable disgust on both detectives' faces. ‘Fuck you,' she had wanted to say but had not had the energy. Detective Sappington had nodded at her and said, ‘We'll pick this up again tomorrow.' She had left the room quickly, leaving
Brian to offer water and tissues, and organise for her to get home. Everyone in the station had turned to look at her as he led her out—everyone including a man holding a mop and bucket to clear away the evidence of her humiliation.

She hadn't bothered saying that she could drive. She could barely walk.

A uniformed policeman had driven her home. Caro had not been able to talk to Lex or Geoff, who were sitting in the kitchen sharing a pizza.

‘I was so worried,' Geoff had said when she walked in but he hadn't moved from his place at the table. Instead, he had put his hand on Lex's shoulder, as if to remind Caro that she was sitting there.

‘What happened?' he asked.

‘Nothing,' said Caro. ‘I'm not done. I have to go back tomorrow. I need to sleep.'

She had dragged herself upstairs, thrown up again, and then managed to get herself into the shower and into bed. She thought briefly about taking herself downstairs again to get a drink—a sweet, relieving drink—but she couldn't face Geoff and Lex again, and so, had turned on her side and closed her eyes.

At some point, hours later or minutes later, she had heard Geoff open the bedroom door, knowing that he wanted to speak to her about the interview, but she had made herself lie absolutely still so that he would not bother her. She had dropped gratefully into the black hole of sleep, but it hadn't lasted long.

Now she is awake. and desperate, desperate, desperate for a drink. She looks over at her bedside clock and calculates it's been fourteen hours since her last drink. Too many hours.

She hasn't gone fourteen hours without a drink for the last two weeks, and before that, she hadn't gone twenty-four hours without a drink for at least two years.

‘Alcoholic,' she thinks but the word sounds stupid. She is not an alcoholic. Alcoholics live on park benches. They don't have houses and children. They don't do the grocery shopping and the washing, and clean the house. Do they? Could she be an alcoholic, and if she wasn't an alcoholic, then what was her body doing if it wasn't withdrawing from alcohol?

‘It's just because I've had so much to drink in the last two weeks; that's all,' she comforts herself.

‘Liar,' she hears someone say, and she takes her hands away from her face and switches on the bedside lamp, looking around wildly for the person who has spoken. No one is there.

She switches off the lamp and lies down again.

It had happened so gradually that she cannot pinpoint when it went from a glass of wine every night to a bottle of wine every night, to more than that. It had been a slow creep, one mouthful at a time.

She is fascinated by American television shows about grossly overweight people, watching them obsessively, wondering how on earth a person allows themselves to get
to a size so large they cannot even walk or get out of bed. She has made the connection between her drinking and those killing themselves with food but only briefly before she denies it. ‘I am in control,' she has always told herself. ‘I don't drink until after five,' and then, ‘until lunchtime,' and then, ‘until Lex is at school.'

And now she has to admit that she doesn't drink until her body cries out for it, which it does earlier and earlier each day. ‘How did that happen?' she thinks now. She had never been much of a drinker when she was younger, preferring to remain in control of herself. No one in her household drank much at all. There were always bottles of alcohol left over from Christmas and New Year, and other family occasions, filling up cupboards and getting in the way.

‘No one likes to see a drunk woman,' she remembers her father saying at a family barbecue where a cousin's girlfriend had overdone things and ended up falling asleep on the couch.

Even at university, Caro hadn't indulged much. She had only ever walked past the university bar to get to the vegetarian restaurant, and she can remember wondering what all the students sitting there were doing drinking in the middle of the day. She was judgemental towards girls who got drunk at parties and allowed themselves to be taken advantage of. ‘A lady is always in control of herself,' her mother told her and her sister over and over again. Caro and Melissa heard constantly about all the things a lady was and was not, but mostly what Caro heard was that a
lady never opened herself up to shame and scandal and judgement.

‘Keep yourself above reproach,' was how her mother put it. It had only taken a few moments one afternoon for Caro to reveal herself to the world as guilty of all of what her mother considered the greatest sins. In the dark, she covers her face again, imagining reporting her behaviour to her mother. She can see how her thin lips will purse and her nose twitch as she considers what an embarrassment her daughter is.

Melissa wouldn't understand it either or, rather, she would understand it but Caro knew that her sister would almost have to cover her mouth with her hand to prevent the words, ‘I told you so,' coming out. Mentally, Caro lines up all the people who have commented on her drinking, made allusions to the amount of alcohol she gets through on a Friday or Saturday night, or judged her for her lack of dignity. Geoff is there, and her mother is there, and her sister, and even Lex, who is too young to know anything. Only Anna has never said anything, even when Caro could see that she wanted to. Anna has been a safe and accepting haven for Caro, and in the dark, she touches her mobile phone on the bedside table, wondering if Anna would pick up this time. ‘You won't believe the day I've had,' Caro hears herself saying. But Anna has probably also had a bad day, the worst day. ‘Oh God, Maya,' whispers Caro.

‘I don't understand,' her mother had said when Caro explained about the accident.

‘There's no way to explain it, Mum.'

‘No way to explain it? Caro, it's been on the news. I've had friends call me about it. You should have called me when it happened. It wasn't fair of you to let me hear it on the news. That's not the kind of family we are. You should have called me or, at least, Geoff should have called me. How on earth could you keep something like this from your family?'

‘It only happened two days ago, Mum. I was going to call but I just . . . I was just trying to think about it by myself for a day or two. I don't know how to explain it. It's been so hideous and Lex is so upset. I can't even explain how I feel. I can't even think about it.'

‘Caroline, I'm going to ask you a question now and I would like an honest answer. I read on the internet that you were taken in for drug and alcohol testing. Were you drunk, Caroline?'

‘It's standard practice, Mum. They do that with every car accident.'

As Caro had spoken, she had heard the squeal of her brakes again, felt the jolt of her car as it hit Maya, seen Anna launch herself into the road and the look of horror on her friend's face.

The images and the sounds had returned hour after hour in those first days. They were there when she woke up and went to sleep, and when she stood in the shower.
Squeal, jolt, Anna, horror. Squeal, jolt, Anna, horror.

It was a song she could not get out of her head, a thirty-second loop that played over and over.

‘What's going to happen? Are they going to arrest you?' asked her mother as the loop started again.