by Nicole Trope
Detective Sappington smiles and indicates that Caro should sit down.
She is perfectly polite, even though Caro is at least half an hour late. Despite her plan to be guarded, Caro finds herself beginning with an apology: ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’
‘Please don’t worry about it.’ Detective Sappington sits down and Caro does as well. The other detective just nods at her and she understands immediately who’s in charge.
‘Is it okay to start?’ says Detective Sappington and Caro nods. Detective Ng turns on the camera they have set up at the end of the table and Caro feels sweat collect at the base of her spine. ‘This is really happening and I am really here,’ she thinks.
‘It is eleven-thirty am and this is the West Hallston police station. Attending are Detective Sergeant Susan Sappington and Detective Sergeant Brian Ng.
‘To begin with, Mrs Harman, I want to let you know that we are recording the interview. Do you give us permission to do so?’
‘No, I don’t,’ says Caro, hating the idea of her face being on camera.
‘Mrs Harman, whether we use a tape recorder or a video recorder or we manually record the interview doesn’t matter. It will be recorded in some form or another. Using a video recorder does tend to shorten the process.’
Caro looks at the small camera set up on a tripod. She thinks about having to wait as the detectives write everything down and she says, ‘Okay, fine. You can record it.’
‘Thank you. I also want to let you know that you do not have to say or do anything, but if this does go to court and you attempt to use information that you have not given us in this interview it may not be accepted into the record.’
‘Do you think this is going to court?’ asks Caro, feeling her stomach flip with panic.
‘I have no idea,’ says Detective Sappington. ‘I also want to let you know that you have the right to let a friend or relative know where you are and you have the right to request a lawyer.’
‘Do you think I need a lawyer? What on earth would I need a lawyer for if I haven’t been charged and you don’t know if I’m going to be?’ Caro feels her heart speed up as she acknowledges to herself that Geoff was right and she should have had someone with her. ‘I need a lawyer,’ she rehearses in her head but the words don’t come out. She feels like her guilt has already been decided, but knows that if she gets up and leaves now, they will be convinced that everything was her fault. She wants to be able to explain things to them; she needs to be able to explain, so they understand. A lawyer may tell her that she cannot say anything, that she must keep what she knows to herself.
‘Would you like a lawyer?’
‘I . . . no.’
‘Are you happy to answer some questions about the night of the accident, Mrs Harman?’
‘Why are there two of you here?’ Caro hears the sharpness in her voice and congratulates herself. She feels like she has taken an important step and now they know she won’t be pushed around. The best form of defence is a good offence, or something like that. She crosses her arms over her chest.
‘I’m going to ask you some questions, Mrs Harman, and Detective Ng is going to observe.’ Detective Sappington’s voice is pitched perfectly to calmness, but instead of relaxing, Caro finds herself even more irritated.
‘Fine, whatever,’ she says. ‘I just want to go home. How long is this going to take?’
‘I’m not sure. Do you have children who need to be picked up? If so, I can get you a phone, so you can call someone to let them know.’
‘No, I don’t have children who need to be picked up,’ she says and remembers Lex’s bowed head from this morning. ‘Keep quiet,’ she thinks but Detective Sappington relaxes in her chair, waiting for Caro to continue, so, without having meant to, she says, ‘I only have one child and my husband drove her to school this morning. My mother . . . yes, my mother is going to fetch her.’
‘Right, so now—’ says Detective Sappington, but Caro speaks over her even though she doesn’t mean for the words to be heard by anyone but herself.
‘She won’t get in the car with me.’
‘Who won’t?’ asks the detective.
‘What?’
‘Who won’t get into the car with you, Mrs Harman?’
Caro looks at the wall behind the detective and shakes her head.
‘You’re doing an excellent job of putting your foot into your mouth,’ she can almost hear Anna say.
‘Lex, my daughter,’ she says. ‘Lex won’t get in the car with me because of the accident. She doesn’t understand.’
‘What doesn’t she understand?’ says Detective Sappington.
‘That it wasn’t my fault,’ says Caro, meeting the detective’s gaze, ‘she doesn’t understand that none of this is my fault.’
Chapter Three
Anna shreds the tissue in her hand and sniffs. The detectives watch her. She closes her eyes for a moment, feeling herself back in Maya’s room, where she had spent the night. She hadn’t meant to stay there, had only gone in for a look, to feel her child, but she had sat down on the bed, the room spinning a little from all the wine she’d drunk. Then she had rested her head on the pillow, and covered her face with her arm, the way Maya used to do when she slept.
‘Why do you do that, Maya? Why do you cover your face when you sleep?’ Anna had asked one morning, knowing she would never get an answer, but asking anyway because she couldn’t keep to herself all the questions she had for her daughter.
Maya had picked up her iPad and touched the word ‘jump’. She had only been seven at the time.
Anna had smiled at her. ‘Do you want to jump?’
Maya had touched the word again and again, until Anna had gently taken the iPad away from her. ‘Jump then, Maya; if you want to jump, jump.’ Anna had jumped up and down to show her. ‘Let’s jump together, Maya—jump, jump.’ But Maya hadn’t wanted to jump. She shook her head and touched her eye. She pointed at the iPad, and when Anna gave it back, she touched the word ‘jump’ again.
‘What did you expect?’ Anna had thought. ‘Let’s do your writing exercises,’ she had said, pushing on with the day, but Maya had begun to scream and thrash. It had taken seconds for her to go from sitting calmly on the couch to becoming a screaming, raging dervish.
‘Oh, not today, Maya; please, not today,’ Anna had said but it was too late. Chaos had reigned for hours.
Lying on her daughter’s bed, Anna had relived that day, trying, as she always did with days like that, to work out what had set Maya off. She had touched the word ‘jump’ on her iPad but hadn’t wanted to jump, so why had she touched the word?
And then she had touched her eye. ‘“Jump”, eye; “jump”, eye,’ Anna had muttered to herself. What had Maya meant? What had she wanted? Anna had taken her arm away from her face as a car turned in the road outside. Its lights flashed through the gaps in the closed curtains and Anna instinctively covered her face again. ‘“Jump”; eye,’ she thought. The lights flashed into the room again as the car drove off.
‘Oh,’ Anna moaned, feeling her stomach churn with nausea. ‘Oh, Maya. It was the lights, the lights from the cars outside,’ she whispered, sitting up. ‘That’s what you were trying to say. The lights made your eyes jump, so you had to cover your face. I get it, Maya, I understand now. It was the lights.’
She had curled up on the single bed and let herself cry once again. ‘I get it, Maya, I get it now,’ she said. It was so clear, so obvious, what her daughter had been trying to say, that she had been answering the question. As she had drifted off to sleep, Anna had another thought: What else did I miss?
When she had woken up, only hours later, she had found herself covered with a blanket. ‘He’s trying so hard,’ she thought as she gulped water, and had experienced a sharp stab of sorrow for her husband, who just wanted to take care of her.
‘Okay, Anna,’ says Detective Anderson, forcing her back into the present, ‘I know this sounds silly but, just for the purposes of keeping an acc
urate record, I’m going to need you to state your full name and date of birth.’
‘Anna McAllen, twenty-first of February 1976,’ says Anna and it occurs to her that she’s forty. She hadn’t even thought about it on her birthday but she has reached the Big Four-O. She recalls being twenty-five when Sophie, her boss at the graphic design company where she worked, turned forty, and feeling sad for her.
Sophie had a husband and two children to go home to, and didn’t want more than half a piece of cake because she was watching her weight, and at the time it seemed to Anna that Sophie’s life was almost over.
‘All I want to do is get to bed early and have a full night’s sleep,’ Sophie had said. ‘Just wait until you girls have kids. You’ll know what I mean.’
‘Imagine being that old,’ Anna had whispered to Melanie as they sipped champagne out of plastic glasses.
‘Hideous,’ giggled Melanie and then she threw her hair back over her shoulder, attracting everyone’s attention. Anna and Melanie had worked on many projects together and knew some of the older men in the office called them ‘the beauties’. Watching Sophie pick at her cake, Anna had been sure that even when she was forty, she would be young and beautiful, still attracting attention with her long blonde hair and perfect smile.
‘Having children won’t do that to me,’ she had thought and then quickly took another sip of champagne because it was the same thought she had had about her own mother.
‘I only wish you have a daughter just like you,’ Anna’s mother had spat at her during an argument over doing the laundry.
‘Well, she certainly will never have a mother like you,’ Anna said in reply.
‘I’m not sure about having kids,’ Melanie said as the party broke up. ‘They don’t seem like much fun.’ She and Anna had lost touch after Maya was born. Melanie might still be single, for all Anna knew.
Anna had not had a party to celebrate reaching the milestone birthday, although Keith had brought home a large chocolate cake with a ‘four’ and a ‘zero’ painted in white butter-cream icing, which Maya shouldn’t have been allowed to eat. She had let her daughter blow out the candles, and then grab the icing roses off the top and snatch a whole piece of cake with her hands, making a mess of everything. She didn’t really feel like having a piece after that, but she can still remember the smile on Maya’s face as she tasted the rare mouthful of pure sugar. Joy is always easy to see on a child’s face, regardless of who that child is. Anna touches her cheek, and realises she is crying again and that both detectives are watching her.
‘Sorry, can I get another tissue?’ she asks.
‘The box is empty, Walt,’ says Detective Moreno and she stands up quickly. ‘I’ll go and get another one. Would you like a drink, Anna? Some tea or coffee, or water?’
‘Thank you, Detective Moreno. Yes, I would love some tea—strong, with no sugar.’
‘I’ll take a coffee,’ says Detective Anderson without even looking at Detective Moreno.
‘I’ll be back in a minute, and please call me Cynthia, and Detective Anderson, Walt. We want you to relax and we’d like to make this as easy as possible.’
Once she’s gone, Walt stands up and walks over to the camera, checking it, Anna assumes. He has large hands with the ragged fingernails of a worrier.
She wonders what it would be like to lie next to him, to have him touch her. She closes her eyes briefly and imagines the scape of a rough nail against her skin.
‘What kind of a husband would he be?’ she thinks. ‘What kind of a father?’
Since Maya was diagnosed, she has often found herself looking at other men and thinking about how different her life would have been if she had chosen someone whose faulty genes had not mixed with her own faulty genes and created Maya.
‘There must be something wrong with me to think like that,’ she had said to her therapist when she found the courage to confess these thoughts. The therapist, an older woman named Mollie, had taken her usual minute to ponder a question from Anna before she said: ‘It’s an idle thought, Anna. I’m sure other parents in your situation wonder the same thing from time to time.’
‘Is there a way to test for that? Like, I mean, is there a way to find out if one of you is carrying the gene?’
‘No, Anna; I don’t think there is a way, not yet. If there was, would you feel better knowing that the gene came from Keith or that it came from you, or that it was recessive from both of you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna had said.
‘There is no one to blame, Anna. We’ve talked about that. It just is, as some things just are.’
‘An aphorism, Mollie, really?’ she had said.
‘It’s the truth, Anna. No good comes of such speculation.’
Anna had suppressed the urge to leap to her feet and stamp her foot like a child. ‘I don’t like it,’ she wanted to say. ‘I don’t like it.’
In the last nine years, Anna has seen at least five different therapists, none of whom has ever managed to make her feel better and now it doesn’t matter anymore. Or maybe it does? Would a therapist help her explain what had happened? Would a therapist understand it?
Right now, Anna can think of nothing to say to a therapist, or for a therapist to say to her. There are some things that cannot be reasoned with, some events that cannot be reframed so as to be more acceptable, and no positive thinking that would bring Maya back, so what would the point of a therapist be?
‘You need to talk to someone,’ Keith, her mother, her mother-in-law and her sisters-in-law have all said to her.
‘You’re one to talk,’ Anna had said to her mother when she suggested seeing someone.
‘I’m only trying to help, Anna,’ Vivian had said, a wounded look crossing her face as she became aware other people were listening. Her mother was always particularly self-conscious in front of Keith’s mother and his sisters, knowing that Anna often turned to one of them first when she needed someone to talk to. ‘Keith’s mother says . . .’ Anna would quote when speaking to her own mother.
‘So you’ve already spoken to her,’ an aggrieved Vivian would say.
‘Of course I have,’ she would reply. It is, Anna knows, an unnecessary and unkind thing to do but she had never been able to stop herself from doing it.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she had said to her mother-in-law, because there was never a reason to be rude to Keith’s mother.
‘I have nothing to say,’ Anna has told Keith because that, in the end, is how she feels. She has nothing to say and she would prefer to have nothing to think either.
Cynthia has left behind her a light smell of musk perfume and, without filtering the comment, Anna says to Walt: ‘She’s pretty. Is she your girlfriend?’ It was his coffee order that had alerted her—there was no please or thank you, just an assumption that the other detective would be happy to get him coffee and would also know exactly how he liked it. It might be because they are work partners but Anna senses something else. She can remember the thrill of knowing exactly how Keith liked his coffee, of feeling like she knew him better than anyone did. Now, she can’t remember the last time she’d actually made Keith a cup of coffee.
‘Um . . .’ says Detective Anderson and the tips of his ears colour a little. He goes from man to boy in an instant, and Anna feels a streak of jealousy towards the lovely Cynthia. ‘Who are you?’ she thinks. She doesn’t know where her thoughts are coming from anymore. Maya, and everything to do with Maya, took up most of her conscious thoughts, and it feels like now she’s not here Anna’s brain is in some sort of freefall. She finds herself biting her lip a lot to prevent herself saying awful things.
‘I can’t believe I just asked you that,’ she says. ‘It was very inappropriate, I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve said that word a million times in the last two weeks. I keep apologising.’
‘It’s all right, Anna. It’s been a difficult time; a really difficult time. You don’t have to keep apologising,’ says the detective, but he doesn’t look a
t her.
‘I feel like I should. You were so nice the night of the accident. I remember that, you know. Even though I don’t remember much, I remember how lovely you were. You were so patient with Keith. I wanted to smack him.’ Anna bites her lip even though the words are already out. ‘Oops,’ she thinks.
Walt doesn’t say anything. He looks up from the camera and focuses his gaze on her, and she feels more stupid words trip off her tongue. ‘I shouldn’t have said that but I did want to give him a slap. He was so . . . so . . . so Keith, really. I suppose it was a reaction to what had happened, but when he was sitting next to me and just wailing like a child, I wanted to hit him. “Why has this happened? Why has this happened?” he kept saying; do you remember that?’
‘Yes, Anna. I do remember.’
Anna shifts in her chair. Walt doesn’t take his eyes off her. She thinks that perhaps her discomfort is exactly what he’s hoping for. She looks past him at the wall behind his head as they wait for Cynthia to return.
Keith has shed more tears than she has, but then, he has always cried easily and is unself-conscious about shedding tears in front of others, unlike Anna who always feels faintly ridiculous when crying, as though she is performing rather than feeling anything. She has cried alone in the shower, in Maya’s room with the door closed, at the bottom of the garden at night. Today is one of the few times she has cried in front of people and she thinks it odd she should have picked two strangers. Keith thinks her reticence is peculiar, but he’s found a lot of things not to understand about her over the last eleven years, making Anna believe that he never really understood her at all. Maybe she never really understood him either but he seems a simple enough man. She should have known, knowing who she was, that Keith was not the man for her.
If she looks back at the beginnings of their relationship, she can see that Keith came along at exactly the right time for her to fall for him. She had just ended a relationship with an advertising man, Max, who commissioned work from her agency. He was tall, with hair that looked ginger in some lights, and dark green eyes, and he was into extreme sports. Even when he was sitting at a desk, he looked ready to leap, to run, to fly. He spoke quickly and his laugh boomed across whatever room he was in. He took Anna kayaking and mountain climbing, and coaxed her into parachuting out of an aeroplane. He was exhausting and sexually insatiable, and almost violently jealous if Anna even glanced in the direction of another man. The excitement of the first few weeks with him gave way to fatigue as Anna felt herself constantly on her toes, anticipating his next move. She ended it when he suggested bringing another girl into bed with them. ‘What fucking century are you from?’ he said when she turned him down.
