Blame

by Nicole Trope

  ‘I stopped moving and she stayed quiet. “Don’t,” I yelled at Keith. “Don’t touch it . . . look.” Maya was absolutely silent and her eyes were wide open. I felt her whole body relax in my arms, and then her eyes started closing and she went off to sleep. It was, and I don’t use this word lightly, a miracle. It felt as though we’d been blessed. “Let’s move this to her bedroom,” Keith said but I begged him not to touch it. “Just get the pram and I’ll try and put her down,” I said. She slept for six straight hours. Six straight hours! I slept on the couch next to the pram. I turned the machine down a little bit at a time until it was a reasonable volume, and she stayed asleep.’

  ‘I have one of those sleep machines but my boys never seemed to like it,’ says Cynthia.

  ‘Well, Maya loved it; the static noise calmed her down. It changed my life. She started sleeping through the night, and because she was getting sleep, she was able to deal with the day better, so she screamed a little less, and if she ever started again, I just turned on the machine and, even if she didn’t go to sleep, she calmed down immediately.

  ‘She still screamed at the clinic . . . really, really screamed. She hated being touched by the nurse, hated being undressed. And I hated being looked at by the other mothers. I felt like a complete failure every time I went in there and it was no different on the day I met Caro. I think I vowed to never go back again, but then Caro helped me and it seemed like everything changed. I mean, Maya was still the same but I felt like I had someone I could call, someone I could share things with. I felt like I had someone.’

  Walt stands up and stretches. Anna watches the movement of his muscles under his shirt and envies Cynthia again. She doesn’t even know if they are dating, and yet, while she talks about Maya, there is a parallel story running in her head about Walt and Cynthia. She has constructed a whole life for them and it is perfection. She has become good at this, at playing a soothing set of images in her head. She had even managed to do it in the middle of one of Maya’s tantrums once and had been surprised when she emerged from the story in her head to find Maya lying quietly in her arms.

  Once Maya was diagnosed, Anna started reading romance novels at night. It was a way to tune out all the information on autism floating around her head. It allowed her to stop thinking, if only for an hour or so before she needed to close her eyes.

  She had taken one of the books from a shelf at her mother’s house on a whim and opened it hoping only to stop the treadmill in her head, but two pages in and she was hooked. She thought of nothing else until Keith called her to help him with dinner.

  She would spend all day with Maya, researching what she could do to help her and taking her to all different kinds of therapies, and then, when she was finally asleep at night, Anna would read romance novels like she was gorging on chocolate. She read about warriors with giant hands, who carried the scars of battle and wrapped themselves in armour but whose hearts were pierced by women with flowing hair and perfect skin. She flicked quickly through the pages, rejoicing as every heroine was rescued by every hero. She bought them from charity shops, mindful that Maya would destroy them if she found them. They sat in piles by her side of the bed, causing Keith to make jokes about her ‘fantasy life’.

  ‘It’s where I’d like to live,’ she wanted to tell him but never did. They were the most beautiful escape, as long as she made sure to pick ones in which none of the protagonists had children.

  ‘I knew something was wrong with Maya,’ Anna says, looking at Cynthia. She is more interested in the story than Walt is. She is, like every mother Anna knows who has average children, thanking whatever god she believes in that she is not her. ‘I kept saying it, and Keith kept telling me that I was wrong and I so wanted to believe him. But you can’t bury your head in the sand, can you? One of Keith’s sisters came over for tea and I was explaining the sleep machine and how it worked, and I was laughing and Keith was laughing because we were so completely relieved that we had figured out the problem, and his sister Hannah, who’s a nurse, said, “Maybe this is something you need to look into?” And Keith said, “What do you mean, Hannah?”

  ‘“I don’t mean anything, Keith. I’m just saying that this may be something more than a sleep problem and it wouldn’t hurt to look into it.”

  ‘God, Keith was so mad at her. He sat back against the couch and crossed his arms, and I actually saw him turn a little red. “There’s nothing wrong with my daughter, Hannah, and before you say anything else, I think you should remember that you’re only a nurse. You empty bedpans and take temperatures. You’re not qualified to assess someone else’s child.”’

  ‘That’s pretty harsh,’ says Walt. He has sat down again and slid a little further into his chair, relaxed. Anna can see he’s just going to let her talk and talk, hoping that she says something he can use. Anna would like to tell him that she knows what he’s doing. She would like to shut up and force the detectives to prod the story of that night out of her but she can’t seem to do that.

  ‘I know. I couldn’t believe what he’d said to her. If I’d been her, I would have been really pissed off, but she just got really quiet and said, “Have it your way, Keith.” It was really the first crack I’d ever seen in his relationship with one of his sisters. He didn’t want to know but I knew. I felt it. I’d been trying so hard to pretend that Maya was fine, I knew there was something very not fine about her.’

  Anna had walked Hannah to the door. ‘I think you’re right,’ she had whispered to her, ‘but I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Oh . . . oh, you know, maybe I’m just being overcautious. Keith is right. It’s not my place to comment. I’m glad you’ve finally got her sleeping,’ she said.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘I’ll see you later, okay?’ Hannah had said and turned to go.

  ‘But I think you’re right, I need someone to help me convince Keith that we need to look into this.’

  ‘Anna, I can’t get between you and Keith, you know that. Maya’s still very young, things change quickly at that age. I’m sure she’s fine.’

  Anna had known better than to continue to push her sister-in-law. They weren’t close enough for that.

  ‘She’s still young,’ was something Anna heard about Maya for months, for years. Until it was too late to use those words because they were no longer true.

  Chapter Six

  Caro feels like she has been sitting in the small interview room for days, but when she looks at her watch, she realises that it’s only been a couple of hours. Her mouth is dry and she sits on her hands for a minute, hoping to make the shakes go away. She keeps talking quickly. She needs to get the story told before she begins feeling really sick. The shakes are bad but the nausea is worse, and she knows that it’s possible things could get even worse. She knows how this works. She’s done it before, and before and before. Some months, every Monday is supposed to be the beginning of a new self. She sympathises with hopeless dieters. Monday beckons from every regret-filled Sunday night.

  It’s never really been this bad before. She’s never been this bad before. She hadn’t meant to let things get this far. All she wanted to do was block out Anna’s screams, the sound of the ambulance, and the voice of the policeman telling her she would be tested in hospital. She needed to make it all go away for a few hours and then a few days, and now she is here and it’s been two weeks, and she can’t remember the last time she chose water over vodka before she was sitting in this room.

  The two detectives sit quietly, looking as if they have nothing else to do other than listen to her tell her story.

  Caro thinks of what Lex said to her last night, ‘Fuck off and die,’ and she wants to say it to them. It’s a childish impulse that she knows comes from fear. She bites her lip, thinking about Lex’s flushed cheeks and teary eyes. She had never sworn at her mother before and Caro knows her child was more shocked by these words than she was. Caro’s first reaction had been to laugh, which had made Lex even angrier. Caro understa
nds her daughter’s contempt for her and even knows that she deserves that contempt. It had been during the argument about Caro driving Lex to school in the morning.

  ‘I’m driving you whether you like it or not,’ she had said to Lex. ‘It’s time for things to get back to normal around here.’

  ‘I don’t want you, I want Daddy.’

  ‘Daddy has been late to work every day for the last two weeks, Lex. I’ll drive you to school tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not getting in the car with you. You don’t know how to drive. You hit Maya. You killed Maya.’ Lex was brutally honest, and Caro could see she didn’t understand completely the punch her words had.

  Caro felt them hit her but knew she had to win this argument; for herself, if nothing else. ‘Lex, I’ve explained that it was an accident. Everyone knows it was an accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen. It’s wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘You were speeding.’

  ‘No, Lex, I wasn’t. You know I wasn’t. Lex, please—I feel terrible about this. It’s an awful, awful thing and I don’t want to discuss it anymore. Please, let’s just leave it now. I’ll be driving you to school in the morning and that’s final.’

  ‘If it wasn’t your fault, how come you have to go and see the police tomorrow?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Daddy,’ Lex said and she had folded her arms, triumphant at having bested her mother. Even as her child attacked her, Caro could not help but see her beauty. Alexa’s big brown eyes dominated her face, and her copper-coloured hair was almost down to her waist. Caro still thought the same thing she had thought the first time she held her, the same thing she thought every time she looked at her daughter: ‘How could I have produced such an exceptional creature?’ And every now and again she thought, as she did then, ‘How could I have produced a creature with such a capacity to wound?’

  ‘Daddy should not have told you that, Alexa, and it really has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It has everything to do with me!’ shouted Lex. ‘They’re going to put you in prison! Everyone will know my mother’s a criminal.’

  ‘No, they are not. What rubbish. Where did you even hear such a thing?’

  ‘I read it on the internet. The news sites said you were speeding and drunk.’

  ‘Alexa Robin Harman, you are talking absolute crap, and I’ve told you before that I don’t like you being on the internet without permission! I’ll throw that computer away if you can’t stick to my rules!’

  ‘You don’t stick to any rules. You just do what you want. You shouldn’t have been driving. It said so on the internet. Lots of people are talking about you on the internet. They’re saying horrible things about you. You shouldn’t have been in the car, and now Maya is dead and my mother killed her and everyone’s talking about it at school.’ Lex had burst into noisy tears, and Caro knew she needed to put her arms around her child and comfort her but she couldn’t move.

  Everyone was talking about it at school. Everyone was talking about it at school. Caro felt her cheeks colour as she imagined the mothers and children passing her name back and forth. She could hear the sniggers and the gasps of horror. She had been working so hard to keep it all at bay, to make the whole thing seem unreal. Even as she had discussed it with Geoff and talked to Keith on the phone, continually begging him to let her speak to Anna, she had been separate from it.

  Each time Keith had told her that Anna wouldn’t speak to her, she had been heartbroken but that wasn’t the only thing she’d felt. She also felt relief, a relief so strong that it sometimes felt like her first hit of vodka, because what would she say to her friend, what words could she use? The daily phone call to Anna had become something she just did, and each and every day since the accident, she has pressed Anna’s number on her phone and thought, ‘I’ll just have a quick chat,’ and only when she hears the ringing of the phone has she realised what she’s doing.

  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.
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  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.