by Nicole Trope
She knows she has a problem. Every morning, when she promises herself that today she will stay away from alcohol, she knows she has a problem.
She begins to shiver again. There is a reason why she gives in each and every time. Her brain is too dependent and fights to be given what it needs.
The red numbers on the clock turn again. She has not had alcohol for fifteen hours. It is too hard, too hard, too hard. She stands up, hoping that her legs will support her weight, and moves towards the bedroom door. As she reaches for the handle, the door opens and Geoff is standing in the passage. He is illuminated by the small nightlight they have left on in the passage since Lex was born. His body and his smell are familiar and completely strange at the same time.
‘Are you okay?’ he asks.
She has no idea what has made him come to her room. He never does anymore, not since a few months before, when he’d tried and she had shoved him, swearing and slapping at his back, out again when he said that he thought she needed help.
Caro would like to think that, even in the dim light, her husband of fourteen years can see that she is not okay, that she is lost and alone and sick. But he doesn’t know, because for the last two years, Caro has done everything she can to push him far enough away that he can’t know. With every drink she has taken, she has pushed him away, not wanting him to get between her and the only thing that has made her feel like she can get through the day.
An image of the two of them on their honeymoon, in a cheap motel near the sea, flashes through her struggling brain. They had barely been able to leave the bed, so enamoured of each other’s bodies were they. They had not touched each other like that for two years. If anyone had told Caro then that she would give up sex for alcohol, she would have laughed. She would have laughed so hard, she would have cried. Once or twice a month, she thinks about sex but dismisses the idea It’s not like it’s going to get me what I want. Caro realises that since Gideon died, she’s been waiting for Geoff to tell her that they need to try again, that he wants her to get pregnant; that this time they will succeed. She has been waiting for Geoff to say it because she believes that if she says it, she will jinx herself with another failed pregnancy. She has been waiting and waiting, and with every passing month he has failed to say the words, she has drowned her sorrows, stuffing them down and throwing alcohol on top.
She feels close to death as her legs work to hold her body up. Her brain is fighting itself and she doesn’t know how she will even get through the next five minutes, let alone the next few hours and days, but she has a moment of clarity as she looks at Geoff. He stands still and quiet, as if he almost understands what is going on inside her, and she focuses on the stubble on his cheeks and on his slightly rounded stomach. Her legs start to give way, and he steps forward and grabs her.
‘Caro?’ he says and then, ‘talk to me. Please talk to me.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m not okay. I’m . . . not . . . okay.’
Geoff holds her up and she lets him take her weight, remembering how strong he is. He leads her back to sit on the bed.
‘Tell me,’ he says.
Caro’s mouth is a desert and her stomach is heaving, but she squeezes her husband’s hand tightly and is grateful that he squeezes back equally hard.
‘I’m in trouble,’ she says.
Chapter Fifteen
Anna flicks through the television channels again, knowing that she will find nothing to hold her interest. If she had the strength, she would dip into her collection of romance novels, but she is tired and fizzing with energy at the same time. She knows she won’t be able to concentrate. She should be asleep. It is past twelve and she will be exhausted in the morning, and she knows that she needs her wits about her when she goes back to the police station.
She sips her chamomile tea, tasting the honey she put in it. Everything she eats or drinks needs to be sweet. There is a bitter taste in her mouth that she cannot seem to get rid of. ‘Maybe you have an infection in your mouth,’ Keith said when she told him about it but Anna knows that’s not the case.
She cannot get used to the absolute silence in the house. For nearly eleven years, she has gone to bed every night with the static sound of Maya’s sleep machine in the background. She is tempted to turn it on now but is afraid that Keith will think she’s going mad. She could take some of the pills the doctor prescribed her but she is afraid of the dreams that come with them. It’s better to stay awake.
She is used to sleeping very little and very lightly. Maya would sleepwalk sometimes and Anna would open her eyes to find her daughter staring at her. It had been terrifying at first but Anna had gotten used to it. Once she’d worked out what it was, she would take Maya gently by the hand and lead her back to bed. She was strangely pliable at these times, and even allowed Anna to tuck her covers tightly around her and smooth her hair back from her face. It was the only time that Anna could touch her without having to worry about a reaction. She would have loved to have been able to ask Maya why she did it, what she saw and where she thought she was going, but she would have loved to have been able to ask Maya anything.
Anna had refused Cynthia’s offer of a lift home. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she told the detective. Cynthia had touched her on the shoulder, and told her again and again that everything would be okay. Her soft voice and gentle hands had soothed Anna more than she wanted to admit. Being comforted by a stranger was somehow easier to accept than being comforted by her mother or by Keith. She had wanted to put her arms around Cynthia and just let go but she had managed to pull herself away.
She needed to be alone in her car. She had sat in the car for a few minutes, saying, “I’ll be fine; I am fine, fine, fine, fine,’ until she started to irritate herself. Driving home, she had mentally gone over the interview, trying to work out where she had let herself down, had opened herself up to questions and suspicions, but the whole day was a blur.
‘I think they’re going to charge me with murder,’ she had said to Keith as she walked through the door. She had enjoyed the momentary look of shock on his face but he had recovered quickly.
‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous, Anna. Jesus, what’s wrong with you?’ Keith had said.
He thought she was making a sick joke.
‘I mean it, Keith,’ she said. ‘They think it was my fault.’
‘It wasn’t your fault. There is no way they’d think that, Anna. You’ve had a long day and you’re tired. I’ll make you something to eat and we can talk about it.’
‘You weren’t there, Keith. I know what they’re thinking. You shouldn’t be surprised, it’s what you’ve been saying all along.’
‘It’s not what I’ve been saying, Anna.’
‘You don’t say it directly, Keith, but I know what all those questions are about.’
‘What questions, Anna?’
‘“Why did you leave the door open, Anna? Why did you need to get the post right then, Anna? Why didn’t you have the back-up iPad working, Anna? Why did you let her get so upset, Anna? What did you do to her, Anna? Why would you let her go outside, Anna? Why didn’t you call me sooner, Anna?”’
‘Enough, Anna; enough now,’ Keith said.
But Anna couldn’t stop there. She was on a roll, as her years of failures and perceived failures with her child came spilling out. ‘“Why don’t you hold her the right way, Anna? Why do you need her to speak, Anna? Why don’t you just love her for who she is, Anna? Why aren’t you more involved in the autistic community, Anna? Why aren’t you a better mother, Anna? Why, Anna? Why, Anna? Why, Anna?”’ Her words became bullets, ricocheting around the room.
‘Stop it!’ Keith had yelled. ‘For fuck’s sake, just stop it. What is wrong with you? Why are you being like this? We’ve lost our child. We need to pull together, not tear each other apart.’
‘You pull your way, Keith, I’ll pull mine.’
Keith had grabbed her hand, holding it too tightly for Anna to pull away. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it was an accident.
I know it was an accident and it’s only my grief, my loss, making me say what I say. I’m sorry. I know you just made a mistake. I know you didn’t mean it.’
Anna can hear his mother in his words. Estelle had been over every day, she and Keith taking long walks together, and Anna knows that Estelle is counselling her son to forgive his wife her greatest and final failure.
‘Come with us,’ says Keith but Anna cannot stand the platitudes anymore. People go on and on, and they say the most stupid things. ‘Time heals,’ is the one she hates the most.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Anna had asked Peter when he called from Canada. She had shocked her brother into silence for a moment.
‘I don’t . . . I don’t know; I mean, I just . . . I just want you to know I’m thinking of you, I’m thinking of you and Keith, and I hope that, in time, it gets easier.’
Anna had felt a twitch of remorse. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she had said. ‘I know what you mean.’
She tries to picture herself many years in the future, doing . . . doing what? Will she actually be able to get out of bed in the morning and not think of her child? She can’t see it. It feels like she will be stuck here on this couch forever, simply waiting to die herself.
Her own mother is enjoying the attention, Anna is sure of it. When she’s visiting them and people come over to the house, Vivian will greet them with a hug and dissolve into tears, whether she knows them or not. ‘You barely knew her,’ Anna wants to say to her. ‘You found her too much and you hardly saw her.’
Anna knows that all of them, her mother, Keith’s mother and Keith, are looking at her and finding her wanting.
‘It’s okay to cry,’ Estelle had said to her a few days after the funeral. ‘You’re with family and you don’t need to be brave. We’re here to help.’ Anna had wished, at the time, for the ability to fake tears, to satisfy her mother-in-law, but nothing would come. All she wanted was for everyone to go to their own homes and stay there, and give her some space to work out who she was now that she was no longer Maya’s mother.
‘You don’t understand, Keith,’ she had said, pulling her hand away hard so he would let go. She couldn’t stand the feel of his skin against hers. ‘The police don’t just think this was my fault because I was a crap mother; they think I actually made it happen.’
‘Why? That’s unbelievable. She ran in front of a car. There was nothing you could have done once she started running.’
‘I may have . . . maybe I . . .’ Anna had said.
‘Maybe what, Anna? What are you trying to say?’
Anna had looked at her husband and felt a cold, creeping exhaustion. She wasn’t ready for this conversation. She would never be ready for it.
‘Nothing, Keith, nothing . . . I’m just . . . so tired.’
‘I’m sure you are. You don’t have to go back tomorrow, you know. You can say you need some more time. This is them getting their paperwork in order. It can wait. I don’t know what made you agree to do it in the first place.’
‘No, I’ll be fine. I want it done.’
‘My mother says that . . .’
‘You mother says what, Keith? Please tell me, because I really want to know.’
Keith shook his head. ‘Nothing, Anna. I’ll make dinner. Why don’t you have a shower?’
‘Good idea.’
Anna had stood under the pulsing heat, watching her fingers become like prunes. For the last two weeks, she has been able to stand under the shower as long as she wants. It is a strange sort of pleasure. Pleasurable and pleasure-less at the same time because, as her skin wrinkles, she looks at her hands and thinks about why she is able to stand there longer than fifteen minutes, longer than twenty minutes, longer than she has been able to for eleven years.
They had eaten their late dinner in silence. Anna had pushed her pasta around her plate, and then made her way through almost half a coconut cake that had been dropped off by one of her mother’s friends. She ate quickly, compulsively and quietly, standing up in the kitchen when Keith was watching the news.
She doesn’t know what she will do when people decide to stop feeding them. She has never mastered the art of baking.
When Maya was alive, she tried to keep a minimal amount of sugar in the house. Maya was on a special diet that meant she couldn’t have dairy, gluten or sugar. Some people in the autistic community swore by it. One family even claimed that it had cured their child. Keith and Anna had met them at their local autism awareness group. Keith had found the group online and suggested they attend one of their events, ‘Just to see what it’s like,’ he said. Anna had, by then, already tried an autism group and wanted nothing more to do with them. ‘I meet enough people at school,’ she said.
‘Well I’m going to go and I’m taking Maya. We hope you’ll join us.’
‘Maya doesn’t hope anything,’ Anna wanted to say but she went along to the picnic and it was there they met the Leigh family and their son, Aaron. Anna had stood on the fringes of the group, watching the children play and had seen Aaron but assumed he was the sibling of a child with autism. Even now she can still remember the giddy feeling of hope that suffused her body after being introduced to the family and told that Aaron was autistic. His mother, Sonya, had explained about the diet to the rapt audience of Anna and the other mothers. Anna had returned from the picnic and immediately emptied the fridge and pantry of the foodstuffs Sonya claimed were to blame for her son’s autism diagnosis.
Aaron was in high school now, getting through life without spinning or rocking or staring at the wall when someone spoke to him. He still came along to fundraising events and Anna had watched him at the last picnic, had seen his eyes glaze over with boredom as he looked around him, and decided that he had nothing in common with the other children there.
‘He may be on the very edge of the spectrum,’ Dr Theo—the latest in a long line of doctors Maya had seen—had said when Anna told the story and asked about the possibility of a cure. By then Maya had been on the diet for two weeks but was not showing any signs of improving.
‘I don’t see any harm in the diet but don’t expect a dramatic difference. Each child is different. What worked for this boy may not work for Maya,’ Dr Theo said.
Whenever a doctor counselled acceptance and patience, Anna moved onto someone else, and Dr Theo was a paediatric specialist in autism who had trained all over the world. At only thirty years old, she was some kind of whiz-kid, and Anna had waited six months for an appointment with her. She thought Dr Theo would be the one who would finally manage to put together the right combination of diet and therapy to help Maya. But even the brilliant Dr Theo couldn’t help Maya.
When Maya was five, there had been a spectacular year of progress. She’d been seeing a Dr Evans, who favoured a combination of routine and play therapy. Within weeks of starting on his program, Maya had acquired five words, and was using her iPad all the time to tell Anna and Keith what she wanted. If she asked for something to eat, she usually ate it. It felt like a small miracle and Anna started to believe that, one day, they would be able to do things that all other families did. She pictured Maya morphing into an ordinary child.
Anna wanted to take a walk in the local park on a sunny day and feed the ducks. In the early stages of her pregnancy with Maya, she and Keith had loved watching the children stand by the artificial lake and throw bread at the ducks. They had delighted in imagining their own giggling child celebrating a summer’s day in the same way. It was such a small thing and yet it hadn’t been possible. Maya was terrified of the ducks, and if someone shouted or laughed loudly, she freaked out and ran. She didn’t understand the water, and twice, before Anna had simply given up taking her to the park, she had run straight into the lake before Anna could catch her.
She had watched Maya with her play therapist and projected forward to a future where she could say to her friends and family, ‘Yes, she has come a long way, hasn’t she? We didn’t think it was possible but we’re so grateful tha
t she’s making such great progress.’ She had thought about the possibility of a mainstream school and seen a teenage Maya sitting with her in a coffee shop.
But just as suddenly as her improvement had begun, it had simply stopped. In fact, Maya had seemingly taken three steps back. And her tantrums had grown worse. Anything could set her off—a colour she didn’t like, a food she didn’t want to eat, Anna sitting in a chair she didn’t want her to sit in, her DVD taking too long to load, the sun shining too brightly. Anna never knew what it would be. She spent all day, every day, moving slowly and trying to keep everything the way it had been the day before but she could never get it completely right. And when Maya threw a tantrum, she became violent. She would bite and kick and scratch and punch, and Anna had no choice but to hold her. If she let go, Maya would make for the front door, or she would kick and punch the walls, damaging her hands. So Anna held on and Maya used her as a punching bag. Afterwards, they would both feel exhausted, and peace would descend on their home for a couple of hours, but each time it happened, Anna felt a little more hope for a different future for her child drain away.
It seemed impossible to her, as she sat on her couch sipping tea, that she was going to be accused of murder in the morning. Would the police use her lie about Caro coming over to somehow make everything her fault?
It was almost laughable, but not funny at all. She had seen the way the two detectives had looked at each other—like they’d heard something, or seen something, and now they knew the answer.
