Blame (15 page)

‘I'm sorry to hear that. I really am.'

‘You're sorry to hear what?' says Susan, returning to the room. Caro catches the faint whiff of chocolate. None of the sandwiches were to Susan's taste, obviously.

‘Nothing, Suze, we were just talking. Did you get all your calls done?'

‘Yes, all done. I got some Diet Coke for you, Caro. I'm not sure if you drink it. I could get something else.'

‘No, that's fine. It's really cold; that's great.'

‘Are you ready to get back to it?'

‘As ready as I'll ever be, I suppose.'

‘Do you think we can discuss the accident?'

‘The accident,' says Caro and she rubs her hand across her forehead, ‘when you call it an accident it sounds so trivial, so small. It doesn't sound like what it was, like it
was the end of Maya's life.' She takes a tissue from the box sitting on the table and blows her nose.

‘We know it isn't small or trivial Caro,' says Brian, ‘and we know how you felt about Maya.'

Caro pictures Maya's face, sees one of her rare smiles, and feels her throat constrict. She has cried for many reasons in the last two weeks. There is a gap somewhere between her first and fourth drink of the day where she allows emotion to overwhelm her and gives into tears. The tears are for Geoff, who is bewildered by his wife, and Lex, who hates her mother, and Anna and Keith, who are so sad, and for herself because of how unfair she feels it all is, but she has never shed tears for Maya. Those tears would bring it all back, and before they come, she takes the next drink and steps away from the accident. But now she cannot take a drink, cannot make it all go away.

‘Maya, poor Maya, poor kid,' she says. She sees Maya at four, when she first got her iPad, standing at the front door and pushing the ‘hello' button again and again to greet Caro. She was so proud of herself, so happy that she could finally say something.

‘Hello, hello, hello to you too,' Caro had said and had been rewarded by a rare giggle from Maya.

‘I'm sorry; I don't mean to get stupid and weepy. She wasn't my child but I did love her—kind of. She was hard to love. I think she was very hard to love.'

‘Even for Anna?' asks Susan.

‘Especially for Anna. Especially for her.'

Chapter Nine

Anna swallows, forcing the last mouthful of sandwich down. It has been an uncomfortable few minutes as she and the detectives watch each other eat. It feels like they should all have gone to different parts of the station so they could eat in peace. The sound of chewing and swallowing is starting to drive Anna a little crazy but what can she say to the detectives? ‘What are your plans for Saturday night?' They are all trapped in the stifling little room together and she's telling them . . . she's telling them everything about herself and her life and her child, and yet, they are complete strangers.

‘Are you okay to start again, Anna? Have you had enough to eat?' asks Walt. Cynthia picks up the platter of sandwiches and their plates, and leaves the room.

‘Yes, thanks, I'm fine; well, not
fine
, but fine.'

‘Are you ready to talk about the night of the accident?'

Anna sighs. ‘I don't know if I can ever be ready for that. How can anyone ever be ready for such a thing?'

‘Anna,' says Walt, ‘I want to tell you again that we can leave this and do it in a week or so, when you've had more time.'

‘No, no, I want to do it now,' says Anna. ‘I want to get it done. I wish it was over already. I wish I was a month into the future. A decade into the future. I wish I didn't have to feel like this for even one more hour.'

‘I understand,' says Walt.

‘No, you don't, because you can't,' Anna wants to say.

‘Two days ago,' she says instead, ‘I went into her room and someone, I don't know if it was my mother or my mother-in-law or Keith, but someone had tidied it. They'd tidied it so completely that any trace of who she was is gone. Like they wanted to make sure that when you walked into the room, it looked like it had belonged to any other eleven-year-old girl, as if that could make the memory of her easier to stand. They'd pushed her beanbag in front of the holes she kicked in the wall and they'd put all her clothes on the shelves, even though Maya preferred them to be in coloured piles on the floor. I used to tidy up her cupboard once a week, and every time I did it, I hoped that she would leave her clothes where I'd put them but she never did. She would come home and go into her room and then she'd come out and touch the words ‘no' and ‘mum' on her iPad
and yank everything off the shelves again. “Just leave it like that,” Keith said to me. “Do you want to cause a meltdown because you're a neat freak?”

‘Her books had been put back on the bookshelves too, and now there's nothing in there that looks like her. She liked the books stacked in blocks of colour in front of the bookcase. I used to buy books for her only for their covers. I specifically used to look for covers that were in a single colour like red or blue or yellow. I was so angry about the books being put on the shelves, but I just didn't have the energy to find out who did it and knew it would do no good. I'm unlikely to forget who she was and how she was, anyway.'

‘How was she, Anna?'

‘She was . . . she was Maya,' says Anna, and realises that as she says this that it is the only way to describe who her daughter was. ‘There are no typical ways for a child to be autistic, Walt. To start with, it's a spectrum. I met some children at Maya's school who were so ordinary, so normal, that I resented the fact they were taking up a place and, of course, those sorts of kids usually moved into mainstream schools quickly enough, but not Maya.

‘Maya was extreme. She was severely autistic. It took almost two years of different doctors for us to get a definitive diagnosis. I took her to our paediatrician first, and then to a child psychiatrist, and then to an occupational therapist, and then to an audiologist and then an ophthalmologist. No one wanted to make a definite diagnosis,
although by then, she was old enough for everyone to agree that there was something wrong. Maybe no doctor wants to be the one who dashes a parent's hopes and dreams.

‘At first, when she was still a baby, I could see every doctor I went to thinking I was simply a neurotic mother, that I was watching my child too closely. Her paediatrician even suggested that I was suffering from post-partum depression. “Sometimes a lack of sleep and a huge change in lifestyle can make a woman think that she sees things that aren't there,” he told me. “Maya is highly strung, and I can see that she is a little delayed, but we want to be wary of making knee-jerk diagnoses.” But the difference between Maya and her peers got bigger and bigger, and, finally, the doctors started to see what I was seeing.

‘Everyone we went to would run a whole lot of tests with Maya, and then they would sit Keith and me down at the end of the appointment and say something like, “Well, I do see some issues here.” I remember how my heart used to skip a beat every time that happened. It was an awful feeling, and every time we left another doctor's office, I would look at Maya and think, “Her speech is severely delayed,” or “Her cognition is poor,” or “Her fine motor skills are lacking.” I felt like I was eventually seeing a collection of problems, rather than my child, and because of that, I think I hated every doctor we went to see.'

Cynthia comes back into the room and sits down. She has reapplied her lipstick and put on a dash of perfume. She brings with her a smell of open spaces and flowers,
and Anna thinks about a walk on the beach—something she has not done for years. Maya didn't like the feel of beach sand, and even when Anna was alone, she never went, because the beach was far from Maya's school and she was always afraid that a call would come, summoning her back.

As Maya got older, the calls from the school came more and more often. Maya had, at first, been well behaved at school, but the older she got, the worse her behaviour became. She would attack the other children on a regular basis. There were other students who could also become violent but, for the most part, the teachers seemed to have them under control. The problem was that none of their strategies worked with Maya. She would wonder over to a child working through a puzzle and slap him or her across the face, and when the teachers tried to discipline her for her behaviour, she would tantrum, falling on the floor, kicking and screaming and biting, and pulling hair and punching anyone who tried to come near her.

‘We think she wanted to have a go at the puzzle and she just had no idea how to communicate that,' they told Anna.

‘We're working on it,' they said.

‘It's getting harder to have her in the classroom,' they began saying.

‘She's become extremely disruptive.'

Anna was often called to come and get her, especially as she got bigger. Maya's teachers had bruises from their interactions with her, just like Anna did.

She doesn't let herself think about the final phone call from the school, the one that came right before the accident. It doesn't matter now.

‘I can go to the beach now,' she thinks. ‘I can go for a day or a week. There is no reason for me to be home anymore.' The thought is terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

‘Go on, Anna,' says Cynthia. ‘I didn't mean to interrupt.'

‘I was talking about Maya, about trying to find out what was wrong with her. You know, I felt like such a fucking failure, like I had somehow messed up the one thing that every woman was supposed to be able to do. There were days, many days, over the course of her life when I didn't understand my child; didn't like her, even.'

‘Sorry, Anna, you didn't like her?' says Walt.

‘Oh, oh God, I didn't mean that. I mean, I just . . . I just meant that some days were really hard. Caro tried to help. She came over to my place all the time because she knew that then I could control Maya's environment. Once Maya started walking, it was difficult to keep on top of things. Whatever I did, she would follow me and undo. I know that most kids do things like that. They like to take the washing out of the basket and the pots out of the cupboard and then put everything back again, but Maya would throw things and rip things . . . she tore into books like she hated them. When she was older, she liked books for their covers, but when she was about two, it was almost like she had to destroy them. One of her therapists suggested that she didn't like the smell and feel of them. I took all the books
away and put them up on a high shelf, and then I caught her trying to climb up the bookshelf to get them. I had no idea what she wanted. Now I know that she was just trying to find a way to communicate with me, but then it felt like I was raising a one-child army of destruction.'

‘Anna, I know that you need to explain this and I'm going to let you do that, but it does feel like we're getting fairly off topic,' says Walt. ‘The night of the accident is our main concern.'

‘Yes, yes, the night of the accident. I know, I know.' Anna does know. She understands why she is sitting in a room with two detectives but she doesn't want to talk about that night. She knows that eventually she will have to discuss what happened, but in the back of her mind, she thinks that if she can just keep talking and talking, then, eventually, the detectives will give up and send her home.

‘Do you know what I felt when I finally had a diagnosis for Maya?'

‘What?' asks Cynthia, because Walt is looking down at his notepad. Anna can see he is getting frustrated with her but trying to keep his cool.

‘Relief. I was so fucking relieved that I knew what was wrong.'

Walt sighs and leans back in his chair. ‘Anna, please . . .' he says, ‘we really need to get to that day. It's important that we hear from you about that day.'

‘Walt, I think we can just let Anna talk.'

‘Cynthia.'

‘Please, I really don't want you two arguing because of me. I'm getting there, I really am. I need to explain who she was. I don't know why I have to do that. Perhaps it's because no one will actually talk about that anymore. When Keith spoke at her funeral, he talked about her being creative and having an infectious laugh. He said she loved movies and her friends, and I wanted to get up and shout, “No, that's not right. That's not who she was.” She wasn't creative. She would take a whole box of crayons and draw lines, one after the other, again and again, until she couldn't move her arms anymore, and sometimes the picture that resulted would have a kind of beauty but it wasn't as though she were trying for beauty. And she didn't have any friends at school. There were kids she would play next to, or learn next to, but she never got past that. Most of the kids at her school were scared of her, anyway. I would drop her off and watch them move away from her, in case she was in the mood to pull someone's hair, or bite or kick. When Caro brought Lex over, Lex would try and talk to her, would ask her to play pretend or to play with dolls, and mostly Maya would ignore her but sometimes she'd look at her as if she didn't understand what she was. When she got older, she liked to watch a DVD about space. I don't know what she was seeing—maybe the colours or the way the planets were lined up—but she loved that DVD.

‘One day, when the girls were around six, Lex and Caro came over for tea. Lex sat next to Maya and watched the DVD about space, but when it got to the end she didn't
want to see it again and said, “This is boring,” and she got up and ejected it from the machine. Maya went . . . went absolutely crazy. She grabbed Lex's hair and pulled it, and screamed and screamed. By the time we'd managed to get the two girls apart, Maya had pulled out a whole handful of Lex's hair. It was awful. Caro started crying and that made me cry and, of course, Lex was crying, but Maya was just screaming. I think it was probably the last time Caro brought Lex over but she didn't stop coming herself. She understood about Maya, she really did.