Catch Me (Detective D.D. Warren, #6)(91)

“Might be that you never saw him alive,” D.D. suggested. “ME’s office consulted a forensic anthropologist on the remains. Based on the size of the skeleton, the baby boy was approximately full term, but could’ve been born a few weeks premature, maybe even died in utero. Either way, let’s just say he didn’t make it long in this world.”

“Boys are icky,” I heard myself say. “Boys just grow up to be men who want only one thing from girls.”

Not my words, but the memory of an audio fragment, playing back. I caught myself, shook my head slightly, as if to clear the words from my brain. “When was he born?”

“Don’t know. No birth certificate.”

“His name was Carter. I know that, even if I don’t know how I know that.”

“It was written on the outside of the Tupperware container.”

I winced. “She killed him. Gave birth, killed him, that’s what you think.”

The older detective shrugged. “Technically, your mother was charged with abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child. Given the skeletal remains, there’s no way to prove if the baby was stillborn, or was killed after birth. Logic would dictate, however…”

“What do you think?” Detective O spoke up, her voice more demanding. “You lived with the woman. You tell us what might have happened.”

“I don’t remember a baby boy. Just his name. Maybe she told it to me. Maybe I found the container. I don’t know. I saw the body. I remember the name Carter. I took it, made it part of mine. My own way of honoring him.”

“But you just said you didn’t remember him.”

I looked up at Detective O. “It’s possible to lie to yourself, you know. It’s possible to both know and not know things. People do it all the time. It’s called coping.”

“Tell us about Rosalind,” the younger detective demanded.

“I loved her. She would cry, and I would try…I loved her.”

“Was she born first?” D.D. asked.

“I don’t know. But she lived longer. Right?”

“Probably a year,” the detective said quietly.

I resumed staring at the floor. Carpet wouldn’t come into focus. My eyes were swimming, turning the blue-gray Berber into a moving sea of regret.

“I was in the ER,” I heard myself whisper. “My mother had fed me a crushed lightbulb. I was in the ER, vomiting blood and there was this nurse, this kind-looking nurse. And I remember thinking I needed to tell her. If I could just tell her about the baby. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. My mother trained me well.”

The detectives didn’t say anything.

“I don’t understand,” I said after another moment. “My aunt is nice, my aunt is normal. I’m really fond of puppies and kitties and I’ve never played with matches. And yet my mom, my own mother…She did such horrible things to me just to get attention. And that still made me the lucky kid.”

“Is that how you view yourself?” Detective O pounced. “As lucky?”

I looked up at her. “What are you, f*cking nuts?”

The young detective’s eyes widened in shock, then D.D. stepped between us, placing a hand on her colleague’s shoulder.

“What we’re both trying to understand here,” D.D. stated, with a pointed look at her partner, “is how you survived such a tragic childhood and how it might impact your current situation.”

I stared at her blankly, not following. “I don’t know how I survived. I woke up in a hospital, my aunt took me away, and I’ve done my best never to look back since. The few things I recall mostly come to me as dreams, meaning maybe they’re not even true? I don’t know. I haven’t wanted to know. The first eight years of my life I’ve purposefully blanked from my mind. And if that means the past twenty years are spotty as well, that’s just the way it goes. You rattle off your first day of school, the dog you had in third grade, the dress you wore to prom. I’ll do it my way.”

Both detectives regarded me skeptically.

“You really expect us to believe that?” Bad cop Detective O spoke up first. “You’ve blanked your entire childhood from your own mind?”

“Please, I’ve blanked most of my life from my mind. I don’t remember things. I don’t know how else to tell you that. The first week of my life, the last week of my life. I don’t know. I don’t dwell on things. Maybe that’s freakish, but it’s also worked. I get up each morning. And from what I do remember of the brief time before my aunt came to take me away, I didn’t want to get up anymore. I was alive, and I was deeply disappointed by that.

“Eight years old,” I whispered. “Eight years old, and I already wished I were dead.”

“Tell us about your dreams,” D.D. said.

“Sometimes, I dream about a baby crying. That one feels real enough. Last night, however, I dreamed of my mother digging a grave in the middle of a thunderstorm. And her hair was filled with snakes, hissing at me, and I grabbed a baby girl out of the hall closet and ran away. Except, obviously my mom’s hair wasn’t made out of snakes, and oh yeah, there’s no way a toddler can climb a tree holding a baby, not to mention that in the dream, the baby’s name was Abigail, when of course, it was Rosalind.”