Saving Meghan(46)

“How can you be so sure of me?” Becky asked.

Zach cleared his throat and recomposed himself. “I don’t believe for one second that you’d hurt your daughter intentionally. We’re going to get this straightened out.”

“What if I was doing it unintentionally?” Becky asked. “What if I’m sick and I can’t help myself?”

Zach found Becky’s calm demeanor eerily unsettling. “I don’t believe that’s true,” he said, worried his answer might have sounded forced.

“Why so confident?” Becky asked. “You don’t know me well at all. How can you be so sure of yourself?” The coolness in her voice set a chill against Zach’s skin. If he’d just met her, if this were a police interview, he’d think her quite capable of the charges.

“I guess I can be confident because I believe Meghan has mito,” he said.

“But you’re not positive, are you, because we don’t know for sure it’s mito?”

Zach shook his head, rubbing his facial scruff with the hand newly freed from Becky’s touch. “That’s right, I’m afraid. We haven’t confirmed a diagnosis.”

“So you see, Carl might be behaving like a complete jerk but, in a way, a part of me understands why he’d have his doubts. Nash, too. But what I don’t understand is how they can take my daughter without having the proof. Why does Nash’s claim trump ours?”

“Because you don’t return a child to a dangerous situation,” Zach said flatly.

Becky’s body tensed. She got it. If mito were harming Meghan, then it would be blamed on bad luck and nothing more. But if Becky were to cause harm, everyone from the hospital down to the doctors who had treated the patient would bear the responsibility. For this reason alone the burden of proof shifted, arguably unfairly, onto the parent.

“Carl’s attitude isn’t helpful. It’s going to work against you,” Zach said.

“Be honest, Dr. Fisher—”

“Please, call me Zach.”

Becky leaned back in her chair, hands folded primly in her lap. Her eyes were again assessing him, making him feel strangely vulnerable. “Be honest, Zach,” she said, tilting her head, looking at him coquettishly. She could start a fire with that smile, thought Zach. “If you weren’t so close to the situation, you’d probably blame me, too.”

Zach did not like the way Becky kept planting these doubts. Did he see Meghan as having mito because it’s what he wanted to see? Was it possible Becky was something more than a devoted mother? Zach looked at Becky with renewed intent, forcing himself to see past her beauty, searching her face for assurances that were not there, looking into eyes that were clouded with grief, anguish, or perhaps something else—perhaps, as he now feared, malice.

Zach knew something of the psychology that makes a parent do harm behind closed doors. He knew that in such cases, the parent had usually suffered an unpredictable childhood, one of abuse or neglect. And while he knew nothing of Becky’s upbringing, he thought of the baby she had lost, and what it might have done to her. He knew what the loss of Will had done to him.

No … no … no, Zach thought to himself. It can’t be true. It can’t be.

And yet, try as he might to reason it away, the doubts remained.





CHAPTER 22





MEGHAN


I woke up not sure where I was. I didn’t remember falling asleep, but as soon as my eyes opened, I thought for a second I’d been in a car accident and this was an operating room. I’d never had an operation before, but the walls of the room were painted white like the operating rooms I’d seen on TV, and the overhead lights burned my eyes the way I figured powerful operating room lights would burn. I panicked because I knew I wasn’t supposed to wake up during surgery. I wondered if maybe my stomach was cut open or something. I waited to feel sharp jolts of pain, hear doctors screaming: She’s awake! She’s awake! Get her back under!

But as my mind cleared, I saw there weren’t any doctors in the room with me. In fact, I was alone. But where am I? I drifted in and out of consciousness, feeling woozy and dazed, but little jolts kept jabbing me back to alertness.

The feeling of coming in and out of focus reminded me of the time I’d woken up still drunk in Shelly Stevenson’s basement last year. A bunch of my girlfriends had crashed out in sleeping bags after we’d polished off the rum punch that Tanya Carmichael had made from her parents’ stash. We had huddled together and watched horror movies until we’d passed out, having laughed and screamed ourselves to exhaustion.

When I came awake on the basement floor, my head was throbbing, buzzing. I eventually made it to the bathroom, where I sent that good time into the toilet with a splash. I stayed in a fog for most of that day. That’s how I felt now. My brain was clouded and I’d swear someone had stuffed cotton in my mouth. But where am I?

I tried to swing my legs off the bed to stand, but my knees connected hard with a plastic guardrail raised along the side. Who has a bed with guardrails on it except old people or sick people? Directly across from my bed was a television built into the wall, but the screen was covered in thick plastic, like someone was worried I might try to steal it or break the glass. I slumped back onto the mattress and began to count to ten, trying to rid myself of that doped-up feeling. My eyelids grew heavy, and it became dark again.