Hidden Pictures(79)
“You and Ted were having problems. He said you spent years trying to conceive. Was this the last resort? Stealing a child?”
“I rescued that child.”
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done and we need to move on. I’m sorry you won’t be part of our family anymore.”
Caroline carefully pushes the powder back into the spoon and then reaches for the BBQ lighter. She clicks the button several times before it produces a small blue flame, and I see that her hands are trembling.
“Does Teddy remember anything?”
“What do you think, Mallory? Does he seem traumatized? Does he seem sad or unhappy? No, he does not. He remembers nothing. He is a happy, well-adjusted child and I worked very hard to get him to this place. He’ll never know how much I’ve sacrificed for him. And that’s fine.”
As Caroline speaks, the powder in the spoon smokes and blackens and finally liquefies. East Coast heroin doesn’t have much of an odor but I’m struck by a whiff of something chemical—maybe it’s the fentanyl, maybe it’s some other lethal additive. I remember hearing about a drug dealer in Camden who supposedly cut his product with Ajax cleanser. Caroline sets down the lighter and picks up the syringe. She dips the needle into the bowl of the spoon and then slowly draws back the plunger, filling the syringe with sickly brown sludge.
“He remembers the rabbit,” I tell her.
“Excuse me?”
“In Anya’s pictures, she shows a little girl chasing after a rabbit. The girl follows a white rabbit down into a valley. Now think back to my job interview, Caroline. The very first day I came here, you had one of Teddy’s drawings on your refrigerator. A picture of a white rabbit. Maybe he remembers more than you realize.”
“Her pictures are lies. You can’t trust them.”
“I had a hard time making sense of them. But I think I finally put them in the right order. They’re in the folder, on my nightstand. They show exactly what happened.”
Caroline reaches in her bag for a length of rubber tourniquet. She stretches it between her hands, like she’s ready to tie it around my arm. But then curiosity gets the better of her. She walks over to my nightstand, opens the folder, and starts sifting through the papers. “No, no, see, these drawings are so unfair! This is her version of what happened. But if you’d seen my side of things? The big picture? You’d understand better.”
“What’s the big picture?”
“I’m not saying I don’t feel guilty. I do feel guilty. I feel remorse. I’m not proud of what happened. But she didn’t leave me with a choice.”
“Show me what you mean.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the drawer of the nightstand, there’s a pad and pencil. Draw what happened. Show me your version of the story.”
Because I need all the time I can get.
Time for Adrian to drive home and get here and knock on the door and figure out something is very, very wrong.
And Caroline looks like she wants to do it! She seems eager to tell me her side of the story. But she’s smart enough to recognize that she’s being manipulated. “You’re trying to make me incriminate myself. You want me to draw out a confession, with pictures, so the police will find it and arrest me. Is that the idea?”
“No, Caroline, I’m just trying to understand what happened. Why did Teddy need to be rescued?”
She reaches for the tourniquet and moves behind my chair, but she can’t manage to tie it around my arm. Her hands are shaking too much. “Sometimes she gets in my head and it feels like a panic attack. It’ll go away in a minute or two.” She sits on the edge of my bed and covers her face with her hands. She takes deep breaths, filling her lungs with air. “I don’t expect you to have any sympathy but this has been really hard for me. It’s like a nightmare that doesn’t end.”
Her breathing is ragged. She grabs her knees and squeezes hard, as if she can will herself into a state of calm. “Ted and I used to live in Manhattan. Riverside Heights, Upper West Side. I was working for Mount Sinai, thirty-five years old and already burned out. My patients had so many problems. There’s just so much pain in the world, so much misery. And Ted, he had some boring IT job that he hated.
“I guess we were two very unhappy people trying to get pregnant, and we were failing, and the failure made us even more unhappy. We tried all the usual tricks: IVI, IVF, Clomid cycles. Do you know about these things?” Caroline shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing worked. We were both working crazy hours but we didn’t even need the money, because my father had left me a fortune. So finally we were like, screw it: Let’s leave our jobs and take a one-year sabbatical. We bought a place in upstate New York on Seneca Lake. The theory being that maybe—in a more relaxed state of mind—we would conceive.
“The only problem is, we get up there and we don’t have any friends. We don’t know a soul. It’s just me and Ted alone in this cabin all summer long. Now Ted, he gets really into wine-making. He takes classes with a local vintner. But me, I’m so bored, Mallory. I don’t know what to do with myself. I try writing, photography, gardening, breadmaking, none of it sticks. And I have this horrible realization that I am just not a very creative person. Isn’t that an awful thing to discover about yourself?”