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“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?”
I try to look sympathetic and encourage her to continue. The way she talks, you’d think we were mother and daughter chatting over coffee and scones at Panera Bread. Not me in a chair with my arms looped behind my back, and Caroline fidgeting with a loaded syringe, anxiously twisting the barrel between her fingers.
“The only thing that gives me any joy is walking. There’s a park on Seneca Lake with nice shaded trails, and that’s where I first met Margit. That’s Anya’s real name: Margit Baroth. I’d see her sitting in the shade of a tree, painting landscapes. She was very talented and I guess I was a little envious. And she always brought her daughter. She had a two-year-old, a little girl named Flora. Margit would just plop her on a blanket and ignore her. For two or three hours at a time. She’d stick a smartphone in the kid’s hands and then completely neglect her. And not just once or twice, Mallory. I saw them every weekend! This was their routine! It made me angry every time I walked past them. I mean—here’s this perfect child, this beautiful little girl, starved for attention, and the mother’s plying her with YouTube videos! Like she’s a burden! I’ve read a lot of research on screen time, Mallory. It’s toxic for a child’s imagination.
“So after a couple times I decided to intervene. I walked over to the blanket and tried to introduce myself, but Margit had no idea what I was saying. I realized she couldn’t speak English. So I tried to pantomime what I meant—I tried to show her she was being an awful mother. And I guess she took that the wrong way. She got angry, I got angry, and pretty soon we were both screaming, me in English and she in Hungarian, until some people finally came over. They had to literally stand between us.
“After that, I tried going to different parks and trails. But I couldn’t stop thinking about that little girl. I felt like I failed her, like I had one chance to intervene and I blew it. So one day, maybe two months after the argument, I went back to the lake. It was a Saturday morning, and there was an incredible hot-air balloon festival. They do it every September, thousands of people show up, and the sky is filled with all these big bright colorful shapes. The perfect thing for a child’s imagination, you know? And Margit is painting one of the balloons but little Flora is just staring at a phone. She’s down on the blanket getting sunburn all over her arms and shoulders.
“And as I stood there, getting madder and madder, I notice something. I see this rabbit wriggling out of the ground. It must have been burrowed nearby. It popped out of the grass and shook itself off and Flora saw it. She called, ‘Anya, anya!’ and she pointed to the rabbit, laughing, but Margit didn’t turn around. She was too caught up in her artwork. She didn’t realize that her little girl had stood up and walked away, that Flora was crossing a field and heading down into a valley. Toward a creek, Mallory. So I had to do something, right? I couldn’t ignore what was happening. I followed Flora into the valley, and by the time I reached her, she was completely lost. She was bawling, hysterical. I knelt beside her and I told her everything was fine. I said I knew how to find her mommy, and I offered to bring her back. And I really meant to, Mallory. I really meant to bring Flora back.”
I almost lose the thread of the story because I am remembering the spirit board and its cryptic message and realizing I put too much faith in Google Translate. The message wasn’t HELP FLOWER—it was HELP FLORA, help her daughter.