“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.