Free Blame by Nicole Trope Page B

and Caro feels some of her tension release. The detective sneaks a quick look at her watch.
    ‘Do you have to be somewhere?’ asks Caro.
    ‘No,’ says Susan. ‘I have as much time as you want. As much time as you need.’
    ‘I need forever,’ thinks Caro. ‘Forever.’

Chapter Five
    Anna can see that she’s managed to make Cynthia understand what she’s saying. She knows that she could have said, ‘Maya was autistic,’ and Cynthia would have understood, but she feels the need to make the detectives understand exactly what that meant to her, to her life, to their life as a family. Everyone knows what autism is or, at least, they think they do. Say ‘autistic’ to someone who has never met an autistic child and they will automatically think ‘ Rain Man ’. Anna used to think ‘ Rain Man ’. But Rain Man was a movie and the actor in it was not autistic. At night, he could stop holding his head to one side and being afraid of cracks on the sidewalk, and go home to his wife. Even after eleven years of knowing that her child was autistic, Anna still had days when she would wake up and thinkthat Maya would have somehow been cured overnight, that she would magically be able to stop playing the role she was playing and just get on with being a little girl.
    ‘Maya was autistic,’ says Anna to the detectives, and sees the nod of recognition but is not grateful for it; only resentful that it comes with so little actual knowledge. She sighs, thinking about those first days after Maya was diagnosed, when she began researching the condition, and discovered everything that autism could mean and everything that it could not mean. What she remembers most was feeling overwhelmed and sad—very, very sad.
    In one hour-long appointment at the developmental paediatrician, she had all her worst fears confirmed and, at the same time, lost the child she thought she was going to raise. It was devastating.
    She has spent Maya’s whole life explaining her to people and, now, sitting in the small, stale room across the way from the man who put his arms around her when the doctors admitted that Maya was gone, she feels the need to explain one last time.
    ‘There are babies who cry more than others. I’ve read that you can go to any mothers group and always find one child who has colic or is really unsettled, but Maya was like nothing anyone had ever seen. I tried mothers groups a few times, but I think I made the other mothers uncomfortable. I had to bounce Maya the whole way through or she’d scream. And each time I went, there was one mother who said, “If you just put her down for a minute, she’ll befine,” and inevitably I’d do just that because I could see the way they were all looking at me, and then Maya would start screaming and I could feel them judging me, judging her. They would turn their heads away from us and try to speak over the noise and eventually one by one they would get up and move away from me, from Maya. It was easier to get up and leave then, easier to be at home alone, so I could avoid everyone’s stares. I don’t think anyone really believed me about the screaming until they experienced it for themselves.
    ‘One day, about two weeks after the screaming started, Keith’s mother came for a visit. She’s one of those women they call “earth mothers”. It’s like she was born to get pregnant and raise a large family. Keith has five siblings, three brothers and two sisters, and they all have kids. Nothing fazes Estelle. She bakes every day, just like she did when her kids were little, and when they were at school, she was always the class mother, and she helped with homework and sang while she did the dishes.’ Anna shakes her head. ‘It sounds ridiculous now when I say it, ridiculous that any mother could be so perfect, but it was the impression Keith gave me. He remembers this really idyllic childhood. According to him, his mother barely ever raised her voice. He and his siblings never