Lisa Gardner - Catch Me

Both of them all business.

I wished I’d brought Tulip, just to have a friend in the room.

“Charlene Rosalind Carter Grant,” D.D. repeated, testing each word. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Turns out, my past is a work in progress.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “You gave us the two names to run, Rosalind Grant, Carter Grant.”

I nodded.

She tossed a file on the table. It landed with a faint thwack and I flinched. “There you go. Full report. Sister. Brother. Mother. Ever read it?”

I shook my head, eyed the manila file folder, made no move to touch it.

My aunt said the doctors had advised her that I should remember on my own. That forcing the issue, before I was ready, might do greater emotional harm.

Greater harm than what? Waking up each morning, knowing that when I had nightmares of my mother digging midnight graves with coiling, hissing snakes in lieu of hair, I wasn’t totally wrong?

A perfectly pale and still baby girl. The nearly marble-like form of an even smaller baby boy. That is what I’d spent the past twenty years trying to forget. Rosalind Grant. Carter Grant. The baby sister and baby brother I’d once loved, then lost to my mother’s madness. The babies, crying down the hall, that I’d known, even as a toddler, that I needed to help. Tell a nurse. Bolt with them out into the rain.

I’d tried in my own way. But I’d been small and vulnerable, my mother all-knowing, all-powerful. In the end, what I couldn’t change I’d opted to forget.

One crazy mother. Two murdered siblings.

Was it any wonder my head was so fucked up?

I stared now at the manila file. I thought it was unfair that my sister and brother’s entire lives could be distilled into a single thin folder. They had deserved better. We all had.

“Why you?” Detective O spoke up crisply. “You lived. They died. You must think about that, have some theories on the subject. Were you more cooperative, the good little girl? Maybe they were sniveling little brats-”

“Stop.” I wanted my voice to come out firm. It sounded more like a whisper. I cleared my throat, tried again. “You want to beat me up, fine. But not them. You don’t get to pick on them. They were just babies. You leave them alone, or I’m outta here.”

Detective Warren was scowling at her partner, clearly agreeing with me. Or maybe not. Maybe this was just the latest episode of good cop, bad cop. But then I realized a couple of things: They didn’t need me to come down to HQ to talk about two twenty-year-old homicides from an entirely different state. Nor were they mentioning the Facebook page, or how to bait a killer in preparation for tomorrow evening’s murderous deadline. Instead, they had a single manila folder holding police reports from my childhood.

They wanted something from me. The question was what, and how much it would cost me.

“What do you remember?” Detective Warren asked me now. “About your childhood?”

I shrugged, gaze still on the closed file. “Not much. I can’t…I don’t…” I had to clear my throat, try again. “I don’t even remember a baby brother. Not a smile, not a whimper…Just, his body. His perfect little form, so still, like a statue.” I paused, cleared my throat again. Still wasn’t working. I looked away from both detectives, stared at the carpet. “I’m sorry.”

“Might be that you never saw him alive,” D.D. suggested. “ME’s office consulted a forensic anthropologist on the remains. Based on the size of the skeleton, the baby boy was approximately full term, but could’ve been born a few weeks premature, maybe even died in utero. Either way, let’s just say he didn’t make it long in this world.”

“Boys are icky,” I heard myself say. “Boys just grow up to be men who want only one thing from girls.”

Not my words, but the memory of an audio fragment, playing back. I caught myself, shook my head slightly, as if to clear the words from my brain. “When was he born?”

“Don’t know. No birth certificate.”

“His name was Carter. I know that, even if I don’t know how I know that.”

“It was written on the outside of the Tupperware container.”

I winced. “She killed him. Gave birth, killed him, that’s what you think.”

The older detective shrugged. “Technically, your mother was charged with abuse of a corpse and concealing the death of a child. Given the skeletal remains, there’s no way to prove if the baby was stillborn, or was killed after birth. Logic would dictate, however…”

“What do you think?” Detective O spoke up, her voice more demanding. “You lived with the woman. You tell us what might have happened.”

“I don’t remember a baby boy. Just his name. Maybe she told it to me. Maybe I found the container. I don’t know. I saw the body. I remember the name Carter. I took it, made it part of mine. My own way of honoring him.”

“But you just said you didn’t remember him.”

I looked up at Detective O. “It’s possible to lie to yourself, you know. It’s possible to both know and not know things. People do it all the time. It’s called coping.”

“Tell us about Rosalind,” the younger detective demanded.

“I loved her. She would cry, and I would try…I loved her.”

“Was she born first?” D.D. asked.

“I don’t know. But she lived longer. Right?”

“Probably a year,” the detective said quietly.

I resumed staring at the floor. Carpet wouldn’t come into focus. My eyes were swimming, turning the blue-gray Berber into a moving sea of regret.

“I was in the ER,” I heard myself whisper. “My mother had fed me a crushed lightbulb. I was in the ER, vomiting blood and there was this nurse, this kind-looking nurse. And I remember thinking I needed to tell her. If I could just tell her about the baby. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. My mother trained me well.”

The detectives didn’t say anything.

“I don’t understand,” I said after another moment. “My aunt is nice, my aunt is normal. I’m really fond of puppies and kitties and I’ve never played with matches. And yet my mom, my own mother…She did such horrible things to me just to get attention. And that still made me the lucky kid.”

“Is that how you view yourself?” Detective O pounced. “As lucky?”

I looked up at her. “What are you, fucking nuts?”

The young detective’s eyes widened in shock, then D.D. stepped between us, placing a hand on her colleague’s shoulder.

“What we’re both trying to understand here,” D.D. stated, with a pointed look at her partner, “is how you survived such a tragic childhood and how it might impact your current situation.”

I stared at her blankly, not following. “I don’t know how I survived. I woke up in a hospital, my aunt took me away, and I’ve done my best never to look back since. The few things I recall mostly come to me as dreams, meaning maybe they’re not even true? I don’t know. I haven’t wanted to know. The first eight years of my life I’ve purposefully blanked from my mind. And if that means the past twenty years are spotty as well, that’s just the way it goes. You rattle off your first day of school, the dog you had in third grade, the dress you wore to prom. I’ll do it my way.”

Both detectives regarded me skeptically.

“You really expect us to believe that?” Bad cop Detective O spoke up first. “You’ve blanked your entire childhood from your own mind?”

“Please, I’ve blanked most of my life from my mind. I don’t remember things. I don’t know how else to tell you that. The first week of my life, the last week of my life. I don’t know. I don’t dwell on things. Maybe that’s freakish, but it’s also worked. I get up each morning. And from what I do remember of the brief time before my aunt came to take me away, I didn’t want to get up anymore. I was alive, and I was deeply disappointed by that.