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.
“Eight years old,” I whispered. “Eight years old, and I already wished I were dead.”
“Tell us about your dreams,” D.D. said.
“Sometimes, I dream about a baby crying. That one feels real enough. Last night, however, I dreamed of my mother digging a grave in the middle of a thunderstorm. And her hair was filled with snakes, hissing at me, and I grabbed a baby girl out of the hall closet and ran away. Except, obviously my mom’s hair wasn’t made out of snakes, and oh yeah, there’s no way a toddler can climb a tree holding a baby, not to mention that in the dream, the baby’s name was Abigail, when of course, it was Rosalind.”
“Abigail?” Detective O asked sharply. She and Detective D.D. exchanged a glance. “Tell us about Abigail.”
I shook my head, rubbing my temples where a headache had already taken root. “You tell me. Do you have a record of an Abigail? Because I mentioned it to my aunt, and she said no. There were two babies. Rosalind and Carter. No Abigail.”
“No birth certificates, remember? No way to be sure.” D.D. was staring at me as hard as Detective O. “In your dream, what did Abigail look like?”
“Like a baby. She smiled at me. Big brown eyes.”
“Brown eyes,” Detective O interrupted. “What about blue?”
“I don’t know. In my dream, they were brown. But…maybe. Don’t all babies start with blue eyes?”
“But you remember brown,” D.D. said. “Blue eyes could darken into brown, but a baby wouldn’t start with brown eyes, that then turned blue.”
I shook my head, confused by both of them and their intensity. “My aunt said two babies, that’s all the police found.”
“It’s possible there were other babies,” D.D. said softly. “According to the police report, your mother moved around a lot, rarely spent more than a year in the same area. Probably helped her disguise the pregnancies, while keeping people from asking too many questions. The officers searched former rental units, of course, but she might have buried other remains, disposed of them in the woods, that sort of thing.”
“What kind of woman does such a thing?”
“A psychopath.” D.D. shrugged. “Munchausen’s by proxy is all about narcissism, a woman objectifying, then harming her own child in order to receive sympathy. Infanticide isn’t that much different. She would’ve viewed the pregnancies as inconvenient, maybe even considered an infant as a rival for attention. She acted accordingly.”
“What do you think,
“What?”
Detective Warren frowned at O, then turned back to me. “You ever try to find your mom?”
“No.” I hesitated, fingered my side. “I, um, I assumed something bad had happened. I know I ended up in the hospital, seriously injured. Then my aunt arrived. I never saw my mother again and my aunt never brought it up. I assumed…I assumed maybe I’d done something to her.”
“Police received a nine-one-one summons to the residence. They found you, covered in blood. Further search turned up two plastic bins with human remains in the hall closet. A warrant was issued for your mom, but she was never arrested.”
“But you said you found her.”
“You said you’ve been talking to your aunt,” O interjected, demanding my attention. “She here, visiting? Or did you talk to her by phone?”
“She’s here-”
“Where?”
“My room-”
“When did she arrive?”
“This morning.”
“What about last night?”
“What about last night?”
“Where’d you go after speaking to us yesterday? You talk to your aunt, hang out with friends, take the dog for a walk?”
