Chapter 16: The Question
I want to be very clear about why I could not answer her, because it looks like a lie and it is not one.
Every episode has its own page.
Date at the top, underlined. Then onset. Then duration. Then the rest of it in the order Dr. Moreno wanted it.
You write the page in the dark at three in the morning with a torch in your teeth, and then you close the book.
You do not flick back through it. There is nothing in the back of it that helps you with the one that is happening now.
You are counting, and holding a child’s head, and watching a clock with your other eye. That is the whole of your attention, and there is none of it left over.
I had filled about thirty pages in six months and I had never once sat down and turned all of them at the same time.
I had never made a list. I had never written a number at the top of anything.
I gave the pages to a doctor, and a doctor is the person who is supposed to do that.
That is not an excuse. It is the truth, and it is also, as it turned out, the single largest mistake of my life.
Nobody had ever asked me for a total. Not the doctor, not the family, not once in six months.
Detective Hale said, “Roughly.”
I said, “More than ten. Less than thirty. I could count them in ten minutes if I had the book.”
She wrote that down word for word, including the ten minutes.
Then she turned two pages back in her pad and read something over, and I watched her read it, and I knew what was coming.
She said, “I have to put another account to you.”
I said, “All right.”
“Ms. Montigue’s statement is that the injury to the child’s arm occurred when you pulled him out of her hands.”
There it was.
Not the shoe. Not the wrist. Not the camera. Just a clean sentence with my name inside it.
Officer Pryor had stopped writing again and he was looking at the carpet.
I said, “I did pull him out of her hands.”
Detective Hale looked up.
I said it again, because I could hear how it sounded and I said it anyway.
“I took him off her. She had his wrist and she had lifted him and I took him off her with both hands under his ribs.”
“And you don’t know when the arm was hurt.”
“No.”
“You didn’t hear anything.”
“No. It doesn’t make a noise. That’s not what it’s like.”
She said, “You’re aware that puts you in it.”
I said, “Yes.”
I was aware of it from about the fourth second of the whole thing, and I have never once considered saying it differently.
If I had said she wrenched him, if I had said I heard something, if I had put one adjective in that was not mine —
Then eleven months later, in a room with wood panels, a man in a good suit would have had that adjective, and he would have used it to take the rest of it away.
The only thing I have ever had is that I do not add anything.
It is a poor weapon and it is slow, and it is the only one they issue to people like me.
Detective Hale wrote for a while. Then she closed the pad, which I thought meant we were finished.
She was not finished.
She said, “One more. Then we’ll let you sit down.”
I said, “All right.”
She said, “You work four nights in seven.”
“Yes. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. Thursdays and the weekend I’m in the coach house or I go to my mother’s.”
“So on the other three nights, nobody is sleeping in that room.”
“No. There’s a monitor. It goes through to the housekeeper’s landing.”
She said, “Right.” And then she asked it.
“Of these episodes, Ms. Carter — how many of them happened on a night you weren’t in the house?”
I sat there.
I heard the ventilation. I heard a trolley go past outside. I heard Officer Pryor’s pen touch the pad and stop.
I said, “I don’t know.”
She said, “Who writes them down when you’re not there?”
“Nobody.”
There is a monitor, and a housekeeper on a landing, and a door at the end of it that is usually shut.
A monitor tells you when a child is crying. It does not tell you anything at all about a child who has gone quiet.
And then she asked me the second half of it, and it is the sentence I have carried for the rest of my life.
“Then how do you know there were only the ones you saw?”
I have answered that question in my head every night since.
I have never been able to answer it out loud.