“No,” she continues. “Not Cath…”
We might as well start with what happened to Catherine. After all, I would still be a father today if not for Claire’s brief descent into madness nineteen years ago.
You can’t change facts. Some will never be forgotten, especially the excruciating ones.
“You wrote in your diary that you found her in her crib,” I say. “Looking pale. You touched her cheek. It was cold. So you called for help.”
“I did,” she says. “My diary tells me that…”
And this is what I say:
Your diary only tells you what you’d much rather believe. What you can bear knowing. Truth was, you must have placed a pillow on Cath’s face during one of your black fits. She’d been crying all morning and afternoon. All day long. The day before. Two days before, too. Cath was a weepy little baby. No one could figure out why she howled all the time. You were frustrated by the fact that you didn’t know how to stop her from bawling. It didn’t help that you’d slipped into one of those syndromes common to new mothers. They now have a proper term for it: postpartum depression. I later found out a relevant fact from Dr. Jong. You were on antidepressants for a couple of weeks soon after you conceived Cath. But you stopped taking them when you discovered you were pregnant. Your depression came back with a vengeance after you gave birth…
Claire’s eyes are whirls of horror.
“I didn’t…”
Denial, I suppose, is a natural reaction to harsh truths. But it’s time for Claire to confront the past.
I entered Cath’s nursery that afternoon. I saw you cradling her. A pillow lay at your feet, limp and accusing. Your jaw was clenched. Your mind seemed light-years away. You fixed your gaze on me. Your eyes looked as though they had been occupied by demons, dragging you to a terrible new place where no one had ever ventured. They looked as though they’d been stripped of their human essence. But they were also disconcertingly vacant. It was an alarming combination, one unlike anything I’d seen before. I froze in my tracks, not believing what I was seeing. I merely gaped in horror. You told me, in a small voice, that you’d finally managed to stop Cath from crying…
“No…” Claire is on her knees now. Her eyes are awash with tears; a couple of drops have begun to streak down her cheeks. She has also covered her ears, as if to stop my bleak words from flowing in.
“This can’t be…”
Her mouth is a tortured circle. Like the mouth in Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
I rushed over to save Cath. I pulled her from your hands. Her body looked like a marionette’s. Like a frail, broken puppet. Or a rag doll without its spine. Her head was drooping downwards, as if it had been detached from the rest of her body. Her face had turned a pallid shade of gray. Her pupils were a blank void, like those you see on a shop mannequin. Something vital had been snuffed out of her eyes. In their place, a silent and unseeing scream of darkness. Those were the precise sentences I wrote in my diary, all those years ago. You were right. Cath had indeed stopped crying. But it was also clear that she would never cry again…
“I didn’t kill her,” Claire says, still clamping both ears with her hands. “I surely couldn’t have…”
It’s time for you to face the truth. After concealing it from yourself for such a long time. They placed you under observation in Addenbrooke’s that evening. I saw you lying on that hospital bed, your face scrunched up in misery. You were whimpering to yourself. Shaking your head to and fro. Mumbling the words Cath and sorry over and over again. Chewing your nails until nothing was left. I waved the nurse out of the room, saying that I had to talk to you in private. You looked up at me, a sudden flash of clarity in your eyes. You said you didn’t know what overtook you. You didn’t mean to hurt Cath. You merely wanted to stop her from crying. You couldn’t live with the knowledge of what you’d done. The truth, you said, would destroy you for the rest of your life. That was the moment I decided to help you: I felt sorry for you. After all, you were the woman I chose to marry. We’d just lost our daughter. I didn’t want to lose my wife to insanity. You were already close to the breaking point. In sickness and health, for better or worse, through good times and bad. Sickness, I reasoned to myself, applies to the mind, too.
But the guilt in my heart trumped everything else. I blamed myself. I should have suspected that things weren’t right with you soon after you gave birth to Cath. I should have written a stern Note to Self in my diary, telling myself that I should take you to see a psychiatrist at once. I should have read the signs; they were there before my eyes. My diary, after all, said that you had terrible nightmares after Cath was born; I saw you crying and wringing your hands in her nursery several times. I should have acted at once, based on what I wrote down. But I did nothing. Absolutely nothing. Back then, I was too preoccupied with the draft of my first novel; I was blinded by the act of creation, oblivious to the destruction within my own household. My guilt shattered my soul. Because I could have saved Cath from you.
Claire is hugging her knees on the floor, her face a vista of desolation. Her forehead is furrowed with lines of pain, sorrow, and guilt. She looks like a tiny, hunted animal. The sight is heartbreaking. Sudden, unexpected sympathy slides into my heart; I’m tempted to walk up to her and squeeze her hand.
But I should continue with my relentless exposition of harsh facts before I lose my nerve:
That’s why I suggested you forget what happened that afternoon. With hindsight, it was the most foolish thing I’ve ever done. But I was the person who suggested you write a sanitized version of Cath’s death in your diary. Saying you found her pale and unmoving in her crib, with cold cheeks. It was a credible story. After all, she bore no marks of physical injury on her body. It was a story you could believe yourself. You looked up at me with gratitude, tears welling up in your eyes. You whispered: “Thank you, Mark.” I felt that I’d given you a second chance. An opportunity to regain your sanity, the peace you so desperately craved. When you woke up two mornings later, I still thought I did the right thing. You were a different person. Your cheeks were swollen. Your eyes were puffy. Grief colored your pupils. But the guilt was gone. I felt vindicated. But then I realized that the truth of what had happened to Cath was still buried somewhere inside your head. That it was killing you from within, whether you realized it or not. One never truly forgets.
Claire emits a sudden agonized bleat. It sounds like the gasp of a drowning person.
“Mark,” she says. “Oh, Mark…”
“I taught you to lie to yourself,” I say. “When it mattered.”