The Couple Next Door

“Okay,” Anne says listlessly.

But when Marco leaves, she doesn’t call the doctor’s office. She wanders around the house thinking about Cora. She imagines her dead, in a Dumpster somewhere, crawling with maggots. She imagines her in a shallow grave in the woods, dug up and gnawed on by animals. She thinks of newspaper stories she’s read about lost children. She can’t get the horror out of her head. She feels queasy and panicky. She looks at herself in the mirror, and her eyes are huge.

Maybe it’s better that she not know what happened to her baby. But she needs to know. For the rest of her life, her tortured mind will supply hideous ideas that may be worse than the truth. Maybe Cora’s death was quick. Anne prays that it was. But she’ll probably never know for sure.

From the moment her daughter was born, Anne knew where Cora was every minute of her short life, and now she has no idea where she is. Because she is a bad mother. She is a bad, broken mother who didn’t love her daughter enough. She left her alone in the house. She hit her. No wonder her daughter is gone. There is a reason for everything, and the reason her baby is gone is that Anne does not deserve her.

Now Anne is not just wandering around the house, she is moving faster and faster. Her mind is racing, thoughts stumbling over one another. She feels intense guilt about her daughter. She doesn’t know whether to believe Marco when he tells her that Cora was alive at twelve thirty. She can’t believe anything he says—he’s a liar. She must have hurt Cora. She must have killed her own baby. There is no other possibility that makes sense.

It’s a terrible possibility, a terrible burden. She must tell someone. She tried to tell Marco what she did, but he wouldn’t listen. He wants to pretend it didn’t happen; he wants to pretend that she’s not capable of harming her own baby. She remembers the way he looked at her when she told him she hit Cora, the disbelief.

He might feel different if he’d seen her slap Cora.

He might feel different if he knew her history.

But he doesn’t know, because she has never told him.

There was the incident at St. Mildred’s—the one she has no memory of. She remembers only the aftermath—being in the girls’ bathroom, the blood on the wall, Susan slumped on the floor as if she were dead, and everyone—Janice, Debbie, the science teacher, and the headmistress—all looking at her in horror. She’d had no idea what happened.

After that, her mother had taken her to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed a dissociative disorder. Anne remembers being in his office, frozen in her seat, her mother sitting anxiously by her side. Anne was terrified by the diagnosis, terrified and ashamed.

“I don’t understand,” her mother said to the doctor. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“I know,” the psychiatrist said gently, “that it seems frightening, but it’s not as unusual as you might think. Think of it as a coping mechanism—an imperfect one. The person disconnects from reality for a brief time.” He turned to Anne; she refused to look at him. “You might feel detached from yourself, as if things are happening to someone else. You might perceive things as distorted or unreal. Or you might experience a fugue state, as you did—a brief period of amnesia.”

“Is this going to happen again?” Alice asked the doctor.

“I don’t know. Has it happened before?”

It had happened before, but never so shockingly.

“There have been times,” Alice admitted tentatively, “ever since she was a little girl, when she seemed to do things and not remember doing them. I . . . I thought at first she was just saying that so she wouldn’t get in trouble. But then I realized she couldn’t control it.” She paused. “But there’s never been anything like this.”

The doctor clasped his hands and gazed at Anne intently, asking her mother, “Has there been any trauma in her life?”

“Trauma?” Alice echoed. “Of course not.”

The doctor surveyed her skeptically. “Dissociative disorder is usually the result of some sort of repressed trauma.”

“Oh, God,” Alice said.

The doctor raised his eyebrows at her and waited.

“Her father,” Alice said suddenly.

“Her father?”

“She watched her father die. It was horrible. She adored him.”

Anne’s eyes were fixed firmly on the wall in front of her; she was perfectly still.

“How did he die?” the doctor asked.

“I was out shopping. He was in the house, playing with her. He had a massive heart attack. He must have died almost instantly. She saw it. By the time I got home, it was too late. Anne was crying and pressing numbers in the phone, but she didn’t know what numbers to press. Anyway, it didn’t matter—no one could have saved him. She was only four years old.”

The doctor nodded sympathetically. “I see,” he said. He sat quietly for a moment.

Alice said, “She had nightmares for a long time. I didn’t let her talk about it—maybe that was wrong, but she would get so upset and I was trying to help. Whenever she brought it up, I tried to take her mind off it.” She added, “She seemed to blame herself, for not knowing what to do. But it wasn’t her fault. She was so young. And we were told that nothing could have saved him, even if the ambulance had been right there.”

“That would be very difficult for any child to deal with,” the doctor said. He turned to Anne, who continued to ignore him. “Stress can temporarily worsen symptoms of this disorder. I suggest you see me regularly, to try to deal with some of the anxiety you’re feeling.”

Anne cried in the car all the way home. When they got there, before they went into the house, her mother hugged her and said, “It’s going to be all right, Anne.” Anne didn’t believe her. “We’ll tell your father that you’re seeing someone for anxiety. He doesn’t need to know about this other thing. He wouldn’t understand.”

They didn’t tell him about the incident at school. Anne’s mother handled the meetings with the parents of the other three girls from St. Mildred’s herself.

Since then there had been other “episodes,” mostly harmless, where Anne would lose time—minutes or sometimes hours—when she wouldn’t know what had happened while she was “gone.” They were brought on by stress. She would find herself somewhere unexpected, have no idea how she got there, and call her mother, who would come get her. But she’d had no episodes since her first year of college. It had all happened such a long time ago; she’d thought she’d put it behind her.

But, of course, she had immediately remembered it all after the kidnapping: What if the police found out? What if Marco found out and looked at her differently? But then the onesie had arrived—and her mother no longer looked at her as if she were afraid that Anne might have killed her own child and that Marco had helped to cover it up.

Now the police know that she attacked Susan. They think she is violent. All along, Anne has been afraid that the police would believe she was guilty, whether she was or not. But there are worse things than being wrongly accused.

Anne’s greatest fear now is that she is guilty.

Those first few days after Cora had been taken, when Anne was so sure that she’d been taken by some stranger—those had been difficult days, having to withstand the suspicion of the police, the public, and her own mother. She and Marco had borne it, because they knew they were innocent. They’d made one mistake—they’d left their baby unattended. But not abandoned.

But now, because of what happened the other night before she’d fallen asleep on the sofa, she had confused the search for signs of Marco’s unfaithfulness with the search for Cora. Reality had become distorted. She remembers thinking that Cynthia had stolen her child from her.

The illness was back. When, exactly, had it returned?