a ‘lost for words’ shrug than a ‘I don’t give a shit’ shrug, so I didn’t take offence. ‘I told her I needed someone to search for Sunny and she said she knew a woman who specialised in finding missing people.’ She must have taken my habitual frown personally because she added, ‘You don’t get much choice of roommate in prison.’
We sat in silence. I was thinking I had no right to judge her. I had no idea what was going through her head. Maybe there was nothing. Seven years in prison you might learn how to do that. I was the first to speak. ‘Okay. I’ll do some preliminary work. See what I can find out about where your ex might be living. I can’t promise anything but I’ll give it a go.’
‘Thank you.’ She sniffed loudly. No doubt wiping away tears is a no-no in prison. I felt my attitude thawing and thought it wouldn’t hurt to give her something. Some little fragment of hope.
‘Your daughter might want to get to know you now that you’re out of prison. You can never tell with fourteen-year-olds. Don’t rule it out.’
I saw her slam a door on the gift I’d offered. ‘There’s something you need to know,’ she said, straightening her back. ‘I tried to hurt her.’ For the first time she looked me in the eyes. ‘That’s what I went away for. I tried to kill my daughter.’
I think I said ‘Oh’.
The two women sitting at the table beside us had gone very still. Deluxe is a tiny café and I was pretty sure they’d heard her. I made a mental note not to choose this place again for meetings with clients. Karen kept her eyes on me but didn’t drop her voice. She knew they were listening.
‘My excuse back then was that I had a heavy P habit. Half the time I was off my face, the rest of the time I was doing everything I could to get that way. But that wasn’t what it was. I was empty.’ She stared directly at me. ‘That was before I found God. Before He found me.’ I didn’t even try to hide my scepticism but she lifted her face as if to take the blow full on. ‘He gives us all His love, you know,’ she said, dry as a desert storm. ‘The kids were making a racket. I took the handbrake off and let the car roll into Lake Pupuke. There was a man feeding the swans in the next bay round who saw it. He dived in and managed to get Sunny’s seat belt undone. He pulled her to the surface and gave her mouth to mouth. He saved her.’
There was nothing, absolutely nothing I could say. But she didn’t need me to respond.
‘Thank God,’ she added, in that different way Christians say it. ‘The judge gave me some credit for telling the truth. For not pretending it was an accident.’ I saw the blotches of red bloom across her neck, saw the internal struggle as she forced the confession out of herself like some kind of exorcism. I wouldn’t have been surprised if her head had spun around 360 degrees. Well, okay, maybe a little surprised. ‘I tried to kill her. I tried to kill my beautiful little girl.’ The air seemed to have gone out of her. Her whole body slumped, deflated. She wasn’t the only one. We both needed a minute. So did the two women beside us. They stared bug-eyed at each other and hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle since Karen’s confession began. I was struggling with how to ask the question when she answered it unprompted.
‘There’s no answer to “why”. No excuse.’ She hitched the shrug that I already recognised as habitual. ‘Sure, I was an addict.’ Her voice broke but she brought it back under control. ‘But I knew what I was doing.’
We went over a few details of how I liked to work, she wrote me a down-payment cheque, I punched her number into my mobile. All the time I was trying to think of some way to get out of this deal. The signed agreement on the table was like a rebuke. Call me picky, but I didn’t want to work for a woman who tried to kill her own child. I gathered up the bag of documents, still trying to think of a way out of the deal when she unexpectedly clutched at my shoulders