The Boy in the Photo

by Nicole Trope

  ‘I know it seems ridiculous, but situations get complicated. The courts have to look at every possible eventuality.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll hurt him? He won’t hurt him, will he?’ she had pleaded.

  ‘I wish I could give you the answer you’re looking for, Megan, but I really have no idea. In my experience, if he wanted to… hurt him in any way, to punish you for the divorce, then he would have called you to let you know he had him. The fact that he hasn’t contacted you is a good sign.’

  That’s a good sign? Megan had thought. How can that be a good sign?

  When she gets back to her apartment hours later, what feels like years later, her parents are waiting for her. When she fits her key into the lock, she prays that Daniel will be sitting on the couch, talking to his grandfather about his day. She forces her mind to accept this with absolute certainty, despite knowing that her mother would have called her to tell her Daniel was home. When she opens the door and only her parents are there, the reality winds her.

  ‘Oh, Megan, oh, darling,’ her mother says, leaping up from the couch for an encompassing embrace.

  ‘How could this have happened, Mum?’ Megan replies, eyes filled with tears.

  ‘We’ll get him back.’ Her father’s low, rumbling voice puts an end to any possible hysteria. ‘We’ll get him back even if I have to kill the bastard.’

  Megan calls Olivia, filling her in with a trembling voice. ‘I’ll check in with someone I know who deals with recovery orders, make sure this one is fast-tracked,’ her friend says.

  ‘Thanks, Liv.’

  ‘He’ll be home soon. Your idiot ex is probably just trying to scare you. He’ll bring him home stuffed with sugar so you’ll be up all night dealing with him.’

  ‘I hope so, Liv, I really hope so.’

  An hour passes. Then two hours, then three.

  ‘Connor and James went past his building,’ her mother reports after she speaks to Megan’s brother. ‘James managed to speak to the landlord. He never lived there, Megan. He lied.’

  ‘But I don’t understand, why would he lie?’ What have I missed? Why didn’t I know? What is happening? Oh, Daniel, baby, where are you?

  Her father shrugs; her mother wipes her eyes. ‘Surely he’ll bring him home soon.’

  Another hour passes, two hours, three hours and then it is midnight.

  ‘Go home, Mum. You and Dad need to rest.’

  ‘We’ll stay here with you.’

  ‘No, please, don’t worry, just go home and rest. The detective said I need to go back in the morning. They’ve put out an alert.’

  ‘Okay, then. Try to get some sleep, Megs, just rest on the couch.’ Her mother wraps her arms around her and holds tightly. Megan doesn’t want her to let go, but eventually her mother steps back. ‘Rest,’ she says, planting a kiss on Megan’s forehead.

  ‘I will,’ Megan replies as she sees her parents to the door.

  After they have left, she calls Greg’s mobile over and over again, finally dropping into an exhausted doze with the phone clutched in her hand.

  In the morning she wakes with a start, worrying she has overslept and that Daniel will be late for school, only to realise that Daniel is not in the apartment, not in his bed.

  He is gone. He has been taken by his father. She curls herself up, holds her cushion against her mouth and screams until her throat burns.

  Three

  Daniel – six years old

  It’s Daddy. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

  ‘A special surprise,’ Daddy says.

  Daniel loves Daddy, loves him more than anything. Daddy lets him watch as much TV as he wants to. Daddy lets him eat chocolate for breakfast and chips for lunch. Daddy likes to play Xbox and he doesn’t care about bedtimes. Daddy is the best and Daniel knows he’s sad that he can’t see him every day.

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ Daddy has told him. ‘I love Mum and I want to live with you and her so we can be together every day, but Mum won’t let me.’

  Daniel feels mad at Mum sometimes because she won’t let Daddy live with them, but sometimes he loves her as well. Before Daddy went to live somewhere else, Mum used to cry in the bathroom. Now she doesn’t cry, but he misses Daddy. A lot of the time he’s not sure what to think or to feel. He wishes he was bigger so he could understand about Divorce. Divorce is a big ugly word and he doesn’t like it at all. Divorce makes Daddy sad and Mum cross. Divorce is bad.

  Daniel jumps up and Daddy catches him and Ms Abramson says, ‘Aren’t you a lucky boy to have your daddy pick you up?’ and Daniel laughs because Daddy is the best.

  ‘Chips!’ he shouts because Daddy always buys him hot chips, all salty and crunchy but soft inside.

  ‘Whatever you want, my little man. Whatever you want.’

  Four

  Evie moves an arm forward, followed by a knee, and then she repeats the process. Megan notes somewhere in her brain that her daughter has just made her first attempt at crawling and that she would like to take a video to show Michael, but there is a ringing in her ears that is so loud it has almost paralysed her. In the kitchen she slumps onto the floor and presses the phone against her ear.

  ‘How?’ she asks because she cannot think of anything else to say.

  ‘Apparently he walked into a police station in Heddon Greta and told them who he was.’

  ‘What?’ She is trying to breathe but her body doesn’t seem to know how to do that. She cannot get her lungs to expand enough. She pants like she remembers doing in labour with Evie.

  ‘Okay, Megan, I need you to calm down.’

  ‘I am calm,’ whispers Megan. Concentrate, calm down, think straight, listen. Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.

  ‘You sound like you’ve just run a marathon. I don’t want you to hyperventilate. Just take some deep breaths. Where’s Evie?’

  ‘She here, she’s… I think she’s crawling. She just started crawling.’ Megan inhales deeply, finally, and holds it for a count of five before letting it out slowly.

  ‘That’s… that’s great. She’s getting so big… I wish I was there. Are you okay, Megan, are you still with me?’

  ‘I’m okay. I’m here. Where’s Heddon Greta?’

  ‘It’s a town just outside of Newcastle, in New South Wales.’

  ‘In New South…? You mean here in Australia? Not in the UK?’

  ‘Yes, here.’

  ‘But I thought he was in the UK. You said, everyone said, that Greg must have taken him there and then just disappeared. You had records of him getting on a plane, you had witnesses, you had…’ Megan’s voice rises as adrenalin floods her body.

  ‘I’m sorry, Megan… You have no idea how sorry I am. I can’t believe we’ve… I’ve let you down like this but we were wrong.’

  ‘You were wrong?’ A simple statement of fact. The words cannot convey the magnitude of such a mistake. What if she had known he was in Australia? What if? How different would her life be now? She would have never given up on finding him. She would have knocked on every door across the country, renewed her appeals on Facebook and television, talked to police in every state. She would not have given up.

  ‘We were wrong. He did go to the UK and he did disappear for a short while but sometime in the past six years he must have returned. He’s been living in a small town called Heddon Greta; they’ve been living there together. It’s about half an hour from Newcastle. It’s a small town with a three-man police station and some stores.’

  ‘So, he’s still there now? What did he say? Is he okay? Where is Greg?’

  ‘Sorry, Megs, right now I don’t know much more than that.’

  ‘Heddon Greta,’ Megan repeats as if that will make what she is hearing any more plausible. It doesn’t.

  Evie has crawled forward a metre and finds herself unable to move anymore. She shouts, ‘Gaah,’ furious with her uncooperative body, and then she begins to cry.

  Megan stands and goes to pick her up.

  ‘Megan, are you still there? Are you okay
?’ asks Michael.

  ‘I am, I’m still here but I have to feed Evie and put her to sleep. I can’t… I can’t do this right now, not with her crying. I’ll put her down for her nap and call you back.’

  ‘Do you need me to come home? I’m getting up now. I’m coming home.’

  ‘No… don’t worry, I just need to get Evie into her bed for her nap and then I need to know, I need to know everything. How do you—’

  Evie shrieks in her ear.

  ‘I’ll call you back and you can start at the beginning.’

  ‘Okay… but if I don’t hear from you in an hour I’m coming home.’

  ‘I promise I’ll call you. I will.’

  In the rocking chair in Evie’s room, Megan watches her daughter drink. Evie reaches up as she feeds to touch Megan’s black hair and pat her cheek as if she senses her mother needs comforting. Her big brown eyes blink slowly as she grows closer to sleep. Megan bites down on her lip. She wants to scream or cry or something but the endless ringing in her head is still bothering her, and what she mostly feels is utter confusion. How has this happened? How did I not know he was so close? ‘Daniel,’ she murmurs, earning a smile from her daughter, who has no idea of the existence of her big brother. Relief floods her body as Evie succumbs to sleep.

  Over the last six years she has imagined thousands of scenarios in which her son is found, in which he comes back to her. At first, she thought it would be simple. The police in the UK would go to the house where Greg’s parents lived, Greg and Daniel would be there, Greg would be arrested and she would fly over and collect her son. That scenario kept her going for weeks despite the evidence to the contrary, despite Greg’s parents denying having seen him, and the police confirming that there was no evidence of them having been at their house. As the years passed the scenarios changed with time. She imagined that Greg would get tired of raising his son, that he would remarry and have other children and simply send Daniel back to her. She imagined that Greg would call one day, apologising and apologising, and they would meet and discuss joint custody. She pictured a car accident where Greg would die but her son would miraculously be fine and his details would be found on the missing persons database.

  What she has not imagined is this scenario – this scenario in which, after years of hoping, praying and then grieving, she has found a place to put him in her mind so that she can move forward with her life. This scenario in which she has another child and has basically given up all hope of seeing her son again until he is eighteen and hopefully makes the decision to contact her again – only for him to return. She has not prepared for this. How can he have casually walked into a police station and told them who he is after all this time? Why has he never told anyone before? Where has he been? Why has he never tried to contact her if he has been in Australia? Why has no one recognised him from all the photos that the media and police sent out over the years?

  Evie is deeply asleep in her arms and Megan stands up and lowers her gently into her cot, covering her with her wrap and placing her soft doll next to her to play with when she wakes up. She straightens up and looks around Evie’s room, with its light-pink-coloured walls and tumbling bunny decals. When Daniel was a baby his room was painted white with a yellow border because they didn’t find out if he was a boy or a girl before he was born. Greg hadn’t wanted to know, and even though Megan had, the choice had not been hers to make. ‘It’s my first child, Megan, don’t ruin this for me,’ Greg had hissed.

  It’s my first child too, Megan had thought but had been wise enough not to say. She knew the result of a quick comeback; knew the rage it would engender.

  Megan scratches at her neck. She has managed months now without thinking about Greg, without hating him with a visceral heat, but here he is, right back in her brain.

  She goes back to the kitchen to get her mobile phone as the ringing slowly fades away and more questions begin to form in her mind.

  ‘How do they know it’s him?’ she asks Michael when he answers his phone. There was a boy four years ago who was found in an abandoned house in the UK. He was the right age. He had curly brown hair like Daniel did, and people had seen him with a man who looked like Greg. The man had disappeared and it was assumed that the little boy had gone with him, leaving the house empty for months until the council turned up to begin clearing the home for demolition. That’s when they found the boy’s body.

  Megan doesn’t like to think about those few brutal days as she waited for pictures to come through official channels, refreshing her email again and again in the hopes that those few seconds would mean the photos had arrived, and then the suffocating heartbreak as she waited again to view the body via webcam because the images were not clear. He would have changed, she knew that, and the child’s body was badly decomposed. But on the webcam, it was obviously not Daniel.

  Megan remembers how long she sat crying, how much she drank, filling her glass with acidic white wine over and over as she tried to find a way to rid the image of the unloved little boy from her mind. She’d stayed in bed for a week, unable to eat, unable to sleep, pulled back to the first dark days after Daniel disappeared. Now, she knows she cannot go through such a thing again, so when Michael doesn’t immediately answer, she repeats, ‘How do they know it’s him?’

  ‘He told them his name. He told them that Greg Stanthorpe was his father and then he told them he’s been living in a house and that there had been a fire.’

  ‘A fire… Is he… Is he okay?’

  ‘According to the constable I’ve been speaking to at the Heddon Greta station, he seems physically fine. He wasn’t wearing any shoes or a jumper. His feet are pretty messed up but not as bad as what she would have expected for someone who walked at least ten kilometres. He has blisters and some cuts but he’s basically okay, so she thinks he may have hitched a ride with someone at some point, although he denied it when they asked him. She and her fellow constable are looking into that. He won’t answer any questions about how he got there. He told them a few things and then just clammed up. He just repeats his name any time they try to question him further.’

  ‘Is he hurt? Has he been hurt?’ Shock floods her body at the thought of her son in pain.

  ‘No, just the blisters and cuts on his feet according to her. But she has no idea how he would have made the journey without help because he lived somewhere in the middle of some bush, in what was basically a shack, apparently.’

  ‘A shack?’ Confusion ripples through her. ‘How do they know where he lived?’

  ‘He explained it to them and they were able to find it. It’s on the edge of a state forest, owned by someone who lives overseas and doesn’t want to sell it.’

  ‘Maybe Greg dropped him off, maybe he didn’t want to take care of him anymore?’

  ‘No… no, they don’t think so.’

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’

  Michael grows silent and Megan hears the pencil’s rapid beat as he tries to find a way to tell her what he is about to tell her.

  ‘Daniel told them Greg was dead, that he burned in the fire.’

  ‘Oh… God, is he sure, are they sure?’ She is surprised by an instant and overwhelming feeling of guilt as she remembers how many nights she has lain awake in the last six years, her mind churning with the words, I wish you were dead, I wish you were dead, I wish you were dead.

  ‘Right now, they don’t know. When the local guys found the shack, they discovered that it had been burned down. Completely obliterated, really. A woman who lives on a property nearby reported that she saw fire and smoke and she heard one explosion which may have been a gas bottle, but she assumed it was back burning going on in preparation for summer.’

  ‘But there are no explosions in back burning.’

  ‘They’re not sure if she did or didn’t actually hear an explosion. She’s nearly ninety and prone to confusion. An explosion would explain the condition of the house. She said the fire went on for a while, maybe a few hours, and the smoke was begin
ning to bother her – but again, she thought it was back burning. That night there was one of those major storms that just goes for hours and hours. The rain must have put out the fire and there was nothing left by the time they got there. It’s hard for them to tell right now without an investigation if there are human remains in the house or not.’ He whispers the last few words.

  Megan feels bile rise in her throat, and she sees the decomposed body of the little boy on the webcam again. The image will never leave her. It’s not Daniel, it’s not him, not him.

  ‘Could Daniel be wrong? Could Greg still be alive?’

  ‘Constable Mara in Heddon Greta says Daniel seems certain that Greg is dead.’

  ‘He told them his father’s dead… just like that?’ No child should have to utter those words, she thinks, tears rolling down her face.

  ‘According to Constable Mara, he was very distressed, hysterical when he began talking about it. They’ve calmed him down now and he’s just stopped talking. It must be a reaction to the trauma.’

  Megan closes her eyes and sees her son at six. She mentally wraps her arms around him, shushing him, soothing him. I’m so sorry you’re sad, little man, my beautiful boy. I’m so sorry your heart is broken.

  ‘So, Greg is… he really is dead?’ Megan needs to make sure she has heard correctly. She wants to feel sorry for Daniel’s loss, but her relief that her son is fine, that he has not been hurt, makes this impossible. Her deepest, darkest wish has come true and it has brought her son back to her. It has brought her little boy home. She won’t feel guilty about it.

  ‘Well… yes. I’m sorry, Megs. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why are you sorry? He took my son from me, stole my son from me.’ She is suddenly furious, sadness morphing into anger.

  ‘He was Daniel’s father.’

  Megan bursts into tears, listening to Michael trying to calm her down as she howls into the phone, sobs ripping through her body.