The Boy in the Photo

by Nicole Trope

  ‘I’m coming home,’ he says eventually.

  ‘Yes,’ she chokes, ‘please come home.’

  When Michael arrives twenty minutes later, Megan is curled up on their bed, looking at a picture she has on her phone of six-year-old Daniel. In it he is watching some bubbles being blown by an entertainer at a party. It had been a science party for one of his classmates and they had made their own coloured bubble water as one of the activities. Megan had arrived to pick up Daniel, finding him gazing rapturously at the different-coloured bubbles floating in the air. Instead of calling to him she had taken out her phone and snapped a photo, wanting to preserve the wonder in Daniel’s eyes. She has looked at this image every day for six years – every single day. The pure joy on his beautiful face has made her cry more times than she could ever count.

  ‘Evie?’ asks Michael as he sits gently on the end of the bed.

  ‘She’s still sleeping,’ murmurs Megan, not taking her eyes off the photo.

  Michael slips off his shoes and slides next to her. He wedges a pillow behind his head and Megan shuffles over to him, resting her head on his chest, feeling calmed by his familiar smell and the sensation of his arms around her. She wonders at the way the universe works. If Daniel had never been taken, she would never have met Michael. She would never have known her strong, gentle husband and they would never have had baby Evie. On that first devastating afternoon when Michael had stood up from behind his desk in his office, she had looked up at the tall, broad-shouldered man, noting his dark brown eyes, and she had thought, You will find him. You will find my son.

  So much suffering has led her to where she is now. She would never wish Michael and Evie away, and she can only be grateful that Michael was the detective she spoke to on that terrible day all those years ago, but she has missed six years with her child, her son, her boy.

  ‘I think this is for real,’ Michael says, squeezing her hand.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not,’ replies Megan, a tremor in her voice. There have been false alarms over the years, aside from the little boy in the abandoned house. Daniel and Greg have been sighted in the USA, in Mexico and in China, but there were never any records of their passports being used.

  The private detective she’d hired in the UK had never closed the case, and every six months or so he would send her a bill for work he claimed he was doing until Megan married Michael and he put a stop to what he said was a ‘useless waste of money’.

  ‘I’m a detective,’ he’d assured Megan. ‘I’m good at what I do,’ he’d said gently. ‘Even though I no longer work with missing persons, I promise I will always keep the case open. I will never stop looking for him. But from what I can see, this guy isn’t doing much except writing a one-paragraph report every six months and then charging you for each word.’

  Everyone in Megan’s family had said more or less the same thing. ‘He’s a con artist,’ her father repeated whenever Megan called to tell him that the detective had a new lead. There was a boy in London, a boy in Beaconsfield, a boy in Castleford. But it was never Megan’s boy. ‘He’s taking your money,’ her father had said, ‘money you don’t even have, and he’s doing nothing at all. He could be making all of this up.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Dad. Tomorrow he could find him or next week he could find him or next month. If I give up now, then who is going to look for my son? Who will search for Daniel?’

  It had taken days and days of Michael pointing out the obvious mistakes the detective was making before Megan had agreed to give him up. She had struggled to accept that no one would be actively looking for Daniel anymore. Every day when she woke up, her first thought was always, This could be the day they find him. This could be the day he comes home. Firing the private detective meant that she could no longer open her eyes with that thought. She felt she was losing him all over again. Giving up hope was tantamount to giving up on him.

  But then something else had happened, something that made Megan toss and turn through nights riddled with guilt. Once she had worked through the pain, the agonising pain, she had found a way to finally accept what had happened. She hadn’t seen her son for five years by then. In the beginning each breath had hurt, each passing hour had been impossible to bear, and the idea of a whole day without seeing her son was horrifying. But when Michael convinced her to stop paying the detective, some tiny part of her had also felt a sense of relief. There was nothing more she could do – she had to get on with her life and hold onto the hope that one day an adult Daniel would walk back into her life.

  She’d prayed every night for her missing child, for him to be found, for Greg to be treating him kindly and raising him well. She’d prayed for Greg to love his son enough for the both of them, and it was only by remembering how much Greg loved Daniel that she was able to find comfort in her son being with his father. On the internet, she’d found a group of people who understood her experience. Her close relationship with two of them had helped her as much as her friends and family.

  ‘I have a picture on my phone – are you ready to see it?’ Michael asks, tearing her away from her thoughts.

  Megan closes her eyes. ‘I’m so afraid, Michael. I’m scared to believe, only to have my hopes dashed. I’m terrified of going through that again.’

  ‘I know, Megs, but to me the photo looks a lot like the age progression image we have on the fridge, except his hair is much longer. And I have to ask myself why anyone would want to say he’s Daniel Stanthorpe if he isn’t. What would be the point? There would be no reason for a stranger to have any information on him. His case hasn’t been in the news for years. I honestly think this is him.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Megan, inhaling deeply. She sits up. ‘Show me.’ She tries to temper the hope flaring inside her, tries to force herself to approach the picture with logic, but she cannot stop the feeling from taking over her body.

  Michael hands her his phone. The photo has been taken in a room with a leather couch and a picture of a landscape on the wall. There is a window and a box of tissues on a chipped coffee table. Megan studies each of these things carefully, managing to studiously avoid looking directly at the skinny boy sitting on the couch, for fear that it is not her son. When she feels that she will see the room in her dreams, she finally looks directly at the boy. She starts with his hands, noting the long, tapered fingers and bony wrists, and then she moves her eyes over the rest of him, seeing his long, wavy brown hair, his full lips and his eyes. His eyes that look brown because of the flash of the camera but that she knows, as she examines his whole face, will take on a green hue in the sun. Hazel eyes. Such beautiful, wide, hazel eyes that were always full of wonder for the world.

  The boy in the photo is not smiling. He doesn’t look angry or unhappy. He simply looks detached, as though his picture has been taken when he is thinking about something else entirely even though he is staring directly at the camera. There is a slight pull in her full breasts, a sensation that she experiences when she looks at Evie, and it’s nearly time for her to feed. Her body recognises the boy even though he looks nothing like the picture Megan has in her mind, despite the age progression photos pinned to her fridge.

  ‘I think it’s him,’ she whispers, hearing the words, believing the words. ‘I think it’s him.’ She covers her mouth with her hand and then bites down a little on one of her fingers as she nods her head. ‘It’s him,’ she repeats, dropping her hand, ‘it’s him.’ Tears splash onto her chest. The impossible has become possible.

  ‘Okay,’ says Michael. He reaches forward to take the phone from her but Megan finds herself unable to let go as if she can somehow hold onto the truth of his existence if she just keeps looking at the picture, drinking in every detail. She sniffs and takes the tissue Michael has handed to her.

  ‘Oh, sweetheart,’ he says. He leans back against the pillows on the bed and places his hand on her knee, squeezing a little, and they sit in silence for a few minutes while she gazes at the photo of her son. Her Daniel. Finally, Mic
hael takes the phone gently from her hands and forwards the image to her phone. When Megan hears the text notification, she grabs her phone and opens up the picture, and when she sees it is there, she feels her shoulders slump forward, relieved that the photo has not disappeared into thin air, stealing away the evidence of her son’s existence.

  ‘If we leave soon, we can get there before six,’ says Michael.

  ‘Yes,’ replies Megan, still staring at the picture.

  ‘Babe, I need you to get up now. You need to get organised so that we can go,’ he says gently, softly.

  ‘What if I had said it wasn’t him?’

  ‘We still would have gone to make sure. It’s only a two-hour drive and you would have needed to give a DNA sample anyway, although I’m not sure if they’re set up for that there. And I think you should call your parents. Tell them what’s happened and ask if they can have Evie for the rest of the day. Then let’s check that you’ve expressed enough milk for her.’

  ‘Okay,’ agrees Megan, unable to comprehend the practicalities. This is one of the things she has come to rely on Michael for: his ability to bullet point any situation so that it can be managed. She will follow his instructions because she can’t think for herself right now. She gets off the bed and goes to the kitchen, pressing her mother’s number as she opens the fridge to check her milk supply.

  ‘Mum,’ she says when her mother answers.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asks her mother, Susanna, displaying her ability to notice even the slightest change in Megan’s voice.

  ‘They found him,’ says Megan.

  ‘Oh God… no,’ says her mother.

  ‘No… no he’s fine… he’s fine,’ she says, and for the first time since Michael called her, she experiences a rush of pure elation through her body. ‘They’ve found Daniel, Mum.’ She starts giggling and, even without knowing all the details, her mother joins her as they celebrate the return of the boy they both love and adore and have missed for six long, torturous years.

  Five

  Megan feels a fluttering in her stomach somewhere between excitement and nausea. She and Michael have made the two-hour drive largely in silence. She has spent most of the time staring at the picture of Daniel on her phone, occasionally running her fingers over his face, a smile on her own.

  Michael had tried to get her to talk about how she was feeling but she couldn’t articulate what was going on in her head. Finally, he had turned on the radio and they had listened to a report on the missing British backpacker. ‘Mr and Mrs Hindley have flown in from England and they are deeply concerned about their twenty-five-year-old son,’ the reporter had said.

  We never stop worrying, Megan had thought. We mothers can never stop worrying.

  Her thoughts have careered wildly from certainty that everyone has made a mistake and the boy is not Daniel to absolute belief that her child is safe and will be sleeping in his old bed, set up and waiting for him, in her house tonight.

  ‘Will they let me take him home? They have to let me take him home, don’t they?’

  ‘I think they will, Megs. I’ll make sure of it.’

  She has tried not to dream up a pretty picture of family reunions and her and her son cuddled up close on the sofa sharing a pizza, but the images have flashed through her head uninvited anyway. As a new mother, she had often imagined what her child would be like as he grew. She had prepared herself for an awkward adolescent and a surly teenager, had promised herself to always remember the vulnerable baby in her arms.

  When Greg had taken him, he hadn’t just taken her son in the present; he’d robbed him from her in the future as well. It was not something Megan could ever have forgiven him for. She has wanted, many times over the last six years, to see Greg in jail for what he has done, but she knows that even if he had been found, he probably would have escaped a jail term. Greg would have argued that she’d agreed to let him take Daniel overseas, that she’d signed forms so he could get him a passport. Greg could be charming and convincing when he wanted to be. Megan knew that better than anyone. She had found herself easily persuaded out of her own opinions and thoughts for years.

  In the car she has made a list of questions to ask Daniel, and then has abandoned that list and exhorted herself to let him lead the way. She has also decided that when she gets to the station the constable will say, ‘Sorry, that child’s parents came to pick him up an hour ago.’ Or, ‘Sorry, his father who we thought was dead came to get him and they’ve disappeared again.’ When Greg picked him up from school and left the country with him, he made the impossible possible, and so now Megan knows that even the most ludicrous thought in her head may very well eventuate. She has had to learn the hard way.

  But now the drive is over and she and Michael are standing outside the same small room where the photo of Daniel was taken. The door is closed but Megan knows it’s the same room. She can almost feel her body pulling towards it as her heart races.

  It is after five and the winter sun has disappeared, leaving a chill in the air, but she is sure she’s not shivering from the cold. Heddon Greta is as small as Michael described it. They have driven through kilometres and kilometres of forest filled with pine trees and layered green bush. There are no people anywhere and Megan assumes they have been driven inside by the cold. The empty street has an eerie, post-apocalyptic feeling to it, as though some disaster has caused all of the residents to disappear.

  In the police station, three officers are sitting at a desk, each drinking a beer. The workday is over but Megan fights the urge to tell the woman and two men that what they’re doing is inappropriate under the circumstances. All three look up as she and Michael walk in. The two men quickly return to their beers.

  A young Asian woman in a starched police uniform with perfectly pleated pants stands up and quickly walks across the floor. ‘You must be Megan Stanthorpe,’ she states, smiling a little.

  ‘Yes,’ answers Megan. But Stanthorpe is not her surname, not anymore. She glances at Michael, who nods. He understands.

  ‘I’m Constable Mara, we spoke on the phone,’ continues the woman, holding out her hand to Michael.

  ‘Thanks for waiting for us,’ Michael says as he grasps her hand.

  ‘No problem. This way.’ She walks over to the door and opens it slightly, allowing Megan to look inside. Megan puts her hand over her mouth, not wanting to call out to her son before she’s had a chance to look at him. Her body is shaking, her heart racing. What if it’s not him? What if it is him? Will I recognise him? Will he recognise me?

  The boy, Daniel, is sitting on the couch absorbed in a game he is playing on a mobile phone that reminds Megan of an old bar phone she had years ago. He bears only a passing resemblance to the computer-generated image she was given by the police only a month ago. He has always been portrayed with short, brown, curly hair and the boy sitting on the couch has long hair halfway down his back. The tangled curls give him a feral look as though he has been living in the bush for years, which for all Megan knows he may well have been. At six, his face – despite his skinny body – was round, slightly chubby with cheeks she used to cover in kisses. Now his face is elongated with sharp, angled cheekbones as though the lengthening of his body has continued past his neck.

  Megan feels a tightening in her breasts and hopes she won’t leak. She has left Evie with her mother, who took the child wordlessly, her eyes filling with tears, unable to say anything.

  ‘Ready?’ asks Michael. He places a hand on her shoulder, and as he takes a deep breath, she does as well.

  She nods even though she is not ready, and as she looks at the boy on the couch, she realises that she could never really be ready for her son at twelve years old. He has been six years old in her head for the last six years, and that is the Daniel that she would like to see sitting on the couch now. That boy she would recognise. That is the boy she has missed. The Daniel that was stolen from her.

  Constable Mara goes into the room and sits down on the couch next to him.
Megan cannot hear what she’s saying. He doesn’t take his eyes off the phone but he begins to nod as the constable speaks, and then when she points at Megan, he finally lifts his head and looks at her. She stands up straight and then pats her hair without meaning to. Her son is almost unrecognisable from the little boy he had been. Even sitting down Megan can see that he is probably taller than her now. Greg is – was – over six foot, and when Daniel was born Megan had hoped that he would not just share his father’s eye colour and wavy hair but also his height. Now she can see that this is the case and her heart aches once again for all that she has missed. He will be thirteen soon. He had been taken three months before his seventh birthday, exactly three months. He has been gone for six years, one month and four days. And now he is sitting on a couch in a police station, looking at her.

  His childhood is over. She watches as he reacts to seeing her and wonders if she looks older to him. At thirty-eight she has just begun dyeing her black hair to cover the grey, and she knows that even though she had Evie only six months ago, she is thinner than she was before he was taken. She has been carrying around the image of her six-year-old son all this time and he has probably been carrying around an image of a much younger woman. Perhaps he has even forgotten what she looks like, her face fading from his memory with each passing year. Megan can feel she is holding her breath as her son looks at her.

  Daniel stands up and walks over to the door and Megan moves quickly to be there.

  ‘Mum… Mum… Mum.’ His voice catches in his throat, deeper, somewhat husky –almost the voice of a man. Megan can hear the tears he is holding back. She can do little except nod. Her eyes fill and her throat closes and she opens her arms.

  ‘Hello, my beautiful boy,’ she whispers.

  He looks at her for a moment and then he steps into her embrace, bends a little and lays his head on her shoulder. He smells different – the thick odour of smoke clings to him – and he looks different, but for some reason he fits right where he should, despite his height and his age and everything that has happened.