The Boy in the Photo

by Nicole Trope

  ‘I’ll show you,’ she replies, rising out of her seat, but he jumps to his feet and holds his hand out to indicate she should stop.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says and he turns and walks towards the bathrooms at the back of the restaurant.

  Megan stares after her son. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asks Michael.

  ‘Trauma,’ he replies. ‘His father has died, which would be horrifying enough but there was also the fire. We don’t know how the fire started and what happened after that. We don’t know if he tried to save Greg. We don’t know anything, and until he tells us, we have to tread carefully. I know how hard it is, but we have to try, Megs.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know what to even say.’

  ‘I wish I could tell you, but I think maybe talking about everyone in the family is probably a good thing. I know he doesn’t seem to be listening but I think he is. I know it’s hard but try to relax a little. Maybe don’t ask so many questions – he doesn’t seem to want to respond.’

  ‘But how can I relax, Michael? Just look at him. He’s obviously battling with emotions and I can’t help him. I used to be able to help him with everything. I was the person he came to, and now he won’t even look at me for more than a few seconds.’

  ‘It’s natural that you would want to get him to open up to you, but you have to be patient,’ Michael says.

  ‘He’s not your child, Michael, you have no idea,’ she snaps.

  Michael shakes his head slowly, sadly, and Megan can read the wounded look on his face. She’s being unfair. In her desperation to get something from her son, she’s attacking her husband and it isn’t what he deserves. He has listened to her talk about Daniel for years, not just as a detective but as a friend, a lover and a husband.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Megan gasps and she drops her head into her hands.

  ‘Babe, babe, don’t, it’ll be fine, just relax, it’ll be fine,’ Michael whispers, squeezing her shoulder.

  Back in the car she manages to keep her questions and comments to herself.

  ‘Are you sure you want to pick Evie up tonight?’ asks Michael as they approach the outskirts of Sydney.

  ‘Yes, absolutely, I want us to all be together.’ She is aware of herself wishing for a magic wand so she can make her family immediately whole again.

  Michael pulls up to a stop outside her parents’ flat.

  ‘Where are we?’ asks Daniel.

  ‘This is Nana and Pop’s flat. I’m just going to get Evie from them. Do you want to come in and say hello? They would really love to see you.’

  ‘My grandparents don’t live here.’

  ‘That’s because they moved. They wanted an ocean view so they sold their house. It’s a lovely flat – why don’t you come in and see it?’

  ‘My grandparents,’ he says slowly, ‘don’t… live… here.’

  He slumps down in his seat and folds his arms.

  ‘I think everyone is tired, Megs. I’m sure we’ll all feel better tomorrow,’ says Michael.

  Megan nods and slowly gets out of the car.

  ‘I’m sorry, not right now. I’ll call you later and explain,’ she says to Susanna when she asks to see Daniel.

  Once she’s buckled into her car seat, Evie stares at her brother.

  ‘This is Daniel, Evie.’

  ‘This is Daniel, Evie,’ Daniel repeats, pitching his voice high.

  Megan feels a ripple of shock run through her. She struggles to think of what to say, unable to believe that he has imitated her the way he has. Once again, she chooses silence as the best option.

  ‘We’re here,’ she says cheerily as they pull into their double garage.

  Daniel’s sigh is long and loud.

  ‘It must be strange to have a little sister you didn’t know about,’ she says once they’re all inside, standing awkwardly in the kitchen as though they are trying to acclimatise to a new country. Michael is holding Evie. It’s nine o’clock and Megan wishes the heater would hurry up and warm the room. The cold makes the house seem bigger and more sterile than it is.

  ‘Half-sister,’ states Daniel, his tone flat. ‘A real sister would have come from you and Dad.’

  ‘Yes…’ says Megan, unsure of exactly how to respond. ‘Come this way, Daniel,’ she says, holding out her hand to him.

  He glances down at her hand and then very slowly clasps both of his own behind his back.

  Megan laughs self-consciously. ‘I suppose you’re a bit old to hold hands, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m twelve. I’ll be thirteen on the twentieth of August.’

  ‘Of course, I know more than anyone when your birthday is, Daniel,’ she replies with a smile. ‘You’re too big to hold my hand, I know that. I just wanted to show you your room.’

  ‘I don’t have a room in this house. I had a room in the house with the blue roof and the water fountain out the front, and then I had a room in the small flat with the old man who lived downstairs and liked to play the trumpet, and then I had a room in the old house in the bush but that’s gone now. It burned down.’

  Megan looks at Michael, who is holding Evie. The baby’s normal exuberance has been hushed by the strange boy with the long, curly hair.

  Daniel has spoken more in the last minute than he has in the last four hours.

  ‘That’s right,’ Megan finally says because Daniel has fixed his flat gaze on her. She wants to laugh with relief because with just a few words Daniel has indicated to her that he remembers things she has been talking to him about, but she also feels tears forming because the memories are recited without emotion. It is simply a list of places Daniel has lived in and lost, and that breaks her heart.

  ‘When you were little,’ Megan continues, ‘we did live in the house with the blue roof but I had to sell that house, and then we lived in the flat and now I live here with Michael and Evie. But don’t worry, I brought everything from your room at the old house, all your toys and books and… I suppose you’ll be too old for a lot of it but I thought you might like to decide what you want to keep and…’ Megan finds herself unable to keep speaking. Daniel doesn’t appear to be listening to her. He looks as though he is simply staring at her mouth, watching her lips form words. He has barely blinked and his hazel-eyed stare is disconcerting enough to make the hair at the back of her neck stand up. Every now and again his gaze darts over to Evie. He doesn’t smile or try to engage with her, he simply stares at her.

  ‘How about I show you your room and we can find something for you to sleep in?’

  ‘These are my pyjamas,’ says Daniel, looking down at himself. His tracksuit pants have a hole in each knee, and the T-shirt he is wearing may have started out white but is now a washed-out grey. Over it he has a cardigan given to him by Constable Mara. It’s a man’s cardigan, swamping his skinny frame.

  ‘Okay, well, tomorrow we can go shopping and get everything new. That will be fun, won’t it?’ Megan asks, conscious that her voice is too high-pitched, too desperate.

  Daniel nods at her again. She walks up the stairs and then down the passage to the room she has had set up for him for months. When she and Michael married and bought this house, she had thought of keeping all of Daniel’s things in storage, but when she was nearly eight months pregnant with Evie, she found herself standing in the empty room and gasping for breath. The space was supposed to be filled with her son’s things. Keeping everything in boxes felt like he was dead, and she still needed someplace to sit and think about him, someplace to be with all the stuff that defined his six-year-old self.

  When Michael had come home from work that night, he’d found her attempting to put together Daniel’s blue racing-car bed, her huge belly getting in the way.

  ‘Please don’t tell me not to do it,’ Megan had said. ‘I can’t explain it, but I can’t breathe until his room is ready for him. He’s too old for this bed now, I think, but…’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you not to do it,’ Michael had replied. ‘I
was going to tell you to give me a minute to change and I would get my drill.’

  When it was finally done, Daniel’s room looked almost identical to the way it had looked in the flat where they had lived together. There was a Cookie Monster poster on the wall and a stack of Legos in a box under the bed. His collection of superheroes stood ready to defend on his bookshelf, and next to his bed, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was waiting with a bookmark at chapter three, which was where she had read up to with him the night before he was taken.

  Michael had put his arms around Megan and said, ‘You’re not replacing him, Megs. You haven’t given up, we haven’t given up. He’ll be back one day. We’re still looking for him.’

  Now, Megan opens the door to the room that has been waiting for Daniel and then she steps aside and lets him walk in first. The clothes he is wearing have a weird smell about them – not just smoke but something unwashed – and Megan cannot wait to take them away and throw them in the garbage, although she is unsure if this is a good idea. He has lost everything except for the clothes he has on and his old phone and charger – can she really take them away from him too?

  It was too late in the day to do anything about shoes, but she knows he can probably borrow a pair of flip-flops from her that will at least allow him to walk around the shops tomorrow. Where are his shoes? How could he not have had shoes? And if he doesn’t like to wear them, will he agree to buy some new ones?

  She would like to sit him down and wash his feet and examine the cuts and blisters, but she is reluctant to touch him again until he relaxes a little. She can see the tension in his neck and across his skinny shoulders. An image of him as a baby in the bath, his soapy pink body covered in bubbles, comes to her, his unselfconscious kisses and hugs, his habit of twirling her hair in his fingers as he fell asleep and she lay next to him. They were so physically connected. His tangible separateness right now is painful.

  Megan watches her son look around the room. Inside she feels her heart race and flutter as she wishes that she could rush him to the shops and fill his room with things he would like and his wardrobe with clothes that would fit him so that she could wake up tomorrow and call him for breakfast and enjoy the sight of him sitting in his pyjamas in front of the television as though the last six years had never happened.

  Daniel stands in the middle of the room and turns in a slow circle. Occasionally he spots something that is obviously familiar and lifts his hand and starts to move towards it, but then he quickly drops his hand and resumes the slow circling.

  ‘Do you remember?’ asks Megan.

  Daniel nods and stops his circle to look at the bed. A duvet and Transformer-themed sheets are on the bed, and on top of the pillow is Daniel’s Billy Blanket. The blanket she’d wrapped him in to feed him when he was a baby, the blanket that had become necessary for sleep. She had held Daniel’s Billy Blanket at night for months and months, devastated that he did not have his comfort object, and she had willed him to feel her touching it, touching him.

  Megan knows that the boy staring at his car bed is Daniel, but as she watches him peruse the room, she can’t help wanting some further sign that this is the boy she remembers. She knows he’s been through a lot, that he must have missed her terribly, and the thought of him crying for her has kept her awake not just for months but for years – and here he is. But at the same time, here he is not. The child in front of her is essentially a stranger, and she needs something from him, something that she knows is unfair to want but she needs it nonetheless.

  Daniel walks towards the bed. ‘I’m too old for a blanket,’ he says slowly, but he climbs onto the bed that he barely fits in now and curls up around the blanket. He drags his mobile phone from his pocket and holds it as he falls asleep. He is filthy and he smells but his sleep is so deep and so instant Megan cannot bring herself to wake him.

  She stands and watches him for a few moments, unsure of what to do, and then she moves quietly out of the room, turning off the light as she goes. In the morning she will show him the years of wrapped birthday and Christmas presents stacked up in the bedroom cupboard and let him open them and decide what to keep. In the last few years she has bought him a new electronic device every year, unsure which one he would prefer. She hasn’t thought about the money wasted, only about wanting to be able to give him a gift from all his missed birthdays when she saw him again. Each year she has baked a cake, and her family has come over and she has lit candles. They have sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to him and blown out the candles together. In two months’ time Daniel will finally, finally be able to blow out the candles for himself.

  Nine

  ‘He’s exhausted,’ she says when she finds Michael trying to pat Evie to sleep.

  ‘He must be.’

  ‘I’m not sure how we’re going to do this, Michael,’ she says with a sigh, picking a fussy, still awake Evie up out of her cot, and sitting down with her in the rocking chair so she can feed her to sleep.

  ‘We’ll do it the way everyone does anything: one step at a time. I’ve called your mum. She says she can take Evie for the day tomorrow so you can spend time with him. I think we’ll need a new bed and…’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s going to need to see someone, Megs, about what happened, about being taken and then about the fire and losing Greg. There’s a lot going on inside him. It’s going to be quite a while until the investigation is complete. I don’t know how much there is to find. If there was an explosion of some sort and then the fire burned for some time, they may only be able to find fragments of bone. Those will have to be identified with DNA from Daniel or dental records if they can’t get any DNA from the bones. It’s a long process. A funeral would help bring closure but we’re a month or two away from that.’

  ‘Of course, but he might be okay. We’ll get him into school and get him a whole lot of new things. It’ll be exciting for him. We can have a party to celebrate that he’s back. I can invite Max and Olivia…’ She stops speaking, aware of how ridiculous she sounds. She cannot erase the last six years with a party and a visit from his best friend.

  ‘Slow down, Megs. You don’t know how he’s going to be or who he’s going to want to see. I know it’s hard to hear, but you don’t know him really.’

  ‘But he’s my child, Michael. I know him.’

  ‘Of course, of course you do, but maybe try to take this slowly. He’ll settle in soon, I’m sure. You haven’t eaten anything for hours so while you get Evie down, I’m going to order a pizza. I’ll get two in case he wakes up.’

  ‘Okay,’ agrees Megan quietly, suddenly so exhausted she can barely think.

  As Evie’s eyes close, Megan struggles to make sense of the boy sleeping in the too-small bed in the room next door. What has he seen in the last six years? What has he heard? Where has he been? What has happened to him? Who is he now? Michael is right: she doesn’t know him at all really.

  When the pizza comes, she finds herself hungry, realising that she hasn’t eaten since breakfast.

  Michael pours her a glass of red wine. ‘You won’t have to feed Evie until tomorrow morning, will you?’

  ‘No, and I need this.’ She takes a sip and closes her eyes, willing her shoulder muscles to relax. ‘I wonder if he still likes pizza,’ she says to Michael.

  ‘What kind of kid doesn’t like pizza?’

  ‘True.’ She smiles.

  Michael’s phone rings. ‘Kade here,’ he answers. ‘Oh yes, hello, Detective Wardell. I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon, just a minute.’ Michael covers his phone with his hand. ‘It’s a detective from Newcastle, she wants to talk about Daniel,’ he tells Megan.

  ‘Put her on speakerphone.’

  ‘Go ahead, Detective,’ he says, hitting the speaker button.

  ‘I just wanted to touch base with you about Daniel Stanthorpe, your…’

  ‘My stepson,’ says Michael, and Megan flicks him a smile.

  ‘Yes, your stepson. I’m a little concerned th
at you took him home from Heddon Greta. Constable Mara really shouldn’t have allowed that. I wanted to begin the interview process. It’s also very important that we get a DNA sample from him to confirm his identity and to use it with what we found at the scene of the fire.’

  Megan shakes her head. She knows her own son. That’s enough. It should be enough.

  ‘What did you find there?’

  ‘We’ve only just begun.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. Has a fire investigator been out there?’

  ‘Yes. She was there for most of the afternoon.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘She has found human remains, bone fragments mostly. She’s going through the scene very slowly so she doesn’t destroy possible evidence.’

  ‘Just bone fragments?’

  ‘And part of a skull. I think they’re going to have to extract DNA from what little there is of the bones and teeth. That could take a few weeks at least. Amanda, the fire investigator, said the bones are black-burnt, meaning DNA is probably highly degraded. Until the pathologist gets there, we won’t know if any nuclear DNA is left. They may have to use mitochondrial DNA analysis. We need to get some dental records as well because that’s probably our best hope for a positive ID. I think we’ll end up bringing in a forensic anthropologist. There’s really very little left.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Megan’s hand shoots up to her mouth as she feels nausea rise.

  ‘Jesus, Megs, sorry – I shouldn’t have let you hear that,’ says Michael.

  ‘Oh, I do apologise, Mrs Kade,’ says Detective Wardell, ‘I didn’t realise you were listening in.’

  ‘No, it’s fine… I just can’t think of him… burning, it’s so hideous. What if Daniel had been in the fire?’ She thinks about the knife her son had been concealing, about the black lines he had burned into the wood. ‘He could have been hurt,’ she says.

  ‘But he wasn’t, Megs, he’s okay, thank goodness. Listen, Detective Wardell, I told the constable we would provide a DNA sample as soon as possible. We needed to come home, we have a young baby who my wife needed to feed, and she wasn’t going to leave Daniel there overnight. He’s been through enough.’