by Nicole Trope
‘I won’t… I won’t say anything.’
‘I’m sure that what just happened over the last hour in this classroom wasn’t real. He can read, he can comprehend, and his maths ability is very high.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s odd, I know, but I’m assuming it has something to do with how he’s been raised by your ex-husband, and something to do with the trauma of losing his father – and, well, I could go on. He’s been through a lot but I know he was mostly faking. I watched him read to the end of the passage before he began sounding out words like a much younger child, and he did the maths questions correctly before he rubbed them out and put in the wrong answers. He thought I was marking some papers but I wasn’t. I was watching him.’
Megan feels abashed at having assumed the same thing, at having wondered why Mel was not paying more attention.
‘I wasn’t trying to be deceptive,’ explains Mel. ‘I know what he’s been through and I was worried that intense scrutiny would make him freeze up. He’s perfectly capable of being in our class, and were it not for everything he’s been through, I would suggest sending him on to high school, but perhaps primary school is the best place for him now until he’s settled in.’
Megan nods, stunned by the revelation.
‘Principal Gordon will give you all the necessary forms, and I’m sure that he can start Monday next week.’
‘Thanks… thank you,’ says Megan.
Once they have returned to the car, Megan turns to Daniel, who is stroking the face of his mobile phone. ‘Was that hard for you?’ she asks gently.
He shrugs his shoulders and then flicks his eyes at her.
At home Evie is taking her midday nap, watched over by her grandmother. Daniel gives his grandmother a short, tight hug before disappearing to his room. Megan knows she would be beyond grateful for a hug of any sort from him right now, for even the slightest amount of physical affection.
‘How did it go?’ asks Susanna.
‘They’re going to put him in the school year that’s just below where he should be. There’s only six months of the school year left so it’s better to let him finish the year at primary school.’
‘Well, that’s good news, Megan – why do you look so unhappy?’
‘Oh, I’m not.’ Megan sighs. Explaining it all would take too much energy and she’s not sure she wouldn’t sound a little paranoid. ‘It will be fine.’ She smiles instead as her mother picks up her knitting and gets ready to leave.
‘You’ll call me if you need me?’
‘I will, thanks, Mum,’ says Megan and she walks her mother to the front door.
In the kitchen she makes herself a strong cup of coffee. She wants to talk to Daniel about what happened when he was away – and for that, she needs caffeine. She wants to show him the blog and the Facebook page and the newspaper articles she has kept. She goes to her room and grabs the large box on the top shelf of her wardrobe. It’s a box that used to contain a pair of long boots. At first, she had just used it to keep everything in one place, but as the years went by, she began to decorate it. It’s covered in pictures of Daniel at every age and she has shellacked over the top of it, giving it strength and sheen. Decorating the box had helped her find a way back into her own art again, and most of her paintings over the last few years have been of Daniel. She has even painted pictures of him based on the age progression pictures. They look nothing like he does now. The features are similar but the curious wonder at life in his eyes is gone, which somehow changes his whole face.
She takes two giant sips of her coffee and then she takes the box to his room.
As she goes to open the door, she hears Daniel’s voice. At first, she thinks he must be humming some tune to himself, and she feels a spark of joy that he feels happy and safe enough to do so. Maybe we’ll be okay. She presses her ear to the door and listens, wanting to preserve the moment, but he is not singing – he is speaking.
His slightly muffled voice sounds like it is pleading with someone.
‘This is not my bed and this is not my house and this is not my family,’ he whispers, his voice tinged with despair. ‘Not my bed and not my house and not my family.’
Megan feels shock ripple through her and she opens the door quickly to see Daniel lying on the floor. His mobile phone is next to him, and on its screen is a picture of Greg wearing a cap and sunglasses, his face tan with a huge grin. Daniel is looking up at the ceiling, tears running down his face.
‘Daniel,’ she says, and he turns quickly to look at her, fear evident in the way his body stiffens and his eyes lock onto hers. He swipes quickly at his face.
‘Who were you speaking to?’ asks Megan.
‘Dad,’ he says, as if it should have been obvious. He sits up and picks up the phone, staring at the picture for a moment before turning it off.
‘Oh, Daniel,’ she says, ‘oh, sweetheart.’ What an enormous loss this is for a child.
She puts the box on the floor in front of him and sits down next to him on the carpet. She would like to wrap her arms around him but she knows that he will flinch at her touch.
‘That’s okay, you can talk to him… to a picture of him. I’m sure you can still feel him with you even though he’s not here anymore.’
‘I know he’s dead,’ states Daniel flatly.
‘Yes,’ agrees Megan. ‘Do you want to talk about the fire, about how it happened? Do you want to talk about Dad, about anything? You can talk to me about anything, anything at all.’
He looks at her.
‘Anything at all, sweetheart, I promise,’ she says.
He nods and looks down at the mobile phone; his thumb begins its convulsive movement across the screen.
‘He told me we were going on a holiday,’ he says, his fingers making sweaty marks on the black face of his mobile phone.
‘A holiday? You mean when he picked you up from school when you were six?’
‘A holiday to visit Granny Audrey and Grandpa William in England,’ he says.
‘And did you… did you visit them? Did you have your holiday?’
‘I liked the aeroplane but I wished you were there. Dad said you didn’t want to come. He said you hated Granny Audrey and Grandpa William.’
‘That’s not true,’ protests Megan. ‘I liked them very much. I didn’t know your dad was taking you to England that day. He shouldn’t have done that without telling me.’
‘I know you were tired of taking care of me.’
‘No, I wasn’t,’ she says softly. ‘I was never tired of taking care of you. I could never be tired of taking care of you. It was the one thing I loved more than anything in the whole world because I loved you more than anything in the whole world.’
‘Now you have her,’ spits Daniel.
‘Now I love you both more than anything in the whole world.’
‘Just leave me alone.’ He gets up off the floor and climbs onto his new bed, turning towards the wall.
Megan feels utterly helpless. She wants to go to him, to hold and comfort him, but she knows he does not want her there. His words have cut deep inside her. She hasn’t even managed to show him what she has collected in the box. He hasn’t even looked at it.
Wounded, she steps out of his room, closes his door and makes her way to the kitchen, finding the names of psychologists that Michael has collected for her. She and Daniel can no longer do this alone. They obviously need a great deal of help.
Sixteen
Wednesday 20 May 2015, Two years since Daniel was taken
Megan wakes from a dream about three-year-old Daniel in his favourite park, his little legs determinedly climbing the steps for the slide, his tongue poking out as he concentrates.
He has been gone for two years already. Two years in which she has felt the passing of every minute, every hour without him.
She slides out of bed and finds clean running gear. She runs a lot now. Mostly early in the morning before work but sometimes she runs at nigh
t if she can’t sleep. The movement and the physical pain keep her centred in the here and now. On the nights when she finds herself in bed, going over all her failures that led to her son being taken from her, she hauls herself out into the cold or the rain and she runs. The burn in her legs is the first thing that distracts her from her circular punishing thoughts, and then the burning in her lungs forces her to concentrate on her breathing. She listens to her feet, loud in the silent night, and she feels her mind empty.
‘Why must you do it at night?’ her mother had asked, anguished at what she considered reckless behaviour.
‘Sometimes I have to,’ had been the only thing she could think to reply. She had never been the kind of person to take refuge in exercise, not until now. She had begun with walking and then progressed to a few minutes of running. Exercise was the last of her options, she thinks. She had tried drowning her despair and she had tried talking about it with a therapist.
‘I don’t know when you’re going to see him again,’ her therapist had said. ‘I don’t even know if you will. All I can do is try to help you find a way to cope with this situation.’
‘That’s not enough,’ she had said through tears that never seemed to stop returning, and then she had paid her final bill and walked out.
In the autumn morning, Megan breathes the cold in, panting until she settles into her stride. Her body is strong and lean now. She feels more powerful, more in control.
She crests a hill, feels the pain in her legs increase, pushes herself to run faster as the image of the new age progression photograph sent to her from the Department of Missing Persons appears before her. Daniel’s front teeth have been filled, changing his face completely. The picture makes her flinch each time she sees it. Her son’s little-boy years have faded from his face, and so her six-year-old son seems to have truly disappeared. She has put the photograph on the fridge next to the one from last year. The two images sit below a row of six fridge magnets, each with a photo celebrating a year in Daniel’s life. She knows that, one day, those that are computer generated may eclipse the number she has of him from babyhood to six. It’s an agonising thought.
Megan listens to the thump of her feet on the ground. ‘Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think,’ she mouths in time to her steps.
The sun rises higher in the sky as she runs, illuminating gardens as she passes by. She does this route often and by now knows which houses to avoid looking at. Don’t look at number fifty-four, they have a swing set in the front. Don’t look at number sixty-two, they leave their toys and bikes in the garden.
Back at home she showers quickly and makes herself breakfast. She is watching something on cable television. She doesn’t watch the news, can’t watch the news. There are missing children, hurt children, abused children everywhere. How can the police possibly save them all?
As she sips her coffee, she opens Facebook.
There is a message from Sandi, who is now living overseas in Italy studying art.
‘Hey, darling. Thinking of you today. I hope you get through it thinking of your little boy’s smile and his laugh and all the other wonderful things you remember about him.’
When Sandi had told Megan about her decision to move a month ago, she’d explained, ‘I may as well live my life. It’s been five years already. I need to do something while I wait for them to come back into my life. People keep telling me that this is the way forward but I’m not sure. What if I move forward and lose them forever?’
Megan had known that Sandi’s decision would have come with so much heartbreak it was best not to delve into it. ‘Good for you. I am sure it will be wonderful and you’ll learn and experience so much,’ she had replied, because what else was there to say?
She could never leave Australia. What if Daniel tried to find her and she was gone? The thought terrifies her.
She and Sandi spend a lot of time discussing things other than their missing children, like their shared interest in the surrealist art movement, comparing and contrasting their favourite painters and decorating ideas for dream houses neither of them will ever own.
‘I wish we could meet and sit down together over lunch or dinner. I feel like we would never run out of things to say,’ Megan has told her.
‘We will one day, darling, when the time is right. Everything happens for a reason and I know that one day we will be in the same place at the same time and then there will be a lot of wine consumed and a lot of laughing for two women who’ve been through the worst.’
‘Thanks, sweetie. Hope all is going well and you are on your way to becoming a master artist. xx.’
Today there is also a message from Tom.
‘Hi Megan. I hope that today is a peaceful day for you.’
‘Thank you,’ she writes.
‘I know it doesn’t help much,’ is his immediate reply, ‘but what else can you say?’
‘Nothing helps much, does it? I know that in a few minutes my phone will ring and it will be my mother, and then my brother will call and I’ll have to reassure everyone that I’m fine, and then I’ll go to work and reassure everyone there that I’m fine, and by the end of the day I’ll just be exhausted from lying,’ she replies.
‘We can never really be fine, can we?’ Tom types. ‘Not without our kids. I’ve been thinking a lot about Leah lately and how I could have managed the whole thing better.’
‘I know it’s hard to do but you have to stop blaming yourself. I know the blame rests with Greg. I know he’s the one who took my child. I am trying… really trying to let go of the other stuff, the stuff that I could have done. It’s the same thing with Leah. You couldn’t have watched her all day, every day. She was always going to find a way to take her.’
‘I know, Megan. I’ve heard that from so many people, but I keep trying to reimagine the situation, and this time I’m kinder to Leah, and instead of taking Jem she and I manage to work it out. Whatever anyone says there is a reason that the saying “It takes two to tango” exists. I have to acknowledge my part in the dance. She wanted another chance.’
‘I don’t think Greg wanted to work anything out with me. I think he just wanted to control me.’
‘If he walked back into your life right now, what would you say to him?’
Megan thinks about this question. Her first instinct is to write that she would do everything she could to physically annihilate Greg, but when she really considers it, she realises that’s not the truth.
‘I’ve been so angry at him for so long, but funnily enough, I think the first thing I would say to him would be, “Thank you.” I would just be grateful to him for bringing my son back.’
‘Yeah, that’s how I would feel too. Look, I have to go. We’ll speak soon, okay?’
‘Okay. Bye, Tom, and thanks.’
Tom signs off his usual way: ‘Xx.’
Her phone rings and she takes a deep breath, readying herself to speak to her mother.
She answers without looking at the screen. ‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Megan?’
‘Oh, sorry, I was expecting my mother.’
‘It’s Michael Kade, Detective Michael Kade, I’m just calling to see how you are.’ The words come out in a rush as though he has to say them fast enough to prevent Megan from getting her hopes up. Megan remembers the way she screamed last year when he called, and she feels herself grow hot with shame. She had never called to apologise.
‘Hello, Detective Kade. I’m sorry… sorry about last year.’
‘Please, no need to apologise. It was a tough day, just like today is a tough day. I wanted to call and let you know that we are still looking. We won’t close the case until we find him.’
‘Thanks… thank you, that’s good to know. I assume if there were any new leads or anything you would have…’
‘No question, even if it’s the smallest thing we will call you about it.’
‘Good. Do you call everyone on the anniversary of the disappearance?’
‘I, uh… I do
tend to call the families with missing kids.’
Megan would like to end the call, craving the solace of silence, but doesn’t want to sound too abrupt. ‘So how long have you been working with missing persons?’ she asks instead, trying to picture Detective Kade. Muscular arms and broad shoulders are all she can visualise.
‘It’s been four years now.’
‘And do you like it?’
‘I guess… I guess I do. I mean I hate it when we fail, when we can’t find the person we’re looking for, but when we succeed, it’s pretty amazing.’
‘How often do you succeed?’
‘Not as much as we would like.’
‘Oh.’ She wishes she hadn’t asked the question, wishes she hadn’t heard that answer. She needs to be able to hold onto hope, and her body floods with despair at the words. Not as much as we would like.
‘Are you still teaching art?’ he asks.
‘Yes, still in the same place. It’s strange to think that I now have classes filled with people who just assume I’m a single woman without children.’
‘It must be, but you like the work?’
‘It’s very peaceful, even on the worst days. I have older people during the day and teenagers and kids in the afternoons after school. The classes with kids who are Daniel’s age are hard but wonderful at the same time. I feel like I can connect with him a little even though he’s not here.’
In the background someone speaks to Detective Kade, and she hears the hush as he places his hand over the speaker on his phone.
‘I’m sorry, Megan, I have to go,’ he says. ‘If you’d like to talk a bit more, maybe we could meet for a coffee?’
‘Oh,’ says Megan, ‘that’s very nice of you, but I’m fine, I mean I’m okay, thanks, but thanks for calling, it was very kind of you.’ She doesn’t think she can meet up with the man responsible for finding her son, doesn’t think she would be able to sit across the table from him without the day he disappeared consuming her thoughts.
‘Not at all, take care of yourself.’
‘You too.’
Megan hangs up the phone and finds herself thinking about the detective’s voice. On impulse she googles him and finds a picture of him in an article on some charity work being done by the police of New South Wales. He has thick dark hair and brown eyes and she can see she had been right about his arms.