The Cuckoo's Child

  Daniel quickly made a place for himself in the house. He demonstrated amazing mechanical abilities: got our ailing lawnmower going in short order and corrected the timing on my car.

  “Got plenty of practice on the boat,” he muttered when Neil commented on his skill.

  He seemed to like the flowers but ignored the vegetables in the garden, repotted my geraniums, and coaxed a struggling white lilac into putting out new leaves. He adored Maisie. He haunted Neil’s studio, drawing on scraps of paper and experimenting with paint on leftover pieces of canvas and board. He never sought out any companions, never wanted to go by himself to the movies or a dance, but he would lose himself in music, any kind, lying out on the lawn with his Walkman, eyes closed, foot twitching in time, and roam the beach for hours collecting shells and driftwood.

  But he never picked up a book, or a magazine or a newspaper. At first he claimed there were never any on the boat so he just didn’t think about them.

  “I can find out what’s going on from the radio,” he said. “Why do I need a paper?”

  The truth was, though, that he could barely read, something I discovered the day I asked him to read me the instructions in a recipe as I was cooking and had no spare hand to turn the page.

  “Never cottoned on to it,” he muttered. “Never stayed long enough in any school.”

  And there it was. We might have envisaged a son who would do well in school, who would be happy and well adjusted, popular with everyone, who would go to college and enter a profession or pursue a shining career in the arts. What we had was a solitary young man, friendless, in need not only of therapy but also of a basic education, an individual whose experience was totally alien and burdensome, who was miserly with his trust, always holding part of himself in reserve, reined in and undemonstrative, giving nothing away.

  Neil made headway. From that very first moment he seemed to have the knack of the right word, the right gesture, while I couldn’t find the way at all. Everything I did or said felt contrived somehow: too much or too little, like the pointer on an oversensitive scale, never on the mark. I felt hopelessly inept.

  “I’m a failure,” I said one night after a particularly disastrous attempt at a shopping expedition for clothes when Daniel had politely turned down every single thing we’d looked at. “He won’t even let me buy him a shirt!”

  “Give it time,” Neil soothed, “he hasn’t had much practice with mothers.”

  And I knew he was right, but that didn’t stop me feeling envious—no, I’ll call it by its proper name—jealous of the way he could get Daniel to smile and laugh, fool around, act goofy like any other sixteen-year-old. The way he could sometimes reach right into Daniel’s heart.

  Like the day he showed Daniel all the miniature paintings of the Boy. At first, Daniel glanced at each one, then studied them intently, the pages turning slower and slower, until he looked up and said, wonderingly, “That’s me, isn’t it, in all of them?” And when Neil nodded, his eyes filled and he swallowed hard. “You were keeping me alive, weren’t you?” he said and smiled with such warmth at his father that I wept.

  But Neil was right about time. I suppose I had been expecting Daniel to feel a sort of instant love for me just because I was his mother and that’s what sons are supposed to feel. He couldn’t, of course. I had failed him, after all. When I stopped expecting and started doing things without any motive beside their necessity, Daniel finally let me approach.

  I taught him to read. On his own, he’d gone out and tried to find a job, but the manager at the very first place he tried had told him to come back with a resumé.

  “What’s a resumé?” he’d asked angrily when he came home. And when I told him, he shouted, “That’s stupid! What do I have to have that for? Who wants the stupid job anyway?”

  I pointed out that he apparently did, or he wouldn’t have gone looking for one.

  “Why don’t we kill two birds with one stone?” I suggested. “I’ll teach you to read and write properly, and then you’ll be able to do your own resumé. And take courses, perhaps.”

  So that’s what we did. At first it was babyish and frustrating, but Daniel was a quick study, and soon we were able to set aside the juvenile readers and make up our own material. I told him stories about living in Vanderhoof as a child, about school, about London; he avoided anything about himself but invented fantasies about the Boy in his perfect world. We wrote these down and read them out loud. Daniel shyly gave a copy of the Boy stories to Neil.

  “I’ve never given anyone a present before,” he said.

  That night Neil showed me a page in one of the stories. Daniel must have written some on his own because I hadn’t seen it before. It was set on an island, a tropical paradise. The Boy lived on fruit and fish; his companions were flocks of brilliant birds and monkeys. He seemed to have all he could wish for. I read on.

  The Boy had everything he needed. He could reach out and pick papayas and mangoes; he could spear fish in the lagoon. He had a hut made of driftwood with a palm leaf thatch. It was so warm all the time he didn’t need any clothes. He could play with the monkeys when he felt like it, or just lie around and do nothing. But something was missing. He watched the monkeys in the trees over his head. The babies were clinging tightly to their mothers, and the teenagers were leaping about in the branches, very daring, showing off. Every so often though, they stopped playing and went back and chattered at their mothers, then sat still so that the females could groom them. The Boy envied them because they all had someone who would talk to them and look after them. He decided he needed a mother too.

  “I know just where to find one,” he said to himself.

  I wept again but with relief this time.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  How I wish there was more time, Stephen! Not just for me, to finish what I have to say before the others come back, but more time for you to watch your children grow up, time to grow old with Holly, time to go on being part of our lives.

  Meeting you again was the highlight of the family reunion for Daniel, you know. I’d been dreading the whole thing, worrying how Daniel would react to all those strangers laying claim to him. I’d warned him about Mum, told him to expect her to talk non-stop and treat him like a little boy, primed him with all the names and past history. Maybe I gave him too much. He was quiet on the way north, perked up only when Neil let him drive for a while on the straight stretches beyond Clinton.

  “Perhaps this is all happening too soon,” I whispered to Neil when we stopped for coffee at Williams Lake.

  “For Daniel or for you?” Neil asked. “He’ll be fine, see if he’s not.”

  And he was. Maybe I’d been so conscious of having to face reality and not allow myself to indulge in happily-ever-after fantasies that I’d never entertained the possibility that some things might be as simple as could be. The psychologist warned us, after all, that abducted children become survivors first and foremost.

  “They learn not to depend on adults,” he said, “and they develop strategies to ensure their own survival no matter what, and won’t let anyone stand in their way. They can, in fact, develop sociopathic tendencies.”

  Covertly, I’d watched Daniel like a hawk after that, watching for the slightest evidence of sociopathic tendencies. I even quizzed him about how he felt when another kid landed the busboy job he’d applied for at the local café, but he just looked at me as if I were mad and asked why he should feel anything.

  “It’s a shitty job anyway,” he said. “And Alex said I could start helping at the garage next week, so I guess you could say I feel relief, if anything.”

  He still keeps to himself, but he helps Neil in the garden all the time. I hear them laughing and chattering, two male voices in perfect accord, oblivious to me listening in. Daniel has an ongoing joke about Neil’s ineptitude with the mower—he can never start it without practically dislocating his shoulder and flooding the motor—which he now extends to any kind of machine. I’ll ask Neil to make a
pot of coffee and Daniel will call out, “You’d better let me do it. It’ll never work again if Dad gets his hands on it!”

  Does he sound like a sociopath to you? Me neither. Of course, there are always concerns too, and I know you’ve thought of them. I saw the look that passed between you and Holly, that instinctive alarm, when Daniel and Jason were roughhousing with a soccer ball and Daniel caught Jason in a bearhug and lifted him off his feet to stop him kicking the ball. I’ve heard it all too, all the sad stories of abused boys turning into abusers when they grow up, and I know it happens. I know Daniel’s still an unknown quantity, but I think Mum got it right, amazingly enough, although it was probably quite accidental. Remember what she said when Holly went to intervene?

  “Let them have their fun,” she said. “Daniel wouldn’t harm Jason, would you, pet? Think how he looked after that other little boy, not that it was quite the same, but you know what I mean, he has a kind heart.”

  And that is a point, isn’t it? I’m not just deluding myself?

  Night’s crept up on us. I can barely make out the cars and trees down below, just the impression of bulky forms, and the hospital wing opposite blazing with light, riding the dark like a great oceangoing vessel.

  The others will be fast asleep at home now. They’ll have eaten at White Spot and enjoyed one another’s company in a slightly guilty fashion, embarrassed at being able to eat and laugh, even if it’s only for a short time, while you lie here. Daniel’s part of that. The family scooped him up the instant they saw him: Mum patting him and stroking, tears pouring down her face, Dad wringing his hand and pulling him close in a silent hug, Vanessa and Jason hauling him off to see the banner they’d strung across the living room—Welcome Home, Daniel—and then squabbling over who had had the biggest hand in its construction, Holly distracting them with chips and dip and bottles of pop as if she knew exactly what he’d like best. And you, gazing into the engine of your truck when we found you, flashing a smile and saying, “Hand me that wrench, will you, Daniel?” as if you were just picking up where you’d left off ten minutes before. I knew he was all right when you got him covered with grease under the hood.

  All exactly what he needed. I could almost feel him relax and soften. How come you were all so unerring, when I couldn’t put a foot right at first? But then, I’ve been a tangled mess for such a long time, I suppose I’d lost the knack of certainty. I’m hoping you haven’t gone too far away to hear me now; I need you to know it’s all right. I’ve got it all together at last.

  The threads lie loosely in my grip, some short, some long and spun very fine. Many of them attach to my past, to my real identity, but I’m no longer concerned with who I am or where I came from. Heredity is an accident; environment, pure chance. With a turn of the dice, I could have been Olivia or Ruth or Rue Tribulation and no less myself, merely different.

  For there is a sense in which we are all the cuckoo’s children. Fate sets us down, little naked entities, and lets us struggle for survival. Many are lucky and find help, so abundant and selfless, perhaps, that they feel life is always so, that this is how we should expect life to be. Truth is, we are alone in a crowd, forever nudged this way and that by random forces, our forms dented and scraped by every person and event we bump into or rub up against. I am a composite. I am no more just Livvy than I am really Ruth, or my grandmother’s Tribulation, but the sum of all my parts, just as Daniel is the little boy in the red shirt I last saw playing under the tree, and the victim, the angry stranger, the knight errant, and the prodigal son.

  Thinking for hours without sleep produces a strange exaltation. Here in this spartan room, I am Miss Penfold’s hero returning from the quest exactly as Neil has painted me in his latest picture. He has me crouched on my battered vessel, heading for a distant harbour where two tiny figures stand, one a small splash of red, and says he waited to finish it until he knew what colour to paint the sails. White, I told him, white.

  But returning heroes always bring back some sort of gift after their confrontation with the monsters. Could mine be knowing what it is to be a cuckoo’s child? If I followed all the threads to their source, would I find a fragile chain of consequences all leading to this moment? From the grafting of the cherry on the damson tree and the blighting of Paradise with a Calvinist morality, down through birth and war and death, changelings and sickness, betrayal and love and rejection, to the old woman’s hand in the fire and a son in exchange, I could trace the connections, see them pushing their way to this room, patiently lining up all the variables to produce exactly this result.

  The future is mysterious. We will have to deal with concrete things: Jerry’s trial and Daniel’s testimony; seeing our son through therapy; repairing the holes in his education and getting him started in the world. Maybe my contribution will be to convince him that none of his life was a mistake or a waste, that he is who he is, a work-in-progress to be modified for the rest of his days. That he is alone, but not lonely, a cuckoo’s child just like me and everybody else.

  I am full of hope. It sounds almost heartless to say it now, but the future beckons. The weight of anger has dropped away. I can think of Mum and Dad without flinching at the names; they are my parents, and when Mum babbles and Dad strokes his moustache to cover his anxieties, I feel bound to them in a circle of loss, reinvented as an only child, the only one they will have left.

  Horizons have moved for me, edging out to the remains of my other family, meshing Magnus’s and Deirdre’s lives into mine, into Neil’s and Daniel’s, even into our parents’. Soon Dad will write to Magnus, sending him all Olivia’s details so that the gravestone can finally be put right.

  “He’s a good man,” Dad said. “Forgiving. More of a Christian than his mother.”

  And he is. When the hurricane in England was all over the news, I called him to ask about the damage at Hescot. You could hear the grief in his voice.

  “Tore up a lot of those old beeches,” he said. “One came right through the roof of the orangery, glass everywhere. Not too bad in the garden because of the walls, but my dad’s tree’s gone—split right down the middle. The graft’s always the weakest spot.”

  I was horrified, but he’d moved on.

  “I’ve a mind to start another one,” he said. “I’ve got the scions already. But that’ll have to wait on some spare time; I’ve got a mort of work to do, clearing up the mess. I could do with that boy of yours; plenty for him to do here. And learn, I reckon.”

  And there it was. Another opening door, and one we’ll walk through soon, I think. I have to show Neil where I was born, after all, and watch him and Daniel draw it into themselves too.

  The others will be back soon, and the nurses are already here. They check their patient and their machines, and tell me quietly that you do not have much more time and we should get ready to make our goodbyes. I will not say it; there are no real endings, only revolution. You will not have gone while we remember. But I will take your hand in mine, so, and make myself believe that your fingers move against mine, an intimation from far, far away that you have listened and understand it all.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank all of the members of my writing group, past and present, especially Kathy, Helen, Gillian, Jennifer, Sara, Maureen, and Lynne, for their critical insight and many helpful suggestions over the years it took for this book to see the light of day. My thanks also to Leah Fowler, who proved to be a most enthusiastic and encouraging editor, and to Heather Sangster, for demonstrating the value of a sharp-eyed proofreader.

  A note here about geography: The street names are all real, but those familiar with them may feel they are not portrayed exactly as they remember. I confess to taking some liberties with their topography, but this is fiction, after all.

  MARGARET THOMPSON came to Canada from England in 1967, and taught English at secondary and post-secondary levels until her retirement in 1998. She is the author of seven books, including a BC 2000 Book Award–winning YA novel, sho
rt stories, and two collections of personal essays, and has contributed to five anthologies. She is a past president of the Federation of BC Writers and now lives in Victoria, BC, with a basset hound, a neurotic cat, and an itinerant peacock.

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