What She Knew

by Gilly MacMillan

  Laura let me jitter. She calmly laid out our food on the kitchen table and poured us glasses of wine. “I know you probably don’t feel like this,” she said, “but I’m going to do it anyway and I won’t be offended if you don’t want it.”

  The food and drink she’d brought looked like ancient relics of a life that I’d once enjoyed, but I went through the motions of appearing grateful. I picked at one or two of the dishes, managed just a sip of the wine, which had lost all of the comforting qualities it had before Ben disappeared and tasted like acid in my mouth.

  “Do you want to talk about him?” Laura asked, breaking our silence. “Would it help?”

  Laura never ate much; she had the appetite of a sparrow. She toyed with her food for a few moments, while I failed to answer her question, and then she said, “Do you remember when you had him? At the very beginning? We couldn’t believe how tiny he was, do you remember that?”

  I found my voice. “You wouldn’t hold him at first.”

  Laura hadn’t been able to take her eyes off him when she came to see me in the hospital. I lay exhausted in the bed, my body bruised and sore, hormone-drenched and soft, and watched her while she’d stood beside his Perspex crib, all trim and well dressed and tanned and pretty in a little summer dress and big sunglasses pushed up on her head—like a postcard from my life before motherhood. I told her she could pick him up, but she’d shaken her head at first.

  She smiled at the reminder. “I’d never held a baby before. I didn’t want to break him, or to drop him.”

  “But I made you.”

  “And he puked on me.”

  “He puked everywhere for the first few months. It was constant washing.”

  “But it was love at first sight, wasn’t it? For you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I envied you that. It was so intense, so private.”

  Her fingers sat on the stem of her wineglass and she turned it slowly, delicate wrists flexing. Then she refilled it. More than half the bottle was gone, and I hadn’t had more than a sip.

  For the first time I noticed that lines were beginning to form on her elfin face. It was just an impression, they seemed to be there one moment, and gone the next, but they were a reminder that she was aging, that we were all aging. I stretched my hand across the table toward her and our fingers linked briefly.

  “I can’t believe this is happening to you,” she said. “It’s like a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere and struck you, and Ben. I can’t imagine what you must be going through.”

  “All my feelings hurt.”

  Her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and she said, “Can I tell you something? I want to say it so you know that other people know how you feel. Just a little bit of what you feel anyway.”

  “Tell me,” I said, and instinctively I felt a reawakening of the feelings of dread that our reminiscences about Ben had briefly put to sleep.

  “I had an abortion.”

  “When?” This was startling news, shocking too. I thought Laura and I had had the kind of friendship where you lay yourself bare, where the only secrets you keep are to do with your plans for each other’s Christmas or birthday presents.

  “Before you had Ben.”

  “I don’t know what to say. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “You were pregnant.”

  And there it was: a wedge in our friendship that I’d never known about.

  “Who was the father?”

  “Do you remember Tom from Bath?”

  I did. He was a married man, whom she’d met through work.

  “Did he know?”

  “He paid for it. God, Rach, I’m sorry. It’s stupid of me even to mention it now. I don’t even know why I’m telling you. It’s nothing compared to what you’re going through.”

  And here’s the thing: I couldn’t deal with it. If Laura wanted us to feel solidarity at that moment, then she’d just said completely the wrong thing. It was simply too much to cope with: the intentional loss of a child.

  A week previously I would have been there for her, supported her, but at that moment it was viciously, unbearably painful to hear, and my brain, addled with her news, with everything, did a flip.

  The exquisite and painful pleasure of our reminiscences about Ben disappeared in an instant. The earlier warmth of her friendship, and her company, suddenly felt frosty and brittle. Goose bumps ran across my skin like squalls agitating glassy water.

  “No,” I said. “No, no, no. I can’t hear this now. Why are you telling me this?”

  And then another thought, a corrosive one, as the distrust that my sister had sown as a seed now bloomed freely in my mind. I voiced it with a tone that was raw enough to surprise even myself, the tone of somebody who has reached the end of her tether. “Are you feeding stories about me to the other journalists? To your friends out there? Is that why you wanted to talk about Ben?”

  I got to my feet, and my wineglass tipped over in my hurry to stand, the wine everywhere, pooling on the table, on me, dripping onto the floor, and Laura stood too and shock had peeled away any softness in her expression so that her cheeks looked cold and smooth as marble.

  “Jesus, Rachel! I know you must be feeling desperate, but . . .”

  I pushed her. She came around the table toward me, wanting to hug me, and I pushed her away. I grabbed her coat and her bag and I shoved them at her and I hounded her all the way to the front door, ignoring her pleading words, and her tears, until she was out and gone, like Nicky, and the press, her so-called friends, took photographs of her on the doorstep while I sat back down at the kitchen table, on the chair that was damp with wine, and I sobbed.

  JIM

  We worked closely with John Finch all day. The feeling of recognizing myself in him didn’t abate; if anything it got stronger as we talked. It troubled me.

  He waited at Kenneth Steele House with me while my officers began checking out families whom he’d identified for us. We sent a pair of DCs down to the hospital, hoping there weren’t going to be too many confidentiality issues and bureaucratic hoops to jump through before they would release information to us.

  “Do you ever tire of it?” Finch said to me in a long moment of silence when my thoughts had flown to Emma, to when I might see her next. “Do you ever tire of the daily contact with people when their lives are shattered?”

  We sat in a windowless interview room around a gray-topped table. A strip light above us threw out a glare that made my temples ache. I didn’t answer him. If I had, I would have lost my separateness, my professional distance. I had to remember that John Finch was not my friend, but it was hard not to answer, because there were parallels between what he did and what I do. For a moment or two I was overwhelmed with a desire to say yes, to talk to him, to compare notes and admit that there were times when it was very, very difficult to stand back. In another universe, I thought, we might have been able to do that, and it would have been nice, but not here, not now.

  “Do you know what this room reminds me of?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “We call it the bad news room at the hospital. It’s where we take families when we have to tell them the worst. It’s exactly like this, except that there are brochures.”

  I kept my reply neutral. “We’re hoping to bring you good news, Mr. Finch.”

  “Do you know how they know?” he said. “The smart ones, the clever families? They see the china teapot and the china cups with saucers, and the door closing behind them, and the unusual number of staff all together in one room, and they ask themselves why all this fuss, just for us? It doesn’t take them long to work it out. They read the situation before we’ve even started talking. They start to grieve before the milk goes into the cups.”

  “Well, you’re safe on that count,” I said.

  In front of us was a tray of four polystyrene cups with gray coffee remains swimming in the base of them. Torn and half-emptied sachets of sugar littered the table like doll-sized body ba
gs.

  He understood why I’d given such a shallow response. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course you don’t want to have this conversation because to do so would be unprofessional. That was stupid of me. I’d do the same in your situation.” He barked out a noise that was supposed to be a laugh, but instead was a noise that crept sullenly around the edges of the room, mocking his attempt at forced jollity.

  I wondered then if all the pain and difficulty of his profession, the hopelessness and the encounters with death, had become toxic for John Finch, too toxic to bear any longer.

  I let my guard down then, just for a moment, because I was curious.

  “Do you get emotional when you lose a patient?” I asked him. I wanted to know how much failure hurt him; I wanted to know if he was like me.

  “Very occasionally there’s one that gets to you, no matter how hard you try. It’s very rare. You learn early on, when you’re training, that you have to keep your distance emotionally, because if you don’t, you can’t do your job.”

  “What makes that one stand out?”

  “Sometimes you don’t even know. Once I operated on a boy who reminded me a little of Ben, and I met his mother, she wasn’t unlike Rachel. They reminded me of us, of our family. It wasn’t that long ago, Ben was about seven at the time. The boy’s operation was quite a simple one, but there was bleeding, and he died. His heart failed. There was nothing we could do. It was an unexpected death and when I went to tell his mother, I . . . ​I’m afraid I broke down.”

  Distress swam deep in his eyes, but John Finch had obviously learned to be stoic too. He didn’t lose control; he said, “It was unprofessional of me.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “Do you think so, Detective? Has it ever happened to you?”

  I looked at my watch. It was late. I was in danger of confiding. I had to get things back on track. “I think we could do with something to eat,” I said. “Chances are, it’s going to be a long night.”

  We took John Finch home at ten that night. By midnight, we’d narrowed things down based on the information he’d given us, and we had a standout suspect for the letter. By the early hours of the morning we’d disturbed countless colleagues and we were as certain as you can be. We’d checked and double-checked the details, gone into background, and triple-checked that we had the correct address for our suspect.

  Fraser, on what must have been her fiftieth cup of coffee, tasked me with leading a dawn raid. We wanted the element of surprise, and that’s the best time to get it. I chose my men, and we went through our preparations carefully.

  We were due to go in at five a.m.

  DAY 7

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2012

  An abduction may occur for many reasons, including a desire to possess a child, sexual gratification, financial gain, retribution, and the desire to kill. Research findings indicate that when a child is killed, the motivation may be either emotion-based, where the abductor seeks revenge on the family; sexual-based, where the offender seeks sexual gratification from the victim; or profit-based, which involves most often ransom for money (Boudreaux et al., 2000 & 2001). Moreover, child homicide usually follows an abduction and is not the reason for the abduction.

  —Marlene L. Dalley and Jenna Ruscoe, “The Abduction of Children by Strangers in Canada: Nature and Scope,” National Missing Children Services, National Police Services, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, December 2003

  WEB PAGE—www.twentyfour7news.co.uk/bristol—7:22 AM BST Oct 27, 2012

  Where is Benedict Finch?

  The blogosphere rises—people power or vigilante justice?

  by Danny Deal

  Officers working on the Benedict Finch case have been frustrated by the emergence of a blog, which has stirred up the media frenzy.

  Apparently written by somebody close to the case, the blog has been blamed for leaking details of the case and stirring up suspicion against the family of Benedict Finch.

  DCI Corinne Fraser said last night, “We don’t know who is writing this blog, but it is a vindictive piece of work. At this time we are very concerned for the well-being of the family of Benedict Finch, as well as for the lad himself, and we would ask people to remain calm, and respect this family’s situation, and not pay heed to this blog, which is the work of an uninformed and unreliable individual. Our efforts at this time are all concentrated on finding this lad.”

  She also added that police are still “pursuing multiple lines of inquiry” and are “hopeful of a significant development soon.” She declined to comment on what that might be.

  James Leon QC stated that “anybody, either a media organization or an individual, can be prosecuted under contempt of court laws if their comments published online are found to be prejudicial at trial.”

  3 people are discussing this article

  Donna Faulkes

  People should be able to say what they like.

  Shaun Campbell

  If the police cant find him then at least somebodys saying what everybodys thinking.

  Amelie Jones

  Its stupid to write this and not say what it is that people cant say.

  RACHEL

  In the early hours of the morning I woke to find myself drenched in sweat again, consumed by that scooped-out feeling of loss that was brutal and all-consuming and was no longer tempered by having people close to me.

  I began to consider the thought that Ben might not come home.

  I began to consider the reality that I might have to exist in, should that happen.

  It would be intolerable.

  My obsessive, jumpy thoughts drove me downstairs, and out of the back door into the night. The wind was still sharp and it sent me running across the garden to my studio, and in that short distance made its way coldly between the folds of my nightwear so that by the time I let myself in, I was shivering so violently that I felt like a shaken bag of bones.

  I didn’t dare turn on the lights, in case of being seen through the glass doors, top-lit in all my falling-apart glory. My neighbors, like my friends, felt like adversaries now, potential spies. Instead I just turned on my computer, and sat in its frigid blue glow. Then, compulsively, slowly, knowing I shouldn’t, feeling unable to stop, I began to look online.

  I found myself castigated further. In the absence of news about the case, editorial pieces had emerged, primarily in the broadsheets. And if I’d ever hoped before reading them that they might provide a more balanced view of our family’s situation, then I was wrong, delusional. They were as brutally judgmental as the tabloids.

  Almost without exception they discussed the case, and my performance at the press conference, in the context of my single motherhood, and they used it as a stick to beat me with, or a label with which to stigmatize me.

  Those editorial pieces asked a lot of questions about me, and about Ben’s case. You can imagine that, can’t you? Perhaps you read them. They questioned my morals and they cast doubt on my fitness to raise a child. They condemned me roundly for my slack parenting in letting Ben run ahead in the woods. They blamed me, made a social pariah of me. Single mother, failed mother, person of dubious social status, target.

  Here’s what they didn’t ask: they showed no curiosity whatsoever about whether I’d considered the decision to let Ben run ahead, or any of the factors I might have taken into account; they didn’t examine the sense of loss I had to overcome when John left me, or my efforts at rebuilding, or my longing to be a good mother in his absence; they didn’t ask how much I loved Ben.

  Nowhere did any journalist mention the hardship of single parenthood, the evenings spent alone, the pressures of making difficult decisions without support, the painful absence of a partner who might have been there if life had turned out differently.

  These were people, I thought, with a growing sense of desperation, who would have put me in a workhouse a hundred years ago, and a few centuries before that strapped me into a scold’s bridle, or built a tall bonfire just for
me to sit atop, and lit it with flaming torches, which underscored with flickering light their hard-bitten features, their lack of mercy or compassion.

  And nowhere, in any of the hundreds of words written, did any of them lay a scrap of blame at John’s door. In contrast, he was the object of sympathy, protected by his gender and his profession: pediatric general surgeon, his new wife a deserved salve for his pain, not a cause of the breakdown of our marriage. One of them even featured a photograph of John and Katrina looking like a perfect unit, irreproachable in their togetherness.

  I was their target because I was socially unacceptable, and so they did everything they legally could: they publicly lanced me with words which were written, examined, and edited, each process carefully honing them in a calculated effort to push people’s buttons once they were published, to froth up public opinion around them so that my situation could titillate others, could thrill and bolster the minds of the smug and judgmental. Schadenfreude. Conservatism. Better the worst happens to somebody else, because, quite frankly, they must have done something to deserve it.

  And they felt entitled to do that, these so-called “thinkers,” as they sat comfortably behind their desks with their reference books and their own unexamined moral compass, because I was nothing to them. Ben and I were simply the commodity that would sell their papers, nothing more. And these were the very papers that I used to read, that I used to carry down the road from the shop and bring into my home.

  It was cowardly, yellow journalism, and I knew that. The problem was, knowing it wasn’t enough to stop every single word from chipping away any final scraps of self-respect or dignity that I might have had left. I was only human, after all.

  And I suppose I’m interested now to know whether it troubles you to read these things, to know that the rug you’re standing on so securely can be whipped out from under your feet rapidly and completely? Or do you feel safer than that? Do you assume that your foundations are more secure than mine, and that my situation is too extreme to ever befall you? Have you noted the moments when I made mistakes that you might have avoided? Do you imagine that you would have behaved with a more perfect maternal dignity in my situation, that you would be unimpeachable? Perhaps you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to lose your husband in the first place.