The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  ‘How old were you when your mum died?’

  ‘I was sixteen.’

  ‘How did she die?’

  He has never asked this before. But she has always known he would.

  ‘She fell under a train, Joey.’

  He lifts his head, alarmed. ‘I don’t want you to fall under a train!’

  ‘I’m not going to do that.’ She kisses his head. ‘I promise. I am very careful. So, what do we think of the name, Lily?’

  He rests his head back on her. ‘It’s OK, probably.’

  There is a rattling downstairs. They both jump. The door to the basement slams.

  ‘It’s just Greg!’ She laughs, pressing her hand on her heart. ‘It’s OK. It’s only Greg.’

  But Joe’s face shows only alarm.

  *

  It has been snowing all night, but it is easing off now, the flakes turning from heavy clumps to intermittent, weak structures that float to earth one by one, like ghostly parachutes. When she walked Joe to school, in his new snow boots, he was swept away by the excitement – chucking snowballs with other kids, skidding down the road, the anxiety of the night before erased by the unexpected magic of the weather.

  While he is playing in the snow, she slips into reception and makes an appointment to see his PE teacher.

  Back at home she makes a cup of tea and takes it to the sofa. Folding her legs under herself and shifting until she finds a spot that works for both the laptop and her belly, she opens up Google and types in ‘Alex Kingman, Marblehead’.

  The first link is to an article from a Marblehead newspaper about a planning application protest, led by ‘landscape architect Alex Kingman’. She peers at the grainy picture: beard, pea coat, woollen hat. It could be him. It’s a bit blurred.

  She tries ‘Alex Kingman, Landscape Architect’ and the website of a Boston-based landscape architecture firm appears. She clicks through descriptions of impressive projects: a university campus, a downtown park, an arboretum. Then she finds a button for ‘Team Members’. And there he is. She recognizes the beard and the steady eyes. In the photo he is wearing a white shirt and linen jacket and sitting at a desk above spread-out plans that show lots of greenery and trees. There is no text to go with the picture. She clicks around, but the website is so trendy that she can’t find a button giving actual written information about staff members. There is a ‘Talks & Lectures’ link – she clicks that and reads down a list of forthcoming events.

  He is to give a guest ‘Landscape Lecture’ in mid-December, a few weeks away, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in downtown Boston. It is a place she has wanted to visit; she has read about it – a house of treasures collected over a lifetime by a wealthy nineteenth-century art-lover. She clicks into her calendar. Greg is on call that night. She could ask Sandra’s nanny, Delia, to babysit for Joe. She could go and visit the museum, listen to Alex’s talk, maybe catch him afterwards and ask why he is so sure that he knows Greg.

  She jots down the time of the talk, then she goes back to the Philadelphia Inquirer archives – the ones she visited briefly when she was in the hotel room. She types in the name Carlo Novak and the dates, as she did before. There are three news items. She reaches into her bag for her wallet and enters her credit card details to get access to the full reports.

  They are all disappointingly brief. She rereads the first one, which has no further paragraphs. The details feel more stark in the daylight: a young man accused of a macabre crime, the judge’s decision to adjourn because of the intolerable stress of an overheated courtroom.

  She clicks back to the search. The next article was written a few months beforehand.

  University of Pennsylvania medical student Carlo Novak was charged yesterday with murder, illegal abortion and the unauthorized practice of medicine in a case centering on an alleged abortion performed on Sarah Bannister, 21, at Novak’s West Philadelphia apartment. Prosecutors allege that after inducing the abortion Novak, 23, allowed Bannister’s baby girl to die shortly after birth. The alleged termination was carried out thirty-two weeks into the pregnancy.

  Said Philadelphia District Attorney Geoffrey K. Arnold, announcing the charges at a news conference yesterday: ‘This young man coldly decided fatherhood was inconvenient to him. He took the law into his own hands, coercing Ms Bannister to abort. It is the Commonwealth’s case that when the child was unexpectedly born alive he failed to adequately care for her. Despite Ms Bannister’s desperate pleas, Mr Novak watched his own daughter die. He sought to play God.’

  The third article is dated just a week after the one about the jurors being sent home.

  The case of University of Pennsylvania medical student Carlo Novak was dropped yesterday. Novak had been charged with murder, illegal abortion and the unauthorized practice of medicine but retraction of a key witness statement led prosecutors to withdraw charges. Novak was accused of performing an illegal abortion on his sometime girlfriend Sarah Jane Bannister, 21, of West Philadelphia, who was thirty-two weeks pregnant, and unlawful killing through failure to adequately care for the child, born alive but who died approximately three minutes after birth. Bannister this week retracted her statement, however, blaming stress and depression.

  Bannister, originally from Scranton, NJ, told the court that she had falsely accused Novak due to mental instability following the premature birth and subsequent death of their daughter, saying she had been distraught when, shortly after the infant’s death, Novak terminated their relationship. Jurors heard that Bannister had a history of drug use and psychiatric problems. Without Bannister’s testimony, and without conclusive medical evidence to support the charge of illegal abortion, the Commonwealth withdrew the charges against Novak. ‘You are free to leave,’ the Hon. Anna Coulson told Novak at the conclusion of yesterday’s hearing at the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.

  She stares, for a minute or two, at the screen. This could be nothing – just a coincidence, just a name hooked from the past, a random event in someone else’s grim life. But of course it can’t be: the library card in Greg’s box was a University of Pennsylvania card. She looks again at the dates, and makes some quick calculations. Carlo Novak would have started medical school two years before Greg. Greg was accelerated through his Pittsburgh undergraduate degree so he would have been three years younger than Novak. It is not clear how their paths would ever have crossed. The two men were at separate universities, in different cities, academically two years apart.

  She shuts down the computer. There is, of course, another possibility: Novak is a Polish name and Greg’s mother was Polish, so Carlo could be a relative. If this is the case, and it seems the most likely connection, then Greg’s failure to mention him has to be more than forgetful – it feels slippery, almost deceitful not to have said anything. It is like looking over your shoulder to see a shape rising out of the fog, but not knowing what it is or how menacing it might prove.

  *

  That night, when she comes downstairs after putting Joe to bed, Greg is at the dining-room table with his papers spread out around him. She brings him a cup of tea, and he looks up, smiles and murmurs, ‘Oh, thanks, hon.’

  ‘I saw Joe’s PE teacher today,’ she says.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘She says she’s noticed some of the other kids are ganging up – well, her words were “a little hostile at times”. She hasn’t noticed any physical violence, but she’s going to talk to his form teacher about it and bring it to the staff meeting, and they’re all going to keep a close eye on things.’

  ‘That’s great. They’re good at this stuff. Don’t worry, if something’s going on, they’ll be on it now.’

  ‘I can’t bear it that it’s been going on all this time and I haven’t protected him from it.’

  ‘It’s only been a few months.’

  ‘A few months is an eternity for a nine-year-old.’

  He reaches for her hand. ‘I know it is. But you’ve done everything you can – you’ve been to see the
m several times, haven’t you, and it’s notoriously hard to pin this stuff down – kids can be sly. But if something is going on, then they won’t tolerate it.’

  ‘Something is definitely going on.’

  ‘You want me to come with you, to see the school?’

  ‘No, I’ve got it. I’m going to go and see his form teacher tomorrow, just to make sure.’

  ‘You want me to talk to Joe?’

  ‘No, God, no, don’t say anything. I don’t even want him to know I’ve spoken to them. He’ll only worry more if he knows.’

  He lets go of her hand and sips the tea. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to be honest?’

  ‘Not about this, no. Not yet.’

  He shrugs and nods, putting down his tea.

  ‘Greg,’ she stands by his shoulder, ‘talking of truth telling – I keep thinking about the man on the beach in Marblehead.’

  He flicks through some papers. ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘I got the feeling you recognized him.’

  He glances up at her, over the top of his reading glasses. ‘Tess.’ His voice is heavy with exaggerated tolerance. ‘Why are you obsessing over this?’

  ‘I’m not obsessing … I just had the feeling, when I asked you, when we were in that café, that you weren’t quite telling me everything.’

  ‘OK, you’d just passed out, you were freezing cold, your BP had crashed, your blood sugar was low and you were about to throw up: I’m not sure you were at your most clear-headed.’

  ‘So you didn’t know him then?’

  He flicks through his papers again, plainly irritated. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I’ve got to go through a deposition tomorrow at 7 a.m. with the legal team – do you think we could do this another time?’

  She stiffens. ‘Fine. But also, I wanted to let you know that I put your stuff – you know, from your boxes? I transferred it all to some damp-resistant containers. It was getting really soggy down there and …’

  ‘You did what?’ He looks up, sharp-eyed.

  ‘Your boxes in the basement. I bought some damp-resistant containers.’

  His jaw is tight, his face suddenly thunderous. ‘Those are my personal files, Tess, all my vital documents and certificates, my … just about everything’s in there.’

  ‘I know that. And they were getting damp. Have you been down there lately? The walls are almost wet.’

  He slams his hand, flat, on the table. ‘What the hell, Tess?’

  She jumps. Then she squares her shoulders. ‘Don’t shout at me.’

  His nostrils flare and he looks at her for a moment longer, then he turns his head away and swallows hard. ‘OK. I’m sorry.’ His voice is controlled again. ‘I’m not … I can’t …’

  ‘What can’t you?’

  ‘I can’t do this right now. I have to think about this deposition … Could I please,’ he takes a long, slow breath, ‘get on with this now?’

  There is no point in asking him about Carlo Novak’s library card now. He will only be hostile. He will never open up in this state. She turns and walks back into the kitchen, picking up her mug of tea. It spills on the countertop. She realizes that her hand is shaking.

  This is very wrong. She feels as if she keeps finding doors and pushing at them, only to find that he has got there first and turned the key. She makes up her mind then, to go and meet Alex. She will ask him how he thinks he is connected to Greg and then she will know for sure whether Greg lied to her in Marblehead. Once she has established that, she will be able to confront him about it, and about Carlo Novak too, and get to the bottom of this, whatever it is. She switches off the kitchen lights and goes upstairs, leaving him at the dining-room table with his laptop and his papers, preparing his defence.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Back Bay Fens is a part of the city she has not yet visited. She steps out of the T into sleet and peers at Google Maps on her phone, trying to make sense of the tangle of streets as she dodges the cars and buses that carve up sludge, their yellowed eyes looming at her out of the gloom, tyres hissing on the tarmac. The museum is uncomfortably close to Children’s Hospital, just a few blocks away. She wonders how she would explain what she is doing if she bumped into Greg. She has told him she is going to the Museum of Fine Arts to hear a talk about the Alfred Stieglitz photographs tonight. She told Delia, the nanny, that she’d be home by ten, so if there is time, she will go across to the MFA and then it will not be a lie. But of course she isn’t going to bump into Greg here in the street because he will be inside the hospital complex, in a surgical mask and scrubs, moving meticulously through his other, unimaginable world.

  After the suburbs, the city feels colossal and booming; it towers and teeters and roars. Someone bumps against her shoulder – she is blocking the pavement, peering at her phone – so she keeps moving, squinting through the sleet at the brick buildings. None looks like a Venetian-style palace. She calls out to a passing woman walking confidently in heels over the icy pavement, ‘Excuse me? The Isabella Stewart …?’ The woman points upwards but doesn’t stop. On the brickwork above her head foot-high letters spell out ‘Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’.

  The lecture is in the museum’s concert hall, a tall cube-like structure with red velvet seats going up in layers of balconies. She spots an empty seat on the same level as the stage, third row back, and squeezes her belly past women with expensive hair, men in jackets, students with slashed red mouths, heavy fringes. Everyone seems to be wearing interesting glasses.

  The room hushes as Alex walks onto the stage with a handsome woman in a trouser suit. His hair is more grey than she remembered, his beard bushier. He is wearing a navy shirt, a tweed jacket and square black specs. She watches him as the woman gives her introduction, listing his achievements, including a design award and a visiting professorship at Harvard. His gaze travels from face to face as she talks – and then he gets to her. Their eyes lock; he looks briefly startled, but people are clapping now, and the chairwoman is holding out an arm to welcome him to the microphone.

  She half expects him to take the stand and address her directly, demand to know what she is doing here, why she has come. The room suddenly feels extremely hot. He clears his throat.

  ‘Van Valkenburgh has called this garden “a place to get lost”, a place for thoughts – as well as feet – to meander through associations, memories …’

  Inside her, the baby’s feet dig into the cushion of her gut and she moves her hips so that she is perched on one buttock, trying to rock it off this axis. It gives another jab, then settles on her bladder. She tries to refocus on the stage.

  ‘… Instead of being a means to get from point A to point B, the path curls back on itself, crossing and recrossing. It is designed for play because Isabella Stewart Gardner herself was famous for her sense of humour, her adventurous spirit, her defiance of stuffy Victorian conventions. She walked through Back Bay with a tiger on a lead, she loved the Red Sox, she was scandalous and outspoken and famously said, ‘Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.’ It is this spirit of irreverence and play that the garden captures so perfectly …’

  His face is animated, his head held high. He has a strong nose and intelligent, deep-set eyes, but his small mouth is lost in his beard. She realizes that it was slightly mad to come and confront Alex like this. She should have emailed him. This feels far too public.

  ‘Gardner built this place from nothing. She called it her “memory palace”. But memory is never linear,’ he is saying, ‘our memories fold back on themselves, they recur and repeat, there are variations and overlappings and that is, I believe, what Van Valkenburgh set out to achieve here, a small space that would honour the memory palace. Like memory, the Monk’s Garden is confounding, impractical …’

  *

  When the talk is over she urgently needs to go to the toilet, and when she gets back to the lecture hall most people have gone already. There are small groups chatting here and there as they gather belongings, but the stage is empty. She fe
els a wave of relief that Alex has gone. She will email him – that will be much easier than a face-to-face conversation.

  She glances at her watch. Joe will be asleep, there is no need to hurry home. She doesn’t have the energy to walk to the MFA – she’ll see the Stieglitz photographs another time – but she might as well take advantage of the ticket and have a look round the museum, which has been kept open specially for half an hour after the talk.

  She passes along a glass corridor from the modern extension to the original building, and finds herself in a cloister that looks out onto a palatial, glass-roofed indoor courtyard. She stops and gazes at the unexpected greenery. The courtyard is dotted with Roman statues and plinths, tall ferns, a mosaic with Medusa’s head at its centre. At one end, two fish spout water from an ivy-covered wall. Looking up, there are tall arched balconies leading from rooms that are packed with the art and artefacts collected over a lifetime of travel. A few people are wandering through the cloisters on the other side, but the place is hushed, church-like and very chilly.

  She perches on a low wall next to a Roman tomb with carved figures gathering grapes. Perhaps, between restless bouts of travel, society dinners, trips to the Opera, the Symphony, Fenway Park, Isabella herself sat in this spot to remember the husband she lost, or the little boy, her only son, who died when he was not even two years old. The courtyard has the hallmarks of a sanctuary, but there is something lonely about these echoey shadows. It must have felt desolate when all the guests had gone.

  She hears footsteps behind her and startles as a man clears his throat.

  ‘Magical, isn’t it?’

  She turns. His feet click on the stone floor as he comes to a halt in front of her and the light falls on his face.

  ‘I’m glad I found you – I thought maybe you’d left,’ he says. ‘I saw you at my talk. We’ve met before, haven’t we, in Marblehead?’