The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  Lily’s cries recede as he carries her off down the stairs. Beneath the shrill wails, she hears him singing a low and unfamiliar song in a language she has never heard from him before.

  She lies back on the pillows. She was right about one thing: Greg only needed to see Lily, to hold her in his arms and look into her face, in order to love and want her. He is such a tender and protective father, it is inconceivable that he could have ever wanted to abort their child.

  Then the memory resurfaces of the question she asked herself out in the snow, when she realized that she was in labour. She had forgotten it – and it feels like a temporary insanity now. She cannot fathom how – even for a single deranged second – she could have wondered if Greg would save their baby.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  They are on Skype and Nell’s face is lit by a side-lamp, so that when she smiles the dimples on either side of her mouth become deep black commas.

  ‘The weird thing is, when you search for Carlo you get nothing, absolutely no mention of him anywhere online after the trial. He just vanishes.’

  ‘Well, yes, exactly; he did vanish.’ Tess keeps her voice down because Lily is sleeping in the Moses basket by the bed, a massive relief after four hours straight of colicky howling this morning.

  She is folding Babygros, her head thick from five weeks of profound sleep-deprivation. Her ears are, very gently, ringing. It is possible that this is a permanent problem. She cannot imagine what she would do if she had to go on photographic assignments now. She is wrung out. She can barely think, let alone organize a shoot, make decisions about angles, lighting or settings. The galleys of Hand in Hand arrived yesterday and she has hardly even looked at them.

  ‘He has no online presence,’ Nell is saying, ‘but guess what I did find?’

  She sighs. ‘What?’

  ‘A Facebook reunion page for people who were at Penn Medical School in Carlo’s year. The actual reunion’s been and gone but alumni are still posting on it – mostly photos of their beautiful children on Costa Rican holidays or themselves collecting awards, but you should take a look.’

  ‘Why? Why would I do that?’ She cannot keep the frustration out of her voice.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I was just thinking that if Carlo is, by any chance, still alive, then maybe someone will know where he is.’

  She puts the pink Babygro she is folding onto the pile and picks up a soft blanket.

  ‘Nell,’ she says, ‘why are you doing this?’

  Nell’s face vanishes briefly behind her mug of tea. Then she lowers it and leans closer to the screen, tucking a curl behind her ear. Her eyes are wide and clear. ‘I just think,’ she says, ‘that if Carlo is out there it might be good to find him.’

  Tess stops folding the blanket.

  ‘I mean, people don’t just vanish.’ Nell puts the mug down. ‘Do they?’

  ‘Of course they do! Missing persons websites are full of them – people vanish every single day.’

  ‘But what if he’s still alive?’

  ‘Jesus, Nell.’

  ‘Come on, don’t be like that.’

  ‘Like what? You’re basically suggesting that Greg’s still hiding something and that’s …’

  ‘Hey, that’s not what I’m saying, not at all. Why would you think that?’ Nell pauses. ‘Wait. Do you think he’s hiding something?’

  ‘No! I just don’t know why you’re opening this whole thing up again.’

  ‘I didn’t realize it was closed.’ Nell’s face, close up and slightly distorted by the camera, is serious.

  ‘It isn’t!’ Tess hears herself – querulous and defensive and irrational.

  ‘OK, we won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Talk about what?!’

  ‘Well, all I was thinking was, if Greg could see that Carlo was vulnerable and possibly even suicidal, then why didn’t he do something to stop him? Why didn’t Greg help him?’

  ‘But that’s so unfair! If a person wants to kill themselves, they’re going to do it; you can’t blame it on the people who love them. We feel guilty enough already without that …’

  Nell pushes back her hair. ‘Shit, I’m sorry – your mum. You’re right. I’m so sorry. Forget I said it, I’m an idiot. I didn’t mean it like that. You know I didn’t.’

  ‘No, I know, but …’ Tess tucks her hair back and shuts her eyes. The room actually spins. ‘Listen. I can’t really do this … Lily has colic, I’ve had roughly two hours sleep a night for the past five weeks, I’m breastfeeding her about every twenty minutes, Joe is still unhappy at school and Greg is working all the time. I honestly haven’t got the energy for this.’

  Nell straightens her shoulders. ‘Of course you haven’t. I wish I could come out there and help you. You look totally shattered, you poor thing – and I really want to meet my goddaughter.’

  ‘Well, unless you can breastfeed her you’d be no use to me right now.’

  Nell laughs and tension eases. Neither of them wants to bicker, least of all over Skype.

  ‘I do wish I could come and see you though.’ Nell’s features briefly pixelate, then right themselves again. ‘Every morning I wake up worrying about you out there, and I don’t know why. I want to see you.’

  ‘I know, I want to see you too, but you’ve got twins and a catering business to run, and you definitely can’t turn down two weddings in order to come here. I won’t let you.’

  ‘We might need the money actually – four of Ken’s colleagues just got made redundant and he told me last night he’s worried he might be next.’

  ‘But you said things were going better for him lately.’

  ‘He thought they were, but this latest round of redundancies has really rattled him. If he did lose his job, there’s no cushion at all – we’ve got almost nothing in the bank. I daren’t even buy a Boston flight in advance.’

  ‘Listen, it costs a fortune to fly to Boston and at the moment all your goddaughter does is yell, eat and poo. Don’t even think about coming to visit us. Lily and I will both be a lot more fun when she’s through this. Come in the spring, when you know what’s happening with Ken’s job. Greg says Boston’s lovely in the spring. Or even better, I’ll bring her home to see you.’

  A thin wail rises from the Moses basket; the Skype call has to finish.

  *

  After she has fed and changed a screaming Lily, she paces round the front room, patting her back until she burps, then perks up. For a while they sit on the sofa. Lily gazes up at her, alert and beautiful. Her eyes are big, and deep brown like Greg’s. Her hair is definitely dark, and it is beginning to curl at the edges. Her face is pink-cheeked and symmetrical. Tess talks to her, sings songs, blows raspberries on her neck, and for a while everything is perfect.

  Then the colic pains come back. It begins with a plaintive hiccupping and then all Lily wants is to be held and walked up and down, and patted and soothed – she stops being a beautiful baby and turns into something tortured, almost animalistic, tormented by pain.

  As she paces the house with Lily’s cries jangling against the high ceilings, Nell’s suggestion that Greg could have done something to stop Carlo from committing suicide replays in her mind. And then suddenly it makes sense. She can’t believe she hasn’t seen it before. This is the guilt she has always felt in Greg – his constant companion. It is not just survivor’s guilt, it is more complicated even than that – it is a guilt that she herself is all too familiar with. It is the legacy of suicide. She should have recognized it the moment he told her about Carlo’s disappearance. She, of all people, should have known immediately what it was.

  The evening her mother died she was going out to a party. She was in her bedroom playing music, doing her hair, redoing her hair, trying on different outfits, and even though she knew that her mother was not good – sitting downstairs in the living room, immobile, with the white, mask-like face that always signalled a crisis – she didn’t go down, she shut it out, she sang louder.

  She
did not want to be responsible for her mother that night. She didn’t want to wait for her father to come home from his meeting at school. He said he’d be home by eight. She should have waited for him, been sure that her mother was supervised, but she didn’t. She didn’t want the responsibility of the pale-faced woman in the chair anymore. She just wanted to be sixteen years old and going to a party.

  Soon after she left the house, over made-up, overdressed, her mother left the house too – and walked straight to the tube station.

  When her father got back from the staff meeting, just twenty minutes later, the police were already on the doorstep.

  The guilt ate away at both of them in the years that followed. She is sure that it was guilt that caused her father’s death nine years later. Guilt had stretched the fibres of his broken heart too far, and they gave out. It almost undid her, too. For years she felt it was her fault. If she had waited that extra twenty minutes, until her father walked through the door and took over, then her mother would not have gone to the tube station – she would be alive. It wasn’t until she was in her twenties, when she finally saw a grief counsellor, that she realized she was not to blame for her mother’s actions. If it hadn’t been that night, that tube train, it would have been another. But even now the guilt will sometimes fold over her like a crippling fog, and she has to make a real effort to lift her head above it and move on.

  She stands by the kitchen window, swaying and patting Lily’s back as her cries echo off the steel appliances. The last snowfall is turning to sludge and ice, but there is more on the way, she can feel it gathering. The bare branches of the trees poke at the murky sky.

  It is possible that Carlo did not take himself off on a Greyhound bus to commit suicide. Carlo Novak could be alive. And if he is, then Nell is right that one of the people from medical school might still be in touch with him. If Greg and Carlo could be reunited, then it would release Greg from the guilt he has been carrying all these years about his cousin.

  Lily’s cries subside and she drifts into an exhausted, limp, sweaty sleep. Tess knows that if she puts her down the cries will start again, so she keeps her draped on her shoulder as she gets the laptop from the bedroom and carries it into the kitchen.

  If Carlo is alive, it is possible that he eventually returned to Robesville. Home seems like a good place to start. She googles his name and Robesville, but nothing comes up. She is about to give up when she remembers Greg mentioning the Pennsylvania artist, Aunt Julianna’s friend. Perhaps she is still there and would remember the family. She might know if Carlo had ever showed up again in town.

  She searches for local landscape artists and finds numerous references to Sally MacManus.

  She finds a website dedicated to Sally’s paintings, and skims through her biography. She is clearly well established in the art world – one of her paintings is in the Smithsonian. She has lived in a shack in the woods for almost fifty years. Tess clicks through to the images of the paintings.

  They are extraordinary – haunting, realist landscapes in washed-out colours, tawny greys and browns, dreamlike and powerful. There is one of a Pennsylvania farm with snow drifting on the ridges of the hills, another of a river bursting through glistening rocks; one of a closely observed raven with blue-black feathers and an accusing eye. And then there are portraits: a black dog sitting in front of a wooden house, perhaps the artist’s cabin, an old woman sewing on a blue chair. But it is the young, dark-haired woman, in profile, uncomfortably close, that makes Tess pause and look again.

  Her tangled hair is darker than the blue-black background, and her skin looms out of the frame, the palest shell-pink with raw, reddened patches on her Slavic cheekbones. She looks as if she has just stepped in from the freezing night. Her jaw is strong, her troubled eyes hooded, her nose straight and fine above a full mouth. It is a striking, powerful face and there is an unmistakable family resemblance in the bone structure, those dark, hooded eyes. The portrait is called Lost and was painted almost forty years ago. It can only be Greg’s aunt, Julianna.

  She types an email to ‘The Office of Sally MacManus’.

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  I would like to get in touch with Ms MacManus and wondered if you could possibly pass on this email to her?

  Dear Ms MacManus,

  My name is Tess Harding Gallo. I am married to Greg Gallo, who grew up in Robesville – he left years ago. I am trying to locate his cousin, Carlo Novak, who also grew up there. I think it’s possible that you were once friends with my husband’s aunt, Julianna? (In fact, I wondered if your portrait Lost might be her?) I hope you don’t mind me contacting you like this; I was not sure where else to try. Carlo disappeared almost thirty years ago and my husband has not heard from him since. We would very much like to find him, if he is still alive.

  Yours truly,

  Tess

  Almost as soon as she has pressed send she realizes that she is going to have to tell Greg about this or it will be yet another secret between them. Suddenly she feels annoyed that she has allowed herself to get sucked back in. Even if Carlo is alive – which he almost certainly is not – he clearly does not want to be in touch with Greg. Greg is easy to find. It would take one click of a mouse to locate him at Children’s.

  Telling Greg that she has emailed Sally MacManus is only going to cause more problems. She probably won’t get a reply anyway. The best thing to do is forget this. Emailing a stranger was a mistake.

  She shuts down her laptop, but even later, as she feeds Lily, burps her, changes her, straps her, squalling, into the sling and heads out into the cold afternoon to collect Joe, Julianna’s beautiful face hovers in her head, as persistent as a ghost.

  *

  The next day, as she is walking home after dropping Joe at school, she gets out her phone and checks her emails. Peering at the screen over the top of Lily’s head, her fingers numb and raw, she sees the name Sally MacManus in her inbox. Her heart speeds up.

  It is probably just a form reply, saying that the message for the artist will be processed, but she opens it right there, standing on the packed snow and ice.

  Tess, thank you for getting in touch. I was certainly surprised to hear that Grzegor married. I remember him well, the poor boy. I’ve often wondered what became of him. I am not well now, can’t paint anymore, so I have too much time to think – and I do think about that family more and more these days, though I can’t fathom why. Perhaps it’s frailty – my mind going back to the past because sometimes it is harder to remember what I did yesterday, or even an hour ago, than it is to remember Julianna in my yard on a summer’s day browning her legs in the sun. So it was extraordinary to get your email, like you’d come right out of my mind. To answer your question: no, I have neither seen nor heard from Carlo in decades and don’t expect I ever will.

  Julianna was my dear friend, but she was not a good mother. You probably know that she drank. Sometimes she’d take off and nobody would know if she was even alive. I understand why he left and didn’t come back, even when she was dying and loved him so. But she was not a bad woman. She could be a great friend and she was the smartest person I’ve ever known. We had such great talks! What others saw as selfishness, I understood as unmanageable pain. That family did her awful injustices. So I loved her despite her obvious flaws, but of course I didn’t have to live with her.

  I hope you find Carlo. Say hi from me if you do. He was a good kid.

  Yours,

  Sally.

  PS Yes, Lost is Julianna. Wasn’t she something?

  As she turns into the street, trying to absorb Sally’s words, she looks up, and there is Helena. She is standing on the verge, her furlined boots planted deep in grey snow, the floor-length puffa coat zipped to her chin.

  Tess’s heart sinks. She slips her phone into her pocket, wondering if she can somehow slide past, unnoticed.

  But Helena raises a hand, waving her over. ‘Hey, Tess.’

  She is standing next to a For Sale sign. ‘Oh goo
dness, you’re moving?’

  ‘We are.’ Helena gives a brief smile.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’ve been offered a professorship at Berkeley,’ Helena says. ‘Starting in the spring.’

  ‘In California? Oh, well, that’s great.’

  They look at each other. Helena’s green eyes are cool.

  ‘What will Josh do out there?’

  ‘Oh, he’s looking into some academic options right now.’

  ‘And can you move your business?’

  ‘Businesses. But it won’t affect Dr Vaus too much. And my partner’s taking over the Cambridge clinic.’

  ‘So you’re really going?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Helena lifts her chin and gives an icy smile. ‘Relieved?’

  She doesn’t deny it as she looks back into Helena’s eyes. It is hard to believe that not long ago this woman dominated her thoughts, alarmed and disturbed her, seemed to threaten her marriage, her home, her sanity. Helena’s actions are simply the by-products of an unhappy marriage and the discovery that career success is not the same as fulfilment.

  ‘Well, good luck.’ She straightens her shoulders and adjusts Lily’s hat. ‘I hope it works out for you in California – for both of you.’

  ‘Oh, it will.’ Helena shrugs and turns away. ‘It always does.’

  As she walks away from Helena it occurs to her that the immediate, physical threats of the first few months in this house – from Helena, from Sarah – have been replaced by something that is much harder to pin down. Greg’s ghosts – Julianna and Carlo – feel more dangerous and present than Helena ever did.

  She gets inside and without removing her coat or undoing the sling she types a reply to Sally.