The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  Dear Sally,

  Thank you so much for replying to my email. I was fascinated to hear about Julianna. My husband has told me very little about his aunt, as he finds these memories quite painful. I know that Julianna lost her husband when they were both very young, and of course there was the fire, which must have been terrible for her. But it is good to hear that she had a friend like you. If there’s anything else you can tell me about her, or the family, I would love to know more. I have just had a baby, a little girl called Lily, and I’d really like to find out more about her relatives but Greg finds it very difficult talk about them, for obvious reasons.

  Many thanks again for your response.

  All the best,

  Tess

  Later that day, as she is cooking pasta with Joe watching the Disney Channel in the front room and Lily, briefly content post-feed, asleep in her bouncy chair, she checks her emails again. Another message from Sally is waiting for her. She feels a rush of excitement as she opens it.

  Yes, I did love her, Tess. I don’t know if you know what she suffered at the hands of Giacopo, but let’s just say he was a vicious man. The only tragedy is that she married him in the first place. Thank God he died young. But that marriage left her with demons. She got rid of his name – that’s why they are Novaks not Gallos (you knew that, I guess?) – but she could never shake off the things he did to her. Natalia was kind enough, on the surface, but she never wanted to hear the truth about her brother-in-law – too close to home (though I don’t think Giovanni ever did anything to her at least). Oh, Julianna fought them both, she did what she could to stand up to them, but she was never going to win.

  I miss her still, you know. She had an extraordinary mind – complicated people often do, don’t they? When I first met her, she dreamed of going to college and I always felt that she could have been something remarkable, under different circumstances – an astrophysicist, an astronaut, a brain surgeon. On a good day she was breathtakingly beautiful too. But beauty isn’t always helpful, is it? Lust and hatred go hand in hand – at least for some men.

  She had so much love in her heart but she could be hell, too – mercurial, complicated, self-destructive. Today, maybe there’d be help for her – therapy, support of some kind – but in those days, in our neck of the woods, all she got was disapproval, small-town gossip and people taking things from her that they had no right to take.

  She was my dear friend but I failed to help her and I’ll feel bad about that till the day I die.

  Yours,

  Sally

  She rereads the email, several times, trying to make sense of the gaps. The bitterness towards the Gallos suggests a story untold, but she cannot squeeze anymore of it from Sally’s words. She needs more.

  She types a reply.

  Dear Sally,

  Thank you so much for sharing these memories with me. They are so interesting, and fill in so many details for me about Julianna. It sounds as if she suffered a lot in her marriage, and afterwards. This explains why she was so troubled.

  But I wonder if you could tell me what you mean when you say that people took things from her that they had no right to take? Are you talking about Natalia and Giovanni, perhaps, taking Carlo away from Julianna? Is that what you mean? Did she fight them for her son? It also sounds as if you are saying that Greg’s father, Giovanni, was not a very nice man? Is that what you mean? You say you think he never hurt his wife – but was he perhaps violent towards Julianna?

  I hope all my questions don’t feel too intrusive. I suppose I want to know more because Giovanni and Natalia are my husband’s parents, my child’s grandparents. It seems important to me, now, to know what I can about them.

  I also wanted to tell you that I am delighted to have discovered your paintings. They really are wonderful. I would love to see them in real life one day.

  All the best,

  Tess

  She clicks send. Then she forwards both of Sally’s emails to Nell, with a brief message explaining what she has done.

  After she has drained the pasta, she hears a new message come into her inbox. Leaving the pasta to cool in the colander, she opens a reply from Nell.

  God, Tess, this is amazing. Poor Julianna! Stuck in that tiny town, having survived an abusive marriage, and now being controlled by her perfect sister and the brother of her abuser. I am sure she was a terrible mother to poor Carlo, but you’ve got to feel for her, haven’t you? I’d actually been wondering why Carlo was a Novak and not a Gallo (his dad and Greg’s dad were brothers, right? The Italians?). So this explains that. I love it that Julianna wasn’t going to let him keep the name of her abusive husband. Good for her! Underneath all the destructive behaviour, it sounds as if Julianna had a real streak of determination. I mean, in small-town America in the seventies it would have been quite radical to change your name and your child’s name, wouldn’t it? I doubt if feminism had made it to Robesville. So, good for Julianna.

  And Sally sounds fantastic, doesn’t she? Thank God Julianna had her, at least. (Do you think they were more than friends?) Don’t you want to meet Sally? I do.

  Tess logs off. A headache ticks behind her eyes like a grenade. Her left breast is hot and painful: the start of mastitis – she recognizes the feverish sensation, the sharp, swollen pain, from breastfeeding Joe, when she had it several times. Lily twitches again. At any moment the screaming is going to start and she needs to get pasta into Joe before it does.

  But she can’t get Julianna out of her head. She feels as if she has pressed on a tender, burning spot in Greg’s past – she has found the deep-down place where the inflammation lurks. Sally has given her another perspective on the family legacy. If Julianna was battling with Greg’s parents, then how did Carlo feel about the Gallos? Did he, too, resent them? If something exploded between Greg and Carlo in that fraught period after the trial, when Greg was on the verge of starting Harvard and Carlo felt his life was over, it might have been catastrophic.

  Leaving the pasta to get cold, she opens her laptop again and googles Harvard Medical School alumni, adding Greg’s matriculation date. She is not really sure why. Perhaps it is just the urge to connect to the person he was then, just starting out, in the immediate aftermath of the trauma. She crouches over the computer and clicks her way to the relevant alumni page. Just one month before they moved to Boston, Greg’s Harvard Medical School class had a reunion. Greg would have been too swept up with the new job to even consider going, even if the event crossed his radar.

  She tries to log into the group but you have to be a Harvard alumnus. She is about to shut the computer when she notices that the reunion has a Twitter feed. She goes to Twitter, finds the account and scrolls through the alumni tweets. Some are from the group administrator, and they paint a mixed picture of its driven cohort.

  43% of us now take prescription meds, 15% have had a midlife crisis.

  Half the class has been published, half has had psychiatric help.

  Others are from individuals, giving little updates on their career triumphs or attaching nostalgic pictures of themselves and fellow medical students. She has no idea what she is looking for, but as she flicks through the tweets Greg’s name leaps out.

  Spring Ball with Tim Knight, Andrew O’Connor and Greg Gallo! Good times!

  She opens the photograph. There is Greg in a dinner suit alongside two young men, with two women in ball dresses – puffed sleeves and frills. They make her think of a line in the Harvard song that she found in Greg’s files: ‘the good and the great, in their beautiful prime …’

  She looks more closely at Greg’s young face. He is thinner, tense and uneasy. His head is tilted and he is standing slightly apart from the group, arms crossed. The other four are grinning, relaxed, arms round each other, but Greg looks as if he does not belong in the picture, or perhaps in the life itself. She cannot imagine what he must have been feeling at that point. Still only in his early twenties, he had come through the loss of his parents followed by t
hat year with Aunt Julianna and then an accelerated undergraduate degree. His beloved cousin, his only surviving close relative, had been tried for infanticide and had vanished. No wonder he looks disturbed.

  She should probably show him the emails from Sally, but all that would do is bring this awful time back to him. It is unlikely that Sally is saying anything about his family that he doesn’t already know – though he has never mentioned his aunt’s abusive marriage or his parents’ attempt to control her, perhaps by controlling her son. But maybe he doesn’t know any of this. A teenage boy might not notice these things, though he would surely have picked up on the tension with his ‘difficult’ aunt. No, dredging all this up is unlikely to be helpful for him.

  As she gazes at the troubled, clean-lined beauty of Greg’s youth she hears his footsteps on the basement stairs.

  She shuts down Twitter and slams the laptop lid shut. Lily is, miraculously, still asleep. She gets up and goes to the basement door. As he steps in, she folds herself into his arms, shutting her eyes tight. She can feel his heart beating beneath his soft woollen sweater. He smells of soap and coffee and cold night air, the leather seats of his car – of himself. He hugs her and rests his chin on the top of her head and for a few moments neither of them speaks, and she has the feeling that she is holding him up, that if she stepped away, Greg would fall.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  ‘I have an idea for you.’ He perches on the side of the bed. It is just before six in the morning and he’s already been for a run through the icy woods, had his shower and washed down eggs and toast with a double espresso. Lily is sleeping, but only lightly. At six weeks, she is feeding and breathing well, she seems more solid, more awake and of this world, but she is still colicky and Tess knows that if she tries to ease her off her shoulder and put her into the Moses basket she will wake up and conversation will become impossible again.

  She closes her eyes and rests a cheek on Lily’s head, feeling the feathery hair, breathing in her sweet, milky smell. She feels Greg’s fingers on her cheek and opens her eyes again.

  Something in his face has changed since they talked about his parents. He looks more vulnerable and raw, as if a door has cracked open inside his head and, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot force it shut again. This, surely, is a good thing, the beginning of a healing process. Perhaps one day he will be able to forgive himself for surviving, just as she has forgiven herself, not all the time, maybe, but much of it. Perhaps one day Carlo will not be sitting between them every time they look into each other’s eyes.

  It is a week now since she heard from Sally and there have been no more emails. Perhaps remembering proved too upsetting for Sally as well. This is probably helpful, because the last thing she needs is something else to conceal from Greg.

  ‘You want to hear my idea then?’ He strokes her hair back off her face. ‘Or are you too sleepy?’

  ‘Yes, sorry, what is it?’

  ‘OK, so I know Joe was upset that David can’t make it over to see him this weekend. Well, a colleague of mine has a ski lodge in New Hampshire, up in the White Mountains, and he’s offered to let me use it. I know you’re tired and you probably aren’t up to going anywhere much right now, but how about I take Joe, just me and him? The snow’s good, I can teach him to ski and I think it would be a great idea for the two of us to have some time together away from all this baby stuff. I know I’ve been very tied up with Lily and I don’t want him to think I only care about her. Some time together will do us good, I think.’

  Her first reaction is no – she does not want Greg to take Joe off to a stranger’s house in New Hampshire. But then she remembers Joe’s face when she told him that David had been called out to an emergency situation in the Middle East and would be gone for at least two weeks, so would not, after all, be coming to Boston this weekend. Joe needs to see his dad, of course, but maybe time with Greg will compensate a little for not having David. And he loves the snow – he’d surely be thrilled to learn how to ski.

  ‘I could drive him up there Friday night – it’s only a couple of hours. I can take him skiing and tubing while you have some time here just with Lily.’

  ‘What’s tubing?’

  ‘You know, it’s where you slide down a snow slope in an inner tube.’

  She nods. Joe would love that too.

  ‘Don’t you think it’d be a good idea for me and Joe to spend some time together, without you and Lily, so he knows he’s important to me too?’

  She tries to smile. He is right. Since Lily was born he has been focused on her, they both have, for obvious reasons. But Greg, particularly, has been concentrating on Lily to the exclusion of all else. He makes straight for her every night when he comes in. She sees him scanning her breathing, temperature, skin tone. And then he carries her round with him, paces the house with her between feeds, changes nappies. She knows that this intensity comes from his lack of time with Lily. He has so few hours at home and he is determined to make the most of them. But a couple of times he has been irritable with Joe, snapping at him that it’s surely time for bed, or to pick up his backpack, or move his snow boots off the rug. It is not surprising – they are both ragged, caring for Lily has been incredibly demanding – but a couple of times she has seen Joe looking a little lost as Greg walks past him to pick Lily up.

  So Greg has realized this and is doing something to rectify it. He has taken a step back and thought through what he has to do to make this family work. The plan is a good one, a solid one.

  She is not sure, then, why the thought of the two of them going off to New Hampshire makes her so uneasy. It isn’t just the separation from Joe. She was anxious a few weeks ago when David took him to New York for the weekend, but it didn’t feel quite like this.

  There is probably an element of maternal guilt in her hesitation. The last thing she wants is for Joe to feel as if she has sent him away. She feels constantly as if she is not giving Joe enough attention as it is. It is hard to hug him on the sofa when Lily is screaming in their ears. And she is painfully aware that when he comes home from school he is still exhausted, much too quiet and withdrawn, even though she has had several meetings with the teachers, and the friendship situation seems to have improved.

  Still, she has to step aside so that Jo and Greg can bond. And in some ways it might be a relief to have a weekend where she doesn’t have to worry about Joe feeling excluded as Lily cries or needs another feed or nappy change. She is probably worrying too much about everything. The truth is that Lily has been good for Joe in many ways. He doesn’t seem to resent her demands. In fact, he has been incredibly sweet with his baby sister, wanting to carry her around, fetch nappies, help with bathtimes – worrying when she cries. When David came to take him to New York, he insisted on holding Lily when he heard the knock on the door. He showed her to his dad like a little pink trophy.

  And David handled the moment brilliantly. He had brought a huge and expensive box of Lego City for Joe, and he took pictures of them together, but he didn’t ask to hold the baby. Instead he asked Joe if she farted a lot, what colour her poo was, how often she ate, whether she yelled all night, and how grumpy she, Tess, was these days.

  Before they left for New York, David kissed her on the cheek. ‘Lily’s a cracker,’ he said. ‘Just like her mother.’ There was sadness in his voice, a note of regret that made them both step apart and become brusque, looking for Joe’s coat and boots.

  Sometimes she hears Joe chatting to Lily in another room, singing made-up songs and she waits outside the door with a bursting feeling in her chest. It is as if having someone so much smaller and more fragile in the house has made Joe feel stronger. The protective urge might not banish fear, but it can certainly override it.

  ‘So?’ Greg says. ‘Good plan?’

  She nods, stroking Lily’s solid little back through the baby blanket that Nell knitted and sent at Christmas, wrapped in tissue paper and ribbons. ‘As long as Joe wants to …’

  ‘Oh,
sure, yes, let’s ask him, see what he says.’ Greg gets up and goes over to the mirror. ‘Only if he wants to.’ He combs his damp hair back off his forehead. She can see that he is a little bit offended, perhaps even irritated that she has not leaped on this plan. With his hair swept back, his widow’s peak, he looks forbidding.

  ‘No, really, it’s a great idea.’ She makes herself sound more positive. ‘Joe’s going to be beside himself at the idea of sliding down a mountain in an inner tube.’

  Greg looks at her over his shoulder and, perhaps because of the angle of his chin, she glimpses the young man on the steps of the Philadelphia courthouse, looking down at the camera – and for that second she feels as if she’s staring into the eyes of that too-familiar stranger. She looks away and tucks Lily’s blanket tighter.

  Her intuition has been telling her that something is missing from the story because, of course, it is. By vanishing, Carlo has become the unanswered question. He is perpetually present, the shadowy figure that has just vacated the room. He is always nearby: slotted between them in bed at night, flitting in their wake, a tall and handsome intruder in the home. Greg must feel it too. Perhaps this is why he is so uneasy.

  She watches him do up his shirt buttons.

  ‘Greg, is there anything I still don’t know about your cousin? Anything at all?’

  He is fixing a cufflink onto his blue shirt and he looks up sharply, frowning, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror. ‘What’s brought this on?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He reaches for a second cufflink.

  ‘It’s just Nell said something, and …’

  He tugs down his shirtsleeves, one by one, and turns to face her. ‘When’s she coming to visit?’

  ‘I’m not sure; she’s worried about Ken’s job, it’s a bit uncertain, and I’ve told her to wait and come when things are less crazy here. Maybe April, when the weather’s better.’

  A look briefly crosses his face – he is relieved.