The Lost Boy

by S. A. McEwen

  She doesn’t want to appear that way. But in this moment, she needs something physical and firm to hold her up.

  Nick moves closer, slips an arm around her waist, presses his lips to her temple. “They’ll find him,” he says, and there’s not nearly enough anguish in his voice to satisfy her.

  What does “ready to help” even mean? That he’ll be around to fix the sink if there’s a blockage? Give Olivia a back massage? Join the police out on the streets?

  She lets herself lean into him, nevertheless.

  Later, lying in bed early—so early—she remembers the last time she tucked Wolfie into bed. She was exhausted, short-tempered. It was after nine, and she’d snapped at him twice already that day.

  He’d taken to showing her how he was holding his fingers, the thumb pressed to one or two or three other fingers, seemingly random and nonsensical. He’d become hysterical if she didn’t acknowledge it directly, looking into his eyes, though what was she even acknowledging? She’d learnt that what he needed was her to look at his fingers carefully, then look at him and nod. Then he’d seem satisfied, though Olivia couldn’t understand it. At first it was two or three times a day. And then it was twenty or thirty. And over the space of just a few days it had escalated to every moment of the day. When he woke. Between each item of clothing he put on. Between spoonfuls of Weetbix and sips of his milk. When she was on the toilet, in the shower. While she was cooking or talking on the phone.

  She had a nagging sense that he needed something from her that she couldn’t provide. Did he need more attention? Did she look at her phone too much? But how much of your day were you supposed to sit, focused solely on your child? It wasn’t realistic. It was demanding and dementing and boring. And was it even good for them?

  “For God’s sake!” she’d snapped, called back into his room for the fifth or sixth or seventh time. Nodded at his fingers. Kissed him on the forehead with unnecessary force, remembering a moment too late Brené Brown’s words: “nice words, harsh face.” Her kiss was a nice gesture, but how harsh was her face? Did Wolfie see it, in the dark? Did he feel it? Her rage, simmering just under the surface so often these days.

  The memory of it takes her breath away.

  What she’d give to kiss his forehead today. Softly, and with love. To see how he was holding his fingers. All day, every day.

  Who was reassuring him now?

  6

  Wednesday

  Ray Smith pulls off the freeway and into the parking bay.

  The truck groans and squeals against the empty night sky.

  Out here, he can see stars to the horizon. It never ceases to make his breath catch in his throat. The expanse of it. It seems so…extravagant. In Melbourne, under the grubby smog, lurking amongst the crammed-tight buildings, such a thing was unimaginable. He was thirty-three before he saw it for the first time, and he hasn’t gotten tired of it yet.

  The familiar whoosh of the air brakes helps Ray to relax. It’s the sound of machinery working the way it ought to work; but also the sound of security, of employment, of rest time. He tilts his chair back and half closes his eyes, watching for a shooting star. He likes to see one before he drifts off to sleep: it’s his promise of magic, and beauty, and luck. He knows it’s superstitious, but he carries some superstitions around with him relentlessly, unable to let them go.

  Of all the things that he wishes he could let go of from his past—allowing to sink into the murky gloom of history, out of mind forever—his superstitious hunt for lucky stars is not one of them.

  Two hours later, his alarm drags him out of his dreams. He blinks, a horn blaring, rising to a peak and falling away as a truck screams past him in the dark. Headlights blind him momentarily; some ass not lowering his high beams on the other side of the freeway. For a moment, his cabin is illuminated, and Ray reaches for his water bottle.

  Next to it is the empty plasticware that had housed his lunch the previous day. Ray closes his eyes for a minute and thinks of his partner, fastidiously packing him something healthy at every opportunity. Not that it did any good—when he was away for a week at a time, he had to eat on the road. He did promise to go for the healthiest option he could find, but that wasn’t always very healthy at all.

  Now, Ray closes his eyes and wishes he was at home in his own bed. His partner would be fast asleep, though Ray knew it wouldn’t have been easy to get to that state. He feels a pang of guilt, being away so much. Knowing someone relies on you, feels your absence so acutely—is on edge the entire time you’re gone, even, waiting for you to return, jumping at dark shadows, both real and metaphorical—is a burden he carries every time he leaves home. Thinking about it makes Ray want to go home right this minute, soothe all those worries away.

  Caring for someone might be the most important thing he has ever done.

  At the same time, Ray loves his job. The hours of solitude. The horizon always so far away. Being on the road soothes his worries away. This is something that he can do, and do well. He looks after himself. He gets enough rest. He tries to squeeze in ten, twenty minutes walking every day. He has never once dipped a toe into the drug culture; he’s been sober for eleven years.

  Not to mention the pay. Deposited into his bank account every fortnight. It’s a miracle. It’s all a miracle. The money, the job. Their apartment.

  Love.

  He can picture their home now. He can see how the whole day would have gone without him, right down to bedtime, his partner carefully marking the page in some hefty nonfiction book, placing it neatly on the bedside table, and switching off the bedside lamp at 10 p.m. exactly. The regularity of it never bores him. Each day, it’s a miracle all over again.

  Seeing this in his mind’s eye now makes Ray yearn to be home even more, but the feeling soon passes, and a peacefulness settles over him as he starts the next leg of his journey. Because he, Ray, is doing his part in that picture. He is a cog in that wheel, and everything is moving like clockwork, as regular and reliable as his driving.

  Their plans. Their future.

  His partner might have designed the clock, but Ray is the one that makes it tick.

  7

  Thursday

  Nick starts guiltily.

  Olivia seems to have changed shape these last few days. Always slender, she now slips around him like a shadow, creeping up behind him on silent feet.

  He shakes himself. Creeping. What sort of word is that to describe your wife?

  He actually thought “grieving wife,” but grieving is not the right word. “Grieving” speaks to something that can’t be applied to them, can it? Their boy is missing. The police will find him. They’re shell-shocked, and scared, and in pain, but they’re not grieving.

  Grieving is what you do when there’s no more hope, right?

  He glances at Olivia’s face, trying to see how much she saw on his computer screen before he hit the close button, his finger hovering over the mouse in just the right spot for exactly this purpose.

  He doesn’t see anything there to alarm him.

  Though she’s staring at his screen intently, her face is smooth and untroubled. “What are you working on?” she says, still looking at the screen. He jumps on this topic, eager to show her his sketches and plans. Their passion in their work has always united them. It gives him something to focus on. Something that isn’t the location of his son.

  As he talks though, he can see Olivia’s eyes going blank. She isn’t actually interested. She has, in fact, recently taken her long service leave. Nick had been confused: it seemed such a waste. Why would you do that just to potter around at home? She’d even pulled Wolfie out of childcare for the duration. So even though she’d cited exhaustion as her reasoning, how did full-time childcare during your precious leave alleviate even the smallest fraction of that?

  Now, though, he swivels around to face her, touching her elbow. She looks childlike, thin and ephemeral.

  Lost.

  At his touch, her eyes fill with tears, an
d he stands up to take her in his arms, grateful for the chance to comfort her. She’s been so aloof since the press conference. Untouchable. He’d felt, suddenly—for the first time—that there was a whole other world behind her eyes that he wasn’t privy to. The space between them had felt so vast, and he had felt unmoored. He’s desperate to pull her closer again.

  At that moment, she’s everything that matters. The smell of her; the way her body melts into his, welding them together. Her remarkable yellow-green eyes. She’s everything he’s ever wanted, ever loved. Even in their worst fights, he’s never not loved her.

  And yet.

  He can’t explain it. If she is everything, why does he have Hannah, too?

  “Let’s go over it again.”

  The detective looks at her kindly, and Olivia feels bad that she can’t remember his name. She glances at his partner, Detective Rolands, and wonders why women’s names always stick in her mind, and men’s all blend in to each other, leaving her stumbling and embarrassed.

  “Why?” she asks faintly. She doesn’t want to be contrary. She just can’t see the point. She’d wracked her mind for any detail she might have missed. Anything that might help.

  “Sometimes it helps to go over it again, to jog your memory. In case there is some little detail you missed, that you see this time as you walk us through it.”

  Olivia thinks about that day, and her stomach tightens.

  It’s my fault, she thinks. My fault, my fault, my fault.

  Wolfie is alone and terrified.

  Or worse.

  And it’s all my fault.

  But Nick puts his hand over hers.

  “Is this absolutely necessary?” he asks. “Olivia has gone over it three times already. It’s distressing, and to be honest, it doesn’t seem like the best use of your time.”

  Olivia is both grateful and hateful. She knows Nick is trying to look after her. But she also thinks—doesn’t he comprehend that the detective knows how to run a case better than he does?

  “It’s okay,” she says softly, squeezing his hand.

  Wolfie had been outside. Playing, she’d told the police.

  She’d been in the kitchen, making cookies, getting started on dinner.

  All that was true.

  It just wasn’t the whole truth.

  Detective Rolands is looking at Olivia curiously.

  “Why did you take Wolfie out of childcare?” she asks.

  Olivia doesn’t answer immediately. Why did she take him out of childcare? In retrospect, the decision was unhinged. She was barely coping with him in there.

  Now, though, she presents the idea as she had presented it to Nick back then. “Something was wrong. He’d become so anxious. He wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t playing. I thought he needed more time with me. It was so hard to leave him there. He’d sob. He wouldn’t settle once I’d left. It was just heartbreaking.”

  She wonders if Detective Rolands has children. She looks middle-aged and tired. Despite this tiredness, her face is kind. She doesn’t look like the sort of woman who would get snappish when life gets hard, who would let her own tiredness or frustration get in the way of being a decent human being. She looks like the sort of woman who could manage motherhood and work and family life without disintegrating. Olivia would bet she managed easily, in fact. Even now, with a missing child to find, with Nick questioning how Rolands is allocating her time, her approach is thoughtful, patient. She seems to have that kind of easygoing temperament, the kind that would roll with the punches and sort everything out. For a brief moment, Olivia feels a pang of regret—for all the times that she didn’t roll with the punches. Where she did the opposite of sorting everything out.

  When Wolfie would refuse to do something that needed to be done, for example. Like walk with her to the post office to pick up a parcel. His stubbornness enraged her. Hadn’t she taken long service leave to spend time with him, without the pressures of work? To help him with his anxiety? To give him a good grounding for starting school? Just the two of them, moving through life at a slower place. Finding joy in the gardens they’d see on their walks. Trying to spot all the cats and dogs that peppered their route.

  And then he’d refuse to go—or worse, sit on the sidewalk, his little face rigid with anger, the sun beating down on them. She couldn’t cajole him, bribe him, engage him, entice him.

  Usually, she’d have to pick him up, her fingernails digging unnecessarily hard into the flesh around his tiny waist as she stormed home, her jaw clenched, rage bubbling inside her.

  Why couldn’t he just do as he was told?

  She felt terrible afterward, of course. The shame of it. Losing her temper with a child, who was already riddled with anxiety.

  But she hated him a little bit too.

  Hated.

  The word shocks her, frightens her. Hated is too strong a word, surely?

  “Did it help?”

  Olivia startles, pulled out of her guilty memories. She wonders if her face gave any of their content away.

  “No.”

  “We’d arranged for an assessment with a psychologist,” Nick volunteers. “He had developed some odd behaviours, a real fear of new situations. We were worried he wouldn’t manage starting school at all.”

  “He was due to start next year?”

  “Is,” Olivia says softly, looking the detective in the eye.

  Rolands stumbles her apology. But Olivia understands the slip. It’s summer already. The new school year is only eight weeks away.

  “But no,” she goes on. “The following year.”

  Olivia has another month of long service leave. She had thought things would be better by now. That she’d be confident that Wolfie could return to kindergarten after Christmas; that he’d be ready to play with kids his own age again. She’d been so sure some focused time with her would solve everything.

  Now, it seems arrogant. Delusional.

  Did she help him at all? Or did she make everything worse?

  All that time together. Wolfie anxious; her furious.

  Like a four-year-old child could appreciate her sacrifices, her needs.

  Olivia looks down at her lap, a flush of shame colouring her cheeks.

  Nick continues talking, oblivious.

  “His first appointment is meant to be next week, actually. We just wanted some more information. To see if something was wrong. Like, what does a four-year-old kid have to be anxious about? Olivia is a great mum. He gets a lot of her time and attention. He has friends he has playdates with. We live in a nice place. We just wanted to check we weren’t missing something.”

  The united front isn’t entirely accurate; Nick had thought it was over the top. “It’s just a phase,” he’d said to her at least a hundred times. He wasn’t exactly a “tough love” kind of guy, but he didn’t think ignoring the problem would do anyone any harm. “He’ll grow out of it,” he’d said, even last week, reluctant to take time off work to go the psychologist with them.

  Olivia had bristled, her shoulders tensing to argue, to denigrate—didn’t Nick always opt out of the hard stuff? Didn’t he always avoid those things that weren’t convenient for him?—but then she caught herself. She was secretly relieved. She felt she could talk more freely without Nick there.

  Now, though, Rolands turns her attention back to that afternoon.

  Olivia remembers it. Every last detail.

  The smell of summer. The promise of good times ahead.

  “I was baking. Usually Wolfie likes to help me, but he was being defiant. I said he had to pack up his trucks first, and he wouldn’t. I got angry with him.” Olivia’s eyes fill with tears. She remembers his little face, shocked—frightened, even—as she shouted and slammed down the biscuit tray.

  “He went outside to play on the trampoline. I saw him get on it. He didn’t bounce, he just sat on it.” He’d been sitting so she could see his profile, his legs stuck out straight in front of him, his fingers worrying at each other on his lap. He didn’t l
ook angry or sad. His lips were moving. He looked thoughtful, if anything.

  Olivia had turned her back to use the mix master. Creaming the butter, adding the sugar. Her body still rigid with anger.

  Why couldn’t he just put his toys away when she asked?

  Why couldn’t she just stay parental and stick to reasonable consequences, without getting consumed by rage?

  “I glanced out a couple of times. He was still sitting on the trampoline, in the same spot. So I rolled out the biscuit batter. I cut the biscuits out with a glass, put them in the oven. Then I went to the toilet before going out to join him.”

  In the bathroom, though, she had just stared at herself in the mirror. Took some deep breaths. Reminded herself that this was her job. To parent her child. And this was Wolfie’s job—to be a kid and learn and push boundaries and stomp his little feet. She had to remember to breathe, to not get angry.

  It was ludicrous, really. She was not an angry person. She didn’t shout and carry on when things were unfair. Life could be unfair; she would shrug and get on with it. Work with what she had. Be generous with perspective-taking. Not take things to heart.

  That was with other people, of course. She had higher expectations of herself. A perfectionistic streak she found hard to shake. An almost obsessive need to get things right. Which made her temper with Wolfie even more confusing. Surely this was the most important thing she would ever need to be good at?

  “And he wasn’t on the trampoline?” Rolands prompts her. “How long was it since you last checked on him?”

  “I’ve told you. I really couldn’t say. Maybe five minutes? Maybe more.”

  “And then?”

  “I walked out the back door. I wasn’t worried at first. He likes to dig about in the garden. He knows he’s not allowed into the shed, but sometimes he goes in there and might hide if he hears me coming. I wandered a bit. I enjoyed the sunshine. I peeked around bushes like we were playing hide-and-seek. But when I didn’t see him, I started calling out. I looked in the shed. I started worrying. That he’d wandered onto the road. He knows not to go out the front but he’s four, you know? Maybe he was chasing a bird or something and forgot. I started jogging along the side of the house, calling for him. I went out the front, and looked over the fence onto the road. Then I went back around the back, thinking he must have heard me and gone down the other side of the house. To pretend he was never out the front. Because he wasn’t out the front. And he wasn’t on the road. So where else could he be?”