by S. A. McEwen
He peers again into the darkness.
“Over here,” says the voice.
The boy takes a tentative step toward it. His apprehension works in step with his hopefulness: that from the direction of the voice there might also come comfort. An adult who knows what is happening and how to fix it, perhaps. Even though adults have not proven to be terribly proficient in that regard, so far.
He can’t think about the man in the car. He will not say his name. He will not call him anything else but That Man. And he certainly can’t think about what happened before the car ride. He has learnt what happens when his mind drifts back that way. To softness and biscuits and cuddles and—
Stop.
He can’t go back there.
And he doesn’t know where else to go.
Again, the voice beckons him. “Over here. Don’t be afraid.”
He doesn’t know what else to do.
He takes another step into the darkness.
“That’s it, boy. This way. I’ve got something for you.”
He’s old enough now to wonder about how safe a man hiding under a bridge might be. But at just eleven, he’s not old enough to come up with a better solution. And besides, nothing has felt safe for quite some time. Memories of breaking glass—a shower of it, glinting and spraying and twisting in the light, suspended in an arc out from the front door—and running, running, being pushed, panicked, are already getting buried, pushed down, far away.
They’ll creep into his nightmares for years, and years. But right now, all he can imagine is food. Might the something be food?
His steps are tentative, not because he is afraid, but because he can’t see.
One foot in front of the other, into the dark.
12
Friday
Charlie inserts himself into the room with his usual sense of entitlement.
It’s not really entitlement, Olivia knows that. He’s just a kid; they’re all entitled at his age.
She bristles a little more than usual as he starts pulling various items from kitchen drawers. “I’m going to make ice cream,” he says, to no one in particular, and Olivia wants to scream. When did he become so comfortable just waltzing in and out of her kitchen?
She takes a deep breath. He’s lost his mother. Patricia is dead, and Olivia and Nick are the only family left that count. Be generous, she thinks to herself.
She had wondered, earlier, when her thinking was clearer, what Charlie made of the money his mother left to Wolfie; if he knew. She hadn’t been worried that he’d mention it to Nick: Charlie would not think to be jealous or curious or anything else.
The phrase “self-absorbed” flashes in Olivia’s mind, again.
“How are you finding living here?” she asks, swallowing her frustration. Rearranging her face into something she hopes is warmth and interest. It’s easier, in this moment, to pretend that their biggest challenge is how Charlie is settling in, than to let Charlie see her pain and grief and terror. Detached, it surprises Olivia that she is capable of such a question.
Now fifteen, they’ve barely seen Charlie over the last few years. Nick’s son from a previous relationship, Olivia remembers him as old beyond his years. He made strange company. And though Nick had shared custody up until Wolfie was born, she couldn’t say that she was sorry when Patricia, Nick’s ex, moved to London for work. They’d barely kept in touch. Phone calls at Christmas. Birthday cards with hastily written updates and the odd photo. Nick had had him so young, and while he, of course, kept in better contact, Olivia had somehow managed to resolutely forget that he was a part of their lives.
Yet here he was. Patricia was gone barely three months, his half-brother was missing, and Charlie was making ice cream in her kitchen.
“Very nice, thank you,” Charlie says politely. “I’m looking forward to starting school in the new year.”
Olivia grinds her teeth and looks away. Nick, of course, has rolled with the punches. But for all Patricia’s wealth, she and Nick will see nothing for their taking Charlie in.
It’s the right thing to do, she had argued with herself. But she hadn’t thought it through. She hadn’t kept in touch with him enough to share a space with this boy. He was a stranger, filling her house with adolescent boy smells and adolescent boy inconveniences. His very presence grates on her nerves. The blank way he looks at her when she explains how things work or family expectations. The secretive little smile when she gently tries to correct behaviour she doesn’t want to see repeated. Like the time she left him alone with Wolfie for just a few minutes, and came back to a standoff—Charlie insisting Wolfie put his dirty plate on the sink, pulling him roughly by the arm, saying, “I think you WILL clean up your mess.” Wolfie was shouting “No!” and resisting, his little face stubborn and angry. Olivia redirected Charlie, trying to conceal the flash of anger she felt, and asked him—again—to call her if a parenting task was required. “You don’t need to do any parenting,” she told him, half reassuring, half chastising, then turned back to Wolfie: “When you’ve put your plate away, then we can start that puzzle you wanted to do,” she said, and walked away.
But Charlie’s expression stayed with her, unsettling her. It wasn’t a look of anger, but he wasn’t trying to help, either. He was exerting power, she thinks now, startled. He enjoyed having some power over my child.
This wouldn’t have worried her, except that it had happened so often since he moved in. She had explained and corrected and redirected, and still he took every opportunity to flex his adolescent muscles over her child. A few times is a misunderstanding; a few dozen was something else.
Her resentment wasn’t helped by the fact that he’d taken over their spare room, spent thousands of (their) dollars shipping all his things from London, requested a new MacBook Pro (his had mysteriously disappeared), and had initially expressed dismay at the local high school they had taken him to tour.
All while his inheritance sat in a trust until he turned twenty-one, with no provisions for a guardian to access any of it to attend to the tasks and costs of parenting now thrust upon them.
It’s the money that’s the problem.
It’s not as though she and Nick are struggling when it comes to money, though. They both earn a lot. Their mortgage is half paid. Nevertheless, Olivia resents spending money on things that she thinks should really have come out of Charlie’s inheritance. When he turns twenty-one, he won’t even need to bother with a mortgage, so drawing down on hers to buy him a fancy computer irks her considerably.
The money.
Olivia sucks in her breath. She knows she should tell the police about it. It’s hardly a motive—a kidnapper isn’t going to be able to access it. But Patricia had left Wolfie a considerable sum in her will. Everything else was left to Charlie, of course, but unlike Charlie’s inheritance, the money left to Wolfie did stipulate a guardian could access it for basically anything related to Wolfie’s well-being. Olivia wonders why Patricia hadn’t thought this through better with Charlie. Or was she so delusional that she thought parenting him would be a pleasure, and the costs would be borne with a smile? Not even given a second thought?
But she pushes her indignation aside and corrects herself. Charlie is Nick’s kid, too. She might be inconvenienced, but Nick is doing exactly what he should be doing: providing for his child. His ex was never that strong in the thoughtfulness department—dropping Charlie off with barely any notice when she had a big meeting to attend, or sending invoices for “Nick’s half” of things she had bought him without even discussing it with Nick—but it’s not like Nick is doing her a favour.
Olivia puts her head in her hands. Charlie in her kitchen is grating on her. She just needs to think. To focus. She needs to think about Wolfie, but Charlie there, making ice cream, it’s like someone sitting with a stick poking into her thoughts, relentlessly. She can’t think straight. She needs to sleep; she needs Charlie to be out of sight. She needs to work out the money problem, too.
Foc
us, focus. Olivia squeezes her eyes tightly shut, like a toddler, pretending if she can’t see Charlie, he and his intrusiveness will disappear too. And even though Wolfie is crowding her mind, she pushes thoughts of him aside, methodical. The money. Maybe the money is one problem she can solve right now.
Her furtive dealings with her lawyer are going to look suspicious. Hell, they are suspicious—keeping the money left to Wolfie a secret from her husband, for a start. How is she going to explain it to Nick, let alone the police?
Not for the first time, Olivia questions her own sanity.
What was she thinking?
She supposes she could tell Nick she wanted to surprise him. Get everything set up. Organised. So then it’s just a pleasant surprise. A little something to help them along, with school fees, maybe. Some family holidays.
Before Wolfie disappeared, she’d felt petulant. What was Patricia even thinking, leaving that amount to a four-year-old? It didn’t make any sense. Even in death, was she trying to be the better person? Breezily showing off her wealth, her goodness? Why would anyone leave two hundred thousand dollars to their ex’s child with another woman? Was it generosity, or something murkier?
Of course, she could say nothing. Paul hadn’t lodged any of the papers. She could shrug and tell Nick that she’d just left it with her lawyer to work out the details and get back to her, and had forgotten about it. Pretend she thought it was two thousand dollars, nothing much to worry about. It wasn’t that unbelievable—Nick’s ex-girlfriend leaving their child two hundred thousand dollars was the unbelievable part.
For some reason Olivia finds herself clenching her jaw again. Nick would never understand it. The more she thinks about it, the more certain she is that Patricia’s motives were dark. Patricia wasn’t being generous. She was taunting them. That she was so successful. That she would be the one to make such a big impact on Wolfie’s life. She’d looked at them so smugly when Nick had told her they couldn’t afford to fly Charlie back and forth from London for visits; she’d breezily stated that she’d cover it, not to worry about it. And then had not paid one single time, and been evasive every time Nick asked if she’d pay for Charlie to come for an extra visit.
Years later, Charlie had made some comment about how the flights “weren’t that much money,” implying that Nick wasn’t pulling his weight, and Olivia had wondered what Patricia had said to him on the topic.
Something self-serving, she imagined.
But Patricia isn’t here; she can’t enjoy whatever it is she was intending with the money. Olivia could easily just never tell Wolfie about where it came from, so maybe she’s wrong. Maybe Patricia was just being generous. Maybe she wanted to be remembered well.
Two hundred thousand dollars.
God.
It’s overwhelming. Olivia can’t sort out her thoughts, let alone come to any decisions. She’s left with a gnawing resentment; it’s just another problem to solve. She knows it’s petty, and not the real issue, but she thinks the whole thing is completely unacceptable. Particularly now that her plan of what to do about it has been upended.
“Good,” she tells Charlie now, her voice forced. “But can you please leave making ice cream for another day? I need some quiet in here for a while.”
13
Friday
Thud, thud, thud.
Nick stares straight ahead, not seeing the television on the wall opposite him, not listening to the top twenty pop music blaring from speakers dotted around the gym. He’s set the treadmill for forty minutes and he moves methodically. He doesn’t adjust the incline or the speed. He sets and forgets and he runs, tuning out everything.
It’s a forty-minute reprieve from the rest of his life.
When he finishes, he’ll shower and make his way slowly home, where the days are blurring in to each other and life is shrouded in a stifling grey fog.
There are updates from police. There are more questions, more people to talk to. Olivia is shutting herself further and further away, and Nick worries about her. But he’s focused on the task at hand: helping the police. To sit still and feel deeply does not seem helpful to him. He spends his time working, trying to remember additional details leading up to Wolfie’s disappearance, and fielding phone calls from police.
Just once more he’s visited Hannah. Just to distract himself. Just to not think about Wolfie for one tiny sliver of his day. To try to not drown in it. Because though he is good at the tasks, when they’re all done, when he’s just left by himself—because Olivia is aloof and distant, and even when she’s there he feels completely alone—it’s unbearable, it’s crushing him. The complete opposite of Olivia, he had, at the start, found something compelling about Hannah being loud, mischievous, raunchy and…available. Now, though, the whole thing strikes him as hollow and meaningless. His child is missing, and Hannah had patted him gingerly on the back, her distaste in the subject jarringly apparent. She’d been so quick to change the topic, to start taking off his clothes.
What was he thinking?
On some level, Nick knows that he started fooling around with Hannah long before he and Olivia were having any difficulties, so his petulant comparisons are not a valid excuse. But on the other hand, it is very hard to continually look at the difficult, less likeable parts of yourself. He has found a way to justify both his love for his wife and his affair with Hannah to himself, such that he can carry on with both and feel comfortable—happy, even. Sometimes, he even tells himself that he’s doing Olivia a favour. That she’s lost interest in him; that he’s not pestering her for intimacy she doesn’t desire.
Today, for the first time, though, he feels something different.
He’s so long been the one in the “wrong,” it takes him a while to recognise the feeling. It sits with him, a vague discomfort, something not quite right, all through the day, niggling and prickling.
Thud, thud, thud.
Usually, running helps him to tune everything out. But today his mind won’t quieten. And eventually he is surprised to realise he is angry with Olivia.
Looking after Wolfie is her only job. She’s been on leave for two months. She took Wolfie out of childcare, where, it seems, he would have been a whole lot safer than at home with his mother.
What was she doing while Wolfie vanished into thin air?
How on earth do you not notice your child is gone for so long that there’s no trace of him?
14
Friday
“You haven’t been a very caring stepmother to Charlie.”
The memory of Bing’s words hang in Olivia’s mind as she tries to focus on Detective Rolands.
“I’m sorry?” she says.
“Things have changed a lot for your family recently. Charlie coming to live with you full-time. How has that been?”
Olivia looks out the window.
How has that been?
She thinks back to the last time she spoke to her sister. Her devastation. Bing’s words as good as winding her, the air knocked out of her lungs, her metaphorical gasping to breathe. To stay alive.
It wasn’t just that Bing didn’t see her—her effort, her struggle with step-parenting. The hours and hours of trying. Of thinking. Of managing. Of planning and sacrificing. It was that Bing was one of only two people she confided in about step-parenting. That she had trusted her sister so much that she had honestly shared her experience and her fears and her doubts. She had trusted Bing completely. Said to her the things that she couldn’t say to Nick. She had never considered for a moment that Bing was sitting in judgement—and even if she was, she would never have imagined that judgement to be so wrong. Because whatever she shared with Bing, back then, Charlie had loved her. Charlie was oblivious to her internal wrangling with the difficulties of being a stepmother. Charlie ran to her, his arms wide, his laugh gurgling all over their house.
He had certainly loved her.
She was sure of it.
How had it all gone so wrong since then?
“It�
��s been hard,” Olivia answers. She watches Rolands warily. Nick isn’t with her, and she checks herself. It would be so easy just to spill everything she’s thinking right now.
“He left…four years ago?” Rolands checks her notepad, glances back at Olivia, who nods.
“Just after Wolfie was born.”
Things had shifted by then, definitely. She remembers the flooding relief when Nick told her Patricia’s proposal. She’d been offered an amazing opportunity in London. She really wanted to take it. It’s just for a couple of years, Patricia had urged them. You guys will be so busy with the baby it’ll fly by.
Nick had been reluctant, obviously. He worried about Charlie missing out on that relationship with Wolfie; he wanted Charlie to be part of their family. But Olivia had been ashamed of how joyful she had felt. The older Charlie became, the less she and Nick agreed on how to parent him. Olivia valued boundaries and routine and structure. She had rules and expectations. Nick was much more laissez-faire, and gave Charlie freedoms and autonomy she wouldn’t dream of giving an eleven-year-old. Charlie decided, for example, how much screen time he had on any given day. And he never ended up doing any of his chores, because Nick never insisted they were completed before gaming.
Plus, there was something unsettling about the boy. He lied, for a start. And sometimes, Olivia would catch him doing exactly what she’d asked him not to do, the look on his face not that of a rebellious or stubborn child testing the boundaries, but of someone pulling a string here and there, watching the reaction.
Calculating. That was what Olivia thought. He watched things, his face impassive, calculating what he could get away with. Stupid things. Things that didn’t even matter.
She felt nervous about him being around the baby, though she couldn’t form rational sentences as to why.
“How was that? Him leaving just when Wolfie came along?”