The Lost Boy

by S. A. McEwen

  Olivia doesn’t understand this new angle of questioning, but it’s a relief to be honest with someone. She stopped being honest with Nick on this subject a long time ago.

  “It was a reprieve, to be honest. Charlie is…not like other boys his age. He never was. I worried that he wouldn’t follow instructions with the baby. That he’d have a ‘good idea’ that was actually dangerous or something. He often thinks that he knows best, and he gets a bit like a dog with a bone. Just pushes on with a plan, and will disregard whatever he’s been asked or told. It was one less stress with a new baby.”

  She doesn’t mention her murkier fears on this subject. That time at the playground with their friends from the country. They hadn’t seen them for a year. Their daughter was three, all flying curls and bubbly laughter. And Charlie was pushing her on the swing, higher and higher. Olivia kept glancing at the girl’s mother, sure she’d caution him to tone it down. And when she didn’t, just as Olivia was rising from her seat to shout, “Not so high, Charlie!” the little girl had flown out of the swing, arcing through the air as though in slow motion, the crunch of her arm meeting the sawdust still making Olivia’s stomach squeeze and her torso hunch over involuntarily, after all these years.

  Nick had called it an accident, but Olivia had watched Charlie’s face afterward. That passive, secretive look. The coldness of it. The rote way he expressed his apologies.

  The arm had broken in two places. No one was upset. They all accepted it was an accident. They tried to reassure Charlie, to ensure he didn’t feel bad. They even thanked him for trying to entertain their daughter.

  Olivia thought they needn’t have worried. She was pretty sure Charlie didn’t feel bad at all.

  Cause and effect. He was just interested in the fallout.

  “I see. Did Nick agree?”

  “God, no,” Olivia looks at Rolands uneasily. “It’s an ongoing point of disagreement. It sounds so clichéd.” Olivia frowns. “The evil stepmother. Glad when the stepchild is gone.”

  “Not at all,” Rolands offers, kindly. “Parenting is hard. Step-parenting is harder. I couldn’t do it.”

  Olivia jumps on this eagerly. It’s the first piece of personal information Rolands has shared. She desperately wants to feel understood, vindicated.

  I’m not a bad person.

  It’s just a hard gig.

  “How has it been since he’s been back? Has it been like you feared?”

  But Olivia clams up. She feels suddenly like she’s exposed too much. Nick would be livid. Charlie is just a kid, after all. And the things that she’s noticed—she knows how they will sound. How she will sound.

  Bing’s words echo in her ears.

  She suddenly needs to get out of there. She doesn’t want Rolands asking too many questions about her family.

  Lots of ghosts in those cupboards.

  Things that shouldn’t be exposed to the light.

  15

  Friday

  Olivia holds the phone stiffly.

  Her parents have it on speakerphone, and the experience always makes Olivia tense, missing child or not. Now both closer to eighty than seventy, they never remember to speak to the phone, and their voices are endlessly muffled, directed out the window or to each other. She always hangs up, realising too late how tensely she’s been sitting, her shoulders aching, her teeth on edge.

  Now, they’re offering help. Should they come down? Should Olivia come up? Does she need any help?

  She wants to scream down the phone at them. She wishes she had parents who knew how to help, who were effective and useful. Her parents can’t even join the dots enough to realise her staying with them in Sydney, while her child is missing in Melbourne, is the least helpful thing they could possibly offer.

  They mean well, she knows that. They’re doing their best, holding together their own grief and fear to try to support her. But when they ask, “Do you need any help?” she wants to shake them and shake them and scream at the sun.

  She wants them to know how to help her, instinctively, without her having to ask or spell it out for them. Because right now, she herself has no idea what help she needs or how to help herself.

  What do you need when your child is missing?

  Your child back.

  She doesn’t need someone to cook meals or babysit a fifteen-year-old or rub her shoulders or even hold her.

  She just wants her fucking child back.

  And—given that they managed to lose one of their own, and they never got him back—they are the last people on earth qualified to help with that.

  After she hangs up, her words forced, Olivia thinks about her siblings.

  Their brother, Abby, was long gone the first time that Bing attacked her.

  She and Bing knew better than to ask any questions about him, and Olivia clung to Bing even more desperately in the years that followed. She—mistakenly, as it happened—thought that as the only remaining siblings, their bond was more special and more essential than ever.

  As an adult, she thinks that it’s probably not such an unusual dynamic. The younger sister hero-worshipping the older one. Younger siblings often seem to admire their older siblings excessively.

  Until they learn better.

  So she would trot around after her big sister like Bing was the only thing that mattered on the planet. Bing would wave her hands about with casual authority, commanding Olivia to do her bidding. And Olivia did it with pleasure. She wanted Bing to need her; to stay close to her; to not just disappear, as apparently it was possible for siblings to do. But sometimes she wonders if it would have been that way, anyway.

  If Abby had still been with them, would she have been quite so eager and compliant? Quite so easily manipulated? Olivia thinks about that sometimes, but she’ll never have an answer, because Abby wasn’t with them and he wasn’t coming back.

  But even that first time that Olivia said no to Bing, and the fallout felt nuclear, things didn’t change. Olivia would spend years trying to understand the dynamic between them and blaming herself every time things went wrong. And that first time—it was a minor thing. So minor Olivia can’t even remember it now. Was it Bing asking to borrow her favourite jeans, or ride her bike somewhere? And good little Olivia, obedient little Olivia, desperate-for-her-sibling’s-love Olivia—testing her thirteen-year-old wings and perhaps for the first time feeling taken advantage of by her sister—casually said “no.”

  The barrage of abuse (after all the things I do for you—selfish little brat—think your things are too good to share with me—no one likes you anyway—I heard Mum telling Dad what a bore you are) was delivered with such violent rage that Olivia fled to her wardrobe floor and lay there in the foetal position for hours. Her mother found her there, shuddering, so devastated and confused by the attack that she couldn’t even speak of it. It wasn’t even the words so much, but the delivery—the flying spit, the savage set of her mouth, the unadulterated hatred in Bing’s eyes. Olivia saw her as a wild dog, killing for pleasure. Intent on destruction, at any cost.

  Bing didn’t speak to her for four days, by which time Olivia was convinced that she had indeed done something horribly wrong. She was so confused; it was so nonsensical that when Bing asked her for the next favour, she scrambled to oblige.

  This cycle repeated throughout the next two decades—when Olivia asserted a boundary or disagreed with her sister, she was savaged so violently that she sobbed for days—until the comment about Charlie just before Wolfie was born. Olivia had just asserted that Bing would need to wait for Olivia to okay a visit to the hospital to meet him—she was anxious about how the birth would go, and found the idea of visitors immediately afterwards overwhelming.

  “I’ll call you as soon as I’m ready for visitors,” Olivia had said, herself understanding the comment to be an invitation, extending something precious to someone special. But she could see Bing’s face tightening, the jeering edge to her jaw that Olivia had come to know so well. And though Olivia could s
ee that Bing was struggling with something upon hearing this news, she could not for the life of her work out how Bing could interpret her wanting a few hours to recover—after pushing a live human being out of her vagina—as a slight or a dismissal or something to take personally and be affronted by.

  She felt the familiar churning in her stomach. Bing’s anger was never terribly rational, but always terribly painful.

  “I’m worried about how you’ll find mothering,” she’d said, so casually it still takes Olivia’s breath away. Her features had been rearranged into something like concern, but Olivia could read the gloating underneath. The satisfaction of finding something to hurt Olivia with.

  For a moment, Olivia tried not to rise, not to bite—to just ignore the comment completely. But she couldn’t help herself. She did what Bing expected her to do: she asked her why.

  “You just don’t seem to be a very nurturing person.” And then, after a pause: “You haven’t been a very caring stepmother to Charlie.”

  And finally, finally, Olivia had come to see the pattern: Bing could not tolerate her little sister disagreeing with her or asserting a boundary. It made no sense—Bing seemed to be able to navigate all her other relationships outside of her family of origin with ease, with professional accolades, endless invitations to interesting people’s parties, and friends who would rave about how supportive she’d been through a difficult period in their lives. Yet she was so undeniably violent and irrational every time that Olivia didn’t acquiesce to her, that Olivia had started to distance herself from Bing. She missed her sister, but she was no longer tiptoeing around trying to avoid the next emotional beating. For most of Wolfie’s short little life, she had congratulated herself on this decision. It was hard, but for her own good. Bing was not to be trusted with her heart. And because her attacks were so nonsensical—juvenile, even—Olivia felt powerless to resolve the issue. Every time she had tried, Bing recounted a perspective so far from Olivia’s that they didn’t seem to be talking about the same event. These conversations always ended with Bing crying about how badly she was hurt, painting Olivia as the aggressor, and playing the victim.

  Disengaging was a relief.

  It wasn’t enough, though.

  Distancing was not the same as asserting herself.

  It was funny, because she didn’t think of herself as a vengeful person. Not usually. And she’d felt so grown up, so proud, to cut off contact and just stop. Stop trying to explain to Bing, stop trying to get her to understand, stop being blindsided by her rage and her tantrums and her rigid adherence to her own interpretations of the world.

  She walked away, and she felt just fine.

  For a while.

  16

  Saturday

  Nick is up early.

  He pauses at the door of his bedroom, his eyes resting on Olivia. She’s sleeping, but not deeply. Her breath is shallow.

  Once, this would have inspired tenderness. He might have made her a cup of tea, or even just watched her for a while, looking forward to her waking, being present with him again. Today, though, it fills him with a sense of urgency.

  He wants to be gone before she wakes.

  In the kitchen, Charlie offers him a coffee. He smiles at his son. He’s grown tall, embodying that awkward teenage lankiness. He’s such a thoughtful kid, Nick thinks. He knows the coffee will be over frothed and not hot enough, but he accepts the offer gratefully anyway. He loves how helpful Charlie is being around the house. He’s really making an effort and Nick is proud of him.

  “What are you up to today?” he asks as Charlie busies himself at the coffee machine. Nick shoves a slice of bread in the toaster, wondering if he can take both in the car. He’s relieved to just have a normal conversation. He’s desperate about Wolfie, too. But he just can’t handle the constant misery, the focus on it. He wants to do things. Be helpful. Olivia’s approach—every waking moment concentrating on the misery—makes him breathless, panicked. The police are doing their work. There’s been a sighting, in Chadstone. The police doubt its validity, but at least it means the community is looking. Everyone is looking for Wolfie. He just wants to let the professionals do what needs to be done. He knows they will find him.

  His mind shies away from any other option. Unlike Olivia, he can’t let himself imagine. Where is Wolfie? Who is with him? What are they doing to him? Is he…hurt?

  Olivia sobs and screams when she lets herself imagine. Nick tries to help her shut these thoughts out, but she seems to think she is doing a disservice to Wolfie if she doesn’t consider and fully feel the pain of every possible scenario. It’s a type of insanity he cannot comprehend. And so he works, he returns phone calls, he keeps his chin up and tells himself it’s for Charlie that he’s holding everything together—but that is not true. He cannot reckon with the darkness that comes with those questions. On some very deep level, he knows that way lies madness, a grief so sharp he will never come back from it. There are possibilities his mind cannot tolerate considering. They will break him, and he will never put himself back together.

  Charlie hands him his coffee.

  “I might go to the skate park,” he says, his eyes not quite meeting Nick’s. “It’s a nice day to get out.”

  “Good idea,” Nick encourages. For the briefest of moments, he wonders about that evasiveness, but decides Charlie might feel guilty about going out and enjoying himself, under the circumstances. It doesn’t occur to him to ask, or acknowledge it; that a greater intimacy might lie that way. “Wear sunscreen,” he says, instead, grabbing his toast and heading for the door. He doesn’t stop to butter it. He’s desperate to go before Olivia wakes and passes judgement on his participation in such domestic normalcy.

  He just needs to get out of this house.

  He just needs to not be suffocating.

  Nick needn’t have worried—when Olivia stirs, she makes no move to get out of bed. Instead, she lies there wondering where it all went so wrong.

  It was only a couple of short years ago that everything had been fine. Back then, the differences in their parenting styles were barely noticeable. Olivia’s concerns those last few years before Charlie left for London had faded away. But it was about then, she thinks now, that things started to get harder. The divergence in their parenting styles was certainly starting to grate on her after Wolfie’s second birthday.

  There was the camping trip, for a start. And not long after that, scrabbling through some papers, trying to find the last payment for their ambulance cover after childcare forms asked for the number (God, have we renewed it? she had worried. I haven’t seen it for years) Olivia found payments going to Charlie. He was thirteen years old, and Nick was sending him one hundred dollars a week.

  When she confronted him, he seemed perplexed.

  “London’s expensive. He needs some pocket money,” he’d said. And dismissed her concerns that he should have discussed it with her first; and that it was an awful lot of pocket money for a thirteen-year-old. When the argument escalated, he’d said—not for the first time—“He’s my son. I get to decide.” Olivia—also not for the first time—felt sucker punched.

  She still remembers how that felt.

  “I got to share the drop-offs and pick-ups for ten years, I got to take time off work to take him the doctor when he was sick, I got to help with the homework, pay for half of everything, but you get to make the decisions?” she’d asked, incredulous.

  “You don’t do those things anymore,” Nick had said, and walked out the door.

  Thinking about it now, Olivia feels foolish. She and Nick didn’t talk about anything when it came to how they wanted to parent. She flew into it, eyes wide shut, bolstered by love. Even though she had evidence right in front of her eyes about how parenting with Nick might go.

  For some reason, she thought it would be different with Wolfie.

  With her.

  Nick and Patricia had separated when Charlie was barely born. She reasoned that Nick felt guilty, and overcompens
ated. Didn’t seek any information or parenting support. Just winged it without someone like her to help him. God, when she first met him, he didn’t even put Charlie to bed. Just let him sit up watching TV until he fell asleep on the couch.

  The fights with Charlie when she instigated a bedtime routine were just the start of all the time and effort and energy she’d devoted to being a good stepparent.

  But by the end of Wolfie’s third year, she knew that Nick’s ideas about parenting were just not the same as hers.

  And sometimes, as much as she doubts her own capacity, she thinks Wolfie would be much better off if Nick just fucked right off out of the picture altogether.

  Charlie places the newspaper on the table carefully.

  He’s longing to cut the article out—he’s started a collection of them, and the idea of one being missing unsettles him. But he can cut it out later, he tells himself.

  When Olivia comes in to the kitchen a few minutes later, it’s the first thing she sees.

  The headline stops her in her tracks. One arm is reaching up to brush a stray hair from her face, and it stops there, a comical pose that would be more in place in a children’s cartoon than in the kitchen of a woman who has lost her son.

  MISSING BOY’S WARRING PARENTS

  The picture of Wolfie is not the one they supplied to police, his blond curls shining, his big blue eyes wide with laughter. That picture makes Olivia’s heart ache every time she looks at it.

  How larger than life he seems.

  How joyful.

  How innocent.

  This picture is grainier. Wolfie is frowning at something. Olivia knows it is his favourite truck puzzle. He has nearly completed it by himself for the first time. Olivia took the photo on her phone. Moments later, she took another, his face triumphant. She remembers that day, like she remembers all his days, in vivid detail.

  Long days, fast years.