The Lost Boy

by S. A. McEwen

  38

  “But why does he have to stay there?” Olivia whines.

  Amelia is peeling carrots and potatoes. The house is eerily quiet. It’s Abby’s first week at his new school—he leaves on Monday mornings and comes back on Saturday mornings. The concept is terrifying to Olivia.

  Isn’t he lonely?

  Who will read him stories at bedtime?

  Who will help him if he’s hurt?

  “It’s just how the school works,” Amelia says, not looking at her daughter. Olivia is voicing all the fears that she is trying to push away. “They say it will help him to settle in, get used to the new routine.”

  “He’ll be back before you know it,” she adds.

  Olivia is perched on a stool behind the breakfast bar. She sits quietly, the pain in her chest growing and growing since Abby was taken.

  Taken.

  He’d been screaming and crying. There’d been grabbing and holding.

  Forcing.

  As Olivia watched, stricken, all her hopes for Abby about the new school seeped quietly away.

  It’s Tuesday night, and the whole family is quiet.

  At dinner, Olivia glances over and over at where Abby would usually sit.

  There’s an aching hole in her heart, but her family sees it differently.

  Daniel almost seeps into his chair with relief: dinner is a peaceful affair. There is no fighting, no angry outbursts, no refusal to eat, no melodramatic dry retching and gagging. No punishments.

  No exhaustion.

  Bing is in her element: in this new empty space, she regales her parents with tales of her day. The niggling discomfort she feels about her brother’s absence is shoved deep down, and covered over with layers and layers of shinier things.

  Even Amelia seems to move about through one long, deep sigh of relief. Dinner is made, served, eaten, and cleaned up.

  Everyone gets ready quietly for bed.

  It’s their brave new world, and she clings on to what the adults tell her: that it is better, and right, and will all be okay.

  On Sunday afternoons, Olivia glues herself to her brother’s side, and tries to shore him up with enough family love to last him the whole week he’ll be away.

  After the first weekend, she doesn’t comment on the bruises she sees on his arms and back. One on his temple, even.

  That first weekend, though, she’d shrieked. Abby had startled wildly, arcing away from her, his toothbrush sailing through the air. Olivia had caught herself, shushed herself. She asked Abby about the bruises, but he seemed more distant than usual. He gently pushed her out of the bathroom, and got dressed in there, alone.

  She had marched into her parents’ bedroom, alerting them forcefully of this new and terrible information: “Someone is hurting him! He’s got bruises everywhere! The school must be horrible. You’ve got to get him back.” Bolstered by her childlike belief in right and wrong, she had assumed her parents would fix everything, and nothing more needed to be said. So when they bundled Abby back into the car to return there on Monday morning—there was less screaming this time—her little eight-year-old heart was wild with indignation and disbelief. She had stomped her feet and refused to get in the car when she realised Abby was not, in fact, coming back to school with her, but would be dropped back at his new school after she and Bing were dropped off at theirs.

  Amelia looked uncomfortable. Olivia even wondered if her mother was going to cry. But if she was so upset about it, why was she taking him back?

  Her father was terse, though. He seemed craggy to Olivia, his face grey and worn. Olivia couldn’t remember the last time that he’d played with her.

  Bing crawled into the back seat beside Abby with a book and an air of disinterest. If she worried about their brother, Olivia didn’t see it. And as she stomped and wailed, her father grabbed her by the shoulder and shoved her roughly into the car. Olivia was so startled that she stopped wailing mid-cry. Despite all the fighting, the breakages, the throwing and screaming, Olivia was not afraid of her father. He’d smacked her on the bottom on the odd occasion, but only when she’d done something very naughty, and she had almost expected it.

  This was different: she felt the unfairness of it in her bones.

  She was just trying to look out for her brother.

  Which no one else seemed to be doing.

  Why did that her make her father angry with her?

  Later, on the road, she started to weep quietly to herself: no longer a protest about Abby’s fate, but a silent recalibration of what and who her family was; and what was to become of them.

  39

  One Month Earlier

  “And you filed a report, how many years ago?”

  “Thirty-one.” Amelia Shorten pauses for a long time. Then: “And thirty. And twenty-nine. And twenty-eight. And—” Daniel shushes his wife gently. Amelia is trembling. It’s always this way when they come to the station. He knows that she looks fearful, but really she is shaking with rage. Partly she is enraged that no one has been held accountable. No one has ever shouldered any of the blame.

  Partly she is shaking with rage at herself.

  Now, she stares down at her hands, resting lightly on the plastic countertop next to the screen that separates her from the police officer tapping away at her computer on the other side.

  The station had been surprisingly busy. She sat with Daniel stiffly in the waiting area, worrying at her fingers.

  They waited for half an hour in real time; but in reality they have been waiting for thirty-one years. Every year, on this date, they come back. Or they did. They’ve missed a few years. It’s only fanned the flames of Amelia’s rage.

  So many people to not forgive, and not forget.

  Most especially herself.

  The police officer taps away at her computer, taking details, searching for things.

  “I’ll look into it,” is all she says. “Someone will call you,” as she gestures for them to leave the room.

  Amelia and Daniel return home, the silence deafening. Between them, behind them, are thirty years full of children and holidays and career successes and their modest Sydney residence, close enough to the beach to retire in.

  There is also thirty years of missing Abby.

  They don’t talk about it. They don’t even cry about it. But every year, on the same date, they get dressed, and get ready, and drive to their local police station without having to say a single word.

  40

  Tuesday, Week Two

  Detective Rolands leans back in her chair and closes her eyes.

  It’s supposed to be her day off, but she can’t shake the case from her mind.

  How does a four-year-old vanish without a trace? No one heard anything, no one saw anything, no one has any idea where he might be. And despite a flood of calls to Crime Stoppers, nothing of any substance whatsoever has been reported by the community.

  Rolands ponders Olivia.

  There’s something that she’s holding back, Rolands knows, but she can’t put her finger on what it is. There’s some guilt in there, for a start. But that’s normal. Wolfie was in her care. Any mother would feel guilty. It doesn’t take that much time to lose a child, really. If you turned your back in a shopping centre for thirty seconds, you could lose them. Maybe for five minutes, if there were no sinister characters about. Maybe for longer, if there were.

  Whatever the circumstances, you’d still feel guilty.

  So Rolands doesn’t want to make too much of the flashes of guilt she sees on Olivia’s face every now and then.

  She’s interested in the money. Nick and Olivia seem comfortable, but not wealthy. So she doubts that Olivia truly forgot about two hundred thousand dollars. And what of the inheritance itself? What a strange occurrence, she muses. With a very basic investigation, it seemed that Patricia was very wealthy. Her parents had a huge import/export business that Patricia had sold when they both passed on. And even though Nick and Patricia’s split appeared quite amicable o
n the surface, it was still more than unusual for money to be left to his child with another woman. Rolands has never heard of anything like it. Were the two things connected, somehow?

  But there was no ransom. And the money itself was still tied up in administration. It’s not like it was sitting in a bank account somewhere, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice.

  And what about Charlie?

  He would come into a great deal of wealth on his twenty-first birthday. But that seemed to have no bearing on the case whatsoever—it was far too far away to be useful. Olivia had worried about how he would be with Wolfie, there was some fears there, some mistrust, but Charlie was at school when Wolfie went missing, the school have confirmed he attended all his classes that day. Anyway, a teenager being a murderer or complicit somehow…well, it seemed a bit far-fetched. What could possibly motivate him? And he hadn’t been in Australia long enough to have made plans, found an accomplice, really, had he?

  Her thoughts run on. When did Wolfie’s anxiety start? Had something happened with Charlie? Before he moved here, at a previous visit? Sexual abuse, for example, could result in serious mental health complications for a child. Maybe Charlie didn’t take Wolfie, but maybe he wasn’t completely innocent, either.

  A knock on her door interrupts her train of thought.

  “Cuppa?” Macy holds out a steaming mug toward her, and Rolands smiles at her wife.

  “Thank you,” she says, reaching for it, reaching for Macy’s other hand, too, and giving it a squeeze. Macy is used to their free time being compromised by her job. Today, they had intended to go for lunch at a new winery that had opened down on the Peninsula, but Rolands is preoccupied.

  Macy understands. A missing child is a sensitive area. So they don’t need to speak about it. Macy cancels their reservation. She books again in a few weeks’ time. She hopes and hopes that Wolfie will be found safely and returned to his parents by then. She is extra thoughtful, extra kind to her wife.

  Rolands continues to think. She makes the odd phone call. There’s the whiff of a marriage on the rocks, but no one is talking much about that. Maybe the flashes of guilt she sees in Olivia are not about losing her child, but to do with her marriage. She’d considered that Olivia had hidden Wolfie and was going to make off with the money, but it wasn’t enough money to start a new life. She’d get more from selling her half of the family home she shared with Nick. And besides, where would she have hidden him? And what sort of mother would traumatise their child by hiding them away from everyone they know and love for—she glances down at her desk calendar—nine days?

  No, that wasn’t worth following. There was something about this family, though. A troubled child. A difficult blended family circumstance. Some dissatisfaction in the marriage. A weird inheritance.

  Rolands exhales slowly.

  Then she reaches for the phone.

  41

  Tuesday, Week Two

  Olivia huddles into Nick on the couch.

  Unspoken, it is where they head now. Minutes tick by, hours.

  Olivia curses herself.

  When the chips are down, it is Nick who she wants to be with. She is surprised to find that here, the length of his body against hers, is the only place that she finds some comfort.

  The outside world presses in on her, but on the couch, nestled into Nick, she can hold it at bay. She can stop time, and float, weightless, in a little pocket of space where no words are necessary. Where they are waiting for their son to be returned to them, and there is no time, so Wolfie is suspended too: he is not afraid, he is not alone. He is almost suspended with them, in this silent little place.

  The stupidity of it.

  Her family is all she can think about. The three of them, together.

  God, even Charlie, if she must. Even the four of them. The four of them, together, is perfection compared to this.

  It might be lost. It might be finished.

  And it’s all my fault.

  In this space, in the eternity of it, it seems pointless to go on.

  She struggles to keep her footing firmly in reality. She can’t actually remember what she was thinking; why she did the things she did.

  Charlie was hard to like, sure. But was it worth losing her family over?

  All the things she had thought about Nick seem ludicrous, now. Huddled on the couch with her, he is exactly who she needs and the only comfort she can find in anything. She wants to hold on to him tightly, almost desperately: no one else understands this pain, this loss. On top of that, all her worries seem so trivial, now. How much did it really matter that he disagreed with her on how much pocket money to give Charlie? How much did it really matter that he didn’t jump every time Wolfie wanted something from him?

  In the tinny, hollow little corner of their new world, Olivia can see more clearly her own shortcomings. How much time she gave to Wolfie, and how little she gave to Nick. How obsessed she had become with the minute tasks of every day.

  Is the floor clean?!

  Is the dinner prepped?!

  How agitated and harsh she was if Nick didn’t do things exactly the way she wanted them done. When she should have been attending to the bigger picture of love and kindness and family time.

  Now, these things seem small-minded and stupid. Like she has been living with blinkers on, more worried about whether Nick bought the right sort of apples than whether Wolfie felt loved. She can’t even understand how tightly she has backed herself into a sad, cold, lonely little corner. When it’s Nick here, on the couch with her. Nick feeling everything she is feeling. Nick who is the only other person in the world who would give anything—anything—to have their son back.

  Suddenly, the weird, floating sensation is unbearable to her. The untethered waiting. The limp, hapless sense of being suspended outside of time, waiting for Wolfie. She needs something to ground her. To bring her back to reality. To make amends, to set things right.

  She sits up suddenly, looks down at Nick. Her shoulders are rigid; she doesn’t know if she can undo what she has done. She is frightened by the choices she has made, the places she’s been inside her mind.

  Was Charlie that bad?

  Was Nick?

  She needs to start fixing it. She needs to know if she can.

  She looks her husband straight in the eye and takes a deep breath.

  “Bing won’t be any good at step-parenting, either, you know,” she says.

  42

  April 1988

  Far away from his family, Abby Shorten sits at a wooden desk in a room with fifteen or so other boys.

  There are no girls, and the room is stuffy and dim. One window hangs slightly off its hinges, and dense spiderwebs populate the space on both sides of the flywire which loosely covers the gap.

  The classroom sits alongside a major road. Trucks groan and shriek alongside the boys all day. The fan above them is broken, and whirs at a fraction of the pace that would be useful to move the stuffy air away from them and out the door. On each rotation, it clunks rhythmically: not only failing to cool the boys down, but relentlessly fanning the flames of their sensory distress.

  Two teachers’ aides flank the room. They are young and nervous. On the weekends, they scan the classifieds for an easier job.

  Abby stares blankly at the sheet of paper in front of him. He couldn’t hear what the teacher has told them to do over the biting invasion of all the other noises. The boy to his right—Jonathan, only ten years old—taps his pencil on his desk, on and on and on. Marley, at the front of the room, has started wailing. The teacher walks in front of his desk and raps it hard with his fist.

  “Quiet!” he barks. “Everyone needs to finish their writing in the next ten minutes!”

  The teacher doesn’t know it, but Abby can’t read. Letters jumble themselves in front of his eyes, dancing and turning, laughing at his confusion. At his old school, Abby would tell the teachers that he couldn’t work the letters out, but they hurried and pushed, not listening to
him. They told him he didn’t try hard enough; that if he spent more time concentrating, and less time disrupting the class, he’d be at the same level as his peers.

  Now, his tiny world is made up of instructions, demands, impossible tasks.

  Do it!

  Read it!

  Write it!

  Be quiet!

  Stop tapping!

  Stop crying!

  It’s prep level, what’s wrong with you!

  It was bad enough when he was the only one falling behind, tapping, shouting, crying. Now he’s in a room full of boys not coping.

  In the evenings, they snatch five minutes here and there to talk, uninterrupted. Unsupervised. Marley tells Abby about aeroplanes in more detail than Abby cares for—but alone, Marley’s voice running over him like gentle, warbling water, Abby feels calm. He rocks rhythmically and listens. He soothes himself. By morning, he has found some equilibrium.

  Then it’s back to the classroom. Where disequilibrium reigns.

  43

  Tuesday, Week Two

  Nick sits up slowly.

  His eyes try to focus on Olivia, but she can see the questions, the confusion clouding them as he tries to ascertain what she knows, and what he should say.

  He had been lying on the couch, lost in his new reality. He had even been thinking about talking to Olivia about it. How it had all gone so wrong.

  Ever since Hannah asked him to move in with her, Nick had been panicking. He found it hard to say no to Hannah, but her expectations had thrown him completely. He had expected that their affair would fizzle out, and they would both keep it secret from Olivia forever, and he would live happily ever after with his beautiful wife and beautiful children.