by S. A. McEwen
Hannah did not strike him as the type of person who would enjoy a long-term relationship, or step-parenting, at all.
So her request, and the subsequent pressure she has been putting on him—even while his child is missing, for God’s sake—had been so incongruous with his reality and expectations that he had just tried to avoid it as best he could.
But lying on the couch with Olivia, his mind had been spinning ever faster, trying to work it all out.
He can’t shove this problem deep down inside like all the others. It is erupting into the world, with or without him. He can’t hide it away.
How has he been so emotionally lazy, so emotionally blind?
And just as he’s trying to work it out, explain it to himself for the first time—what changed when Wolfie was born, why he always has to be so nice—Olivia blindsides him.
He can’t quite put it all together.
He remembers Patricia rubbing her protruding belly thoughtfully.
He remembers being in tears.
“Oh, Nick,” she had said, her voice full of pity. “You didn’t really believe I’d choose you, did you?”
He’d been too stunned by the revelation that Patricia was leaving him to dispute the logic of this statement. If you date someone, and move in with them, and decide to have a child with them, haven’t you already chosen them?
Nevertheless, two weeks before their son was due to arrive in the world, Nick had come home to a half-empty flat. Patricia had already had removalists go through the house and take the things she wanted. She herself was on her way out the door—Nick was only getting this explanation in person because he’d felt unwell, and had left work early.
One picture hangs in his mind, suspended: Patricia, taking the handle of her cheerful little red suitcase, tipping it onto its side to wheel it out the door. Efficient. Bright. She had no intention of talking further about it; she did not care whatsoever about how Nick felt or what state she was leaving him in. She had paused in the doorway, one manicured hand on the door handle, though. As though this wasn’t quite enough pain to leave Nick with. As though she wanted to kick him just a little bit more.
“I just wanted a baby,” she’d said. “I never really wanted you.”
And his world had fallen apart and never quite got put back together, ever again.
Now, Nick watches Olivia through bleary, exhausted eyes.
“What do you mean?” he asks, slowly, one painful item over another pressing relentlessly down on him, squeezing the air out of him, making his thoughts slow, strained.
“She told me she’s thinking of taking on a stepchild,” Olivia replies. She looks disinterested, not angry. “I’m assuming she means Charlie. And Wolfie.” Here, Olivia’s voice catches, and she looks away from Nick, the pain of Wolfie breaking her more than the pain of infidelity has done. She stares out their lounge room window, her vision impaired with tears.
Nick can’t differentiate between her pain, though. She looks sad and defeated. His heart thuds dully in his chest.
He sees what he has done to her as a physical thing—that any pain she feels, her defeat, how crushed and empty she looks—that he has done it. He has put that brick on her chest. He has ripped the colour out of her body.
“I’d like you to stop seeing her,” Olivia goes on, still not looking at Nick, who is scrabbling to keep up. This emptiness is worse than anything he could imagine. He would have expected rage, hurt, tears, an eviction notice—and somehow, they might have been better.
More alive.
At the same time, and for a terrible moment, he feels grateful that Wolfie is missing—the outcome of this conversation he is certain would be something else entirely if Olivia had not been whitewashed by the last nine days. Immediately though, this thought fills him with shame.
He can’t bear how empty and hollow she seems.
What a caricature of a partner he has become.
Olivia, his one true love, colourful above all the others. A kaleidoscope of astonishing things.
He feels suspended above himself: none of this feels real.
“I’m so sorry—” he starts, but Olivia waves a hand in front of her face, brushing everything behind his words away. She does not care.
“We can both do better,” is all she says. “When Wolfie is back.”
For a moment, he clings gratefully to the “we” in the sentiment—that they can work on this together. That Olivia wants to work on it too. That she’s not even blaming him, entirely.
Nick puts his head in his heads and starts quietly to cry. “I’m so sorry,” he mumbles, again, fingers pressing into his eyeballs, as though he might be able to stop not just the tears but the pain, the reality of it all. It all seems so completely senseless in this moment. All he ever wanted was his family. How did he mess it all up so much?
Olivia puts a hand tentatively on his shoulder. It’s not exactly a warm gesture, but it’s more than he would have expected in this moment. And it’s fitting, somehow. It’s a ginger movement, awkward, but an attempt at kindness, at saying, “we’re on the same team,” “we can help each other” and it makes Nick cry even harder. They sit like that, for a while.
Eventually, Nick reaches for a tissue, blows his nose. He looks at Olivia through messy red eyes.
“Olivia,” he says. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about Patricia.”
And saying it aloud—how ashamed, how unlovable, how foolish he had felt—somehow feels less like admitting his shortcomings and more like long-overdue relief.
It’s not until much, much later that Nick finally remembers the thought that has been eluding him, the tiny but significant thing that is not quite right: that his wife would never, ever, ever forget a detail like how much money was left to their child.
She wouldn’t forget what she gave Wolfie for lunch last week. Her mind is a steel trap of information filed and stored with impeccable precision. He has drawn on the impressive abilities of her memory for over a decade.
There was no chance whatsoever she would forget about—and thus fail to tell him about—two hundred thousand dollars.
44
April 1988
Marley is in seclusion.
Abby dreads seclusion. It is a hot, dark little room at the end of the corridor. It’s quieter there, but the darkness and the solitude presses down on him so fully that he feels like he is suffocating.
He is having difficulty thinking about Marley. He feels hot, his T-shirt clinging to him. He knows Marley will be screaming, but he can’t hear him from where he is. He wants Marley to be okay. He wants to help him. It’s not fair that Marley was taken away. Abby understands. It’s the noise, and the heat, and the tasks, all the tasks that they can’t keep up with, they can’t filter and follow all the instructions.
Marley was just tapping. Just tapping his pencil. The noise was pushing Abby over the edge too, but he knows it was helping Marley. Marley was tapping to cope. He wasn’t tapping to disrupt them. He wasn’t being naughty, like the teacher thought he was.
He wants to explain. He wants to tell the teacher. Marley is only eleven. Abby is only two years older than Marley, but he feels responsible, he wants to look after him. He wants to look after all the younger boys. He’s so big. He’s older, and they all turn hopeful eyes toward him like he can make it better, like he can be their spokesperson, like he can represent them. He wants to hold it together so badly and not let them down.
But the teacher is talking. The fan is clunking. The trucks are screeching and honking. And it’s so hot. So hot in this room.
A familiar vibration begins in his bones. There is a weird sensation, like his skull is too small for his brain, and his brain needs to get out, to escape. He starts rubbing at his arms. They feel tight, they feel too big, they feel too small. The roaring starts in his ears, and the teacher is in front of him, his mouth opening, words coming out, but Abby can only hear the roaring now. The other noises have morphed into stabbings, physical pain sh
ooting into his head, his torso. He feels like he is being sucked into a vacuum, a screaming, swirling vortex of light and noise and stabbing and nothingness.
He doesn’t know it, but he is screaming too, pounding his head against his desk, his arms jerking. Saliva runs down his chin. He needs it all to stop.
He just needs all the noise and all the violent, painful intrusions to his brain to stop.
In another world, far, far away from Abby’s one, their teacher, Brent, shouts for assistance. The teacher’s aides come running.
They see Abby shouting and banging; they see him refusing to stop. The other boys start to wail and rock.
The teachers need Abby to stop. He is setting off the other boys. He’s disrupting things. All three of them warn him. They shout and yell that he needs to stop it right this minute. They put their faces very close to his and try to look into his eyes, they shout closer to him, right in his face, so that he can hear them over all the noise. They shout in his face.
They see him refusing to listen.
They don’t see his wild eyes, his panic, his complete loss of control. They just see his failure to cooperate.
They see a very big boy, refusing to do as he is told.
They’re panicked and unprepared, they just need him to stop. But they’re a little bit angry too. They’re angry that he won’t listen; they’re angry that they’re in this job and nobody told them it would be like this, nobody told them what it was really like. “Prone restraint” was just a theory, an absolutely last resort solution.
Nobody told them they’d be doing it every week.
Nobody told them how bad it would feel: this mixture of uncertainty, anger, fear, and lack of training.
They’re pulling him from his chair.
For his own safety, they will tell police, later.
Tom, the youngest aide, kneels on Abby’s back, his knees pressing into his shoulder blades.
Kieran straddles his legs.
Abby continues to bang his head into the floor, and Brent presses a knee into the back of his head.
Just to stop him from hurting himself.
Abby pees himself, and vomits, but they have to keep him safe, they have to stop him banging his head, so they hold him just a bit longer.
Just a little bit more.
45
Disappearance Day – Monday, Week One
Olivia stares at her face in the mirror.
She takes deep breaths, watching the lines around her mouth, willing them to smooth out to something calmer, something prettier.
Wolfie is on the trampoline, and she should go to him. She should apologise for screaming. She should explain that she’s just tired; that she shouldn’t shout at him like that.
That she loves him.
That she wants to spend time with him.
But she’s not feeling those things, not yet. The familiar guilt creeps in, clouding her eyes. She watches her frown deepening, the lines on her face becoming more pronounced. The little turn at the corners of her mouth resettling into something angry. Spiteful, even.
She wishes Wolfie would come back inside. That he would apologise for not helping her. That he’d pack up his trucks, quietly and efficiently, and trot over to the kitchen bench, eager to help. That they would stir batter and cut cookies together like Olivia had imagined they would this morning, when she was helping him pick out his clothes.
Like she had imagined they would as her stomach swelled and changed with the bulk of him, growing inside her.
She had imagined so many possibilities.
Olivia stares at herself in the mirror. Minutes tick by, and she can see the conflict working across her face.
The desire to go to Wolfie, and repair things.
The desire to leave him there, and punish him.
To wait for him to feel bad for not helping her, and come back to her, contrite.
She stares in the mirror, stares and stares, being pulled one way, and then another.
She’s so tired.
Her eyelids start to droop.
The turmoil inside her makes her want to lie down. Just close her eyes. Just for a few minutes.
Perhaps she could rest, and Wolfie could think about his behaviour.
Just for a few more minutes.
Just enough to feel her absence and want to make it right with her.
Olivia blinks in the mirror.
The house is completely silent.
Beyond the house is completely silent too.
Olivia feels the pull of her bed. It’s just a few short steps away. What would be the harm?
Wolfie was on the trampoline. He wouldn’t talk to strangers—he was far too nervous. Once upon a time, perhaps, but not now. Now there was no chance of him being lured into a stranger’s car with kindnesses or lollies.
She kicks off her shoes and slips under her doona, the bamboo sheets caressing her skin, her head sinking into her pillow with so much relief it seemed a miracle she’d been able to keep herself upright all morning at all.
She closes her eyes.
She rests for a minute.
She thinks she really must get up and go to Wolfie. But she’s so tired.
Her bed is so comfortable.
Just a few more minutes.
Just a little bit more.
46
When the call comes, Olivia knows.
There is wailing, and rushing, and hushed voices.
Olivia and Bing are bundled through the next-door neighbour’s front door, whispered thanks, no explanations. And Olivia’s mother and father tear off in the old, rusted, noisy station wagon with barely a word.
Margie from next door is soft and terrified. She speaks in whispers, turns the television on, gives Bing and Olivia ice cream on the couch. Olivia sees tears in her eyes. She is older than Amelia: her kids have already left home. She has a tight perm and soft folds of skin above the waist of her jeans, and Olivia wants to burrow her head in her bosom and sob and sob and sob.
No one has told her anything yet, but they don’t have to. Olivia already knows.
Something’s happened to Abby.
47
Disappearance Day
“Hello, Wolfie.”
The man had been sitting in his car over the road.
He had not intended to talk to the child, he really hadn’t.
He had seen him here before.
Well, that was not true. That made it sound like an accident; that he had just happened upon him on this street, a mere coincidence. If he was really honest, he had come here to watch before. He had sat in this very street, shaded by a youthful plain tree, his window open just enough to hear snatches of conversations.
Wolfie with his mother, examining something in the garden. Asking about where the beetles lived, or how the bird died.
He’d watched Olivia, with the hard set of her mouth, the stiff way she held her shoulders when she was angry.
He couldn’t really say why he kept coming back. He had told himself that this was the last time.
But then the child had emerged, scuffing his shoes, kicking idly at rocks on the path down the side of the house.
He’d watched him for a while, waiting for Olivia to trail behind him, pointing things out to him patiently, or telling him what to do or what she wanted, her voice hard—he could tell from the first moment of seeing her which it would be that day. Soft Olivia, or hard Olivia.
Wolfie looked forlorn. His path was aimless. He wasn’t making a beeline for anything. He kicked stones and plucked leaves, wandering closer and closer to the front gate. His lips were moving, but the man could not hear any words.
Wolfie stopped beside a camellia tree, idly pulling petals off a bright red flower. He paused midway through to wipe at his eyes, and the man squinted, trying to see better.
Was Wolfie crying?
The man scanned the front yard and the wedge of back garden he could see. There was no sign of Olivia.
He wound his window down a little
bit more and listened carefully.
It was one of those beautiful summer days where everything was perfectly still. The sky was blue from horizon to horizon. A faint hum—bees, or distant traffic?—did nothing to disturb the peacefulness of it. The sheer expanse of sky and the perfect temperature made the man’s heart soar.
The beauty of this day.
The stretching, empty, lovely solitude.
And this lovely boy, all alone.
The man inched forward until he was level with Wolfie’s driveway.
Wolfie didn’t notice him. He was staring down at some red petals in his hand, his face blank, his eyes seeing something far, far away.
The man wound his window down completely and rested his arm along the length it. He hesitated for a moment. And then:
“Hello, Wolfie,” he said.
Inexplicably, the boy smiled.
48
Tuesday, Week Two
Olivia is watching Nick quietly.
She’s trying to make sense of everything he told her. She doesn’t think even Nick understands it. But it’s something. A starting point.
“Why did you never tell me?” she’d asked, bewildered. She knew Patricia wasn’t great, but she had no idea how bizarrely their relationship had ended.
“I think I was ashamed. That someone I trusted…I misjudged so terribly. Like, I didn’t even notice she didn’t love me. What kind of an idiot doesn’t notice such a thing?”
Nick looks down, his features twisting into something unfamiliar. Bitterness, Olivia thinks.
“So…what happened?”
“I got over it. I fought for contact with Charlie. I don’t think she expected that. I think in her weird little world, where people were disposable, it hadn’t even occurred to her that I might be invested in having a relationship with my child. She tried to throw money at the problem, but I think even her parents were on my side. They wouldn’t give her money to keep pushing it through the courts. She eventually agreed to shared care. She hated it, though. It wasn’t quite what she had in mind.”