The Lost Boy

by S. A. McEwen

  Nick pauses for a while. “I don’t think I ever really processed it, though. I thought I had dealt with it, moved on, forgiven myself. But then Wolfie came along. And all your time suddenly shifted to doing things for Wolfie. With Wolfie. And I think deep down I was terrified that you were choosing your kid over me, too. It made me question whether I was really loved. But instead of dealing with that, I tried to hide it, too. I just tried to be a good dad, a good husband, accommodate everyone else’s needs. Because I think I was really scared that if I made too much noise, asserted what I wanted, that I wouldn’t be worth it anymore.”

  Olivia looks thoughtful. “But you did assert yourself,” she says. “Especially with Charlie. About how to parent him.”

  Nick thinks about this for a while. “Did I, really, though?” he says, eventually. “I think I was just fighting for a corner where I had some clout. I felt like I didn’t get to make any choices, about Wolfie, about us. I felt like you just took the reins after Wolfie was born. I just had to go along for the ride. And I know it’s a copout. I know that. But maybe if I felt like you had all the power, parenting Charlie was one little corner of the world where I got to have more say. I’m not saying I was right. I’m just saying I can see how it happened. It was lazy and selfish, sure. But if I’m honest, I can see how I ended up there. I think I resented you for the hoops that I was making myself jump through. So I was trying to control something. However small or petty.”

  Olivia looks doubtful. For a moment, she looks like she is going to say something, but Nick goes on:

  “It was eating away at me, and I didn’t even know it. If you’re always thinking about other people and you don’t believe they’re also thinking about you. So when Hannah hit on me, I felt like I deserved to be wanted. I deserved to have some fun. I felt like no one else seemed to care, why should I be the only one caring? Why should I be the only one working so hard to look out for everyone else’s needs? Why shouldn’t I be selfish? It sounds so stupid. And of course, I wasn’t really looking out for your needs. I was second-guessing them. And now that I’m saying it, it seems so obvious that I could have just talked to you about it. Told you how I felt, what I was scared of. But I really thought it might be the same. That I wasn’t good enough. That I was superfluous. That—” Here Nick chokes up, the sentiment—finally acknowledged—overwhelming him.

  “That Wolfie was who you really wanted, not me.”

  Olivia hesitates. It all feels like too much. Wolfie is gone. Nick is crying on their couch. She feels overloaded, unable to compute everything Nick is saying. She really just wants to put it aside and deal with it later. But isn’t that exactly what he’s telling her? That he feels like he comes last?

  She reaches out, tentatively, and puts her hand over Nick’s. Lets him cry for a while.

  Is this where it all went wrong?

  Is talking about it how they can make it right?

  Finally, Nick looks up. “I think what I really wanted was a better connection with you. But it didn’t seem possible. So I opted for any connection. And I should have come to you. I should have told you how I felt. But I didn’t want to ask questions because I was scared of what the answer might be. But that’s no excuse. Because the answers would have freed us both. I wanted to avoid how bad it felt, but all I’ve done is make the pain much worse.”

  Olivia hesitates. She’s still not sure. She squeezes his hand and squeezes her eyes shut.

  Later, Nick is showing Charlie patiently how to improve on his coffee-making. He looks haggard and old. But there is something compelling in his actions. He shows Charlie how to level the coffee grounds, how tight to pack them. How to adjust the grinder if he wants the coffee to pour differently. He smiles at Charlie sadly and squeezes his shoulder, somehow encapsulating both his love for his child and his regret that he can’t do better in that moment. In the moment where their child is missing and their hope is seeping away from them like blood.

  Something shifts inside Olivia.

  She knows perhaps it’s her grief, her emptiness. But it feels like seeing the same old thing anew. With fresh eyes, or clearer eyes, perhaps. Eyes stripped away of all the things that matter less.

  Even battered by life, even in great pain himself, Nick is trying to look after them. He is watching her and Charlie, wondering what they need from him. Trying to hold the fort, and keep them all afloat, or whatever metaphor Olivia is stretching for. The one that equals goodness, and kindness, and helping. Of holding them all up.

  Even as he reckons with the flaws inside himself. Even, perhaps, if it’s the flaws that motivate him.

  He has made mistakes, sure. There’s Bing, for a start. But if Nick made a mistake there, Olivia did, too. And one could argue that Olivia’s error was the more calculated, the more concerning.

  The more unforgivable one.

  Now, her heart lurches in her chest. An orchestrated affair. Keeping secret a strange inheritance. Somewhere deep inside, Olivia knows whose transgressions are the more deplorable. Any sane partner would leave you for things like that, wouldn’t they?

  She yearns toward the idea of starting again, being better, doing better. She wants to tell Nick how crazy things got.

  She got.

  How crazy she got.

  She wants his forgiveness and reassurance that they’re okay.

  That she’s okay.

  But she watches him trying to help Charlie, she feels him trying to support her, and she vows instead she will just do better. She will make it up to him. She can’t tell him, or they will truly break. Forever.

  “Would you like a coffee, Olivia?”

  Charlie’s question startles her. She can see the uncertainty on his face, the eagerness. For the hundredth time, she wonders if she imagined it all. He looks like he is longing for her to say yes, and to enjoy his coffee, and approve of him.

  She feels like she is coming up from under water, from murkiness, from not being able to breathe.

  She smiles gently at Charlie.

  “That’s very kind of you, thank you, Charlie,” she says. Her eyes flick to Nick’s, and there’s something there that stops her heart. It’s gratitude, that she’s trying, too.

  Gratitude and hopefulness.

  That their future could look a little different.

  That if Wolfie is just returned to them, if he is found and fine and back where he belongs, if the world is pieced back together again, then they might all work hard enough to make it okay.

  49

  Tuesday, Week Two

  Detective Rolands hangs up the phone slowly.

  Her Sydney colleague had been surprised.

  “I’ve spoken to the sister, too. Neither of them mentioned a brother,” Rolands had said. She had just wanted someone to go speak to the parents. She’d had a chat to them over the phone, but felt like someone in person might get them talking more.

  She didn’t have any particular questions. They were elderly, and supportive, by all accounts. But you talk to everyone you can lay your hands on in a missing child investigation. Maybe they’d remember something, some little fact that seemed irrelevant but wasn’t.

  And it was just the merest happenstance that Detective Rose knew who they were.

  “Uh, I met them,” she had said, wracking her brain for the context. “I was on the front desk, just helping out over lunch. Let me see.” She tapped away at her computer, the phone jammed against her ear.

  “Missing child. Nineteen eighty-eight,” she’d said, triumphant. “He ran away from a special school in Sydney. Another child died, a student. Abby disappeared immediately afterwards. There was a big search, but he was presumed dead. The school had stated he wouldn’t survive on his own. Said he was a bit simple. Got a whole lot of terrible press. No charges were ever laid. The kid who died had been held down by staff because he was violent, or something, and then a whole heap of parents came forward with complaints about how their kids were treated. Most of them had been restrained in similar ways for m
inor things, like their stims, tapping or flapping and stuff. The school was shut down. I didn’t get a lot of the details. They come in most years, apparently.”

  Rose tapped away some more.

  “We found an Adam with the right birth date at an address in Melbourne. Short, not Shorten, though. Adam Short. Mixed up with some guy who was in and out of juvie, a handful of minor offences as an adult. Shoplifting, that kind of thing. But of course, just a first name and a DOB, it was a long shot. I said we’d send an officer round and see if it was the right kid. He’s an adult now, of course. Forty-four, forty-five. I told them if it was the right guy we’d give him their details if he wanted to make contact, but that I couldn’t do any more.

  “Anyway, wrong guy. Or at least, he denied any knowledge of them. Gave the officer pretty short shrift, apparently. I did give the parents a follow-up call, and they’ve been calling me ever since. Wanting us to go again. Wanting to send letters. Wanting the address to go and see for themselves. Wanting to know why charges were never laid against the teachers involved. Wanting contact with the family of the kid who died. They seemed a bit of a mess, to be honest. The school isn’t even in operation anymore. I doubt anyone can remember anything with enough certainty to be useful.”

  But Rolands was no longer even listening.

  Two missing kids, in the one family?

  “Give me that address. I might just go and have a chat to this Adam,” she’d said, already standing, already swiping her keys off the bench.

  As she drives, she curses Olivia. Why wouldn’t she mention a missing brother? Rolands can’t work out how the two missing boys might fit together, but it’s certainly bloody odd enough to look at further. Why would Olivia keep that from her?

  Dog-legging through suburban Melbourne, she wonders about the Shorten/Hitchens family. It wasn’t that they were more disconnected or more broken than any of the other families she came across in her line of work.

  It’s just that they didn’t seem to know it.

  50

  Daniel Shorten closes the door behind the police officers harder than he intended to.

  Amelia is on the couch, unmoving, and Olivia and Bing creep out from wherever they were loitering and slink around her like stray cats—wary and hopeful. They’ve overheard enough. Still, Olivia wants to be sure.

  “What does ‘scaling back’ mean?” she asks her mother. Amelia doesn’t answer.

  Olivia waits for a while, then narrows her eyes, her face becoming harder. Her little chin juts out, somewhere between defiant and resolute. “We’ll look for him. We’ll look for him every day, for the rest of our lives, and never stop until we find him,” she declares, watching her mother closely.

  Olivia is very careful not to say any more. Not “Why did you send him to that horrible place?” or “Why did you force him to leave us?” and certainly not “If you had kept him at home, none of this would have happened!” She is only nine, but already she knows that while all of those things are valid, saying them aloud might break her mother.

  It takes her a long, long time to realise that her mother is already broken, no matter what she does or doesn’t say.

  When Daniel declares they are moving to Sydney later that year, Abby starts to be erased.

  There is no bedroom for him in the new house.

  If his belongings remain, Olivia never sees them again. Once, crying, she shouts at Daniel, “We don’t even have any pictures of him! It’s like you want him to be gone!” and the back of Daniel’s hand across her face is an explosion, a revelation—Olivia comes to understand that silence does not mean nothing. That silence, in fact, might harbour more pain than a person has the resources to cope with. And if it’s not pain, then what is her father so angry about?

  Even Bing, with whom she tries desperately to keep Abby alive with, to honour him, to not forget—even Bing seems just fine without her brother. Approaching high school, her attention is taken up by boys and makeup and styling her hair. “Don’t you ever think about him?” she asks Bing once, and Bing tosses her hair—dyed red, for the first time—and says, “If he hadn’t been so difficult, none of this would have happened. He should have had better self-control.” Bing snaps her compact mirror closed with an air of finality, and her eyes meet Olivia’s. “You’d be better off looking forward, not backward,” she tells her, and for a moment Olivia aches towards something deep and careful in Bing’s eyes, but it’s gone as soon as Olivia registers it, Bing’s eyes sliding away from her, her face going blank.

  Olivia thinks she hears Daniel in her words, but maybe she just hears coping.

  Amelia doesn’t comment on the red hair, or the makeup, and Olivia wonders where Bing gets the money to pay for these things. Once, Bing doesn’t come home from school until after midnight, and Olivia pesters Amelia all night, every hour, her panic consuming her. Amelia is indifferent, unreachable. “She’ll be fine; she’ll be home soon.”

  To Olivia, everything is exaggerated, a million feelings and fears fitting onto a pin head, everything connected to everything else. But the rest of her family seem to tilt in the opposite direction—everything stretched far, far apart, disconnected.

  She struggles to remember Abby, and they struggle to forget.

  51

  Tuesday, Week Two

  Olivia huddles in her en suite and calls Paul’s offices.

  Furtive, she thinks to herself.

  After barely being able to get out of bed for days, there is enough panic to drive her into action. Now, she has some purpose—a family to hold together. If only Wolfie would come back.

  She’s always been able to achieve things against monumental odds.

  Paul is very busy, but she knows he will take her call.

  This is the way they have always worked. High-school sweethearts, Olivia knows she takes advantage a little bit. But Paul never seems to mind.

  “Don’t lodge anything,” she tells him. “Destroy it all.”

  After she hangs up, she has a flash of doubt. Is she making the right decision? The uncertainty weighs on her.

  Secrets. Misunderstandings.

  Charlie, mostly. Charlie in her life, in her personal space, forever.

  Except—it’s not forever. It’s just for three more years.

  Long days, fast years.

  Is it the disequilibrium of Wolfie being missing? she wonders. Is she clinging onto something comforting and known in a period of weakness, of despair?

  Is she throwing away her one chance at a peaceful life in the country, away from Nick and Charlie and anxiety and the daily grind of work-parent-life-admin-bed?

  But her mind has not always been her friend.

  She lets her heart pull her along, for a change.

  She finds Nick exactly where she left him.

  She crawls back alongside him on the couch.

  She burrows under his arm.

  She wonders, if they can just find Wolfie, and if she never tells him what she has done, if she can live with the half-truths left between them.

  Three long years.

  “Nick,” she says, her voice urgent, breathless. “When Wolfie’s back, I want us to find a therapist. I want to talk about us, and Patricia. And Charlie. I need you to be able to talk about the things that worry me about Charlie. I need a professional to help me, to help us. To move forward.”

  She waits for Nick to answer, and holds her breath.

  52

  Tuesday, Week Two

  Abby looks apologetically at his partner, who is gaping at him, his face etched with shock and fear.

  “I didn’t mean to. I mean. It just happened.”

  A pause.

  “I mean, he wanted to come. It was like he knew me.”

  Ray continues to stare at Abby, a wild look in his eyes.

  They’re standing in the kitchen of their shabby one-bedroom apartment. Wolfie is playing with some toy cars which Abby had procured a few days before.

  Usually, Abby works in the local library fil
ing books three days a week. He still can’t read with ease, and he is laboriously slow. But he was placed there through employment services, with additional supports.

  This week, he has called in sick every day.

  Ray doesn’t match the stereotype of a truckie—he is small, and quiet, and thoughtful. Today, though, he is frightened, and fear can breed anger. Abby squirms in front of him, turning this way and that.

  “Haven’t you seen the news?” Ray asks, his voice faint. He leans against the kitchen counter and stares at Wolfie. His eyes cross back to Abby, who looks panicked and pale.

  “I wasn’t sure what to do,” he says. He looks like a frightened rabbit, terrified that Ray will yell at him, or—even if Ray’s perfectly silent about it—be angry with him nevertheless.

  Abby’s vulnerable innocence softens Ray’s anger—which isn’t even really anger. Just panic, too, that everything they have worked so hard for—this flat, their anonymous, under-the-radar life—could be snatched from them at any moment. Though Abby miraculously managed to stay out of trouble his entire life, Ray was in and out of the justice system for most of his, even with Johnny taking him under his wing and trying to guide him in the right direction.

  Sometimes Ray wonders what his life would have been like if Johnny had been his dad, from his very first day.

  It never helps to think like that, though.

  Things only really turned around for Ray when he met Abby. Just like Ray himself a few years before, Abby had arrived under their bridge, and crumpled against the wall. Ray had immediately started to rise, to go to him, but Johnny touched his arm, and Ray had sat back down.