by Nicole Trope
‘I understand, Detective Kade, but it’s very much against protocol.’
‘Yes, well, it’s done now. Don’t blame Constable Mara. They only had a couple of constables there at the time so she wasn’t to know. Daniel not being there is not hampering the investigation, Detective, and it’s not like we live in another state. I strongly believe that after everything he’s been through, he needs time to settle in and recover a little. Children do better in interviews when they feel safe.’
‘Yes, but he’s old enough to give us a fairly accurate reporting of what happened, and the investigation is going to be difficult.’
‘I understand that.’
‘We need to know why he wasn’t hurt.’
‘Jesus,’ spits Megan.
‘I’m sorry, that sounds terrible. Of course it’s better that he wasn’t hurt, but it is strange that he’s not burned in any way, unless he wasn’t in the house, but only near it when it caught fire. Perhaps I could come to Sydney tomorrow to conduct an interview.’
‘No,’ says Michael.
‘But it’s really important—’
‘Detective Wardell,’ Michael enunciates her surname with exaggerated care. He scrunches his face and wraps his hand tightly around his wine glass. ‘I am very aware that you need to get as much information as you can from him. I can assure you that you will have a chance to interview him once he’s a little settled. My wife needed to take her son home. She has waited six years for him to walk back into her life. I can assure you that we’ll get the DNA sample done and then we will give this child, because he is just a child, a little time to adjust to an entirely new life.’
‘Okay then, sir. Have a good night. We’ll be in touch soon.’
Michael ends the call. ‘You know, they’re right, Megs, we probably shouldn’t have taken him home.’
‘Yeah, well, as you said, it’s done now.’
‘You’ll have to stop off at one of the hospitals to give a sample. If you can, do it first thing tomorrow and take those forms with you when you go.’
‘Yes, sir,’ says Megan with a smile.
‘Drink your wine,’ Michael says, laughing.
Megan does, and as she finishes her pizza, she allows a peaceful lightness to descend. Her son is home. Daniel is home.
Ten
One day since Daniel’s return
Megan is in the kitchen feeding Evie some apple and rice cereal mixture. She had peeked into Daniel’s room when Evie had woken up, holding her dark-haired daughter on her hip, seeing him sprawled on the bed, one foot dangling off the side. As she’d looked at her sleeping son, she’d decided that it was best to let him rest while she got Evie ready to drop off at her mother’s.
In truth she had looked in on him all through the night, getting up to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom or soothe Evie back to sleep; she had not been able to resist opening the door to his bedroom to simply reassure herself that he was there. He was actually there. She could not believe the miracle of his presence, could not believe that each time she opened the door, she could make out his shape curled in his bed. The racing-car bed was no longer empty. She remembered that in the first few weeks after Greg kidnapped him, she would wake up and stretch in her bed while running through all the things she needed to remember for the day, only to be hit with the crushing realisation that there was nothing she needed to do for Daniel because he was not there. She had shed rivers of tears, and now he was there, right there. It was incredible.
Her own sleep had been light and troubled. She had sunk into nightmarish scenes where Daniel was burned alive in the shack in the woods and Greg had survived to tell her that he had finally taken her son to a place he could never return from. When she’d woken up, she had felt only sheer relief that her despised ex-husband was the one who was gone. Then she had felt sick and guilty because Daniel had lost his father.
‘What did Detective Wardell mean when she said the bones were black-burnt?’ she had asked Michael just before she fell asleep.
‘You don’t want to know that, Megs. I don’t want you to think about it.’
‘Please, Michael.’
Michael sighed. ‘Bodies burned in a fire can be well preserved, meaning they’ve been protected by something falling on them or they’ve been under something, or they can be semi-burnt or black-burnt or blue-grey-burnt or blue-grey-white-burnt. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: degrees of burning from the least to the most. If they’re well preserved or semi-burnt, it’s easy to get DNA from them, but if they’re black-burnt or worse, it becomes more difficult. The DNA can be highly degraded. That’s why this process is going to take a few weeks.’
‘But they know it’s Greg – Daniel told them, he told us.’
‘They need a formal identification. It’s the same with Daniel: they know it’s him and you’ve confirmed that, but they will still use DNA. They don’t simply take people at their word. They’ll probably get you to try and remember who Greg’s dentist was so they can get some dental records as well. They need to try and determine how exactly he died.’
‘He got burned in a fire. Isn’t that how?’
‘Maybe, or maybe he was dead before the fire started.’
‘What?’
‘It’s all just supposition, Megs. I’m not saying I know anything. That’s what the investigation is for.’
Michael had closed his eyes and fallen asleep almost instantly but Megan’s mind had been crowded with images of burned flesh and bones. She had been grateful for Evie’s early-morning cries saving her from any more dark dreams.
As she feeds Evie she listens for some movement from Daniel’s room, but so far she hasn’t heard a thing. She is desperate for him to wake up, so excited that she feels like she is the child.
‘You like that, don’t you, darling, yes you do, you do,’ she says to Evie, who is having a lot more success with solid food this morning.
She is relishing every moment of Evie’s babyhood. Finding out she was pregnant two weeks before her wedding to Michael had been surprising, but she had gone from shock to delight in a matter of minutes. She had kept the news for their wedding night, sure of Michael’s ecstatic reaction. ‘Champagne,’ he had said, picking up the phone to call room service at the small boutique hotel in the mountains where they were staying. ‘A very small glass of Champagne for my beautiful bride, who is giving me the gift of a child.’
She turns in her chair to grab a cloth off the counter to wipe Evie’s messy face, and Daniel is standing there, almost on top of her. Her shriek of surprise makes Evie cry. ‘Oh, oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, baby,’ she says, standing and picking Evie up and bouncing her as she wipes her face. ‘It’s okay, look, it’s just Daniel, it’s Daniel.’
‘Just Daniel,’ he whispers.
He stands very still, watching her coo and comfort Evie as she tries to get her to calm down. He stares first at Megan and then at Evie, without seeming to register either of them at all.
Finally, Evie allows herself to be comforted and seems contented with a rusk in her high chair. Megan turns her attention to Daniel, reaching out for him, wanting to hug him, but he steps back quickly. She drops her arms, feeling physically rebuked – but looking at him standing in her kitchen, dressed in his filthy clothes from the day before, she is unable to resist some form of physical contact. She steps forward and gives his shoulder a squeeze.
‘Hello, darling,’ she whispers. ‘Did you sleep well?’
‘I was tired,’ he says.
‘I’m sure you were. Yesterday was a long day.’
‘Long day,’ he repeats as though he is just learning the words.
Megan finds herself flustered and uncomfortable so she smiles inanely at him until he looks away at some pictures on the wall.
‘That one was in the house with the fountain,’ he says, and she turns to see a picture of four-year-old Daniel in his paddling pool.
‘Oh yes, it was.’ She’s surprised that he has remembered something
from so long ago. ‘You loved that paddling pool. I think you spent more time in there than anywhere else during the summer.’
‘The paddling pool was in the garden.’
‘It was,’ agrees Megan, finding herself slipping into the same monotone he is using.
‘If you hadn’t made him get divorced, we would still live in that house.’ The words are not accusatory, simply factual.
‘Um… I suppose we would.’
‘Yeah, we would.’
She would like to explain to him, as she had done many times before he was taken, sugar-coating the truth, the reasons for her and Greg’s divorce. But standing and looking at her twelve-year-old son, she realises that his first morning home is not the best time for that. She decides to focus on getting the day started instead.
He has slept right through from the night before, without any more food or a shower, and as he stands in front of her, rooted to one spot in the kitchen, she notes the sour, unwashed smell coming off him along with the dark, burned smell from the fire. His feet are still filthy and she is worried about bacteria getting into his cuts.
‘Would you like to shower or eat breakfast first?’ she asks brightly.
Daniel meets her eyes for a moment and then he focuses on the fridge behind her. ‘Whatever will make you happy,’ he murmurs.
‘Oh…’ Megan begins but then she stops. The simple words are familiar. Familiar and frightening. ‘Whatever will make you happy,’ was a favourite choice of phrase for Greg.
And just like that, her ex-husband is in her head. He could be standing in her kitchen looking at her with his almond-shaped eyes that on his son are more green than brown in colour this morning. She can feel him assessing her, judging her from behind his son’s eyes.
She reaches out for her kitchen counter, needing something to hold onto, gripping it tightly as she tries to control her emotions. That phrase… Those words were Greg’s way of leading her into a trap. ‘Whatever will make you happy,’ he would say, seemingly uninterested in whatever decision she was about to make, and then, without fail, over and over, she would find herself falling for the idea that her happiness was all that he wanted, whether it was a simple discussion over what kind of takeaway to order or something more complicated like whether or not she should go back to work when Daniel started preschool.
‘I really feel like Chinese,’ she would say to Greg if they were discussing what to have for dinner.
‘Really?’ he would ask as though the idea was a startling one. ‘You do know how much salt and sugar is in a Chinese takeaway, don’t you? I would have thought that with the weight you’re battling, you’d want to cut down on that sort of thing. I mean, it’s not something I care about but I did think it mattered to you. You go ahead and do what suits you though, whatever will make you happy.’
Megan would find herself backtracking, apologising for her appalling choice and almost begging him to make the decision of what they would have. Usually she would land up with a small serving of sushi while he would get a burger and chips. Before her divorce she had lived in a house she didn’t like, driven a car she hated because it was too big, and never had a holiday to a destination she wanted to go to. She had worked for only a few hours a week despite wanting to work more, and she had never bought an item of clothing unless she had received his approval for it. But everything she did had seemingly been her choice because Greg had always said, ‘Whatever will make you happy.’
No matter how many times she reminded herself that it was a trap, she still stepped right into it, wanting to believe he had genuine intentions, not wanting to see him for the man he truly was. The one time she had confronted him about it, he had called her paranoid. ‘I only want to make you happy, Megan – how could you ever doubt that? You’re my life, my love. How could you not know that?’
As the years passed, she understood, logically, how she could doubt that, but it had taken her a long time to make the move she knew she needed to make. And even when she had finally told Greg that she wanted a divorce, he had been furious and aghast that she did not love him enough to know that she was everything to him. Megan had questioned whether or not this was the case, vacillating between being upset at herself for leaving a man who loved her so much and applauding herself for it, until the day Greg took Daniel.
That was the day she understood without a shadow of a doubt that Greg’s version of love was only about suffocating control. She had been his puppet to manipulate, and when she’d failed to perform as expected, he’d had to find another way to wrench back his power. That realisation, over everything else, was the one thing that had made her the most fearful of all for Daniel because she’d understood that her son would now have to be the one to dance when his strings were pulled. How much of what Greg felt for his son was actual love, and how much was something else entirely? For six years she had uttered the same mantra every night. He took him because he loved him. He took him because he loved him. He won’t hurt him. He won’t hurt him. Please, God, let him not hurt him.
She stands up straight as she recovers her equilibrium. It has taken her years to learn how to state what she wants without leaving any room for discussion, and she banishes thoughts of Greg from her mind.
‘I think you should shower first and then I need to change those plasters and clean up your feet,’ she says.
‘Fine,’ he says lightly. He turns and walks away.
He returns twenty minutes later with a clean body, dressed in the same clothes with his hair still dirty and tangled.
‘I think we’ll get a haircut first thing this morning,’ she says. ‘Actually, we need to stop at the hospital. They want a DNA sample from you.’
‘Why?’
Megan debates with herself for a moment, deciding how much to tell him. She could say it’s just to confirm that he is her son, but that sounds ridiculous. She knows he’s her son. She doesn’t want to bring up Greg again but after a moment realises she has no choice. She would rather Daniel hear it from her than from anyone else.
‘It’s to help identify the… remains they found.’
‘They won’t find anything. It was a bad fire. Fire destroys everything. There’ll be nothing left.’
‘But, Daniel, do you remember what Constable Mara said yesterday? There’s always something left.’
‘Not always. I know about fire. There’s not always something left.’
Megan searches for the right words. Daniel looks at the floor, scratching through his tangled hair.
‘Sweetie, they have found something. They have found… bones.’
Daniel’s head shoots up, his face white.
‘I know, sweetheart. I know how hard it is, and it’s okay to cry or yell or get angry. It’s okay, whatever you feel it’s okay.’ She lifts her arm to reach out to him but lets her hand drop onto the counter. He doesn’t want to be touched.
His face twists and he slams his hand down on the counter right next to hers. Then he points his finger at her, so close he is almost touching her face. ‘This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for you. He would be here now and we would be a real family!’
Megan resists the urge to step back.
‘Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry that you have to go through this. We can leave it, Daniel. We don’t have to get the DNA swab done today. We can leave this whole day and you can just have some quiet time to think about Dad, to remember him, take some time to think about him – and it’s okay to cry, it’s always okay to cry.’
Daniel stares at her, meeting her eyes for a moment, and then he simply shrugs, drops his arm and steps away from her. He looks at the food she has laid out for him and then he goes to sit down on a stool by the kitchen counter. ‘He said only pussies cry. Sometimes you need to man up.’ His voice has gone back to neutral.
Megan notes that he has not called Greg ‘Dad’, only ‘he’, and she wonders at this, at how callous it sounds. She finds herself battling surreal confusion and wonders if his outburst even
happened at all. When did he start using words like ‘pussies’, words I always told him were ‘ugly words’?
‘That’s not true at all, Daniel. It’s okay to miss your father, it’s okay to cry.’
‘Stop telling me how to feel,’ he says, and she realises it’s time to back off. There is so much more to say, so many things to discuss, but her son’s eyes tell her he has shut down. He is protecting himself, she assumes. It’s easier not to feel anything at all.
‘Okay, hospital then a haircut,’ Megan says, irritating herself with her desperate cheerfulness.
Daniel reaches up and touches his hair. ‘Whatever will make you happy,’ he says.
‘Well, it’s not really for me. There’s no way you’ll be allowed to have hair that long at school.’
He shrugs again as he surveys the kitchen counter.
She has laid out a bowl of cereal and some chopped-up fruit, which had been his standard breakfast at six years old. But unsure of what he eats now, she has added two slices of toast and a packaged waffle, along with a row of toppings for him to choose from.
He eats everything, sometimes holding the next pieces of food in each hand as he chews, including the toast and the waffle, which he smears with butter and jam.
‘Are you still hungry?’ she asks when he’s done.
Daniel looks up from his empty plate and meets her eyes but then his gaze shifts to a spot just behind her. She watches him carefully, ignoring the urge to give him a shake and say, ‘Just answer me like my son, like the boy you used to be.’
It takes him a minute to answer and she doesn’t take her eyes off him. His face twitches once or twice but his eyes stay focused on the spot behind her. She can see evidence of something going on inside him. He opens his mouth to reply, and Megan knows that it was going to be, ‘Whatever will make you happy,’ but then he closes his mouth again and Megan witnesses the battle going on inside him – between what he thinks he should say and what he wants to say.
