The Ties That Bind

by Lexi Landsman

  ‘The tryout is in two weeks at Tiger Stadium, on Saturday at nine am. We look forward to seeing him there.’

  A knot formed in David’s chest. Just like that, Matthew’s opportunity came and went.

  ‘Mister Hamilton, are you there?’

  David felt like punching a wall. ‘Mister Barnes, I really appreciate the offer. And Matthew would be thrilled. In fact, he would do anything to be on that field. It’s all he’s ever dreamed of.’ He took a deep, painful breath. ‘But he can’t right now.’

  Jake Barnes sounded frustrated at David’s elusive answer. ‘I don’t understand. If this is what he wants, what’s the problem?’

  David hesitated. If he told the truth, could Matthew’s health affect his chances of trying out in future years? He didn’t want his son always to be looked upon as the one who has, had, leukaemia. But if he didn’t tell him, then the scout would write Matthew off altogether.

  ‘You said Matthew’s got real talent, right?’

  ‘I did,’ Jake replied, confused.

  ‘So, can you make me a promise? Can you give him this opportunity next year?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that. Anything can happen in a year.’ Jake’s voice became clipped. ‘Is there a problem with making the tryout game on Saturday?’

  ‘Yes, there is.’ David paused. ‘My son can’t play that day. He can’t play at all right now.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mister Hamilton,’ Jake was growing increasingly impatient, ‘but I don’t know where you’re going with this. What’s the issue?’

  David hesitated and then spat out the truth. ‘My son has leukaemia. He’s having treatment now, but if you can give him a year, he’ll be fighting fit. He’ll be back on that field. Please, Mister Barnes … Jake,’ he pleaded, ‘Matthew needs something to fight for.’

  David stepped into his son’s hospital room. Matthew was re-reading, for the twelfth time, the Get Well card his class had sent him. David felt torn – would he reveal to him the good news only to crush his spirits in his next breath by telling him he couldn’t try out? It was like dangling a prize right in front of Matthew and telling him he couldn’t touch it.

  Matthew turned to him, his eyes so blue against his ghostly white skin. David wanted to desperately to see his son happy.

  ‘The scout called,’ David said.

  Matthew put the card down on the bed. He sat upright. For the first time in days, his mouth turned into a smile. ‘And? What did he say?’

  ‘He said …’ David paused, long and deliberately, as if he were a judge on a talent show. ‘He said that they want you to try out and that you were one of the best players he’d ever seen.’ Matthew beamed. It was such a relief to give some good news for once, to see his son’s smile light up his face.

  Matthew’s eyes grew wide. ‘I can’t believe it. He really said that?’ He stood on the bed and was about to jump when he looked at his IV drip and instead fist-pumped the air. ‘So, when do I try out?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ David said. ‘They’ve decided not to draft a team this year. Financial issues, new management,’ he said quickly. ‘So, they want you to try out this time next year, which is great ’cause that will give us plenty of time to practise.’ The lie came so easily that David almost believed it himself.

  ‘Why would they come watch my game if they weren’t going to put a team together?’

  David avoided his son’s eyes as he continued to lie. ‘They had planned on it but then things fell through. The club has had some management changes and apparently they’re quite disorganised, so they decided to put the list of potential players for next year instead.’

  Matthew sighed, the smile gone. ‘I know what will happen next year. Nothing! This year was my chance. There could be better, stronger players by next year.’ He fought back tears as he gazed at his reflection in the glass window, touching his balding head. ‘They wouldn’t pick me now. Look at me.’ He lay back on his bed, pulling the covers up over his face and sobbed.

  David sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Matty, I want you to believe me when I say that a year is a golden opportunity to perfect your skills. Think of all the training, all the drills, all the time we’ll have to really get you to the best of your ability.’ David was using every morsel of energy to keep sounding positive. ‘If you played that game like you did with your normal amount of training, imagine how much you would impress them if you had a whole year to hone your skills. You were born with talent, kid. It doesn’t just disappear. I would have killed to have played like you do when I was ten – even when I was in my late teens.’

  Matthew lifted the blanket off his face but kept his head turned away from David. ‘It feels like I’ll be in this hospital forever. Like everything will move on without me,’ he mumbled softly, wiping his nose with the edge of the blanket.

  ‘You’ll be out of here before you know it. For now, let’s focus on getting you better so you can get back on that field and show the scout what you’re made of. You’re my son, after all, and we’re made of tough stuff, buddy.’ He rubbed his son’s head then looked at his hand in shock. A clump of Matthew’s once-beautiful blond hair lay in his palm, leaving behind another balding patch.

  ‘Dad, how do you know I’m tough like you?’ He buried his face in his pillow.

  ‘I know with certainty,’ David said, ‘because you’re already tougher than I ever was at twice your age. Chin up, buddy.’ David playfully grabbed his son’s chin. ‘You have a hard few months ahead, but then it will all be over and you’ll have the rest of your life to show me how tough you really are.’

  David was relieved when his mother and father walked into the room because he knew they would shower Matthew with praise when they heard his news.

  As David listened to Matthew’s excited retelling of the scout’s call, he felt a tug of exhaustion. He was glad his parents were there so he could go home and get some much-needed sleep. His time with Mandy and Barry was usually spent relaying what the doctors had said, swapping what they now called ‘shifts’ by Matthew’s bedside, or quiet dinners during which they did everything possible to avoid the subject of illness.

  On his parents’ last trip to Miami over the summer, their house had been a hive of activity and noise. His mother had spent most of her time sunbaking on the deck – but now the only time she spent outdoors was travelling to and from the hospital.

  David left his parents with Matthew and arrived home to find Courtney practically pasted to her computer screen. She didn’t look up or even give him the slightest acknowledgement. Gone were the days where the first thing they did after a long day was kiss each other hello, or, at the very least, make eye contact.

  She had become obsessed with finding her birth parents.

  In her eyes, David was the pessimist, pinning his hopes on the treatment working while they waited for a donor match on the worldwide registry.

  ‘Found anything yet?’ he asked as he flicked off his shoes and flopped onto the couch. What he would give just to spend a few hours mindlessly watching sport, beer in hand.

  Courtney had turned the dining table into a makeshift desk with her laptop, papers and notepad spread around her. ‘All I’ve discovered is how much I don’t know. None of the agencies in Florida have any record of my adoption. I never thought this would be so hard.’

  ‘Just give it a bit more time. You’re bound to find the right one.’ Even though David thought she was wasting her time with the search, he recognised it was providing her with a distraction and sense of purpose.

  He sighed. ‘I feel lethargic. I needed a break from the hospital for a few hours.’

  Courtney said nothing in response and when he looked up, she was so fixed on the computer monitor that he wasn’t even sure she had been listening. ‘Why don’t you take a break from your laptop and come sit with me? Let’s just have fifteen minutes of a complete time out from everything.’

  Courtney’s tone was sharp. ‘David, can you keep it down? I’m trying to
concentrate.’

  David turned to face the black screen of the television as her fingers tapped furiously on the keyboard. The more absorbed she had become with her search, the more invisible David felt. It wasn’t that he needed her constant attention, but the weight of things they were afraid to say had taken refuge in their house. And it stood between them now. A wall of silence.

  After six hours on the phone, eight automated answering phone services, ten transfers to other numbers and three cut-offs Courtney discovered this: she had not been adopted through a local agency in Florida.

  So, now Courtney was taking matters into her own hands. She was in her father’s attic searching for any documentation of her adoption, and if that failed, she hoped to find something – anything – that might spark Frank’s memory. In her studies of art therapy, she had read about memory triggers. Things that people with memory loss might not remember on a conscious level but that elicited a response in the deep recesses of the mind.

  While he was out playing golf for the next few hours, she would search through his life’s relics, hoping to find buried there a clue to how she came to be his.

  The attic was stuffy and the dust caught in her throat. She didn’t know where to start. Every inch of space was covered with boxes: shoe boxes, appliance boxes, tissue boxes, television boxes, fruit boxes. And each was filled with things Frank hadn’t been able to throw out – notes, her old drawings, a pack of cards, clay house models, a porcelain doll, school textbooks, bears. There was a wooden rocking horse in the far corner, old golf clubs stacked against the side wall, empty painting frames, tools. There was even a box of her mother’s clothes labelled Emma’s winter jackets.

  She had just under two hours left until her father was due home, so she rolled up her sleeves and began the painstaking search.

  Not even an hour later, Courtney retrieved a document in a file that she could easily have missed. It was in poor condition. The white paper had faded to a musty yellow and a strip along the middle was completely illegible from what looked like a tea or coffee stain. She stared at it, her hands trembling, thinking that if ever a piece of paper was to change her life, this was it. Her birth certificate – the proof that she had belonged to other parents. She hadn’t mentally prepared herself for the discovery. Courtney thought she’d find adoption papers or the name of agency, certainly not this. She drew her breath as she read it: Rose Courtney.

  The hairs on her arms stood up. How was it possible that her first name had been Rose? An unsettling feeling washed over her as if she were intruding on her own secret. A stream of questions flooded her mind. Why had her father never told her that her name had been Rose? Why had he changed it to her middle name? How old was she when they adopted her?

  There was a dark stain over her surname so she looked closer, desperate to make out the letters, but they were completely obscured. Her eyes quickly scanned the rest of the page, but the names of her parents were also maddeningly unreadable. It looked as though those parts of the certificate had been deliberately stained. The ink below the marks had settled hard into the paper, bleeding out the text into dark patches. There was no way she would ever be able to read the names of her birth parents. The very thing she needed.

  Her throat tightened as she read on. It felt as though a blade were running down her spine and she sat upright as she read her birthplace: Silver Creek, Victoria, Australia.

  Courtney barely knew anything about that part of the world. She couldn’t fathom that her birthplace was the far south end of Australia, thousands of miles from the place she called home. Surely the fact that she had been born in another country was something her father would have mentioned to her.

  Courtney quickly flicked through the remaining documents in the file, but nothing else in it had any relevance to her.

  So, there it was, in her hands. A past she had never before sought to find.

  Courtney Hamilton had once been Rose Courtney, with a surname she had yet to discover. She had been another person entirely. And at that moment, Courtney knew exactly what she needed to do.

  35

  THERE WAS a time when David was the kind of guy who wasn’t ready for marriage and who certainly never thought about having children. In his university days he had scores of girlfriends and the occasional one-night stand. He categorised those days by his dorm rooms housed in different campus buildings – Hecht in his freshman year was a series of awkward and mostly unmemorable encounters; Eaton was his sophomore year and the first of his few steady-ish girlfriends; and Pearson was his junior and senior year, when it dawned on him that he would never be a good boyfriend, and later that maybe he would.

  David thought back to all those girls. It made him think of summer, of humid nights, salt and sweat, and enough perfume to numb his sense of smell. Walks through the university grounds at midnight and the touch of girls whose skin felt like silk, and whose hair smelled like coconut. Some he deeply lusted for, and others he kept around because they became part of his routine and breaking up seemed more effort than it was worth.

  Those former girlfriends had all told him the same thing: he didn’t let them into his world. They could never tell what he was feeling or thinking. In David’s opinion, it was better that they didn’t know what ran through his mind. In one sitting he could go from thinking about new laser vision technology, to the size of the engine on a Boeing 747, to the meat pie he had yesterday, to the shape of their breasts, and then to working out how many days were left until his next paper was due. It wasn’t that David was insensitive or didn’t care for them. He treated them all well and genuinely didn’t want things to end with them red-eyed and snotty. In fact, David was the perfect gentleman. He went through the motions with most of them – took them on dates, bedded them, met the parents, talked about their future, and then somewhere along the way he would lose interest. Like a switch, he would suddenly realise their soft-as-cotton-candy hair was really as brittle as straw, their lean bodies were bony and needed some fattening up, and their personalities were dry and not suited to his wry humour.

  And then came Courtney. Her tanned legs, her dark-blue eyes, her kindness, her vibrancy, her humour. And he realised that love was not the thing you looked for, it was something that found you.

  David was standing in the kitchen when Courtney wandered in, her face ashen and her hands trembling.

  ‘I found something,’ she mumbled. She placed a yellowed piece of paper on the bench.

  David leaned over to take a look. ‘A birth certificate?’

  She nodded. Intrigued, he quickly cast his eyes over the fading ink, and drew his breath when he read his wife’s birth name. ‘Rose,’ he said aloud in disbelief.

  She had a look of numb shock. ‘Keep reading.’

  Rose. It was a beautiful name and surprisingly fitting for her. It made him think of a winter garden, of spring, of petals, of piercing beauty. Parts of the page had faded and sections had been lost altogether from what looked like a coffee stain. David felt shaken as he read on. Silver Creek, Victoria, Australia. He couldn’t believe his wife had been born on another continent.

  ‘I’m going,’ she said bluntly.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There, to Australia. To find my family.’

  David coughed in shock. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I need to do this to save my son, our son. I can’t sit here, David.’ Her voice was charged with emotion. It appeared she had already made up her mind. ‘I can’t just wait. It could take months, years even before they find a match for him on the donor registry. I can’t just sit and wait. I won’t.’

  She stepped towards him but David was too caught off guard to respond. She rested her palm over his hand. It was warm and clammy. ‘I know this might sound brash.’

  ‘Brash?’ David said, drawing his hand back as if she had stung him. He hadn’t expected his temper to flare up, but running on next to no sleep had made him edgy. ‘You’ve just walked in here and told me you want to go ac
ross the globe while our son is being treated for cancer so you can, what? Find your birth parents in the vain hope they’ll be a match?’

  Courtney softened her approach and tone. ‘What choice do we have, David? I’m doing the best I can. The alternative is to do nothing at all. Which would you rather?’

  ‘Of course I want to help Matty. I’d give my life for him. But do you really think it’s going to help him not having his mother around?’

  Courtney’s hair was falling over her face and she straightened her back and regained the poise she had lost. ‘I’m not –’

  ‘You’re not what? Abandoning him? That’s exactly what you’re doing. And even if you do find your birth parents, do you really think they’re going to welcome you with open arms and happily agree to have their stem cells tested for you? For a child they didn’t even want.’

  As soon as the words left his mouth, David wished he could take them back. He hadn’t meant it, but in the moment he’d grasped the one thing he could say to injure her. And he could see it had. Like a knife, his words cut her down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, this time walking towards her, trying to take her hand in his. She pulled away, wounded. ‘I didn’t mean what I said.’

  But Courtney had already retreated, pain visible in the way she narrowed her eyes. David felt a pang of guilt. He was normally so calm and in control. He was always the one to defuse an argument with a joke, but here he was turning against his wife when all she was trying to do was help. They were in this together, so why had it felt in that moment that he was so desperately alone?

  Courtney stormed upstairs and slammed their bedroom door. David decided he would wait until the dust had settled and then talk her out of going to Australia. When she had calmed down she’d see that they needed to focus on Matthew going into remission, and let the bone marrow registry continue the search.