The Outcast Son

by Jacobo Priegue

  “Laura,” he said, attempting the best of his smiles. “He is our son. Our true son. Nothing will change that. But I thought we wanted to have a child our own blood?”

  “I don’t know. The more I think about it, the stupider it sounds. I’m sorry, it’s just the way I feel now. I love Jaime as if I had given birth to him.”

  “But you haven’t.” This was one of the few arguments I felt Mark really wanted to win. He was focused, ready to come up with reasoning and play the rational man before the impulsive and passionate Laura. But I didn’t buy that crap anymore.

  “No, I haven’t.” All the trembling in my voice had gone, and my confident self was now in control. “I don’t need to. I thought I did, but I was wrong. I’ve already got a son, a lovely one, and I don’t give a damn about whose blood runs through his veins.”

  “I get it. I absolutely get it. But you need to concede it’d be so beautiful to go through the process, to get pregnant and deliver your own child.”

  I rolled my eyes and gave my husband a grim look. “Mark, I love you, but I really need you to hear me on this: I don't need to get pregnant to be a woman. I’m very happy with my life, and I feel complete and fulfilled. And I’m not comfortable talking about this a scarce year after we lost our baby, so this conversation ends here.”

  His nods and his eyes were telling me he accepted my will, but I knew he hadn’t given up. I wasn’t against having another child at all, but the timing couldn’t be worse, and it annoyed me to have that conversation with him. He wasn’t being considerate. I hadn’t recovered yet. Some wounds needed to heal before I could even think about getting pregnant again. Nightmares were less frequent and distressing since our furry friend moved to our place, but I needed more time and more space to reflect and digest everything I had been through.

  At that moment, I had the feeling I had overreacted, that I had too high expectations for the trip and nothing was going as expected, and Mark was paying for my bad mood. But my reaction was rather appropriate. I had the right to hope for a lovely stay and a relaxing time in the countryside before facing London again; that was what we had paid for and the reason we were there.

  Mark was absent for the rest of the morning, and I didn’t speak to him for a while. I wasn’t angry, but I needed to be left alone, and he knew. We reached a lovely field where a lonely chestnut tree ruled from the top of its hill over the land extending at its foot. The cool shade it projected seemed the perfect spot to place our tablecloth and start our picnic.

  “Why is it so hot?” Mark asked himself. The clouds had completely disappeared, and the skies seemed to remind us the heat wave wasn’t over yet. “It’s not normal.”

  “We’ll be just fine. This is a rather fresh place,” I said.

  “I don’t think it was this hot last year.”

  “It probably wasn’t. Summers are getting warmer in England.”

  Our lunch was lovely. We had a great time, and Jaime looked livelier than ever. He ran after Happy all over the field until no blade of grass remained untouched by at least one of them. His laugh was a soothing song that warmed and cheered me up. I had already forgotten about my conversation with Mark, I had already forgiven him for being so inconsiderate, and so we engaged in a relaxed chat about work, Jaime’s school, finances and our next holiday projects. But a heartrending scream threw us out of our drowsiness. Happy’s bark tangled in the air with Jaime’s painful cry.

  “Jaime! What’s happened? What’s wrong?” I shouted while running towards him. But he wouldn’t answer. He’d just scream and cry and writhe on the grass. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

  “His ankle,” Mark said. “He must’ve twisted it.”

  Jaime was grabbing his right ankle with anguish. “It hurts! It hurts!”

  “He tripped over Happy and fell to the ground,” Mark said.

  “Did you see it?”

  “Yes, I saw him fall. Then he started screaming.”

  “Oh, dear! Poor thing!”

  “I’ll carry him. He needs to see a doctor. It could be broken.”

  “Yes, okay. Okay. You take him to the nearest medical centre. We passed a main road earlier, you can go there and ask for help. I’ll pick up our stuff. Call me.” I was shaking. I didn’t want to leave Jaime’s side, but it made sense. I couldn’t lift Jaime’s weight anymore, and somebody had to pick up our stuff.

  “Mum! Mum! Don’t leave me!”

  “It’s okay, sweetie! I’ll be with you in a moment! And Dad and Happy are going to be with you.”

  It was hard to tell him I wouldn’t be with him when he needed me the most, but we had important things and documents in our backpacks, and we couldn’t just leave everything behind. It was only a twisted ankle after all, and I thought it’d be okay for Mark and him to go before me and make sure nothing more serious happened. We had our mobile phones with us anyway, so nothing could possibly go wrong.

  I wanted to follow them in the distance, but I lost sight before I started walking. I calculated they were around five minutes ahead, and they wouldn’t move quickly, but I got lost at an intersection after having asked where the nearest medical centre was. When Mark called me, I realised I had taken the wrong road and was now more than twenty minutes away from them. I could now use my phone navigation system, knowing exactly where they were, but ten minutes later Mark’s face appeared on the screen again.

  “Hey.”

  “What happened? Has he seen a doctor yet?”

  “Yes. He’s all right. It’s not even a sprain. He’ll be fully recovered in no time.”

  “Oh, that’s great news!”

  “We’ve already left the hospital. We’re in a taxi on our way to the B&B.”

  “What? Why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “Sorry, I thought it’d be best if we went ASAP so Jaime could rest.”

  “Oh, never mind. I’ll see you there.”

  It was already 5:30 pm when I got to the cottage. I knocked on the door, and Mark opened. He was pale, his jaws almost out of their place, his eyes lost in a void of horror. What had happened? I thought Jaime was okay, but Mark’s ghost face was telling me otherwise, and I started freaking out when I noticed small red spots and stains on his clothes. Something was going on. Something horrible. I shouldn’t have left Jaime alone. My thoughts were with him, and regret and guilt wouldn’t let me think with clarity. Mark wouldn’t move. He didn’t want to let me through. He didn’t want me to see, and this made it much worse. I felt a whole load of adrenaline waking me up, waking up every cell in my body.

  “Move!” I shouted, but he’d just stare at me with his frozen eyes. “I said move!” Nothing. “Mark, what’s wrong with you? I said move!”

  “Mum?” Jaime’s voice reached me from the distance. “Mum!”

  A formidable force pushed me forwards and I thrust through Mark with a strength I didn’t know I had. I saw Jaime. Splatters of dark red stained his shirt, his face and his hands, and he left a trace of crimson footprints on the carpet as he walked to me. It was difficult to know what was going on in the middle of that havoc, and I was drowning in a tide of senseless thoughts and visions and memories and fears.

  My own gasps filled the room. There was only my voice, my screams and the vision of blood sprayed everywhere. It was all I could hear and see. Red. There wasn’t Jaime or Mark or myself anymore, only my heart pounding all the way from my chest to my ears, and the red: a red, thick curtain covering this world and exiling it to a vortex of red shadows.

  Amidst my turmoil, Jaime’s arms wrapped my left leg, his hands wet, warm and viscous, and his voice finding me on the lonely sea I was sailing. “Mum!” His weak voice could scarcely reach me in the place I was. “Mum!” I heard him louder and louder until the world unveiled again before me.

  “Jaime, what happened?”

  “It’s Happy,” he said, bowing his head.

  “Happy?” I had forgotten about the dog, but now a grim tale started to be shaped inside my brain. “What�
�s wrong with Happy?”

  “Look,” he said, pointing at the reddened carpet eight or nine feet from the spot where I was.

  I saw him again. Oscar’s inert body on the kitchen floor. His face, pale. His mouth, open. The unnatural position his limbs ended up after the fatal blow. There was blood on my hands. A red thread dripping from the knife I held. I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. I couldn’t tell the difference between Oscar’s corpse and that of our dog and the dog in Cusco, lying in the same position as Happy. His throat slit. All his legs to one side. His white fur stained with a bright red I’d never forget.

  When I thought reality couldn’t be any more horrible; when my heart was broken at the sight of my dead friend, the one who’d brought me back from my depression, taken from me in that violent way; even then, it seemed fate wasn’t done with me. Next to the dog, in the exact position my eyes went to find it, I noticed a golden sphere. I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I was seeing the present world, and indeed I was. Our dog had been slain and positioned almost identically to the dog I had found in Jaime’s shelter in Cusco. The only obvious difference was that there wasn’t any message written on the dust this time. Just the sphere, lying shiny and stained in red, haunting the last vision I would ever have of our dog.

  Chapter 19

  The blabber

  By the fourth month of my maternity leave, things started to get tense. The brief period of fragile serenity that followed our trip to Peru seemed to have come to an end. Jaime was more difficult than ever. All of his forgotten ghosts had returned to haunt him, to remind him where he belonged. It took him a while to fully comprehend everything he had seen and heard and sensed, but according to his psychiatrist, the trip to Peru had awoken a dormant shadow his brain had fought so hard to restrain. The sorrow was back: the dire look in his eyes, the incapability to build bonds with children his age, the behaviour problems. I had been stupid enough to have forgotten everything we had been through from the very day we arrived in the UK for the first time with our adopted son; the arguments with Mark, the calls from all his schools, the fights, the doubt and the fear of raising an irredeemable misfit.

  The sound of a key made me sit up. I was breastfeeding Marcus on the sofa, watching some stupid show on TV. I saw Jaime first, shouting and looking back at Mark.

  “No, I won’t!”

  “This is my house, you are my son and you will do as I say!”

  “I’m not your son!”

  “What did you say?” Mark raised his voice.

  “I’m not your son, I’m not your son, I’m not your son! I hate you!”

  Jaime ran upstairs and slammed the door of his bedroom. Marcus was crying.

  “Ssssh,” I whispered in Marcus’s ear, “it’s all right, baby. It’s all right.” He calmed down as I rocked him. “What was that about?” I said, whispering.

  “He had a fight.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said, wrinkling my lips. It had been the third incident in a week. “How?”

  “I had a conversation with one of his teachers. This time, it was something serious. They’re considering expulsion.”

  “That’s not possible” I said. “This school is for kids like him, they can’t.”

  “Yes, they can and they will, and the police will be involved as well. He crossed all the bloody red lines here, Laura.”

  “He’s just a boy!” I said, my voice a plea in the vacuum.

  “He hurt a girl, Laura,” Mark said with a monotonous and grave-pitch voice, confronting my incredulous eyes. “Badly.”

  “No, that’s not possible, he’d never…”

  “He did,” Mark interrupted. “He pushed her downstairs.”

  “Oh my gosh!” I interrupted, clenching my feet and covering my mouth with my hand.

  “And that’s not the end of the story,” he carried on. “Although she fell down unconscious and hit her head several times on the steps, Jaime ran to her and kicked her face again and again. The children around him were paralysed. Imagine how they’d feel. And he wouldn’t stop. I’m appalled. I don’t even want to think of what would’ve happened if a teacher hadn’t been near and restrained him. They told me it was very quick. It was just seconds. But he almost killed the girl, and we still don’t know if she’ll have life-changing injuries.”

  “That’s not possible,” I managed to say, devastated. But I knew it was. It was possible. Entirely. And I felt as if a blindfold had fallen from my eyes. I remembered everything. Mark lying down on the floor. The crow crashing into the wall. My miscarriage the day after telling Jaime I was pregnant. Happy. I remembered how I came to be scared of my own son, even though I didn’t want to admit it, even though I pretended that everything was all right, that Jaime loved us and we loved him and we were a beautiful family. But the image of a poor girl being beaten almost to death, the thought of the drama her parents must be suffering before the prospect of losing her, the children caught in that scene, innocent witnesses of violence and horror. It was more than I could ignore. It was the reality. No matter how cruel. No matter how inconvenient to my dreams of a perfect life.

  “What did the girl do to him?” I felt like a monster for asking that question, but I needed to know.

  “Do you think that matters?”

  “No, I don’t say it matters. I’m not looking for a justification. I just want to know why he’d do such a terrible thing.”

  “The teacher I spoke to told me they had an argument earlier. The typical playground fight,” he said.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  “He won’t listen!” Mark answered, changing the tone of his voice from a patient resignation to a trace of anger. “He doesn’t want to listen! He just does as he pleases all the time, and when things aren’t the way he likes, he gets mad and can’t handle his rage! We need to do something, Laura! We’ve got a baby!”

  The bare thought of Marcus getting hurt froze my heart. My troubled mind tortured me with the image of my son lying on the floor like a dog, like our dog, his throat slit and his faint sobs falling silent forever. I couldn’t even look Mark in the eyes. That wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Jaime would never hurt his little brother. He loved him. From the very first time he saw him. He looked after him. He sat beside me in bed and stared at him for hours. He talked to him as if he were able to understand a word of what he said. Jaime would never hurt his little brother. Never. That was plainly impossible.

  My conversation with Mark wasn’t over, but I needed to see Jaime. I left Marcus in Mark’s arms and went upstairs. He didn’t try to stop me. I cleared my mind of any negative thought, any shadow of fear or suspicion or sorrow. I was Jaime’s last stronghold, the only one who’d never fail him, and I didn’t want him to think he had lost me too.

  There was an uncomfortable silence flowing down the stairs as a mist, impregnating everything it touched. Perhaps it was just me. Perhaps it was the tense quietness waiting to be broken by a sudden blow. But it was there. The absolute absence of words, or laughter, or sound. I was almost afraid of disrupting it with my knuckles hitting the door of Jaime’s room. But I did, and its noise made my head move back.

  “Jaime!” I said, but I had no answer.

  “Jaime!” I tried again. Louder. But the only response was an odd silence that became suffocating.

  I wouldn’t wait any longer. I opened the door. Slowly. Scared of what I might find in the room. Jaime was sitting on his chair. At his desk. Drawing or colouring or doing his homework. I could only see the back of his head. Maybe he didn’t want to see my face. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or ashamed. All the same, he didn’t want to talk to me.

  “Go away,” he said.

  “Excuse me? Have you forgotten who I am, young man?” I asked, as composed as I managed to sound. But he didn’t even turn his head. “Jaime, we need to talk.”

  “I don’t want to,” he said.

  “I know. I know it’s difficult, but you have to.”

  �
��It’s not difficult. It’s just I don’t feel like talking.”

  “Sometimes we ought to do things we don’t feel like doing.”

  “Why?” He had turned his head now to ask.

  “It’s part of growing up. Not everything is pleasant, but we sometimes must do unpleasant things so that we can do what we like.”

  “That doesn’t make sense, Mum,” he said and turned his head again as if he had lost his brief interest in the conversation.

  “Jaime, look at me, please.” He did as I asked. “What you did today was awful. The girl almost died. Do you know what this means?”

  “Yes,” he said, lowering his eyes.

  “I’m sure you didn’t want her to die, did you?” The time he took to answer sent a chill down my spine.

  “No.” he finally said. “I was angry at the beginning, but then I couldn’t stop.”

  “Good people don’t do those things, Jaime.”

  “Is Dad good?” The unexpected question made me shift.

  “What?” I said right away. “Yes! Of course! He’s very good! Why would you ask that?”

  “Then I’m good as well,” he said, ignoring my question. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  “Why did you attack the girl?”

  “Attack?” The question surprised him.

  “Yes! Why did you attack her?”

  “I was…we were…” He seemed confused. “We had an argument and…we fought. I didn’t want to get hurt.”

  “Was she hurting you?”

  “Yes, I mean, no. She was going to hurt me. We…she…”

  Tears spread in his eyes until they were wet. Then he cried. He was so delicate. I couldn’t believe he had just done such an awful thing. He was the same scared boy I had found all forsaken six years before. I hugged him, and a smile came to my face when I felt his arms wrapping around my neck. It made me want to forget what happened. In that room – with my boy next to me, feeling the warmth of his body – there was no girl. There was no dog. There was no past at all. Just the two of us. But the world was wider than Jaime’s room, and I had a baby and a husband waiting for me downstairs, and I cared about them.