The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  ‘I was going to last night. I was planning how to talk to him all the way home from the museum, but when I got in he was still at the hospital. I made myself wait up for him, but the later it got the more unhinged this whole thing felt and eventually I fell asleep, I didn’t even hear him come in. Then this morning he was in a rush – he left at 6.15. It’s impossible.’

  ‘OK, fine, but you have to ask him tonight. It’s the only way you’re going to clear this up.’

  ‘I know. I will.’

  ‘Listen,’ Nell says, ‘there are all sorts of reasonable explanations for this, I’m sure. All you’ve got is a library card and Alex, who is hardly reliable since he’s going through a massive midlife crisis. This Novak thing could still be a weird coincidence. I mean, Novak could be the Polish equivalent of Smith for all we know.’

  Tess feels the tension in her neck ease.

  ‘Just ask him, for God’s sake, because this is getting out of hand. You’re starting to hide more from Greg than he is from you.’

  They change the subject then and talk about normal things: Christmas plans, the twins squabbling, Joe’s problems at school, Nell’s frustrations with Ken, the urgent need to get a Christmas tree. It is almost like being home, sitting at Nell’s kitchen table with the boys on the Xbox in the front room, Nell’s spaniel resting his nose on her feet, a pot of tea or a glass of wine and whatever cake she made that day in front of them. Missing Nell feels almost physical at times, an ache in the pit of her stomach, a longing not just for a person but for a place, a life that has suddenly slipped into the past.

  ‘I wish we could go and get our Christmas trees from the Scouts like we always do,’ Tess says. ‘I think that’s why I haven’t got one yet; it feels too sad without you and the boys. I’ve got almost all Joe’s presents now, and we’ve put some lights up, but no tree yet.’

  ‘I know, I’m sure that’s why I haven’t got ours yet either. It just isn’t the same here without you.’

  *

  When they hang up she goes down to the basement to bring up the box of tree decorations. The plastic crates containing Greg’s things are neatly lined up where she left them. She hesitates, then reaches up and pulls one down. She digs through it until she finds a file with ‘Harvard Scholarship’ written on it in Greg’s handwriting. She flicks through the paperwork.

  All the dates stack up; of course they do. Greg finished high school at seventeen, went to the University of Pittsburgh for three years, then to Harvard Medical School. It is all here. As she repacks the file and clamps on its plastic lid she realizes that something must be badly wrong in order for her to be crouching like this in their freezing basement, checking up on his dates.

  This is definitely not how a healthy marriage should feel. She heaves the box back up. As she pulls down the cardboard box of Christmas decorations she dislodges another of Greg’s crates, knocking the lid loose. She pulls it down. It is the box with the baseball things. She can’t stop herself. She reaches inside again and her fingers touch the medallion. She pulls it out and holds it between her fingers: ‘Robesville Sluggers, Junior League Champions’. Slowly, she turns it over: ‘Carlo Novak’.

  It is as if she already knew that the name would be engraved there. It feels unsurprising, almost matter-of-fact to see it inscribed in the cheap metal. She slowly folds the ribbon around it and puts it back. Carlo Novak is a relative, he must be.

  She feels a twinge down one side as she reaches the top of the basement steps. She should not be lifting boxes at this stage of pregnancy. The baby shifts. She puts the box of decorations down on the top step, rubbing her sides, waiting to get her breath back.

  She tries to remember the things Greg has told her about his family. He told her that when he was a little boy they would walk through the town every Christmas Eve and look at all the nativity displays people had in their windows. But he never told her about Christmas Day itself. He didn’t even tell her what they ate – though, when she thinks about it, many of his other childhood memories involve food. Food is presumably safer to remember than people.

  He has mentioned the Gallo family meatballs, the bread dipped in ‘sauce’ that they would eat on Sunday after Mass, the kitchen garden with rows of tomatoes to be picked and canned every year, the pączki, deep-fried, sugar-dusted Polish pastries that he would eat warm.

  Other childhood memories are sparse. He has told her about the network of waterfalls where the kids would go in the summer vacation, half an hour’s hike out of town. They’d stay there, unsupervised, until sundown day after day. He has mentioned wildlife too, wild turkey and deer, black bear, bald eagles. He told her, once, about a bald eagle statue on the high school playing field. But that’s about it.

  And when it comes to his undergraduate days in Pittsburgh or his Harvard degree, she knows next to nothing. He took more courses than other people as an undergraduate, because academic study was the only thing that seemed to help. But he was too modest even to tell her about his perfect MCAT score.

  The only thing he has told her about in any detail is the fire. And he told her everything about that: how he was cycling home with his backpack on, his baseball cap pulled down against the evening sun and smelled burning even before he saw the smoke billowing over the rooftops. How he turned the corner into his street and heard the wail of fire trucks, and people were running towards him, holding up their hands, shouting at him to stop. And he told her how he fought them to get to the front door – and then a wall of heat hit him and hands pulled him back, dragged him away, held him down.

  Whatever else he is concealing about his past, this at least is complete and true. The memory was so real to him, even thirty years on, that the telling of it altered his face and body: his shoulders collapsed, the angles of his brow sharpened, his eyes became hollow and haunted.

  He was less willing to talk about the unspeakable year that followed the fire. It must have been unbearable, living in his alcoholic aunt’s apartment while he finished his senior year at high school. He can’t even say her name. The only thing that kept him alive that year, he said, was the prospect of college. He had been accelerated a year at high school too, so when he left his aunt’s apartment he was only seventeen years old.

  He will always be damaged by loss: no matter how many lives he saves, how many clinical breakthroughs he makes, how many prizes he wins, he is going to carry this traumatic memory around inside him until he dies. But Alex is wrong: there is no reason to doubt Greg’s story because she has seen it written on his face and body. In fact, she saw it in his face the first time she looked at him through the viewfinder of her camera.

  Greg must have been an extraordinarily resilient teenager. He didn’t let the loss destroy him. He turned the tragedy around and let it propel him to where he is now. It is an extraordinary achievement. She picks up the decoration box and goes back upstairs.

  *

  When Greg finally gets home it is past midnight again. She has been dozing fitfully, determined to stay awake, listening for his key in the door between brief, rapid dreams of tunnels, high walls and the smell of burning. She hears his feet treading lightly up the stairs. He goes into the main bathroom so that he won’t wake her, and she hears him crank on the shower, water hissing through the pipes. After a while the smell of his shampoo floats through on the steam. She knows that she should get up, go to the bathroom and demand to know who Carlo Novak is, why his library card and medal are downstairs in his box and why Alex Kingman thinks they are the same man.

  She has to do it. She waits for him to come into the bedroom. He is barefoot. She can smell his damp, clean skin. She forces herself to sit up.

  ‘Greg,’ she says, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

  He stops in the middle of the room, a towel around his waist, broad chest bare, its dark hair massed in a crucifix over his heart.

  ‘Shit, Tess! I thought you were sleeping.’

  ‘I was, sort of, but I need to ask you about something.’

&nbs
p; He does not move and for a moment, for too long, he doesn’t respond. She can almost hear his brain spinning.

  ‘Greg, I—’

  ‘It’s late,’ he says, in a low voice. ‘You really should be asleep.’

  ‘I know, but I have to talk to you.’

  ‘Honey, I have to sleep now. I can’t even think straight, let alone talk – do you know what time it is? I have a full list tomorrow and if I don’t get some sleep now I’m not going to be able to function properly. Maybe we could talk in the morning, early, before I go? Could we do that? Or tomorrow evening?’ She can’t see his eyes, it is too dark.

  Her mouth suddenly feels dry and cracked. She knows he is avoiding her now. She knows he is hiding things. She turns to look for water on the bedside table and he disappears into the walk-in closet. She shouldn’t let him walk away like this, she should get up, turn the lights on, follow him in there and demand answers, but it is the dead of night, they are both exhausted and right now everything feels very breakable indeed.

  This could wait another few hours. They will both be able to think more clearly in the morning.

  She lies down and turns onto her side with her back to the walk-in closet. The baby swivels and stretches busily, pushing, elbowing, poking at her sides. She hears him come back into the bedroom. She wonders if he was stalling in there, folding clothes, hanging up ties, uniting stray socks, hoping she would be asleep when he came out.

  He gets under the duvet and the mattress tilts into his weight. He lies on his back, motionless. He does not try to touch her. Perhaps he thinks she is sleeping. It is as if they are suspended, side by side, in separate cocoons of tension.

  But Greg can fall asleep in an instant, no matter what, with no twitching or sighs, no need for reading, release or winding down. It is the result of years of medical training, of broken nights on cot beds in hospital rooms during forty-hour shifts, alert, high-functioning, snatching sleep only to reboot. And yet right now his stillness feels watchful.

  She keeps her breathing even. In the morning, in daylight, they will both be calmer and more rational.

  After what feels like a long time, she hears his lengthened, whispery exhales. She waits for a few minutes more and then, gingerly, turns onto her back. The baby sinks heavily against her spine. She can see Greg’s profile in the moonlight, the carved, almost noble features, his lips slightly parted. Perhaps she is looking at his father’s Italian nose and square jawline, his mother’s Slavic cheekbones. She wonders if their baby will inherit any of these features. Or maybe it will look like her side of the family, with the light-blue eyes she inherited from her mother, the wavy blond hair from her father.

  She closes her eyes, feels the walls of the house brace themselves against a gust of wind and the questions close in, like faces pressed against a window: Greg’s parents emigrated – separately – from Italy and Poland for a better life, but how did they meet? How did they end up in that Pennsylvanian town? Did they fall in love there? Or did they meet in a big city – New York, Philadelphia, Chicago? Were they happy? Did they love each other? And why – both Catholics – did they have only one child? And what about his aunt – why did she have no children of her own? The questions crowd her head, and then there is a cracking sound and the skewed brickwork of the house begins, very slowly, to tilt, collapsing inwards. The walls are toppling around her – the house is being sucked into the basement – she smells brick dust and the floor beneath her drops. Her limbs jerk – her eyes flip open – she takes a sharp breath.

  She thought she was awake but she must have been sleeping. Her heart is thumping now, and she feels sick, trembly. She is wide awake. Greg grinds his teeth, just once: a sharp, gravelly shriek.

  She slips out of bed and tiptoes shakily across the room, pushing through shadows to take her dressing gown from the back of the door. She lifts her laptop from the chest of drawers and glances back at Greg. He does not move. As she closes the door behind her it gives a little click.

  The house is terribly cold. Down in the living room there are frost patterns on each diamond-shaped windowpane. She grabs a blanket from the arm of the leather chair and wraps herself in it, wiping condensation off the glass. She peers out. Snowflakes drift from a canopy of darkness, illuminated only by the funnel of light from the Schechters’ porch lamp. Greg said snow this early is rare – it is going to be a brutal winter.

  Joe will be excited. It is already lying thick on the road and the front lawns, balancing on branches and fence posts. The ploughs will come soon, growling through the night like slow, determined beasts, scraping everything aside, staining everything they pass. She wipes her breath off the glass and peers across the road, half expecting to see a red-haired figure in the snow, staring back. But of course the street is empty.

  She goes back to the sofa and switches on her laptop. There is an email from Nell marked ‘URGENT – look at this’. She sent it at what would have been about four o’clock in the morning, her time. Tess opens it.

  Insomnia strikes again, so I’ve done bit of digging about this Carlo Novak thing tonight and look what I found; it was on some Deep South rabid pro-life blog (scary). It’s a newspaper picture from that Philadelphia baby trial. It’s obviously very blurry and hard to see but – just have a look. Then call me. N ×

  She opens the link and scrolls through a virulent pro-life blog that has a post devoted to ‘men who got away with murder’. There is a blurred black-and-white image of a young man on the steps of a grand public building. He is looking over his shoulder at the camera, which is below him, as if somebody in the street has shouted out his name. His features are indistinct. She squints at the screen, trying to make sense of the pixels. Then she pulls her head back. Suddenly, the bone structure comes into focus.

  For a moment the living-room walls seem to bend outwards, as if the air around her has expanded. She shoves the laptop aside, hauls herself onto her feet and stands, pressing both hands against her head. Her belly clenches.

  It cannot be. She is seeing things. The image is years old, blurry. It must be an odd photographic effect of angle and lighting. Her eyes must have picked up patterns they want to see – or don’t want to see. She looks at her watch. It is gone one in the morning. She tips everything out of her bag to find her phone, scattering wallet, keys, hairbrush, lipsalves, pens, papers and crumbs onto the parquet. She finds it, and calls Nell.

  ‘Did I wake you?’ she whispers.

  ‘What do you think?’ Nell croaks. ‘It’s six in the morning and I was up till 4 a.m.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry – but I had to speak to you, I just got the email. I just saw that picture.’

  She hears rustling. ‘Wait – hang on …’ She hears faint footsteps. She pictures Nell sliding out of bed, leaving Ken snoring, creeping down the creaking stairs, trying not to wake the boys or the dog.

  ‘Right,’ Nell says, in a louder voice. ‘I’m in the kitchen now.’

  ‘How did you find this?’

  ‘I wanted to see if there was anything online about Carlo Novak. I stumbled across it.’

  ‘It looks so much like him, Nell.’ She keeps her voice to a whisper. The last thing she wants right now is for Greg to wake and come down.

  ‘I know,’ Nell says. ‘I mean, I wondered if it was just me, I almost didn’t send it to you.’

  ‘No, it’s not just you.’ She sits back on the sofa, wrapping the blanket around herself again. The baby lurches, changing position. ‘God, Nell. It’s the bone structure, it’s the cheekbones – they’re so much like Greg; the likeness is freakish. I can’t get my head around it.’ She is shivering now, properly, as if the temperature in the front room has plummeted.

  ‘What did Greg say when you asked him about Carlo Novak? Did you tell him you met Alex? What did he say?’

  ‘He only got in about forty-five minutes ago. I was half asleep – I tried to talk to him, but he said he was exhausted and we should talk in the morning. He’s asleep now, but I couldn’t, so that’s
why I’m down here, reading your emails.’

  ‘OK, well you’ve got to talk to him now. This is bonkers.’ She hears a rushing sound. Nell is filling the kettle.

  ‘What the hell is happening here, Nell?’

  ‘It has to be a relative. Wasn’t Greg’s mother Polish?’

  ‘Yes, yes, she was but he’s an only child and he’s never mentioned any relatives.’

  ‘There are always relatives.’

  ‘There was an aunt,’ she hisses. ‘After his parents died, he had to live with her. It was awful; she was an alcoholic.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Julianna … I don’t think he’s ever told me her maiden name. Clearly it was a hideous time for him – he just says it was appalling and he’d rather not remember it.’

  ‘So then he could have cousins? This Julianna woman could have had kids.’

  ‘But he’d have told me if she did.’

  ‘What was his mother’s maiden name?’

  She tries to think, but no name surfaces. ‘Jesus, I don’t know – I can’t remember. I honestly don’t know if he’s ever said.’ She forces her voice back down to a whisper. ‘He just won’t talk about his family – he always says it’s not helpful, it upsets him to remember them, and he’s coped all these years, really well, by shutting it all off and not looking back. It might not be fashionable, but it works for him.’

  ‘Well, he’s got to talk to you now, hasn’t he? If Carlo Novak is a close cousin, then the family resemblance makes sense and the library card, the medal, Alex mistaking Greg for Carlo. Cousins can sometimes look really alike, can’t they? If Carlo is Greg’s cousin, then all this is explained, isn’t it?’

  She picks up the laptop and makes herself look at the picture again. The man on the courtroom steps is young and beautiful, though his expression is hunted. She feels a shiver pass through her and pushes the laptop away.

  ‘It’s just so much like him, Nell.’

  She hears the clanking sound of the cutlery drawer: Nell is looking for a teaspoon. She will be in her checked pyjamas, barefoot on the terracotta tiles with her dark curly hair all over the place. The longing to be there, with Nell, is almost overpowering. She can feel herself holding out her hand for the mug of tea, warmth radiating from the wood-burner, going over to the big table, pushing back the mess of Christmas cards, newspapers, school consent forms, exercise books, baking trays, dog leads, magazines and rolls of Sellotape, and sitting down. But Nell is three thousand miles away, in a different time zone, on a different land mass.