The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  ‘Or a brother?’ Nell says. ‘Could he have had a brother? A twin even?’

  ‘A brother wouldn’t be a Novak, he’d be a Gallo. And anyway, for God’s sake, Greg would have mentioned it if he had a twin, even one he was ashamed of.’

  ‘Would he?’ Nell’s voice is distant and troubled.

  ‘Yes.’ She wraps the blanket tighter around her shoulders and shivers. ‘Of course he would.’

  After they hang up, she climbs the stairs, but at the top of the landing she turns right, into Joe’s room. He is hunched under the duvet, hair sprouting, snoring lightly. She sits on the edge of his bed, rubbing at the sides of her belly, her hands pressing on what feels like a little heel. The branch of a tree casts a shadow through the window onto the floor. It moves across her toes like a black claw. The skin on her belly feels very tight, as if the baby is expanding too fast. There is another check-up in two days’ time; there are weekly check-ups with the OB/GYN now. Suddenly it feels urgent to sort this out. She has to know what she is dealing with before she brings their baby into this house.

  The photograph makes no sense at all. Perhaps it is her mind connecting the dots, seeing facial patterns that don’t exist. Cameras can alter reality, she knows this; she’s done it herself many times. She has made plain people beautiful, old people younger. Certain shadows and lines of a face can be emphasized, features heightened or diminished by light, angle, focus, settings. She can make a camera lie any time she wants it to. A photograph is no more reliable than a memory, really: both are stories told about the past, rooted in the moment, warped by the teller.

  She tucks the duvet around Joe’s shoulders, then gets up and crosses the landing to their bedroom door. Greg is lying as she left him, on his back. He reminds her of a statue of a medieval knight carved in marble on a tomb. In the morning she will tell him about meeting Alex. She will show him the photograph and ask him what it means. She will demand to know how he is connected to Carlo Novak. She glances at the luminous hands of the bedside clock. It is almost two now. The lack of sleep is not helping. She has to get some rest and face this – whatever it is – in the morning.

  But she can’t bring herself to go over and climb into bed next to him. She stands, shivering gently, and then goes back to Joe’s room. She eases his little body over and tunnels into his warm spot. He wriggles, turns and burrows against her belly and she folds her arms around him, holding him tight, waiting for sleep to come. Deep inside her, the baby struggles and kicks as if it is trapped and panicking – as if its oxygen is failing and it must find a way out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  She must have slept because light is flooding into the room, hurting her eyelids. She is stiff and the Arsenal duvet is folded back, exposing her right side to the air. She remembers vivid dreams that the baby died – she can still feel the weight of it in her arms and see its waxy little face – and then she remembers the other thing that has been racing through her brain all night, the young man on the courtroom steps. She sits up.

  She looks at the empty mattress next to her. Joe is not here. She gets out of the bed, unsteady. ‘Joe? Joey?’

  Out on the landing she calls for him again.

  ‘What?’ His voice rises up from the kitchen and she feels a wave of relief – she does not know why – and she hurries downstairs, the weight of the baby throwing her off balance, forcing her to grip the bannister to stop herself falling forwards, crashing down to the white tiles of the hall.

  Joe is sitting at the kitchen counter with an empty plate next to him, reading National Geographic Kids magazine. His hair has been combed with a side parting and he is in a blue checked shirt, a proper one with buttons, that she does not recognize. She looks at the stove clock. It is 7.55 a.m.

  ‘Goodness, it’s late.’ She tries to sound calmer than she feels. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’

  ‘Greg took me out in the snow!’

  ‘He did?’ She rubs her eyes.

  ‘We made a snowman.’ He leaps up and drags her through to the dining room, pointing out of the window. There is a fat snowman, with Greg’s hat on it, and her scarf. A carrot nose.

  She laughs. ‘Wow!’

  ‘Then he said I had to get ready for school.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’

  ‘Greg said I had to let you sleep. Why were you in my bed?’

  ‘I think I must have had a bad dream,’ she says. ‘Did you have breakfast already?’

  ‘After we made the snowman, Greg made French toast with cinnamon and maple syrup.’

  ‘He did? Has he gone to the hospital now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Joe gets up. ‘He said to tell you he loves you very much, he has to be at the hospital and he’s going to call you later. I’m going to brush my teeth now.’

  ‘Good boy. Look at you – you look so smart today. What’s this nice shirt? Where’s it from?’ She resists the urge to mess up his hair. It has been dampened down before the combing.

  ‘Greg gave it to me.’

  ‘He did? This morning?’

  ‘Yes. He bought it for me – there are four more and a couple of Tshirts too. He says they’re what American boys wear.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  He shrugs, ‘Some of them do.’

  She touches his neck and glances at the label – GAP kids. She has no idea how on earth Greg found time to go to GAP. She feels a prickle of unease – it feels slightly controlling to buy Joe clothes without saying anything. But she must not be so defensive. It is a touching thing to do; Greg is just trying to help Joe blend in.

  ‘Well, you look great,’ she says. ‘So handsome.’

  He groans, rolls his eyes and goes upstairs. She puts his plate and cup in the dishwasher. Greg has washed the frying pan and left it on the draining board. He must have gone in later than usual if he was making snowmen and cooking French toast. Perhaps he was waiting for her to wake up so that they could talk, but then decided that on balance it was more important for her to sleep.

  She realizes then that she left her laptop on the sofa. She can’t remember whether she shut it down before she came up to bed. If he has opened it, then he will know what she has seen. She catches sight of her reflection in the kitchen window. Her hair is tangled, her eyes hollow, her face as white as the T-shirt she is wearing.

  She goes into the living room, passing Joe’s snow boots, a puddle of melted ice. She hangs his coat, which is damp, on the newel post. She can hear him brushing his teeth. The laptop is where she left it on arm of the sofa. She remembers spilling the contents of her bag onto the floor, looking for her phone, but her bag is sitting by the sofa and everything is back inside. She does not remember doing this, but perhaps she did.

  The light of the computer winks up at her. She opens its lid and types in the password, which Greg knows. The page is still open on the blog, with the photo of the young man. She presses the off button without looking at the image.

  She remembers a BBC documentary she once watched about a middle-aged divorcée who had been taken in by a conman. The woman was intelligent, articulate, educated to Masters level, and had fallen in love with a man she met online. He seemed utterly plausible – even her mother loved him – and they became engaged. It turned out that he had five other fiancées. The women were all educated, attractive single mothers. They accepted his frequent absences because they believed that he was busy setting up an international recruitment business. They had each ‘loaned’ him thousands of pounds. Then he vanished.

  After she has taken Joe to school, she leaves Greg a voicemail. ‘I need you to call me back,’ she says. ‘The minute you’re done. I have got to talk to you. Even if it’s just for five minutes before you go into your next thing. I need you to call me.’

  She eats an Oreo from the cookie jar. Then another. Her head feels murky and the brightness of the snow outside hurts her eyes. She makes herself an espresso in Greg’s machine and gulps it down, not caring about the caffeine. Soon she feels a rush of
shaky energy – everything sharpens. She is so unused to caffeine it feels like she’s taken a powerful drug. The baby buzzes inside her like a fat hornet.

  She will get on with tasks around the house until he calls her back and then she will just ask him, over the phone, who Carlo Novak is. The Volvo is booked into the local garage for a service. She’ll take it in, then clean up, then when she gets the car back she’ll drive over to Whole Foods and get a Christmas tree. She has left it far too late – Christmas is only five days away. Greg had a romantic idea that they’d drive out to a Christmas tree farm and dig one up, but every time they’ve planned it something has come up. She has never left it this late before. It is not fair on Joe. She’ll surprise him. She goes back to the hall and shoves her feet into her boots, takes her coat, wraps herself in a scarf.

  The path has been shovelled clear of snow. Greg must have done it this morning. It is as if he is making an effort to do everything right – make snowmen, shovel snow, buy clothes for Joe, make French toast, allow her to rest. The snowploughs have been overnight, and the roads are clear, gritted. Somehow the snowplough has avoided hitting the Volvo, but it is wedged in now by a dirty snow bank, up to the wheel arch. She is sure it should not be on the street – no other cars are. From now on, she’ll park it in the garage.

  She goes back to the porch for the snow shovel and digs at the snow, which is packed hard against the car. Her head is pounding and her sides ache. She straightens, puts the heel of one hand to her forehead and presses it hard.

  After she has dug a channel for the wheels, she gets in. She is sweating and breathing heavily. She puts the car in drive and edges forwards, looking over her shoulder to check that nothing is coming, glad that Greg has put snow tyres on it, feeling them grip and lift the heavy body of the car onto the road. As she turns to look forwards again a hooded figure is standing right there, in front of the car. She stabs the brake and wrenches the steering wheel – the tyres skid – and the figure, in a long black puffer coat, scrambles out of the way, up onto the snow bank. The Volvo stops.

  She cranes her neck to look behind her, her arms shaking on the wheel. The person is getting back off the snow bank now, pulling the hood down to reveal a furious face: Helena.

  She reaches for the button to buzz down the window, but then stops. Helena is almost at the car, and she is obviously angry but unhurt. She shoves the Volvo into drive again and moves away, slowly, leaving Helena in the middle of the road in her long black coat, hands on hips, shouting something.

  The walk home from the garage, across the snowy park, passes in a blur. A heavy, khaki-coloured sky presses down and there is a pause to the air, a tension – more snow is on the way. Her boots crunch and squeak, her belly feels hard and tight, the ache in the base of her spine and round her sides is more intense now, perhaps from shovelling the Volvo out. She checks her phone: no missed calls. She reaches the street – no sign of Helena, or anyone else.

  Back in the house she can’t rest, even though she knows that she needs to. The urge to clean the house is overwhelming. She scrubs the kitchen, loads up the dishwasher, sweeps and mops the floors, washes up the pans and clears away stacks of papers and socks and shoes, colouring pens and schoolbooks and Joe’s crusted snow boots that he should be wearing today but somehow is not. She mops the hall so that the white tiles gleam. She opens the front door and throws the dirty water out. It brands the snow in the shape of a small, dark country.

  She has to keep moving, despite the dragging around her sides and the burning in her lower back. She will do the laundry. It seems vital that the house should be organized, all domestic tasks completed.

  The air temperature drops with every step into the basement and she feels her belly clench, as if the baby has curled into a tight ball, for warmth. As she opens the laundry-room door she hears a thump, high above her in the house: the wind pushing the snowstorm closer.

  The laundry room is pitch dark. She feels for the switch and in the instant before the lights flicker on she is sure that someone will be there, standing in the tiny room, facing her.

  But of course the room is empty. Just a heap of unwashed clothing spewing from the laundry chute, the smell of mildew and Tide and stale clothes. As she bends over to heave the dirty things off the floor she hears it again – a thud upstairs. She stops. The sound was more localized than the wind. Something is moving across the floor above her: rapid footsteps.

  Somebody is in the house.

  It isn’t Greg; she knows the sound of his feet and anyway Greg would have called – he wouldn’t just come home like this. She feels for her phone in her back pocket and then remembers that it is on the counter in the kitchen by the coffee machine. Did she close the door after washing the floors? She isn’t sure. She imagines Helena shoving her way in, pacing angrily through the rooms, looking for her. If it is Helena, she must go up there and face her. But what if it isn’t Helena? It could be anyone.

  She stands rigid, every hair on her body raised, listening. She hears feet, very clearly now, walking along the hall above her head, a flat-booted tapping sound, definitely not Greg’s purposeful stride. If it was Helena, she would surely be making some noise by now.

  She can get out of the basement by going through the garage and onto the back driveway, but the electronic garage-door opener is in the car – and the car is at the mechanic’s. She is not sure whether it is possible to open the garage from the inside without the electronic opener.

  Greg’s crates are lined up front of her, neat, plastic squares. She listens, her head cocked. The house braces itself against another gust that shoves the bricks and boards so that they shift, fractionally. She could go up and confront the intruder, order them out of her house. She suddenly pictures the thin, red-haired woman hissing at her in the street.

  Then she hears her mobile ringtone. It is so loud, as if it is coming from behind her, as if it’s in the laundry room – perhaps she did bring it down. She scrabbles through the clothing looking for it, but it is not there. The sound cuts out. The laundry chute travels all the way through the house like its spinal column, from top floor to basement. There is an opening in the hall by the kitchen, and one on the upstairs landing. The sound must be travelling down the steel pipe.

  She scrapes piles of clothing from mouth of the chute and bends her head to the metal, listening.

  ‘Hey?’ The voice – a woman’s – makes her jerk her ear away. ‘Where d’you go? I only want to speak to you. I just need to … just need to … you know … it’s all I need … all I need is …’ The voice, babbling, rapid, is warped by the chute. ‘Come on! Where are you? Where d’you go, lovely pregnant lady? Pregnant lady, where are you?’

  It has to be her. She recognizes the instability in the voice – when she was bad her mother’s voice had this same feel, the same pitch and rapidity, the same syllabic tumble. The footsteps are moving again overhead, suddenly fast. She imagines the ravaged face, the dyed red hair, the overcoat – those black boots. It can only be her and in a minute she is going to notice that the door to the basement is open and she is going to come down. Tess lunges at the laundry-room door, grabs the key from the outside, shuts the door and locks herself in.

  She hears boots coming down the basement stairs and jumping, heavy and flat, onto the damp concrete floor. She wraps her arms around her belly. The baby gives a monumental kick with both feet. The boots are coming across the basement towards the door now. They stop. The two of them are separated only by a thin layer of chipboard. There is a faint, cloying smell, somehow familiar. The wind hits the house again like a big flat hand.

  Tess holds her breath. The door handle turns. Her eyeballs strain in their sockets. The handle releases. Her head feels light. She looks around for anything to use if the woman breaks through the door, but there is nothing in here – absolutely nothing that she could use if she needed to defend herself.

  There is a scratching sound. The woman is scratching at the wood, maybe with a fingernail – rap
id little scratch-scratch-scratch sounds. She squeezes her eyes shut. And then the scratching stops. She hears the boots shuffle, a sigh, and then the woman moves off again. She crosses the basement floor, moving away, going back up the stairs.

  Tess sucks in a breath, sinks onto the bed of dirty clothes, her heart hurling itself around inside her chest. A few minutes later there is the distant slam of the front door – the thud of mahogany, the rattle of the door frame. The intruder has gone.

  She clambers over the strewn laundry, unlocks the door and goes across the basement and up the stairs. The door at the top is shut now. She tries the handle. Nothing happens. She shoves her shoulder against the wood, tugging the handle, pushing as hard as she can, but it will not move. The woman has locked her in.

  She can see back down the steps and into a portion of the empty basement, but not around the corner. The baby somersaults and a wave of giddiness hits her, as if she, too, is spinning in circles. She hurries back down the stairs.

  The garage is dim and smells of oil and soil. She does not want to think what might be hiding in the dark corners. A draught rattles through the gaps around the door and licks at her ankles with an icy tongue. She looks for a light switch on the exposed brick, but there does not seem to be one. The door is framed by grey daylight and she moves towards it, but there is no latch, just a handle. She tugs and tries to wrestle it upwards, but the door will not budge. She smashes both fists against it and it clangs stubbornly. She kneels down, snagging at the bottom edge with her fingers, trying to heave it up. She pulls again and again. The wind howls in the trees and whacks into the house. She crashes both hands against the door.