The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  Neighbors gathered and by 5 p.m. firefighters were able to use ladders to access the roof and break out the loft windows using long poles so they could then drag more hoses into the building.

  ‘We could see right away the family had not survived,’ said Chief Smith.

  Mr Gallo and Mrs Natalia Gallo, 47, both died. It is believed that the couple’s niece, six-year-old Claudia Novak, also perished in the blaze, though this is still to be confirmed.

  For a moment her legs feel weak. She rereads the sentence, taking in the words but not the meaning. It makes no sense. There was no little girl in the house that day.

  She forces herself to keep reading.

  The Gallo’s surviving son, Grzegor, 16, a junior at Robesville High, was not home at the time of the blaze. The boy had returned to Pleasant St at 5 p.m. when the building was all but destroyed. His cousin, Carlo Novak, 19, a college student who was home for the summer, had arrived at the house at 4.07 p.m. Novak attempted get into the burning building but neighbors pulled him out and restrained him.

  ‘I smelled smoke and came right out,’ said Evelyn King, 78, whose next-door residence was undamaged. ‘There were flames pouring out of the downstairs windows. I called to my son and he ran to the fire station. Then we saw Carlo trying to get in to help them – the sight of him screaming as the menfolk pulled him back will stay with me forever. His face was black. I’ve never heard a noise like that come from a man before. God help them all.’

  Grzegor Gallo is currently being comforted by Julianna Novak, 44, at her apartment in Falls Road.

  Pleasant St is still closed, and all traffic is being diverted via Damson and Pine.

  She pushes the paper back at Alex. She is suddenly very cold and shaky.

  Alex slides another page towards her.

  It is another article, written a week after the fire. There is a family portrait, grainy, black-and-white. She recognizes Giovanni and Natalia and a boy that looks like Greg but also, somehow, not. He has an innocent smile, hair that is lighter, brushed into a side parting and his face is thin and pale. Beneath this is a photo of a beautiful little girl with dark curls and huge dark eyes. She reads the caption.

  Claudia Novak, 6, perished in the Pleasant St fire.

  The page is shaking in her hand and she can feel Alex’s eyes on her face as she turns to the next article.

  Robesville Fire Chief calls for ‘Vigilance in the Home’

  The cause of the tragic Pleasant St fire that claimed the lives of Mr and Mrs G. Gallo and their six-year-old niece, Claudia Novak, last Saturday was a pot of food left on a kitchen stove, said Fire Chief Michael Dooley.

  ‘This tragic fire is a lesson to us all. A pot on the stove caught fire and the flames quickly spread through the residence. We must all be vigilant in our homes,’ said Chief Dooley. ‘It is matter of life and death.’

  ‘Mr Gallo was a pillar of our community,’ said Mayor Randall Gerber. ‘He and his wife and that little child they took under their wing will be greatly missed. This is a terrible loss.’

  A neighbor, Doncilla Henderson, 23, had kind words to say about the family. ‘My mother worked with Mrs Gallo at Woolco,’ Henderson said. ‘She was a great lady, she’d do anything for anyone. She and the baby shouldn’t even have been there – usually at that time Mrs Gallo would be fetching her from daycare. But I guess she didn’t go that day.’

  The little girl’s mother, Julianna Novak, and her brother, Carlo Novak, 19, were too distraught to comment.

  The Gallo’s only son, Grzegor, 16, is a junior at Robesville High. ‘Grzegor is a quiet, studious, straight-A student. He is one of the best academics we’ve ever had here at Robesville High,’ said Principal Jim Swain. ‘He’s had some social challenges lately, and he’s a very sensitive boy, but he has his whole life ahead of him still. We are all praying for him.’

  ‘Our prayers are with the family,’ said Mayor Gerber. ‘This is a tragedy for our whole town.’

  A memorial service will be held at St Savior’s Catholic Church, 10 a.m., Saturday 28 June.

  There is another photograph below the piece, a formal school portrait, of a boy seated sideways, looking into the camera. At first she sees only Greg’s young face again, chubbier, softer around the jaw. But something is not quite right about it. She looks more closely. The features are like Greg’s – but the eyes, the expression, the feel of him, aren’t right. The caption says his name, but this boy is not Greg.

  She feels as if a cold hand is squeezing her chest, stopping her from breathing. She shoves the papers back across the table. She has to get out of this café, away from the photographs of the boy with Greg’s name, and the other child, Claudia, the lost, dark-eyed girl. She has to get away from them, and from Alex. She grabs her bag and coat, knocking the cup of tea so that it sloshes into the saucer.

  Alex watches her, dully, as if exhausted.

  She pushes out of the café, bumping hard against a woman who is coming through the door, making her spin like a skittle and cry out angrily – and then she is standing in the street, sucking in gulps of freezing air. Lily, pinned to her chest, straightens her limbs and lets out a thin, high cry of alarm.

  She pushes her way along the crowded street, away from the café, away from Alex and his papers. She can’t make sense of anything. The sky is murky, the night smothering the city like a dirty, coarse blanket. She feels as if she has dreamed this encounter with Alex – as if she is sick, unhinged, feverish. She starts to run then, pushing her way through a group of shrieking teenagers, past a woman carrying several paper bags of groceries – faces turn, curious, irritated, as she shoves her way into the side street where she has parked the car.

  With one arm she protects Lily as she fumbles in her pocket for her keys and beeps the locks. Lily’s face is like a small, crumpled flower. She opens her mouth wide and lets out a long, plaintive cry.

  She pulls out her phone and calls Greg’s number. It goes straight to voicemail. She dials it again as she struggles to undo the sling and manoeuvre Lily into the car seat, strap her in. She dials again as she gets herself into the driving seat, starts the engine.

  Greg is not picking up.

  Panic begins to spread through her chest. She sees the teenage boy’s face again, his brushed hair, his gentle expression. That one photograph told her what Alex might never have made her believe. And she understands, at last, what this is.

  She is not married to Greg. She is married to Carlo.

  She could call the police, but what could she say to them? That she believes her husband stole his cousin’s identity? That he is an impostor? They would think she was insane. They would keep her in a room for hours and hours asking her questions, checking facts, while all the time Joe is a hundred and fifty miles away in the mountains with a man she does not really know.

  It will be faster to go up there and bring Joe home herself. Once she has him safely home she will deal with everything else. All that matters now is getting to Joe.

  She scrolls through emails, finds the White Mountains address, jabs it into the sat nav. The car has snow tyres, it can cope with the mountains; there are blankets in the back – she always has some in the car – and a snow kit, a shovel, a first aid box. She has enough nappies and wipes, a couple of spare outfits for Lily, her phone. She can get to New Hampshire. She has to, right now.

  The roads are crowded with people returning from shopping expeditions and Saturdays out, heading off for dinner, for cocktails, to concerts, movies and theatre shows. The sat nav says she should make it to the White Mountains by 9.30 p.m. but in this traffic who knows how long it will take even to get out to the freeway.

  The face of the dead little girl looms in her mind again, those half-moon Novak eyes and dark curls. Claudia is Julianna’s other child. The child that Natalia and Giovanni took in. Or – if Sally is to be believed – just took.

  Claudia was Carlo’s baby sister, and Carlo is … Carlo is Greg. She braces her arms on the steering wheel, feeling
as if it might come off in her hands, leaving the car to careen into the street. He had a sister. Julianna wasn’t his aunt, she was his mother. No wonder he had to stop when he remembered her songs, her bookishness. She feels as if she is on a mountain, watching this avalanche of lies boom down towards her, knowing that in a moment they will shatter her bones and suffocate her.

  He didn’t lose his parents in the fire, he lost his baby sister, his uncle and his aunt. Could she have got this wrong? Maybe she is interpreting this the wrong way – there are so many stories and half-stories: Alex’s, Greg’s, Sally’s. It is impossible to know what is true anymore.

  But no. Alex was clear that years ago he met Grzegor, the gay cousin – the boy in the photo with the neat hair. And he recognized Carlo on the beach. Greg, her Greg, is Carlo.

  The garbled references in Sally’s last email begin to make sense. Raped by Giovanni, Julianna became pregnant with Claudia and then the Gallos took her away. No wonder Julianna was going out of her mind. A widow, a non-conformist, damaged by an abusive marriage; a drinker, possibly in a lesbian relationship with Sally – she would have been powerless against the Gallos, who had a whole, disapproving community behind them. She would have been ostracized and overruled. Perhaps setting fire to the Gallo’s house was not an act of madness but of despair and fury, a protest aimed at the man who raped her, then took her child. Sally said she didn’t know ‘the others’ were in there. The neighbour in the news article confirmed that Natalia should have been collecting Claudia from daycare. Maybe she thought only Giovanni was home. If Giovanni was Claudia’s father, then Claudia was the biological sister of both boys. It is too confusing – there is too much to take in or sort out, too many half-answered questions.

  The only thing she knows for sure is that Greg has lied. About everything. And right now he is over a hundred miles away up a mountain, with Joe.

  Lily’s cries are hoarse now, hicuppy, desperate. She is going to have to stop and feed her before they carry on. The traffic isn’t moving anyway, in ten minutes she has only travelled three blocks. The soreness in her breast is becoming acute. She probes the area with her fingers and the pain makes her dizzy, as if a hot blade has slid into her flesh. She is going to have to pull over and breastfeed before they go any further.

  She must stay calm. She must not panic. None of this will get any easier if she panics.

  She thinks about Joe in the wilderness with a man who – but she can’t think about that. She is not sure how she could have allowed this to happen.

  She pulls into a side street, gets out in the freezing air and undoes Lily’s straps with shaking hands, bringing her into the front seat. Lily is so distraught now that for a moment they simply wrestle. Lily’s tiny arms and legs flail, she jerks her head away from the breast, too deranged to know that what she needs is right in front of her.

  Tess feels the tears burning behind her eyes. ‘Just eat!’ she barks. Lily opens her mouth, shocked, and Tess shoves her breast deep into it. For a second Lily’s eyes bulge, her limbs go completely rigid, but then her jaw clamps down and she gives a suck – just one – a huge and painful, burning bite, and then again, a faster suckling, and suddenly she is gulping and pulling, almost choking to feed.

  Tess feels her milk let down. It burns through the inflamed duct, and after a minute or two of sickening pain she feels a creeping relief as Lily’s frantic sucking lengthens into smoother, deeper movements, milk washing over the inflammation, pushing it aside, soothing it.

  Her ears ring, her mouth is dry. She feels feverish and odd. She looks down at the tiny, red, panicky face, Lily’s big brown eyes bulging over the mouthful of breast.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my poor little darling, I’m so sorry.’ She strokes the damp hair off Lily’s forehead. She tries to breathe slowly. She looks at her phone. She has called him seven times in the last half hour.

  She calls Nell’s number and listens to it ring. It is midnight in England. Nell will be asleep. But what could she do anyway? It would be impossible to explain what she now knows. She is on her own. Nobody is going to sort this out for her.

  He must have kept up the lie until he believed it himself. That is the only way it could have worked. Somehow, over the years, he has turned himself into Greg – his own version of Greg. This is why he hid Sarah Bannister’s true identity. This is why he didn’t want a baby. A baby would only perpetuate this terrible deceit. He would have to lie to his own child about who she was.

  But he loves Lily. She knows it. She has witnessed his love, and felt it. And he loves her too. That is real. Or is it? She has no idea what is real anymore. How much longer would he have lied for? She has no idea what he is capable of.

  And he has Joe.

  The key to the next two hours on a busy northbound freeway is not to think. She just has to get herself and Lily safely to New Hampshire and get Joe back.

  *

  The I-95 north is bumper to bumper. She keeps to the slower lanes, pressing on across the state line. A sign flashes past.

  New Hampshire: Live Free or Die.

  She can’t stop thinking about the little girl trapped in the house when she should have been at daycare. Then she realizes that Natalia is not Lily’s grandmother, she is Lily’s great-aunt. Julianna is the grandmother. A woman who may have lit the fire that killed her brother-in-law, her sister and her own baby girl.

  It is too much, too awful. She pushes them all into the back of her brain. If she keeps thinking about them, she will lose it. She just has to focus on getting Joe back. She turns on the radio – a report of a car crash somewhere in Massachusetts, a family of four have been run off the road by a truck and killed. She switches it off again and glances back at Lily. She is sleeping, chin on her chest, hat skewed over one eye.

  The traffic has thinned and the snow is falling now, rapid thin flakes that melt on the windscreen. There is snow on the trees and piled up alongside the freeway. She obeys the sat nav directions, coming off the freeway when it tells her to, passing through small towns with spangled lights and lit-up store fronts, then pushing onwards, higher into dark, deserted, densely forested roads.

  All she can see now is the patch ahead of the car, illuminated by the headlights. The snow is coming down more heavily and although the roads have been cleared and gritted earlier in the day it is beginning to lie, muffling the tyres and giving a strange, unreliable feel to the steering mechanism. She is glad of the snow tyres and the knowledge that she has a shovel, blankets. The windscreen wipers clunk as they push the flakes aside. The tyres thud beneath the wheeze of the Volvo’s heating system.

  The headlights catch the occasional flash of a snow-capped mailbox, reflective numbers looming from the darkness and vanishing again. Skeletal trees crowd the roadside, tall, patient figures stepping out of a dream, punctuated only by the occasional vast evergreen, taller than the leylandii at home, dense and solid and black at its core.

  She turns off this road onto a single track that is unsignposted. The trees press closer, and as she rounds a bend her headlights catch yellow eyes – a deer, a fox – that pop, then vanish into the darkness. The Volvo tyres thud against the packed snow and she prays that nothing will leap out, forcing her to brake, because she knows she will not control the car and they are high now; this road could be clinging to a sheer drop. But she keeps going, hunched over the wheel, thinking of nothing but driving – squinting through the snow which is falling so earnestly, so determinedly, coating the windscreen, piling up as the wipers shove it aside.

  The mechanical voice of the sat nav breaks the silence, and she turns again, off this track: blackness.

  You have reached your destination.

  But there is nothing here.

  She creeps along the track. All she can see is snow-laden branches, but then her headlights round a corner and she is in a circular driveway – and there is Greg’s car in front of a tall wooden house. Its windows are lit up, and snowy steps lead to a garlanded front door. She comes to a halt
and turns off the engine, and for a second she just sits, dazed, in the silence as the heater clicks off and her heart thumps against her breastbone. It is almost 10.30. But she is here. She has made it.

  She fumbles out of the car and crunches round to the back seat, bundling the sleeping Lily into a blanket. Somewhere, an animal shrieks. The air is bitterly cold and the smell of fresh snow explodes in her head. Snowflakes pat down onto her hair and face as she tucks the blanket tighter around Lily and climbs the slippery steps to the front door.

  Before she can raise a hand to knock it opens, and he is there, peering over his reading glasses, wearing a black polo neck, joggers, thick wool socks. For a second she feels relief at the sight of him – she wants to sink into his arms. Then, of course, she doesn’t.

  His eyes are wide. ‘Tess? What the – what on earth are you doing here? How did you – oh my God – here, come in, come inside!’ He opens the door wider, spreads his arms, glancing behind her as if checking that nobody else is with her. She pushes past him, clutching Lily tightly against her chest.

  ‘Where’s Joe?’

  ‘Joe?’ He stands very still. ‘He’s upstairs, asleep.’

  ‘Where? Where is he? Which room? I need to see him.’

  ‘Tess—’

  ‘Take me to Joe,’ she growls.

  ‘What is this?’ He sounds less confident.

  She shakes his hand off her arm and looks around the large, high-ceilinged, cedar-panelled living room. It smells of woodsmoke. Warmth pulses from a wood-burning stove. There are leather sofas, thick neutral rugs and tartan blankets draped on armchairs. His laptop is open on a coffee table – a glass of whisky by it. Jazz filters from speakers. The windows are black.

  ‘Where is he?’ Her voice rises.

  ‘Tess, honey, give me Lily.’

  She ignores him and makes for the wooden stairs. Her boots slap as she runs up them. He is behind her.

  ‘Where is he?’ She feels panic fizzing through her veins as she gets to the landing. He puts his hands on her shoulders but she jerks away.