The Other Child

by Lucy Atkins

  I love you so much, Tess, and I am so sorry for hurting you and Joe, and Lily, like this. I love the three of you more than you can possibly know.

  She rereads the email, then deletes it. As she stares at her inbox, a message sent before Greg’s catches her eye. It is from Sally MacManus. She opens it, hoping that it might contain something that will illuminate this mess.

  But it is just a few lines.

  Dear Ms Harding,

  I regret to inform you that Sally MacManus passed away peacefully late Friday night. I am going through her emails informing those with whom she has corresponded. The funeral will be close family and friends only, but details of memorial arrangements are on Sally’s website.

  I am very sorry to give you this sad news.

  Yours truly,

  Edna Santiago (assistant to Ms MacManus)

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  He is standing by the ice rink barrier. She spots his dark ski jacket first, and his grey scarf, his tall, straight, shoulders-back posture, and she has the urge to run to him and feel his arms fold around her again. But then the feeling drains away. She walks up the frosted path across the Common towards the rink, digging her hands into her pockets and hunching against the raw wind that sweeps across the snow-scattered grass.

  The rink is full on this busy, clear-skied Sunday. Couples skate hand in hand, parents hold onto their wobbling children, friends jostle and laugh, while a few confident skaters weave effortlessly through the pack, their bodies still and graceful, as if they are moving in a different time dimension.

  She reaches him, taps his arm and stands back.

  ‘Oh, thank God you came.’ His face floods with relief. ‘I wasn’t sure you would.’

  They look at one another, dazed by what has happened to them. She can see that he hasn’t slept and she knows that he will see the same in her.

  ‘Where are Lily and Joe?’

  ‘Delia has them. I’m parked under the Common, I have less than an hour.’ She looks at her watch, but doesn’t see the hands.

  ‘Are they OK?’

  ‘Yes, they’re fine.’

  ‘What have you told Joe?’

  ‘Nothing really. I have no idea what to tell him.’

  ‘Tess—’ He reaches out a hand but she flinches and he lets its drop to his side. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Just tell me what I need to know.’

  ‘I’m not sure how much you’ve worked out already?’

  ‘Then start at the beginning.’

  ‘You know who I am?’

  ‘I know your real name is Carlo Novak.’

  He nods. ‘Well, the things you already know about Carlo – me – are true.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yes. My father died in a road accident when I was four years old, my mother was … unstable. She grew gradually worse. Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle and cousin, Grzegor.’ He swallows.

  ‘You had a sister. Don’t leave that out.’

  ‘I was about to … I had a sister. Yes, I had a sister called Claudia.’ His mouth spasms and he grips the barrier. ‘I was thirteen years old when she was born. I don’t know who her father was – my mother would never tell anyone. But Claudia was like, this angel for me, she was … I loved her more than I can possibly describe to you.’ His voice wavers again and for a terrible moment she thinks that he might break down. She knows she won’t be able to handle that. If he does, then she will have to walk away.

  But he gathers himself, staring for a moment at the skaters. Then he looks back at her again. His voice is flatter, as if he has managed to distance himself, just slightly, from what he has to tell her.

  ‘I did my best to take care of Claudia when my mother couldn’t, but I was just a kid, really, and I had to go to school every day. My aunt and uncle couldn’t have anymore children after Grzegor. They took Claudia to live with them when she was two.’

  ‘And your mother just let them?’

  ‘No. God, no. She fought them but ultimately she was powerless. My uncle threatened to involve the authorities and have her declared an unfit mother, and it wasn’t an idle threat. She knew if he did that she’d lose what access she did have to Claudia and she might lose me too.’

  He stops talking. His eyes search hers. ‘I wanted to tell you this, Tess. I almost told you, so many times, you have no idea …’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  The sound of skates biting into the ice, the voices, the smell of hotdogs and the dull hubbub of the city seem to recede for a moment and it is just the two of them, looking at each other.

  She feels the knot in her chest harden and looks back at the skaters. ‘Tell me about your cousin,’ she says. She can’t bear to say the name. She can’t bear to look at him.

  ‘OK.’ She hears him suck in air. ‘Grzegor was three years younger than me. We were really close; I spent a lot of time at their house. I guess I wanted to be with Claudia. My cousin was gay and, growing up in that town, I was the only person he could talk to about it. Being openly gay at our high school was basically unthinkable. And then when he was sixteen, something very bad happened. It was my fault, I did something and it had … it had unspeakable repercussions.’

  She turns and makes herself look at him again. ‘What did you do?’ She is not sure that she can bear to hear anymore confessions, but she knows she has to.

  He folds both hands tight over the barrier as if it is the only thing that will keep him upright. ‘OK. It was the summer after my first year at college. I’d gone back to Robesville because of Claudia – by that time my mother was a mess; she was broken really, drinking pretty heavily. I was nineteen and I got a summer job but I was mostly staying with the Gallos, spending as much time as I could with my sister, who was the most gorgeous six-year-old by then. Natalia was always welcoming, but I knew Giovanni didn’t want me in the house. I probably wasn’t the easiest person to be around.’

  ‘What did you do?’ she says, grimly.

  ‘Grzegor and I had a big fight. I honestly don’t know how it started, it was about Giovanni and me I think, but it escalated. He said some things that I now know weren’t true, but at the time they triggered something pretty dark in me—’

  ‘What things?’ She is not going to let him gloss over any details.

  ‘He said that I was harming Claudia by coming back. He said Claudia didn’t want me there, she thought of him as her brother, not me. It hurt me deeply, and I did something I’m very, very ashamed of. Grzegor had told me about a boy he’d been secretly seeing – the two of them had been going up to one of the waterfalls. After our fight, I went storming out of the house, and I bumped into some guys I’d known back in high school. We got drunk, and I told them about my cousin. They went up there the next day.’

  She dimly remembers Alex saying something about a small-town scandal. She can see the agony on Greg’s face as he continues, but she feels nothing for him, no compassion, just numbness.

  ‘It had devastating effect on the family. Giovanni couldn’t handle it, he was angry, openly disgusted, ashamed, mortified – it was nasty. Natalia, I think, already knew about Grzegor’s sexuality but she was furious with me for what I’d done, really bitter about it. Claudia didn’t understand what was happening, but I’m sure she knew everyone was mad at me, and I wasn’t able to see her to explain because I wasn’t allowed in the house. Grzegor was in a terrible state. He was in a gifted student summer programme at the high school, and things were unbearable for him.’

  ‘This is the summer of the fire, isn’t it?’

  Greg nods. ‘It was just a few days later. Giovanni was home sick for the first time ever, in my memory. I can only guess they were both so upset they kept Claudia home too that day, and they were so distracted they left the pot on the stove and it caught fire. I was effectively responsible. My actions led them being home, in that state, that day.’ He stops, and shuts his eyes. He is fighting to stay in control of the memories.

 
; She remembers Sally’s statement that it was not a pot on the stove, but Julianna who set the fire. But telling him this will involve a level of intimacy that she can’t manage right now. So she says nothing.

  ‘When someone ran into the bar to say the house was burning the first thing I did was look at the time,’ he continues. ‘And I remember thinking, it’s OK, nobody’s home, because Claudia should have been at day care, Natalia would be picking her up. I knew Grzegor was at the high school because I’d seen him heading down there on his bike that day, and Giovanni would be where he always was, at work. I ran over there, but when I turned into the street one of the neighbours was yelling that my aunt, uncle and Claudia were inside. I tried to get into the burning house, but I couldn’t …’ He covers his face with a hand, and turns his head away.

  She stares at the skaters without seeing them. She thinks of the neighbour’s description, in the newspaper report, of him, soot-faced, dragged back, pinned down as he bellowed for his family. The inside of her mouth feels sandpapery.

  ‘So, that fall, I went back to Philly, Grzegor moved in with my mother and you know the rest. We were all broken, in different ways.’

  She feels the pain radiating from him and for a moment the numbness goes and she feels a rush of pity, and her impulse is to comfort him, but then she reminds herself what he has done – all the lies he has told her, the sheer, brazen lie of him. A gust of wind blows up across the Common, slicing through her wool coat, right to her skin. Her body gives a sudden, violent shiver.

  ‘You’re cold.’

  She ignores him. ‘So in Philadelphia you met Sarah Bannister.’

  He nods.

  ‘Did you give her drugs to make her miscarry your baby?’

  ‘You know I didn’t, Tess.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about you!’ Her teeth are chattering now.

  ‘You do. You know that much,’ he says, gently. Then, ‘You’re freezing. Shall we go get a cup of coffee?’

  She cannot be inside a café with him, she cannot sit across a table from him. He seems to understand this too. ‘There’s a stand, right here, look.’ He points to a hatch by the skate rental. ‘A hot drink will warm you up.’

  She hugs herself and they walk side-by-side towards the counter. All around them people in woollen hats and gloves are queuing for skates – some sit and fumble with laces, calling out to each other, laughing. A woman with long blonde hair teeters across the rubber matting on blades, making Tess think of the mermaid in the fairy tale, walking on knives to be with her love.

  Greg comes back with a couple of coffees. As he hands one to her, she looks at his familiar fingers around the cup and realizes they will never touch her body again; he is no longer her love. He is separate, now, moving away from her, sliding out of reach. The realization is like a fist hitting her sternum – for a moment she struggles even to take a breath.

  They carry the steaming cups back to the same spot by the railing.

  ‘So Sarah made up the accusations?’

  ‘It’s exactly how I told you.’

  ‘No, it’s not – not exactly – because it was you on trial, not your cousin.’ She spits the words out.

  He nods. ‘I know. If I ever let myself think about the lie I was living, even for a second, I feel as if I’m drowning. I can’t explain to you how I was able to do this – I guess I just shut off so completely from my old self that it didn’t feel like a lie anymore. I certainly don’t feel like that person. I feel like he’s gone. I just feel like me.’

  She watches a tiny child zip between the adults, smaller, faster and more fearless than anyone else on the ice.

  ‘What happened to Grzegor? Where did he go?’ She isn’t sure she wants to know the answer to this, but she has to hear it anyway.

  He takes a sip of his coffee. His face is set, the tip of his nose is red but his skin is as pale and grey as the ice.

  ‘He was meant to start Harvard that fall. He’d rented a studio in South Boston for the summer and found himself a summer job in a gay nightclub. After the trial, when I dropped out of med school, I went there to see him. I hadn’t seen him in a year and I was shocked at the sight of him. He’d lost a lot of weight and he looked really unwell. His place was squalid, there were empty bottles everywhere. I tried to clean it up, I put him into bed; there was no food in the place so I went out to the store and when I got back, about an hour later, he was gone.’ He is staring straight ahead but even without looking into his eyes she can feel that this is the truth.

  ‘So he just never came back?’

  He gives a brief nod. ‘He took fifty dollars. I saw, later, when I got his bank statements, that he’d been to the ATM earlier that day. I think maybe he planned to see me one last time, then go. I looked for him everywhere, I asked anyone I could find, but no one had seen him.’

  ‘Didn’t you report him missing?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I did go to the police, but when I was waiting to file the missing persons report I realized that the second they typed my name into their computer it would all get complicated. I can’t begin to describe to you the level of mistrust I had for the police at that point in my life.’ He turns to look at her and his eyes are haunted. ‘During the trial they treated me with … there’s no such thing as innocent until proven guilty, Tess, that’s for sure. So I walked out of there. I didn’t report him missing.’

  ‘OK, but how – how the hell – did you get from that … to this?’

  He takes another sip of the coffee. He looks older, suddenly, greyer – the lines round his eyes and mouth deeper, his eyes shrunken in their sockets. She realizes, then, that he is, in fact, three years older than he told her he was. He is fifty already. She does not even know his birthday.

  She feels a wave of dizziness, the vertigo again, but he is talking. ‘The day he was due to register at Harvard,’ he says, ‘I still believed he was coming back and I decided I couldn’t just sit there and let him throw the scholarship away. It occurred to me that nobody at Harvard really knew him and I looked enough like him that anyone who saw him at interview would recognize me as him. All his photos looked like me too. So I went along and matriculated for him. I thought I’d get all the information so when he came back he’d slot right in. I know it sounds crazy, but at the time I honestly thought I was doing the right thing.’

  ‘How could that possibly be the right thing?’ Her hand is shaking so much that she has to bend down and put the coffee on the ground.

  ‘I think my rationale was I couldn’t let his life be ruined too. I felt responsible for everything bad that had happened to him, I was responsible for it. I couldn’t save my mother, I couldn’t save Claudia, or Giovanni or Natalia. But maybe I could save him.’

  ‘Even if it meant doing something criminal?’

  ‘I didn’t think about it like that, not at that point. I just packed up his studio, I moved into his dorm, got a haircut, wrote his signature on everything. I was basically holding his life open for him, and I had to work senselessly hard to get it right. He got a perfect MCAT score, he was already famous for that, and the pressure to live up to him was huge. But by pushing myself to my absolute limits I realized, for the first time in my life, what I was capable of.’

  ‘You liked being him.’

  ‘No, I didn’t like anything. I just worked. I called myself Greg and I worked harder than I’d ever worked at anything, ever.’

  ‘And at what point did you realize he wasn’t coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know, after a year maybe? On a gut level, I probably knew far sooner, but it took me a while to accept it and even then, for years after he went, I’d see his face in the street, you know – I’d catch a glimpse of him in the market, or going down the escalator into the subway and I’d run after him and tap him on the shoulder and he’d turn and …’ His face grows even more sunken-looking.

  ‘So you think he did kill himself?’

  He nods. ‘I’m sure of it. It was an act of kindness to do
it that way. I think he wanted to die but he knew what I’d been through already and didn’t want me to have to deal with that, on top of everything. He wanted to protect me from having to find his body and hold a funeral and mourn and bury him. He was the kindest, sweetest person, Tess. You’d have loved him. I loved him.’

  ‘Do you think he knew what you’d do?’

  He shrugs. ‘I’ve asked myself that a lot and I’ll never know, but sometimes I think he knew me better than I knew myself.’

  ‘So you just stayed? You just carried on the lie?’

  ‘I graduated top of the class,’ he says. ‘They were throwing money at me. For the first time in my life I felt I had a future.’

  She looks at the rink again. Some people waddle, toeing the ice cautiously; some cling to the barrier, afraid to let go – while others push out, alone, too fast, then crash down.

  ‘But you could have turned yourself in.’

  ‘I could have, but I didn’t want to go to jail, it was that simple. So I shut down my old self and I focused on being the best doctor I could possibly be. It might sound inflated, but I also wanted to do some good in the world.’

  ‘But then you met me. You weren’t doing good to me, or to Joe – and to Lily? Would you have lied to Lily forever about who she is? Because this isn’t just your identity anymore – it’s hers too. Your daughter might not ever have known her real name. How could you do that to her?’

  He rubs a hand through his hair. ‘This is the reason I was so afraid of being a father. I came so close to telling you, that time when you were pressing me about not wanting to have a baby. I almost just told you but it seemed like such a terrible thing to do to you – you were pregnant, you’d abandoned a whole life to be with me, you’d trusted me. And I was too much of a coward. I knew you’d walk away if you knew the truth; my God, who wouldn’t? I kept telling myself I’d find a way to tell you when the time was right.’

  ‘My God.’ She closes her eyes, needing to shut him out.