The Lost Boy

by S. A. McEwen

  “I want to remember the good parts of my sister,” she’d told Nick as she did so, breezily, like she was the better person, and they’d both let it go without a challenge, without another word about it. When Hannah mentions the estrangement to any friends, she tells the same story—how vicious, how violent Olivia’s messages were. How she’d had to delete them so as not to have to accidentally see them ever again.

  “They were unspeakable,” she’d said, solemnly, and after a few recitations of this, even she believes it as the truth.

  So she was self-righteous and gratified when Olivia reached out to her. It was the way it should be: Olivia caused the problem. She should grovel a little to fix it.

  They hadn’t spoken for two-and-a-half years. Wolfie was now three-and-a-half, and Bing had no idea who he was or even what he looked like.

  Bing will rewrite this history, too, however: a couple of short years later, she will recount to their mother that she was the bigger person—she reached out to Olivia to make amends. She will even add in little details, mindboggling, random, and untrue: that she left a homemade fruit cake on Olivia’s doorstep. That she received no response, so she followed it up with an email, saying she missed Olivia; asking for a cup of tea.

  It’s not a malicious lie: Bing truly believes that this is what happened. When their mother raises this with Olivia in good faith—It was nice of Bing to make a fruit cake for you, as an olive branch, wasn’t it?—Olivia is stunned into silence.

  Intuitively, she understands that it is not propaganda, but a reflection of the way that Bing exists in the world. She remembers once, when Abby had been gone for months, clutching his favourite teddy bear and crying—and Hannah had tried to soothe her, saying, “He’s happy at the new school, Liv. He told me about his new friends, all the things he’s learning. It’s better that he’s there. He’s going to do better.” And Olivia had stared at her sister, stared and stared, scrolling through her memories of every last weekend with Abby, wondering where such a sentence could possibly have fitted. All she had seen was sadness, hopelessness, defeat.

  Was Hannah trying to make me feel better, or herself? Olivia had wondered. She didn’t think that Hannah could possibly be so blind to reality that she believed such a thing. And it wouldn’t be the last time she’d see her sister will a new reality into existence by the sheer force of her need for it to be so.

  After the fruit cake comment, Olivia had thought about how it was possible to exist in the world with so much certainty. Most people doubt themselves at least a little bit. At least on occasion. And even if you don’t doubt yourself, Olivia mused after that conversation with her mother, most people have good friends who can pull them up when they go too far. Give them a reality check. She doesn’t always like it, but Jodie will raise an eyebrow, tilt her head to the side. If necessary, she’ll tell Olivia she’s out of line.

  “Er, I think you’re wrong about that,” she’d said, that time that Olivia suggested Wolfie’s anxiety—new, confusing—was related to the rift with Bing. Olivia saw it, instantly, of course. She was getting herself so worked up about things, about the cause, about what had happened. She was looking for someone to blame. Her thinking was spiralling madly. But as soon as Jodie said it, Olivia could see the insanity of the idea. She had breathed deeply, looked at Jodie sheepishly. “Oh, yeah,” she’d said, and they’d both laughed. Or, “Really, dude?” when Olivia pitched her theory about Nick’s tendency to ignore Wolfie while he was reading the paper. She had genuinely thought for a few minutes there that he was punishing Wolfie, trying to make Wolfie learn, through his rigid silence, to leave him alone.

  Some people think good friends see the world the way you do, so they agree with you and cheer you on, and to some extent Olivia thinks this is true. But really good friends know your insanities even better than you do yourself.

  Did Hannah not have any close friends who she could be honest with? Who could help her be honest with herself?

  Really good friends will tell you when you’re straying too far off the path.

  Really good friends will stop you, before you do something crazy.

  Or they would, if you happened to share your crazy plans.

  Olivia startles. She’d always been able to be honest with Jodie.

  But she hadn’t been honest recently, had she?

  Perhaps that was where Olivia went wrong. She knew she was straying a little too far from reasonable.

  She knew someone would stop her.

  So she kept her agenda completely to herself.

  35

  Two Months Earlier

  Charlie moves around the house methodically.

  Wolfie trots after him. “What are you doing, Cho-cho?” he asks.

  “Just seeing what the house is like,” Charlie replies.

  Olivia drifts behind them. She feels like a crazy person: she can’t sit with a cup of tea, she can’t watch something on the television, she is stuck in this cycle of supervising her child, seeing nothing to worry about, berating herself, then seeing something that she worries about very much indeed.

  She had expected more tears, more grief from Charlie—and then when she reflects on this, she wonders why. His strange emotional world is one of the things that she has always noticed about Charlie.

  On her better days—her hopeful, caring, proactive days—she wonders if he is on the spectrum. She suggested to Nick an assessment, and he waved her concerns away. He did not see anything unusual about Charlie. Olivia felt dismissed and began to doubt herself.

  Was she imagining it?

  On the days where she can’t shake her fears, her worries, other diagnoses float to the forefront of her mind.

  Sociopath.

  Psycho.

  Today, Wolfie seems calm. It’s his first week with no childcare, his first week home with Olivia, and she resents sharing him with Charlie. She resents having to parent two kids, instead of one.

  She resents having to be diligent. To not be able to tune out, now and then.

  She can’t talk to Nick about this. She is afraid he will dismiss her, again, and she will feel less and less like they are on the same team.

  But Charlie starts school tomorrow. The weight that drapes across her, rough and bleak and suffocating, is close to lifting. At least most days, it will be just Wolfie and her.

  She’s jealous of how Wolfie has taken to Charlie. He adores his big brother. He looks at him much like Olivia remembers looking at Bing: as though he is the sun. As though his warmth and light are the whole world.

  She fears for Wolfie, loving someone like that. Siblings might look like warmth, but you shouldn’t trust them just because they’re related to you by blood.

  There are many things about Charlie that remind Olivia of Bing.

  Charlie treats him like a toy—he’ll use him for his own amusement when it suits him, then discard him, walking away from him without a word, without an explanation, and shut his bedroom door in Wolfie’s face. And Wolfie will come to Olivia, distraught, longing for more of Charlie, and it eats away at her, enraging her.

  Charlie does nothing to deserve Wolfie’s love.

  He is not kind or thoughtful or gentle. He will recruit Wolfie for his own agenda, then leave him hanging. And Olivia hates that Wolfie loves Charlie. But love him he does—so she wants Charlie to be careful with Wolfie’s precious little heart.

  Today, she is conscious of hovering. Does Charlie notice? she wonders. Does he understand why? Or is he oblivious?

  Charlie instructs Wolfie to get him some string and paper: he’s going to make the boy a toy.

  Wolfie is delighted, running in little circles, making the strange little clucking noise he makes when he is happy.

  Olivia is torn between joy that Wolfie is happy—it happens so rarely these days—and trepidation. Because she knows Charlie will lose interest, and disappoint Wolfie. And Wolfie will not be able to understand what follows.

  Now, Charlie sits on the floor. Wolfie is asking
him, over and over, what he is making.

  “You’ll just have to wait and see,” says Charlie, making his eyes big and wild, egging Wolfie’s excitement on. “But it’s going to be very special! And very BIG!” Here he holds his hands wide, showing the grandeur of his project, the size of Wolfie’s expected joy.

  Wolfie plops down beside him, clapping his hands together gleefully.

  “What colour? What colour?” he asks, his eyes fixed on Charlie, his little face rapturous.

  Charlie could cut out a circle, and Wolfie would be overjoyed.

  Olivia observes all this, her heart unable to settle. Part of her is sour, resentful (she could not cut out a circle and it be received with joy. Wolfie expects more of her). But part of her longs for Wolfie’s love and attention to be reciprocated genuinely; for him to bask in the love of his big brother, and be content.

  She swings wildly between these two states, overlaid with apprehension—she has seen this play out enough times to know that Wolfie’s satisfaction will be thwarted. Charlie likes arresting his attention—feeling the full strength of Wolfie’s adoration and attentiveness. He loses interest in the follow through. The payoff for him is at the start: knowing Wolfie is hanging on his every word.

  Now Charlie is cutting a large circle out of purple cardboard. He has a pile of other colours beside him, and he continues building up the anticipation.

  “It will be beautiful! And fierce! And special,” Charlie tells Wolfie, as he cuts and threads.

  A green triangle.

  An orange claw.

  “You can take it to the park. You can play with it!”

  Wolfie claps and gurgles, his words jumbled in nonsense sounds in his excitement.

  “You can even scare your mother with it,” Charlie whispers, conspiratorial.

  He glances at Olivia here, and winks, and her heart lurches.

  Is she meant to join in the game, pretend to be frightened by the end product?

  But she and Charlie both know there will be no end product.

  Or does he not know? Olivia wonders, again. Does he genuinely lose interest, and not realise he has repeated this pattern ad nauseam since he arrived?

  Wolfie is on his feet again, jumping up and down, giddy with longing to see what Charlie will build.

  Then Charlie sighs heavily, puts the scissors and the cardboard down.

  “I’ll finish it later,” he says, not even glancing at Wolfie. And he stands up and goes to sit on the couch. He reaches for the remote, starts flicking idly through channels. Wolfie is devastated, trotting after him, pawing at his legs.

  “Cho-cho? Cho-cho?” he is saying, his voice full of longing. “When? When?”

  Charlie doesn’t even answer. He starts watching some news. He has tuned Wolfie out completely. It is as though Wolfie does not even exist.

  Olivia catches Wolfie’s hand.

  “I’ll finish it!” she exclaims, expressing excitement she does not feel; trying her hardest to not allow Wolfie to feel this abject disappointment, again. To distract him, bring him back to joy.

  It’s not that he is missing out on the toy that Charlie was building, she thinks to herself.

  She’s trying to shore him up against the knowledge that Charlie does not really care for him. That Wolfie’s needs are irrelevant, inconsequential: somehow, Charlie’s need to feel important has been met, and Wolfie’s distress does not move him. Does not touch him at all.

  Wolfie follows Olivia back to the cardboard, but his disposition is confused and pained.

  She can’t protect him from what he perceives. Even in his little, four-year-old mind, he knows that the completion of the toy will not fix things: he knows his big brother has discarded him, and his little heart hurts.

  “No TV in the daytime,” she says to Charlie sharply, without looking at him, and he looks at her—bemused—and shrugs. Then lopes off to his room.

  36

  Tuesday, Week Two

  Olivia still sometimes reads Bing’s messages from that morning, years ago.

  It’s like a scab that she can’t stop worrying: she knows it is unhelpful, and painful, and she does it anyway.

  Sometimes she tells herself it’s a reminder—a reminder of all the reasons she can’t trust Bing. All the reasons cutting her out of Olivia’s life was the right decision.

  It’s also a justification. Though Olivia doesn’t think about it that way.

  She had just been expressing disappointment—and, okay, anger—about a goddamn cake. It wasn’t meant to be an assessment of Bing’s entire person.

  Is a bubble bursting about someone always so…slow? Olivia wonders. It felt like an exhalation, rather than a pop. She’d already cut Bing out of her emotional world, for the most part. She’d thought she’d put Bing somewhere that she couldn’t hurt her anymore. But Bing’s claws were apparently hulk-like—big and strong and razor-sharp, they could reach anywhere. In her mind’s eye, she sees Bing like the lion in The Clan of the Cave Bear: determined, stretching, straining to meet their mark. To sink into flesh.

  To draw blood.

  To eat her alive, maybe.

  Except that lion gives up, goes on to other things.

  In the aftermath, Olivia had tried to understand. She’d posited theories to Nick, stretched her brain as thin and wiry as was possible for her, contorting to find her way into the places that Bing’s mind obviously occupied. But in the end, she could make no sense of it.

  Just because your life is shit, you want to make me feel bad too?

  I told you you’d be bad at mothering. You can’t even organise your kid a fucking cake.

  I feel sorry for Wolfie having you as a mum.

  Did you even ever make Charlie a cake? Don’t pretend you care about children.

  On and on they went, all day. By the end of the day, Olivia had equated the sound of her text messages to violence and pain. She had to block Bing, and change the text tone. Even then, it took her a full week to stop the flash of panic every time she heard her phone ping.

  Now, though, nothing feels the way it was supposed to feel.

  She was supposed to have solved this problem: killed two birds with one stone, as they say.

  It had taken planning and undeserved kindness and problem-solving and months.

  It had taken pretending.

  It had gone against everything she knew to be true: that Bing was bad for her, and would savage her again, one day.

  That Bing was not to be trusted.

  Mostly that Bing would be so self-righteous and smug about a reconciliation, when she deserved to be so much less.

  But Olivia had the bigger picture to think about. She had comforted herself with the notion that though Bing would feel like she won, it would in fact be Olivia who won in the end. And at the time, she seemed to get from point A to point B to point C effortlessly, and her plan had seemed perfectly reasonable. Now, though, her heart lurches at the thought.

  Was it parenting that did this to her?

  Was she this crazy before she had a child?

  She tries to remember life before Wolfie. Before the little gaps between her ideas about parenting and Nick’s ideas became chasms, impossible to traverse safely. She wonders if Nick—dependable, optimistic Nick—had even noticed any changes in her. She had always kept somewhat to herself—but at some point, this had distorted into secretiveness.

  Now, she’s trying to claw her way back from the precipice. She feels like a foreign creature, a black, enormous spider, all scrabbling legs and beady eyes.

  She had wanted Bing to take her husband off her hands.

  She had wanted that edge in the issue of custody.

  She had mused one day how easy it would be to propel Bing and Nick into each other’s arms—how predictable they were. How easily manipulated. And once the thought occurred to her, it seemed so small, so easy to orchestrate. She had been so curious.

  Could she really pull it off?

  She had wanted to take Wolfie far, far awa
y from both Charlie and Nick.

  She had wanted a perfect little life for her and Wolfie, and she had completely lost her mind.

  37

  Tuesday, Week Two

  The familiar beep, beep, beep of ABC news rouses Ray from his memories, and he listens nervously for news of Wolfie Hitchens, the missing little Melbourne boy. It’s been the lead story all week.

  He’s only an hour away from home, after eight long days on the road. His heart is in his mouth as the news is covered. Only a minute or so of air time is given to Wolfie.

  Still missing.

  No leads.

  The presenter urges anyone with information to call Crime Stoppers, and Ray wonders if he could call them. But what would he say?

  That he knows where lost little boys end up?

  Thinking about it makes Ray’s chest tight. He tries to think about something else.

  Getting home. He’s been teaching his partner to drive. There has been much resistance, but Ray has insisted: “Just say something happens to me? Just say there’s an emergency?”

  Ray actually worries that it’s too late. Can you teach a forty-four-year-old to drive a car? The lessons are painfully slow. But Ray is a good teacher. He’s patient, and knows how to speak calmly, softly. He’s already taught his partner enough of the basics of reading and writing to do some simple things. Even when he’s panicking slightly himself, he can keep his voice low, soothing.

  He tries to think about what to focus on for their next lesson. But his mind keeps drifting back to the police, to the Hitchens boy.

  Little boys, without their mothers. Alone in a world full of dark places and dark hearts.

  Ray is having trouble breathing. His vision starts to blur slightly. He’s on a tight schedule, he mustn’t stop, but he has to stop, the truck brakes screeching and groaning as he swerves into a parking bay, too fast. Gravels sprays out from his wheels, and he gasps for breath, the blackness engulfing him, obliterating the vision of little boys with golden curls into nothing but darkness, unreachable and out of sight.