The Cuckoo's Child (29 page)

And then, as if I had crossed a boundary into another country, I was in the wood. Even on that sunless day, there was a marked drop in temperature under the trees. The light was dim, although the leaves were still young and had not linked up in a canopy; there were still some bare black branches and holes for the sky.

It was very quiet. There was none of the secret scurrying, the furtive rustling of dead leaves that would suggest small bodies darting through the undergrowth, none of the subdued chatter of finches, none of the flicks and dashes and vibrating twigs that betray small birds on the move. Not even my own progress among the trees disturbed the peace; my footfalls smothered in the short turf and there was little debris on the path, almost as if it had been swept. No dead branches, no twigs to snap under my tread.

Weightless, I drifted between the green-grey columns of beech trees. The path tilted uphill but so gently there was no effort involved, just a rise that had more to do with levitation than climbing, although I had to keep my eyes on the ground now, where the roots of the trees snaked along just under the skin of the earth, breaking through in some places to lay snares.

I had never trodden the path before, but it was utterly familiar, as if I had rehearsed this walk many times in some other life. So the cry, when it pierced the stillness, though heartstoppingly loud and close, was no surprise. I looked up, and there, where I knew it would be, a white peacock sat on the branch, its filigree tail cascading like a bride's train. It cocked its tiny crowned head to inspect me obliquely with one dark eye, then turned and called again.

Help! Help! Help!

I could see the breath curling out of its open beak. We both listened, and sure enough, a faint reply drifted to us, and the peacock shuffled his feathers and dropped without warning from his perch, gliding away to disappear in green shadows.

There was no doubt in my mind what I would find ahead. The way was steeper now, and the trees were thinning. There at the top of the hill it stood against the sky. A miniature Greek temple, white, a handful of columns supporting a roof with unadorned pediments, open to the winds and rain blowing through it. My mother's favourite summerhouse, I knew.

I climbed into it and gazed down at the far side of the hill. The column I touched struck cold under my hand, as I knew it would, and there were no surprises in the view either. The slope, covered in coarse grass and bracken, ran down to a sheet of dark water. The lake was fringed with reeds; small black water birds, coots or moorhens, darted in and out of its cover. The surface of the water was dimpled like pewter and restless, and light flickered over it, until it seemed as if the very shadows of the gunmetal clouds flying intermittently overhead were pushing the ceaseless flow of ripples from right to left.

I've no doubt it was a reservoir of some sort, with a humble purpose: supplying water for irrigation or livestock, for example. It was a romantic stretch of water, though. Its darkness and isolation summoned words like
tarn
and
mere
, conjured up Grendel and his mother, or the Lady of the Lake and the tumbling, glinting flight of Excalibur through the air.

For the first time, as I sat on the step and submerged myself in that tiny piece of English landscape, I felt connected to my mother. If anywhere, her spirit lived in this wild place. I knew she had shared my thoughts, for didn't she love poetry and romance? Didn't she search, in her own way, for a better world? And more than that, I knew she had shared this place with me when I was very small, carrying me in the twilight through the garden and the wood, sitting in the little temple that represented her only liberty, plotting her deliverance as she watched the water and the dying light.

By the time I looked at my watch and raced back to the cottage, shutting the door firmly and hurrying back to the road to meet the three ladies, I had determined that whatever happened with my grandmother, whatever objections she might mount, whatever difficulties I might cause, I would return to that place where my mother lingered still.

There was no word from Magnus that night. I rang twice, once after reaching Wimbledon, once at ten o'clock in the evening. The phone rang and rang in the empty room. I imagined it vibrating on its little table in the dark cottage, stirring the molecules in the air, reviving the ghostly smell of charred flesh. No answer. Magnus had to be at the hospital still, or he would have phoned me. That was ominous.

At five minutes past midnight I was bundled in my housecoat on the bottom step of the stairs listening to the phone ringing thousands of miles away in my kitchen. I was rehearsing what I was going to say, how I'd tell the story of my encounter with my grandmother, what I'd found, how I wanted to stay longer and soak up the place where my mother had been a child, where I had been born. Caught up in this, I had just realized the phone had been ringing a long time when it suddenly ceased and Neil spoke in my ear.

“Liv? Where've you been? I've been trying to get hold of you for hours!”

“What's—” I began, but he cut me off.

“No, Liv, listen. You've got to come home.”

“Home?” I echoed stupidly. “What's wr—?”

Again he cut me off. His urgency was palpable and I could feel the choking sensation that fear brings.

“Liv, are you sitting down?”

“My God, Neil, what's wrong? Tell me. It's Stephen, isn't it?”

“What? Oh, Liv, no, no, it's nothing wrong. Stephen's . . .  no, nothing like that, nothing wrong, actually, it couldn't be righter . . .”

“Neil. Stop babbling and tell me.”

“Yes,” he said, “yes, sorry. It's hard. Well, it's not
hard
 . . .”

“Neil!”

I heard him take a breath. Let it out. Carefully. When he spoke again, his voice trembled with control.

“Livvy, Daniel has come back.”

It's so peaceful in here. I know things are moving outside this room; gurneys and trolleys keep rolling past, and I can hear the chatter at the nurses' station down the hall, but it's all far away and hushed. I can sit here with my head against the wall, watching the green light tracing the peaks and valleys of your heartbeat on the monitor, listening to the slow whisper of your breathing as the lights in the parking lot flicker on one by one, and think. For the first time since Neil's phone call, I can scan the whole picture instead of poring over each detail.

That moment of hearing Daniel had reappeared was the most visceral jolt of my life, Stephen. I know what the victims of blast feel when the shock waves hit them, the great express train punch, everything silently exploding inside from the pressure, sucked empty in an instant by vacuum, compressed, flattened, before the smile can even start to fade from the unsuspecting face. You'd think it would be paralyzing, and it was, but only for a moment. In the next heartbeat, everything was clear, all hesitation and uncertainty swept away, my path absolutely plain.

It wasn't as simple as that, of course. There was endless talk, arrangements to be made in a fearful hurry, all sorts of loose ends to be tied up in some fashion before I bolted back across the world. And the story itself came in dribs and drabs: a first gush of stark facts from Neil, then more, some of it adding to what we knew already, some forcing us to revise what we believed was true, question what we thought was unquestionable, and all of it involving more and more people and lives, until the starting line of Daniel's disappearance receded almost to vanishing point.

Neil relayed the first facts in a strained breathy voice as if he were chasing after them and daren't let them out of his sight.

“Detective Mallory phoned,” he said, “so I knew at once something was up. I was waiting for him to say they'd found some bones, then he said, ‘Good news!' I swear he was crying, Liv. I bet they don't get to say that much, specially after so long.”

I didn't want to hear about Mallory.

“Well, apparently a sixteen-year-old boy turned up out of the blue at a police station in Santa Barbara with a four-year-old in tow. He told the desk sergeant he'd found the kid crying on the beach alone and had brought him in because he didn't know what else to do. If the desk sergeant hadn't been on the ball, he might have let the teenager go at that point, but he recognized the child as the victim in an abduction that had taken place in Washington State five months earlier. Just the same sort of thing as Daniel: huge manhunt, no results.”

I listened, mesmerized, to Neil's voice in my ear, stronger now, relishing the narrative. You can imagine detectives were skeptical, he went on, about how the teenager and the child came to be together. They questioned the older boy, who said his name was Jimmy, until they had wrung him dry. He was reluctant, but eventually he told another version altogether.

He lived with his uncle, he said. Mainly on a boat. But they moved about a lot.

While they had been moored at Astoria, several months before, his uncle had left him for a day and come back after dark with a large athletic bag. It contained the little boy, drowsy from the effect of some drug.

His uncle said this was Sam, and he would be living with them now. The next day, they moved south, keeping well out to sea.

Sam, said Jimmy, cried a lot and would not be comforted. His uncle took to locking the child in the tiny forward cabin and warned Jimmy to leave him alone. But the child stopped eating and talking and, like an animal, took refuge in the darkest corners, sleeping curled up in fetal position. Jimmy couldn't bear the child's grief, waited until his uncle was forced to come into harbour for supplies, hurrying the process up by furtively tipping food overboard and sabotaging a bilge pump, then broke the lock with a screwdriver and ran with the child.

Asked why he had come to the police, he said, “Well, it wasn't right, was it? Stealing a kid?”

Asked the name of his uncle, he replied, “John Moore. But his real name's Jerry Murtry.”

And Jimmy? He insisted that was his name and he had no other, so that's how the American detectives referred to him. But Jerry's name on a police bulletin had alerted one cop who dimly remembered following up some Canadian by that name, and he checked, eventually blowing the dust off the file concerning the disappearance of Daniel James Alvarsson.

That was what I got from that first phone call. The other things had to wait until later, after the initial shock had subsided and Neil had found out more. The reactions of the three ladies echoed all the questions that had gone so long unanswered.

“How did this Jerry person manage to get Daniel to accompany him?” asked Miss Hoar, and I asked Neil the same question.

“Apparently Jerry said he'd come to take him to Disneyland,” Neil replied, and I could hear the conversation at Daniel's birthday party over again.

“Told Daniel we'd come for him after Disneyland, and then when we didn't, said that we'd decided he should stay with Jerry. What could the kid do? He accepted it, of course. Wasn't happy, but it just became the way things were.”

“What about school? Did he
go
to school?”

“Not on any routine basis, apparently. They were always on the move, slipping up and down the coast, and Jerry'd spend time ashore when the money got low, odd jobs, picking fruit, that kind of thing, and Daniel would get shunted off to some temporary school if there were social workers around to keep an eye on the migrant workers. He'd stay there until Jerry decided they had enough money for a while, or the school started agitating for birth certificates or transcripts, then he'd be whipped out and away. He can't remember how many schools he's been in, but the police have traced at least fourteen. They say he's not much of a reader, but he can tell you everything you want to know about boats and small engines.”

All I could see was the small Daniel trustingly taking Jerry's hand to go to Disneyland, looking back, perhaps, to see me preoccupied with another child. Then the long wait after the promised excitement—if they ever actually got to Anaheim—the days and weeks that stretched interminably for the child with his limited understanding of time, hoping that Neil and I would appear one day to scoop him up and take him back to the familiar. How long had it taken for his hope to die? When did he finally decide that we had given him away, that his parents had abandoned him to this strange nest and were never coming back?

In my mind, I replayed Jerry's last phone call, his offer to return, his shock. His sympathy. The treachery. He had betrayed our trust, infiltrating our little family like a mole, angling, it seemed now, for that affection that would let Daniel take his outstretched hand, then using that same affection to head off any suspicions we might entertain with his phone call—for would the guilty draw such attention to himself?—finally using our son's belief in us as a weapon to destroy Daniel's hope of ever seeing us again as we failed, day after day, to live up to our promise to come for him. And for what? What was Jerry's motive?

“Was there sexual abuse?”

Neil paused, then plunged ahead.

“That's the first thing I asked. Daniel says no, but he's clammed up on the subject, he's not being much help about that.” His voice dropped. “He
likes
Jerry, for heaven's sake. Getting evidence from him is like pulling teeth.”

“He must be so confused,” I said.

“Probably. I get the impression he's not easy. He'll need a lot of help.”

I was silent because a hatred of such refined concentration had taken hold of me that I felt it as a physical pain, rather as if a stiletto of ice had slid between my ribs and was burning its way into vital organs. Daniel's explanation to the detective for bringing the second child to the police, so poignant at first, now took on other qualities. “Well, it wasn't right, was it? Stealing a kid?” What
had
he suffered? Could it possibly have been
jealousy
that gave him the strength to break the pattern?