The Other Child (13 page)

She folds it and tucks it back into the file.

She sits for a moment longer on the cold, concrete floor. She doesn’t really want to think too much about Helena and Greg in their beautiful prime. She is not sure what she thought she’d find in these boxes – evidence? Pictures of Helena? Love letters? Something to demonstrate that Greg has lied about knowing her? She tucks the files back in their box. She has no idea why her instinct is to doubt him when it is clearly Helena who is making things up.

But now she has started she might as well see what’s in the last box. It is light, as if it contains nothing but air. She rips through the seals and finds a child-sized baseball glove inside. She lifts it out, feeling the cracked, stiff leather, turning it over: a little relic of his small-town Pennsylvania childhood.

She cradles it, gently, and a heavy sadness folds itself around her. She has no right to be in this painful place, sifting through memories that he can only handle by containment. He has never invited her to witness this.

As she goes to put it back in the box she sees something pale and cottony folded up on the bottom. She shakes it out. It is a pair of baseball pantaloons, about Joe’s size, and below these a blue-and-white nylon baseball shirt with ‘Robesville Sluggers’ and a number sixteen on the back.

She tries to picture a ten-year-old Greg playing Little League like the boys she has seen in the local park. There are no photos of him as a child because everything was destroyed in the fire. It is a miracle that these few objects survived. She lifts them up to her face. They smell of musty corners, tree bark, mouse pelt – but not smoke or ash. She feels shabby: she really should not be pawing through these things, uninvited.

But no wonder he has carried this box of memories all the way across the Atlantic and back. These things are precious. They shouldn’t be left down here in the damp. That, at least, can be a justification for what she has done. She folds the baseball pants and shirt back up and as she is laying them back in the box she notices something shiny in one corner. She picks it out. It is a medal, on a striped ribbon, lightweight and tinny, with ‘Robesville Sluggers, Junior League Champions’ engraved on it. Again, she wonders how it survived the fire.

They had only known each other a month or two when he told her what happened to his parents. His voice was controlled, but afterwards he went out and ran for more than an hour. When he came back, sweating and loose-limbed, he stood in the kitchen with a glass of water and said, ‘I told you because you need to know, but I don’t want to talk about it again. I am a different person now. It doesn’t help me to remember; it never does.’ He tipped back his head and gulped the water without stopping to breathe, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Sixteen is a terrible age to lose both parents. She was sixteen when her mother died, but at least she still had her father, and he had always been the one who cared for her so, in a sense, when her mother died, very little changed. There was even – something it took her many years to admit – a faint sense of relief because life became infinitely simpler. Her father had continued to be her rock until his death nine years later. So, really, she can’t compare her loss at sixteen to what Greg went through.

Shutting off has worked for him – it allowed him to get his undergraduate degree, his Harvard scholarship, then a medical degree. He has made a phenomenal success of his life, when it could so easily have gone the other way. No, it is not up to her to tell Greg how to handle his past.

She wonders what his parents would think if they could see him. They were obviously good, loving, hardworking people, and they would surely have been so proud. The odd thing is that he can’t even bear to remember the good things – the happiness and security of the first sixteen years of his life. He has shut all that down, along with the tragedy, as if the loss erases everything that went before.

As she puts the medal back on top of the pantaloons she is overcome, again, by the enormity of what Greg must have gone through. He watched the flames consume his home, knowing that his parents were inside and he was powerless to save them. It’s obvious, really, why he chose a career that is devoted to saving lives. In some way, every time he opens up a child’s chest – every time he goes inside – he is rescuing them, mending the past.

She is about to close the box when she notices a plastic rectangle, about the size of a credit card, lodged down one side. She levers it out. It is a library card with a University of Pennsylvania logo. She turns it over:

She looks at it for a moment longer, then lays it back in the box with the other things. Carlo Novak must be a long-ago relative or a friend and, like everything else in these boxes, he is none of her business. She should not be squatting on the floor, going through Greg’s private belongings. This is all wrong.

She tries to stick the masking tape back down but it shrivels away from the cardboard. She puts the ruined boxes back on the shelves, one by one, and then washes her hands with scalding water and soap. She will have to go and buy damp-proof storage crates, repack them, make amends.

She is propped up by feather cushions in the middle of the king-sized hotel bed, reading emails with the iPad on her knees. Greg is hunched over his laptop at the tiny desk, with his back to her. He is doing something vital to do with research funding that just came in and cannot possibly wait until Monday.

Nell has been googling again. Harvard Medical School, she says, has over 700 students and Helena – she found an online reference to a birth date – is three years younger than Greg.

Tess types a brief reply and looks up at Greg again. She hasn’t yet told him she repacked his boxes. It was impossible to talk to him about anything last night.

*

When he got back from the hospital they had loaded the bags straight into his car.

‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘You look tired.’

For once, he nodded and got into the passenger seat. But things began to go wrong almost as soon as they pulled onto the freeway. She had already told him over the phone about the woman with red hair and he had persuaded her, once again, that this person was not a threat, just troubled. But in the car he seemed less patient, edgier, less willing to admit that a stranger watching the house could be problematic.

‘She looked ill,’ she said. ‘She’s so thin and sickly. She shouldn’t be on her own on Thanksgiving like this – she obviously needs help.’

‘I wish you hadn’t tried to speak to her.’

‘Why not? You said she wasn’t dangerous.’

‘She isn’t, but talking to her is going to achieve nothing.’

‘How do you know? I mean, do you even understand why she is doing this? What does she actually want to achieve?’

‘I’m sure even she doesn’t know the answer to that.’

‘Then she needs help. We can’t just pretend she isn’t there.’

‘You can’t help her and nor can I. Only a psychiatrist can do that.’

‘Then shouldn’t we find out who her psychiatrist is?’

‘I told you, I already did – I made some calls. Her doctors know what’s happening.’

‘So we just turn a blind eye? It seems wrong. She looks ragged. Is she living in Boston? Is someone looking after her?’

‘I don’t know – I don’t want to know. If we engage, it will only make things worse.’

‘That’s all very well for you to say, you’re hardly ever home. But I’m walking into the garden and seeing her standing there, watching me. It doesn’t feel right to just pretend nothing’s happening.’

‘You have to.’

‘Then you have to tell me about her. What does she think you did to her baby?’

‘Nothing. My God, Tess, it was decades ago,’ he snapped. ‘She’s just unwell, but she will eventually stop this if she gets no response.’

She gripped the wheel and turned on the windscreen wipers. ‘Well, I think she needs help.’

‘Maybe. But not from you.’ He closed his eyes and spent the next hour like that, with his head back. She couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or simply intent on not talking.

When they arrived in Marblehead it was gone nine o’clock and they were both hungry and irritable. The sea wind roared over the rooftops, and as Greg led her down a salty alleyway in the darkness she wondered why he had brought her to such a brutally cold outpost.

They ate lobster rolls in a seafood bar and Greg’s mood disintegrated further. He glowered at the waiters, drank three large glasses of wine too fast – she had never seen him this tense. He seemed almost at breaking point. And then, in the wide hotel bed, he switched off the light and kissed her hard, his mouth bitter with alcohol, and when her body responded, despite everything, he moved her beneath him, pinned her wrists above her head, pulled her underwear aside and thrust himself inside her. Afterwards he kissed her hair, muttered that he loved her and fell instantly asleep.

She lay for what felt like hours – she had no clock – softly leaking his fluids onto the 300-thread-count sheets. Inside her, the baby had retreated into a shocked stillness. She could have told him to stop but she didn’t. She gave herself over to the mixture of pleasure and pain, but buried beneath this surrender there had been the tiniest seed of doubt: if she had tried to pull her hands out of his grip and roll away, would he have stopped?

He slept on like a dead man. She couldn’t even hear him breathing. And when she finally slept she dreamed there was an opossum curled on its side in the corner of the hotel room, baring fungal teeth in a masquerade of death, and when she bent to it, it rose, opened its mouth and hissed. She woke in the blacked-out room with the words ‘playing possum’ rolling round her head.

He turned over and held her face in his hands. ‘Hello. I love you,’ he murmured. ‘I’m glad we came away. I’m so sorry about the crappy sex and my horrible mood last night. I’m so sorry, I love you so much. God, I need to spend time with you.’

She felt the baby flex and tread down on her bladder. ‘I have to pee.’ She peeled his hands off her face and got out of bed. Under the unforgiving bathroom lights she rested her fists on the sink. Then she noticed a faint, violet thumbprint on the inside of her wrist. She remembered the mark she had found on Joe’s upper arm, a stain on his babyish flesh, the day after the potluck. Then she remembered the terror on his face as he cried out for her, and the rage in Greg’s eyes, the need to control, to dominate, to crush.

*

The memory of the night he proposed suddenly surfaces, out of nowhere. It was more of a statement than a question: ‘I want to take this job,’ he said. ‘But I can’t go without you. I want you and Joe to come with me. I want to marry you.’

Her head felt unsteady when he said it, as if she were running too fast round a corner. He put down his pint of Guinness and covered her hands with his, pressing her fingers onto the sticky pub table.

‘I always thought people who claimed to fall in love this fast were inadequate and deluded, but when you appeared in my office with your camera I just felt as if I recognized you. It really was instant – almost before you’d even opened your mouth. I felt like my heart swelled up and burst open and you were already there, inside it – waiting for me.’

She had laughed, then, because this was how she felt, almost exactly. She belonged with him.

And so in such a short space of time, they were at the town hall, stepping out under a glowering sky with the first drops of rain making little stains on the pavement at their feet; Joe a little dazed next to Nell’s boys, Ken smiling benignly, Nell with a box of confetti and her hair pinned up; the feel of her dress, slightly too snug around her middle already, and the knowledge of this baby – the other child – floating in the centre of everything, a tiny, magic bean: their future.

She is not sure how it has all become so complicated. Perhaps what they need, above all, is simply to spend time together. Before the job offer and the move, they used to go away for weekends when David had Joe. But with the pregnancy and the job offer and the move, their time together, just the two of them, has been reduced to almost nothing. No wonder he feels so out of reach.

He is still hunched over his laptop, typing furiously. Today she will tell him that she went through his boxes. She is not sure how he will react to this, but she’ll tell him anyway.

Suddenly, she remembers the Pennsylvania library card. It was an odd, out-of-place thing to find among his surviving childhood treasures. She is sure that she has never heard him mention a Carlo Novak. She looks at the iPad again.

A Google search brings up reports of tennis matches in Monte Carlo. She adds ‘Pennsylvania’ to the search and gets a funeral director and a few more tennis reports. She adds ‘University of Pennsylvania’ and gets an administrator called Carolle Anne Novak. The University of Pennsylvania, it seems, is in Philadelphia. There is no mention of a Carlo Novak. She tries to think how people searched before the internet. Local papers, probably. Microfiches in libraries?

Perhaps he will be mentioned somewhere in a local paper – an academic award, a marriage, a community project. She finds a website that gives access to local newspaper archives and finds the
Philadelphia Inquirer
database. She glances up at Greg again – still hunched, intent on his screen – and then she types ‘Carlo Novak’ into the search box. She starts fifteen years ago.
No results match your search criteria
. She goes back one more year, then two.

Greg clears his throat. She stops, her hand poised, ready to shut the iPad down. She could not explain to Greg what she is doing – she isn’t even sure herself. He shifts and begins to type again.

She starts twenty-five years ago, then goes back year by year to twenty-seven years ago. And there it is:
Your search has 1 result
.

The website will only allow her to read the first paragraph of any archived article without handing over a credit card.

‘Honey?’

She jumps. Greg is standing above her, stretching his arms up, his torso wide as a flag. She switches off the iPad and throws it onto the pillow. For a tall and muscular man he moves so lightly on his feet. She tries to smile, but she feels as if a moth is trapped in her chest, brown and fat and frantic.

‘You OK? You look a little pale. I’m so sorry, that took me forever – I had to respond to their query or we could lose thousands of dollars of funding literally overnight.’ He looks down at the iPad. ‘What were you so engrossed in there?’

‘Just emails.’ She slides off the bed and reaches for her coat, turning her back on him. ‘I was replying to Nell.’

‘You two should Skype.’

‘We do sometimes.’

‘She could come out and visit.’

‘She’s going to, after the baby’s born.’

She tries to do up the coat, but it won’t stretch over her belly. The baby Carlo Novak was accused of killing was the same age as the one inside her. She feels gargantuan as she tugs her boots on. She glances back at Greg. He looks handsome in his grey cashmere jumper, winding a scarf round his neck. Novak is a Polish name. Perhaps he has a relative with a disturbing past. She feels the baby change position.

She should ask him, but first she has to tell him that she’s looked in his boxes. Suddenly she badly needs to get outside – to breathe sea air and sweep this mess from her head.

*

They step into a street lined with painted clapboard cottages, some in cheerful pinks or yellows. He puts an arm around her and pulls her close to him. She realizes that she is hungry. She couldn’t stomach the hotel breakfast, with fat slices of coffee cake, muffins, bagels, silver trays with glistening scrambled eggs and strips of fatty bacon, but now her stomach feels empty, her legs unstable. The air is bitter; their breath makes plumes above them. Greg, zipped into his black puffer jacket, is talking about the first British settlers coming up the coast to escape the Salem Puritans.

‘This area was ruled by the Naumkeag tribe. You’ll like this – they had a squaw chief . . .’ He squeezes her hand, crushing it, as if forcing her to pay attention to him instead of to the questions roiling in the back of her mind. Gulls the size of small dogs swoop across the rooftops. He is talking about smallpox now, an epidemic brought by pilgrims that wiped out the native population. He sounds as if he has recalled, almost word for word, a guide to Marblehead. His memory seems all-encompassing, almost photographic.

‘This place has had a lot of names,’ he is saying now. ‘It was Massabequash first, then Foy, then Marble Harbor, then Marvill Head . . .’

Her breathing echoes inside her skull. She needs to tell him she has been through his boxes, but she can’t bring herself to, not yet, not without understanding what she has just stumbled across. She could type in her credit card, later, and read the rest of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
article.

‘You OK, Tess?’

She can’t meet his eye. It might not even be Greg’s Carlo Novak in the report. It might be someone with the same name, completely unconnected to Greg.

He slows down. ‘Listen, give me a break, OK? I’m trying here. I’m sorry I had to respond to that email this morning; I’m sorry I was in such a horrible mood yesterday, I’m sorry I’ve been so preoccupied. There’s a lot going on right now – I don’t need to talk to you about it, but—’

‘Why not?’ She stops. ‘Why don’t you need to talk to me, if something is going on with you? Why? Why can’t you talk to me?’

‘OK,’ he says, slowly. ‘You’re right. No, you’re right.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘There’s a lot going on because the parents of that four-year-old who died have filed a lawsuit.’

She squints up at him. ‘They’re suing the hospital?’

‘Not the hospital, me. We’re in negotiations with the family’s lawyers. It’s going to drag on forever, and it’s a pain in the ass.’

‘Oh, shit, Greg, that’s awful. Why? I mean – what are they saying you did wrong?’

He starts walking again, she follows.

‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ he says. ‘Being sued is a hazard for any surgeon, particularly in paediatrics. Virtually every paediatric surgeon gets embroiled in a lawsuit at some point, many more than once. But it’s a monumental hassle right now, that’s all. It’s not what I need when I just got here. I’m going to have to waste time on it, and time is the last thing I have.’