Authors: Lucy Atkins
‘He said Carlo took him to an underwater cave and then vanished. He’s only alive because two experienced divers found him and saved him.’
Greg gives a snort. ‘He said that, did he? Well, I guess he’s forgotten a few crucial details. One, Carlo was getting him out when the other two divers came down, and two, Carlo only took off after the air ambulance arrived. It was reckless and stupid to try cave diving, but he did not leave Alex to die. He got him out of the tunnel.’
‘Why did he disappear then?’
‘Because Alex is a rich kid, Tess, and it’s generally a bad idea for a poor kid to endanger a rich kid’s life.’
She thinks about this for a moment. It is certainly possible that Alex’s memory of that day might be selective.
‘OK, fine, but whatever Alex does or doesn’t remember about your cousin doesn’t change the fact that you lied when I asked you about him. You’ve hidden Carlo from me. And you’ve also lied about Sarah Bannister.’
He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t lie about Sarah. I told you I thought she was someone whose baby had died. I said I believed she had a grudge, and she was unstable. That’s all true.’
She opens her mouth to quibble about lies by omission, but then stops. They are both guilty of this, to varying degrees. The more they talk, the more slippery everything feels. Greg is driving way too fast now, skimming past the other cars.
‘Greg,’ she snaps, ‘you need to slow down.’ She thinks about Sarah Bannister walking through the rooms, calling for her. ‘Is it possible,’ she says, ‘that she’s been coming into our house for months? I know someone has; remember when I asked you about my earrings that were out? And the mail being moved in the kitchen. And the hairclasp – Helena would never wear anything cheap and plastic, would she? And before the potluck, I rushed back to grab something and the front door was wide open and I had this feeling someone was there, there was this smell . . . I think it was Sarah.’
‘Well, she might know how to pick a lock, but I don’t know, Tess. What I do know is that she won’t be coming near us anymore.’
‘We should have called the police the first time you got her note.’
‘Maybe.’ He nods, but she knows he doesn’t mean it.
Her breasts are heavy and aching and despite the extra-strength Tylenol it is painful to sit on the hard leather car seat. Greg drives right up to the bumper of an SUV and has to jab his foot on the brakes, making her jerk forwards. She looks back at Lily, who is sleeping still.
‘Greg, you have to slow down.’ She pushes her hair off her face. ‘You’re being dangerous.’
‘Sorry.’ He eases his foot off the accelerator.
‘So Sarah thought you were Carlo.’
He takes a deep breath. ‘Yes. My best guess is Sarah saw the news about my appointment, and the prize, and it brought back the trauma of her baby’s death. She confused our faces. I have no idea what she was hoping to achieve, but I suspect she didn’t either. She’s not a well person.’
‘She could have done anything to me – or worse, to Joe. You left us wide open.’
‘I understand why you feel that, I really do, but I’d never do that. After that first note, I got in touch with an old friend in Philadelphia, a psychiatrist who works with Sarah’s psychiatrist. There’s patient confidentiality, obviously, but I was able to get emphatic assurance that Sarah is only a danger to herself.’
‘Emphatic assurance?’
‘I was trying to find her, Tess. I just didn’t want to involve you. You had enough on your plate.’
‘I’m not a bloody child!’
‘I know, I’m sorry.’ He shakes his head. ‘You’re absolutely right. I should have told you who Sarah was from the start, and about Carlo. I am so sorry. I was trying to protect you from unnecessary worry.’
‘I don’t need protecting. And the unnecessary worry, here, is that you could hide this sort of thing from me.’
‘It was a huge mistake to think I could deal with her without involving you.’
‘I think you didn’t tell me,’ she says, ‘because you didn’t want me to know about your cousin.’
He nods. ‘I know. You’re right. I didn’t want to think about him. I’d shut him away along with everything else and I didn’t want to open it all back up again.’
‘Did he kill his baby? Is that why you couldn’t face telling me about him?’
‘No, God – no, of course he didn’t. He did nothing wrong, except get involved with a delusional drug addict in the first place.’
‘But it’s just not normal to hide this sort of information, Greg. We’re married. I need to know about your family because, good or bad, they’re part of you. I’ve told you about my mother, haven’t I? I’ve told you everything.’
‘I know you have.’
‘Right, then tell me about him – tell me about Carlo.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Did you know each other growing up?’
‘Yes.’ Greg nods. ‘We were close. His father died when he was just a little kid, and Julianna,’ he swallows, as if the name might actually choke him, ‘slowly fell apart. So we were together a lot.’
‘Your parents took him in?’
‘Well, not exactly, but they looked out for him and cared for him when she couldn’t.’
‘Did it damage him? If he was illegally cave diving, he must have been a bit unhinged.’
‘You can’t come out of a childhood like that unscathed. He had a self-destructive streak.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know. At high school he hung out with the wrong crowd and he made some mistakes. But he made it to college, he got himself out of there.’
She thinks of Alex’s account. ‘Which college?’
‘He started at the University of Pittsburgh, then transferred to UPenn in Philadelphia, after the Florida thing with Kingman.’
It all slots together – Alex’s story is at least rooted in truth.
‘And he met Sarah Bannister in Philadelphia?’
He nods. ‘You wouldn’t think it from the way she looks now but she was incredibly beautiful. She was also magnetic and charismatic, you know – the way very smart, unstable people often are. He was drawn to her for all sorts of unhealthy and probably Oedipal reasons. It was a huge mistake, obviously, but by the time he’d worked out the extent of her drug use she was pregnant with his child.’
She glances back at Lily, tucked into her blanket, her pink hat almost covering her eyes.
‘How did that baby actually die?’
‘Sarah went into premature labour, probably as a result of substance abuse during pregnancy.’ His jaw is tense, his hands clenched on the wheel. ‘She’d been trying to come off opiates and she called him saying she didn’t feel well, she had stomach pains. Stomach pains are common in opiate withdrawal, but he told her he’d meet her at the hospital just to be sure. She refused to go, so he went straight home. He realized she was in precipitous labour, called an ambulance, but,’ he swallows, ‘the baby died in his arms before the paramedics got there.’
His eyes are fixed on the road, but she feels as if he is no longer seeing it. Trees and buildings are flashing past.
‘Can you slow down, Greg? You’re driving way too fast.’
But it is as if something has been unleashed and he can’t stop, can’t even hear her – he is shaking his head.
‘He was innocent, but it was impossible for him to carry on at med school after that – who wants to be treated by a trainee doctor they recognize from an infanticide trial?’
‘So he dropped out?’
Greg’s skin has turned a disturbing shade of grey. ‘He felt like his life was over.’
He jerks the wheel just in time to miss the bumper of a silver car – a horn blares.
‘Greg, please, please – we have Lily in the car. Just pull over; we shouldn’t talk about this while you’re driving.’
‘No, no. You’re right. It’s OK,’ He eases his foot off the accelerator. ‘Sorry.’ He takes a big breath, indicates and pulls into the slower lane. ‘It’s OK. I’m OK.’
She looks round at Lily again. She is still sleeping peacefully, unaware of the fast-moving vehicles and the icy road, or her father’s agitation, his profound distress. She presses her fingertips against her forehead.
‘What I just don’t get is why you couldn’t tell me any of this? How could you possibly hide this from me? Did you think I’d judge you for Carlo’s behaviour? I mean – my God, Greg – me, of all people? I grew up with a mentally ill mother – she killed herself. I’m hardly going to judge you for your own messed-up family members.’
‘No, it wasn’t that.’ Greg shakes his head. ‘Of course it wasn’t. I just made the decision long ago that I needed to put it behind me. It’s what I had to do.’
She realizes that all this time they have been talking about Greg’s cousin in the past tense. ‘Did Carlo die?’
Greg nods.
‘How?’
He glances at her. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know?’
‘He vanished soon after the trial.’
Red blotches have appeared on Greg’s neck, but she is not going to stop. ‘I know this is horrible for you but you can see why we have to talk about this, can’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, so he disappeared?’
Greg nods.
‘In theory he could still be alive then.’
‘No, he isn’t alive, Tess, I’m absolutely sure of that.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘If he was alive, he’d have contacted me.’
‘Where were you when all this was happening?’
‘It was the summer before I started Harvard.’
She tries to line up what she knows. There is Greg, orphaned, staggering through an undergraduate degree in Pittsburg before making it to Harvard just as Carlo’s Philadelphia medical school career implodes.
She tries to think of a gentle way to say what she’s thinking, but there isn’t one. ‘Is it possible that he vanished because he couldn’t face you? I mean, you still had a brilliant future at Harvard and his career was over before it had started.’
Greg’s jaw tightens. ‘It’s not like that, it was never like that. He loved me – and there’s no way, believe me, that I made him feel bad about himself.’ His voice cracks. ‘We were the only ones left, Tess. We loved each other like brothers.’
‘So you looked for him?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘What do you think happened to him then?’
Greg takes another long breath in, as if he is bracing himself for the memories that this turn in the conversation will necessitate. ‘The night he vanished he took fifty dollars out of his bank, but he left everything else – his ID, his wallet, everything he owned. My guess is he got on a Greyhound and went somewhere anonymously, then killed himself.’
‘But then there’d be a body.’
‘Not necessarily. Maybe a John Doe somewhere. Listen, I know he’s dead, Tess. I can’t explain how, but I know it. It took me a few years to accept it, and then when I moved to London I decided that I couldn’t think about him anymore – about any of them.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She reaches out and rests her fingers on his arm. ‘I’m so sorry you’ve had to live with this. And I’m sorry you didn’t feel you could tell me.’
Then she remembers Carlo’s alcoholic mother. ‘What about your aunt Julianna? Is she still alive?’
‘She died a year after he vanished.’
‘What of?’
‘Alcoholism, a GI bleed. She wasn’t much older than I am now.’ He clenches his jaw again.
‘What’s a GI bleed?’
‘Oesophegal bleeding. Not nice.’
‘Did you know she was dying? Or was it a shock?’
‘I knew.’
‘So you got to say goodbye at least?’
‘No.’ His voice is so quiet that she can barely hear him over the car engine. ‘I didn’t go back to see her.’
No wonder he packaged all this away. His family really is an unfathomable mess. He did what he is trained to do, he shut everything down in order to focus on the thing that mattered most: the career that would redeem him and allow him to put everything else in the past. Or at least contain it in some way.
She should feel relieved to have this out in the open at last, but the heaviness has not lifted. In fact the atmosphere in the car feels even more tense and claustrophobic now, as if all the things that he has kept hidden are pressing in on them, sucking up the oxygen.
He turns off the freeway and they come to a halt in a queue of cars waiting to get through the busy junction onto the quiet and civilized streets beyond. Perhaps for the first time since they arrived in Boston she feels almost relieved to be re-entering the suburbs.
‘Is there anything else I should know about your family?’ she says. ‘Are there any other relatives? Did Carlo have brothers and sisters? Do you have grandparents out there in Pennsylvania? Anymore aunts? Uncles?’
He shakes his head. ‘He was an only child and I think I told you before, our grandparents didn’t come to the States. The Novak grandparents died young – that’s why the sisters emigrated – and the rest of the Gallos, as far as I know, never left Italy.’
‘That’s right – you did tell me – they came from a tiny town near Rome, didn’t they?’ He had mentioned its name once, early on, when she asked him about his Italian side.
He nods.
‘Then you must have relatives in Italy still?’
He moves off through a green light. ‘I probably have a hundred of them out there in Italy, and in Poland too, but I have never felt the slightest need to track any of them down. One tragic and messed-up family is quite enough.’
They are driving along the familiar street. They pass the bakery, the yoga studio, the bank. There are Happy Holidays signs in the windows, and Christmas lights, and dirty snow banked up along the sidewalks.
‘I still don’t get,’ she says, ‘why you didn’t feel you could tell me any of this. You managed to tell me about the fire. Why not Carlo? Even just the bare bones?’
His jaw slackens. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He indicates and pulls into their street. ‘You have no idea how sorry I am, Tess. I love you – I love you so much. I wanted it to just be me and you, just our little family. I thought it could be that simple.’
‘Well, it can’t.’ She balls her fists on her lap. ‘A little family is always going to be part of a bigger one. You have to promise that you’ll talk to me from now on, even about the bad stuff – especially about the bad stuff. I know all this must have been unbearable for you. I know the trial and Carlo vanishing must have been hideous. But it’s part of who you are, just like my own experiences dealing with my mother – the sadness, the worry, the guilt – are part of who I am. This is only going to work if we talk to each other. I have to be able to trust you to be honest. The alternative is just too damaging.’