The Other Child (26 page)

As she turns into the street, trying to absorb Sally’s words, she looks up, and there is Helena. She is standing on the verge, her fur-lined boots planted deep in grey snow, the floor-length puffa coat zipped to her chin.

Tess’s heart sinks. She slips her phone into her pocket, wondering if she can somehow slide past, unnoticed.

But Helena raises a hand, waving her over. ‘Hey, Tess.’

She is standing next to a For Sale sign. ‘Oh goodness, you’re moving?’

‘We are.’ Helena gives a brief smile.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve been offered a professorship at Berkeley,’ Helena says. ‘Starting in the spring.’

‘In California? Oh, well, that’s great.’

They look at each other. Helena’s green eyes are cool.

‘What will Josh do out there?’

‘Oh, he’s looking into some academic options right now.’

‘And can you move your business?’

‘Businesses. But it won’t affect Dr Vaus too much. And my partner’s taking over the Cambridge clinic.’

‘So you’re really going?’

‘Oh yes.’ Helena lifts her chin and gives an icy smile. ‘Relieved?’

She doesn’t deny it as she looks back into Helena’s eyes. It is hard to believe that not long ago this woman dominated her thoughts, alarmed and disturbed her, seemed to threaten her marriage, her home, her sanity. Helena’s actions are simply the by-products of an unhappy marriage and the discovery that career success is not the same as fulfilment.

‘Well, good luck.’ She straightens her shoulders and adjusts Lily’s hat. ‘I hope it works out for you in California – for both of you.’

‘Oh, it will.’ Helena shrugs and turns away. ‘It always does.’

As she walks away from Helena it occurs to her that the immediate, physical threats of the first few months in this house – from Helena, from Sarah – have been replaced by something that is much harder to pin down. Greg’s ghosts – Julianna and Carlo – feel more dangerous and present than Helena ever did.

She gets inside and without removing her coat or undoing the sling she types a reply to Sally.

Later that day, as she is cooking pasta with Joe watching the Disney Channel in the front room and Lily, briefly content post-feed, asleep in her bouncy chair, she checks her emails again. Another message from Sally is waiting for her. She feels a rush of excitement as she opens it.

She rereads the email, several times, trying to make sense of the gaps. The bitterness towards the Gallos suggests a story untold, but she cannot squeeze anymore of it from Sally’s words. She needs more.

She types a reply.

She clicks send. Then she forwards both of Sally’s emails to Nell, with a brief message explaining what she has done.

After she has drained the pasta, she hears a new message come into her inbox. Leaving the pasta to cool in the colander, she opens a reply from Nell.

Tess logs off. A headache ticks behind her eyes like a grenade. Her left breast is hot and painful: the start of mastitis – she recognizes the feverish sensation, the sharp, swollen pain, from breastfeeding Joe, when she had it several times. Lily twitches again. At any moment the screaming is going to start and she needs to get pasta into Joe before it does.

But she can’t get Julianna out of her head. She feels as if she has pressed on a tender, burning spot in Greg’s past – she has found the deep-down place where the inflammation lurks. Sally has given her another perspective on the family legacy. If Julianna was battling with Greg’s parents, then how did Carlo feel about the Gallos? Did he, too, resent them? If something exploded between Greg and Carlo in that fraught period after the trial, when Greg was on the verge of starting Harvard and Carlo felt his life was over, it might have been catastrophic.

Leaving the pasta to get cold, she opens her laptop again and googles Harvard Medical School alumni, adding Greg’s matriculation date. She is not really sure why. Perhaps it is just the urge to connect to the person he was then, just starting out, in the immediate aftermath of the trauma. She crouches over the computer and clicks her way to the relevant alumni page. Just one month before they moved to Boston, Greg’s Harvard Medical School class had a reunion. Greg would have been too swept up with the new job to even consider going, even if the event crossed his radar.

She tries to log into the group but you have to be a Harvard alumnus. She is about to shut the computer when she notices that the reunion has a Twitter feed. She goes to Twitter, finds the account and scrolls through the alumni tweets. Some are from the group administrator, and they paint a mixed picture of its driven cohort.

Others are from individuals, giving little updates on their career triumphs or attaching nostalgic pictures of themselves and fellow medical students. She has no idea what she is looking for, but as she flicks through the tweets Greg’s name leaps out.

She opens the photograph. There is Greg in a dinner suit alongside two young men, with two women in ball dresses – puffed sleeves and frills. They make her think of a line in the Harvard song that she found in Greg’s files: ‘the good and the great, in their beautiful prime . . .’

She looks more closely at Greg’s young face. He is thinner, tense and uneasy. His head is tilted and he is standing slightly apart from the group, arms crossed. The other four are grinning, relaxed, arms round each other, but Greg looks as if he does not belong in the picture, or perhaps in the life itself. She cannot imagine what he must have been feeling at that point. Still only in his early twenties, he had come through the loss of his parents followed by that year with Aunt Julianna and then an accelerated undergraduate degree. His beloved cousin, his only surviving close relative, had been tried for infanticide and had vanished. No wonder he looks disturbed.

She should probably show him the emails from Sally, but all that would do is bring this awful time back to him. It is unlikely that Sally is saying anything about his family that he doesn’t already know – though he has never mentioned his aunt’s abusive marriage or his parents’ attempt to control her, perhaps by controlling her son. But maybe he doesn’t know any of this. A teenage boy might not notice these things, though he would surely have picked up on the tension with his ‘difficult’ aunt. No, dredging all this up is unlikely to be helpful for him.

As she gazes at the troubled, clean-lined beauty of Greg’s youth she hears his footsteps on the basement stairs.

She shuts down Twitter and slams the laptop lid shut. Lily is, miraculously, still asleep. She gets up and goes to the basement door. As he steps in, she folds herself into his arms, shutting her eyes tight. She can feel his heart beating beneath his soft woollen sweater. He smells of soap and coffee and cold night air, the leather seats of his car – of himself. He hugs her and rests his chin on the top of her head and for a few moments neither of them speaks, and she has the feeling that she is holding him up, that if she stepped away, Greg would fall.

‘I have an idea for you.’ He perches on the side of the bed. It is just before six in the morning and he’s already been for a run through the icy woods, had his shower and washed down eggs and toast with a double espresso. Lily is sleeping, but only lightly. At six weeks, she is feeding and breathing well, she seems more solid, more awake and of this world, but she is still colicky and Tess knows that if she tries to ease her off her shoulder and put her into the Moses basket she will wake up and conversation will become impossible again.

She closes her eyes and rests a cheek on Lily’s head, feeling the feathery hair, breathing in her sweet, milky smell. She feels Greg’s fingers on her cheek and opens her eyes again.

Something in his face has changed since they talked about his parents. He looks more vulnerable and raw, as if a door has cracked open inside his head and, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot force it shut again. This, surely, is a good thing, the beginning of a healing process. Perhaps one day he will be able to forgive himself for surviving, just as she has forgiven herself, not all the time, maybe, but much of it. Perhaps one day Carlo will not be sitting between them every time they look into each other’s eyes.

It is a week now since she heard from Sally and there have been no more emails. Perhaps remembering proved too upsetting for Sally as well. This is probably helpful, because the last thing she needs is something else to conceal from Greg.

‘You want to hear my idea then?’ He strokes her hair back off her face. ‘Or are you too sleepy?’

‘Yes, sorry, what is it?’

‘OK, so I know Joe was upset that David can’t make it over to see him this weekend. Well, a colleague of mine has a ski lodge in New Hampshire, up in the White Mountains, and he’s offered to let me use it. I know you’re tired and you probably aren’t up to going anywhere much right now, but how about I take Joe, just me and him? The snow’s good, I can teach him to ski and I think it would be a great idea for the two of us to have some time together away from all this baby stuff. I know I’ve been very tied up with Lily and I don’t want him to think I only care about her. Some time together will do us good, I think.’

Her first reaction is no – she does not want Greg to take Joe off to a stranger’s house in New Hampshire. But then she remembers Joe’s face when she told him that David had been called out to an emergency situation in the Middle East and would be gone for at least two weeks, so would not, after all, be coming to Boston this weekend. Joe needs to see his dad, of course, but maybe time with Greg will compensate a little for not having David. And he loves the snow – he’d surely be thrilled to learn how to ski.

‘I could drive him up there Friday night – it’s only a couple of hours. I can take him skiing and tubing while you have some time here just with Lily.’

‘What’s tubing?’

‘You know, it’s where you slide down a snow slope in an inner tube.’

She nods. Joe would love that too.

‘Don’t you think it’d be a good idea for me and Joe to spend some time together, without you and Lily, so he knows he’s important to me too?’

She tries to smile. He is right. Since Lily was born he has been focused on her, they both have, for obvious reasons. But Greg, particularly, has been concentrating on Lily to the exclusion of all else. He makes straight for her every night when he comes in. She sees him scanning her breathing, temperature, skin tone. And then he carries her round with him, paces the house with her between feeds, changes nappies. She knows that this intensity comes from his lack of time with Lily. He has so few hours at home and he is determined to make the most of them. But a couple of times he has been irritable with Joe, snapping at him that it’s surely time for bed, or to pick up his backpack, or move his snow boots off the rug. It is not surprising – they are both ragged, caring for Lily has been incredibly demanding – but a couple of times she has seen Joe looking a little lost as Greg walks past him to pick Lily up.

So Greg has realized this and is doing something to rectify it. He has taken a step back and thought through what he has to do to make this family work. The plan is a good one, a solid one.

She is not sure, then, why the thought of the two of them going off to New Hampshire makes her so uneasy. It isn’t just the separation from Joe. She was anxious a few weeks ago when David took him to New York for the weekend, but it didn’t feel quite like this.

There is probably an element of maternal guilt in her hesitation. The last thing she wants is for Joe to feel as if she has sent him away. She feels constantly as if she is not giving Joe enough attention as it is. It is hard to hug him on the sofa when Lily is screaming in their ears. And she is painfully aware that when he comes home from school he is still exhausted, much too quiet and withdrawn, even though she has had several meetings with the teachers, and the friendship situation seems to have improved.

Still, she has to step aside so that Jo and Greg can bond. And in some ways it might be a relief to have a weekend where she doesn’t have to worry about Joe feeling excluded as Lily cries or needs another feed or nappy change. She is probably worrying too much about everything. The truth is that Lily has been good for Joe in many ways. He doesn’t seem to resent her demands. In fact, he has been incredibly sweet with his baby sister, wanting to carry her around, fetch nappies, help with bathtimes – worrying when she cries. When David came to take him to New York, he insisted on holding Lily when he heard the knock on the door. He showed her to his dad like a little pink trophy.

And David handled the moment brilliantly. He had brought a huge and expensive box of Lego City for Joe, and he took pictures of them together, but he didn’t ask to hold the baby. Instead he asked Joe if she farted a lot, what colour her poo was, how often she ate, whether she yelled all night, and how grumpy she, Tess, was these days.

Before they left for New York, David kissed her on the cheek. ‘Lily’s a cracker,’ he said. ‘Just like her mother.’ There was sadness in his voice, a note of regret that made them both step apart and become brusque, looking for Joe’s coat and boots.

Sometimes she hears Joe chatting to Lily in another room, singing made-up songs and she waits outside the door with a bursting feeling in her chest. It is as if having someone so much smaller and more fragile in the house has made Joe feel stronger. The protective urge might not banish fear, but it can certainly override it.

‘So?’ Greg says. ‘Good plan?’

She nods, stroking Lily’s solid little back through the baby blanket that Nell knitted and sent at Christmas, wrapped in tissue paper and ribbons. ‘As long as Joe wants to . . .’

‘Oh, sure, yes, let’s ask him, see what he says.’ Greg gets up and goes over to the mirror. ‘Only if he wants to.’ He combs his damp hair back off his forehead. She can see that he is a little bit offended, perhaps even irritated that she has not leaped on this plan. With his hair swept back, his widow’s peak, he looks forbidding.

‘No, really, it’s a great idea.’ She makes herself sound more positive. ‘Joe’s going to be beside himself at the idea of sliding down a mountain in an inner tube.’

Greg looks at her over his shoulder and, perhaps because of the angle of his chin, she glimpses the young man on the steps of the Philadelphia courthouse, looking down at the camera – and for that second she feels as if she’s staring into the eyes of that too-familiar stranger. She looks away and tucks Lily’s blanket tighter.

Her intuition has been telling her that something is missing from the story because, of course, it is. By vanishing, Carlo has become the unanswered question. He is perpetually present, the shadowy figure that has just vacated the room. He is always nearby: slotted between them in bed at night, flitting in their wake, a tall and handsome intruder in the home. Greg must feel it too. Perhaps this is why he is so uneasy.

She watches him do up his shirt buttons.

‘Greg, is there anything I still don’t know about your cousin? Anything at all?’

He is fixing a cufflink onto his blue shirt and he looks up sharply, frowning, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror. ‘What’s brought this on?’

‘I don’t know.’

He reaches for a second cufflink.

‘It’s just Nell said something, and . . .’

He tugs down his shirtsleeves, one by one, and turns to face her. ‘When’s she coming to visit?’

‘I’m not sure; she’s worried about Ken’s job, it’s a bit uncertain, and I’ve told her to wait and come when things are less crazy here. Maybe April, when the weather’s better.’

A look briefly crosses his face – he is relieved.

Lily startles and begins to whimper. Tess pats her back, whispering into her ear, feeling her damp, small face pressing into the crook of her neck, nuzzling. Her love for Lily spreads into a tangible, physical warmth, encircling them both.

‘OK, then.’ Greg shrugs on a well-cut grey jacket. ‘I need to get moving. So, do you want to ask Joe about New Hampshire when he wakes up?’

‘OK – unless you want to ask him yourself when you get home?’

‘No, I’m not sure when I’ll be back – might be after his bedtime. You ask him.’

He comes over to the bed and presses his mouth onto hers, kisses Lily on the head, tenderly. Then he leaves.

Her phone is by the bed. She picks it up, idly, and opens her emails. Two leap out at her: one from Sally, one from Alex Kingman. She opens Sally’s first.

She rereads it several times. It makes little sense. She has no idea what the ‘pot on the stove’ means, but it is probably a reference to how the fire started. C must be Carlo. But that makes no sense because Carlo wasn’t in the house at the time of the fire. Her instinct is that the ‘she’ is Julianna. But who raped Julianna, and took Carlo away? It is all confused and brutal. A stroke, of course, can damage more than motor skills. Sally’s memory, logic, recall could all be skewed now.

She needs to find a number and call to see if Sally is all right. But she does not actually know this woman. She can’t just phone. Sally is a semi-famous artist; she’ll have people rallying.

She replies, though, straight away.

She reads Sally’s email again. She is about to forward it to Nell when she stops. It does not feel right to send this to Nell. This is between her and Sally. She saves it in a separate folder.

Then she opens the email from Alex.

She remembers then that the night Lily was born she’d ignored a voicemail from Alex – she’d deleted it. She has been skirting round him in her mind for weeks now. It would surely help him to know that he made a mistake and that there is no chance of bumping into his nemesis on the local beach – that whatever he thinks he has found or knows, he is wrong.

Perhaps it is the warmth of the bed, the feel of Lily against her chest, or the oxytocin coursing through her system, but she feels a moment of altruism, almost responsibility towards Alex and his troubled circumstances. What she knows will release him too in a way.

She types a reply with one thumb.

Alex is sitting at a corner table, hunched over a smartphone. He looks up as she walks through the crowded Cambridge café towards his table, and she hesitates, thinking that she has the wrong man. But he sees her and gets up, smiling. He has changed enormously. His cheekbones are gaunt, vanishing into a beard that has grown bushy and unkempt. His eyes are puffy, with livid violet shadows beneath them.

‘Tess. Hey!’ He leans over Lily in the sling, kissing her on both cheeks as if they are old friends. ‘You look terrific.’ He nods. ‘Really terrific.’

‘You’re very kind,’ she unwinds her scarf, pulling off her hat, ‘but I doubt it.’

He peers into the sling at Lily, curled against her chest. ‘And this beautiful baby . . .’

‘This is Lily. I’m hoping she’s going to stay asleep while we talk, but she might not. She’s been quite colicky.’