Finding You

1 - Julia

When I call out to my son, walking ahead of me along the sandy shore, he does not stop or look back at me.

He’s growing older
, I tell the part of me that yearns to run along behind him like a shadow, never letting him go.  He’s two-and-a-half now; they grow up so very fast, and the truth is we were robbed of almost a whole year together.  A whole
year
. Because he was taken from me.

He was taken from a sparkling Spanish beach, just like this one. 

One moment, I had Hadyn near me. He was playing. I remember he was stamping on the golden sand and he was laughing. We were happy. Then the weather changed. The clouds came over and in an instant, the day changed. Everything changed. All our lives, all my dreams and hopes.  I had no thought of danger at that moment but ... danger was present. It was present and I should have known it and I didn’t. 

I stop abruptly, the water seeping away from my feet, sucked back down into the swell, and call his name again, but he doesn’t look back. He just keeps on walking; a small, lone figure who acts as though he’s got no connection with me at all and I feel my heart shrivel a little inside. 
I am no longer the one he looks for, am I?
 

I worry about this all the time, though Charlie and everyone else around me have been quick to reassure me on this.

Oh, he’s just got to get used to you again,
everyone says.
Be patient! He was gone from you for eleven months—that’s a lifetime for a little child. He’s only been back with you 16 weeks. The main thing is he is healthy and well.  He’ll come around. You just need to enjoy him now, Julia. Relax. Enjoy your time. That’s all you need to do.

And perhaps ... they are right? Perhaps I have not been patient enough.  Without taking my eyes off him, I make myself go and sit down on the biscuit-crumb shore.  With my fingertips exploring the wet granules behind me, I let myself consider the possibility. It is, after all, what I want to believe: that perhaps, given enough time, everything will revert to how it was before. On a peaceful, gentle spring day on an Arenadeluna beach such as this, I could believe it, too.  Charlie—I glance up to the walkway along the top of the beach—he went to take a call; he’ll be back soon, but apart from a lone fisherman mending his nets and a huge flock of gulls that have been parading the shore, we are practically alone on the sand today.  It may be comfortably warm, but it is too early in the season for the locals. The mist wavers up off the warming sand in long, snaky columns. It is early morning; the sunlight is sloping, gentle, and
Hadyn’s safe now,
the breeze whispers over me, caressing my skin.
You don’t have to worry anymore.

In truth, I do not want to worry. The story of what happened—it’s like a piece in a newspaper, yesterday’s news. It’s still fresh in all our minds but really, it’s gone and done now. He is back with me and Charlie and very soon, I am praying, we will be allowed to take him back home. 

What was it like when you found him
, everyone wants to know?

What happened next?
Everywhere I go in the town, people stop me and ask this. The locals are shy but curious. All this has all happened in their own little patch and they feel they have a right to know.
What happened
a
fter you found him that day in the park
?  It’s natural that people should be curious. After all, I am the devoted mum who kept on looking for her missing son after everyone else involved had long given up.

I’m the one who risked everything to discover the truth. I’m the one who risked ridicule and alienation from the family and nearly completely destroyed my relationship with my son’s father. And apart from Hadyn, Charlie meant pretty much everything to me. I kept going for so long, I know in the end I risked my very sanity. And then, just on the point of accepting that I would never see Hadyn again ... I found him. I found him on a chilly, bright blue day in a deserted park in Spain just hours after attending his grandmother’s funeral. He was being looked after by a large woman wearing a comfortable, baggy cardigan who spoke Spanish to him and clearly doted on him.

After a whole year of looking, I
found
him.

And what do I remember about that day?

Precious little, really. I recall I lifted up the dyed-red curls at the back of his neck and then the pure physical shock of finding what I had been looking for; the birthmark that would identify this was unquestionably our son Hadyn in front of us. I was jubilant, yes. Oh yes! But I was also shocked. And ... confused. How can anyone else really understand this?  I was confused because all along, even when not one other soul had understood what kept me going, I had been
right
.

And then I felt sad.    

Even in the midst of my sheer and utter joy, I felt like weeping. Because of the sheer pointless cruelty and the waste of it; all the pain and suffering that we went through when all along, he had
been
here. Alive. Living and breathing and eating and sleeping, somewhere in the world. He’d been alive. He had been, all along. Not lying cold and dead at the bottom of the sea or in the belly of some fish like we’d been led to believe.

Nobody wants to hear about that, though. What they all want to know about are the hard facts.

What was it that actually happened?
Everyone keeps asking, all our friends and relatives and colleagues; all the police and the other officials and the people from the British Embassy who came in, most surprised, after the event, and the paparazzi and the other people from the local media;
what happened then?
They’ve got this scene stuck in their heads with me and Charlie in the park and this woman—this stranger—who’d been secreting our son away for all these months and suddenly there she was, bang in front of us. And him. Our child. I mean, how do you react to a scenario like that? Did you pick him up and run with him? Did you remonstrate with the woman, Illusion, who had him? I imagine she wouldn’t have been too happy, people say; did
she
try to run?  

No. Illusion didn’t try to run.

She didn’t run, but she did do something else. Something I only half-saw, I only half-remember now ...

‘Hadyn, stop!’  I call after him again. He’s strolling a little too far away for my comfort now. 

But Hadyn doesn’t stop. Nor does he acknowledge me at all and so I get up, the sand pouring off my legs and lap in an untidy flurry. 

‘Wait for Mama, Hadyn. Wait for me ...’ As I run towards him, all the gulls take flight. As one, they lift off into the air, a swirling mass of grey feathers and flashes of white against the deep blue and this—finally—is what stops my son in his tracks.

‘Pretty,’ I tell him, my mouth close up against his ear.  ‘Pretty birds?’ I crouch down beside him, his face upturned in joyous wonder. ‘When we get home,’ I say, ‘you can put food out in your bird feeder again.’  We briefly watch the birds fly off together and I feel a swell of pride now, watching him.  Hadyn has hair that is the colour of golden molasses and skin the colour of a dusky peach.  He has strong, chubby legs that will one day be athletic, I think, like his father’s.

And then I hear him laugh. On one or two occasions since his return, when something has taken his fancy, I have heard this gruff, mirthful chuckle. It puts me in mind of the sun peeping over the horizon. Like a morning in early May, his laughter is full of unknown potentials, promising as a rose bush full of buds still unopened, the hint of a summer yet to come. And it fills my heart with joy. Because it means that—even if I can’t get through to him right now—something ...
something
can still make him happy.

Be patient, Julia, and he will return to you, all in his own good time
, but patience is hard and I wish ... I still wish I could find some way into his heart. 
He still likes the birds
, I remind myself, and
that is a glimmer of the person he was before, is it not?

‘Soon we will be home,’ I add encouragingly, more for me than for him. Hadyn glances at me briefly now. Was it the word
home
that did it? Does he even know where his real home is anymore? Is it wishful thinking on my part to hope that he even understands me?  I breathe out, and it sounds like a sigh. Since we’ve had him back, he barely speaks.  He was starting to talk when they took him, and I know his captors spoke Spanish to him for that year, but he doesn’t even speak that. It makes it so hard for me to know what’s on his mind or what he is feeling. And if he’s had a whole year to get used to that other woman who was looking after him, does he even have the first idea who I am?  He must be feeling so confused ... He’s looking up at the sky again. 

What are you thinking, Hadyn
?

I touch his chubby arm briefly—not for too long, because he does not seem to like being touched. ‘Birds all gone?’ My observation, like my previous comment, falls on deaf ears.  Can he even hear me at all? It has occurred to some of the family to wonder if there might not be something up with his hearing, but ...

He heard
her
well enough that day we found him at the park, I remember. He responded promptly enough to her commands.

I don’t want to think about that day anymore, though. And we need to get back to the house.

‘All done here?’ A familiar voice calls out, cutting through my thoughts. I take Hadyn’s hand and we both look up just in time to see Charlie jumping over the stone wall at the top of the beach.

*

‘Daddy’s back.’ I stand up, a little breathless. Charlie’s wearing his hair a little longer these days than he used to. It suits him. He’s got on a skinny white t-shirt that shows off the tan on his arms, a pair of casual blue jeans, and nothing whatsoever on his feet: the overpowering sense of his physical beauty hits me just like it always does.
How lucky am I
, I think. But the thought is tinged, as ever these days, with a little sadness.

The first time we visited Spain just over a year ago, it was originally to introduce me to his late mother’s Spanish side of the family and plan our wedding. How happy I had been that day. How proud, arriving at Malaga with my clever, handsome fiancé and our infant son at my side. I’d had so many hopeful plans back then about how I’d win them all over—especially the grandmother, Agustina—how they’d all fall madly in love with Hadyn and then of course we’d both become part of this close-knit clan. I’d wanted that so much, to know what that would feel like, that effortless belonging. I’d wanted it for Hadyn as much as for myself. For him to have the kind of start in life that I could only ever have dreamed of.

I sigh. The bit about the family loving Hadyn had worked out, at least. Everything else had slipped through my fingers at nightmare speed. Hadyn, Charlie, any hopes that I’d once harboured of living a happy, normal life ...    

‘Hey,’ Charlie’s kiss on my mouth as soon as he reaches us is sweet and tender. He ruffles his son’s hair affectionately but gingerly, I see, with the lightest of touches. He takes Hadyn’s other hand. He looks pleased, I think.

‘Good news?’ I murmur.  That phone call was from his brother. He couldn’t get any reception down here, had to go ring Roberto back.

‘Very good news.’ Charlie’s got the slightly startled air about him of someone who can’t quite believe what he’s just heard. I feel a frisson of excitement in my belly. Oh, God. Good news?
How
good? I hold my breath for a moment. The warm rays of the sun dance gently on my arms. The gentle sound of the surf over many rounded pebbles breaks and fizzes behind us and the moment comes into sharp focus but still, he does not speak.     

‘Charlie?’ I step in a little closer.

‘They’re going to allow us home next week, J ...’ He pulls me close to him in a hug. For a moment, I can feel his heart beating, and it’s going as hard and as fast as mine.

‘Next week?’ I say faintly. How strange that sounds, how close by, when we have been waiting in the dark for so many weeks without a hint of how much longer would be left before our release from Spain. ‘Is it true?’ I wipe away the relieved tears that spring to my eyes.

‘Roberto just got off the phone from the
jefe
’—the Chief of Police, he means—‘and it looks like it, Love. The embassy just rung and confirmed it, too. It looks as if they’re ready to let us go.’

I can hardly take it in.

‘No more interviews then?’ I ask slowly. ‘The Embassy, Interpol, everyone—they’ve finished? Really?’

A hundred questions, like impatient schoolchildren jostling for attention, all tumble into my mind now at once
; how, why
? Didn’t the authorities still have to speak to us some more about things? The last time I spoke to Sally, our contact at the British Embassy, she’d hinted that there was a lot of work that still needed to be done, a lot more red tape that would need to be waded through, but now suddenly, we’re free to go. 

‘They’re finished with us, Julia.’ He bends and in one sudden movement, he swoops Hadyn up, twirling him round and round. I think Hadyn is going to yell at this unexpected manhandling, and his eyes grow wide when he’s lifted up so high. But he doesn’t object. He’s flying like a bird, another one of those seagulls enjoying the whole of the blue morning sky. The breeze ruffles his curls, like golden feathers. He spreads out his arms and he
laughs
.