The Other Child (18 page)

‘You never saw him again?’

‘Not till two weeks ago on my local beach.’

There is no point arguing with Alex. He has clearly convinced himself that his nemesis has returned. She can see why a claustrophobic near-death experience like this would leave emotional scars.

‘It sounds terrifying,’ she says, ‘but you should know that Greg doesn’t scuba dive, he really doesn’t.’

‘Yeah?’ Alex gives a hollow laugh. ‘Well, nor do I. Anymore.’

She is beginning to shiver and her feet are growing painfully numb.

‘Alex, you really have got the wrong man. If it makes you feel better, I’ve seen all Greg’s college paperwork, from Pittsburgh and Harvard. He is not this cave-diving lunatic, he’s a paediatric cardiac surgeon.’

‘He is, huh? Well, I guess he did something good with his life after all.’ They are back where they started by the museum door. Alex stands in front of it, blocking her way.

‘He isn’t your man, Alex.’

‘Then why,’ Alex says, ‘did he threaten me?’

‘Sorry?’ She folds both arms around her belly, shakes her head. ‘What?’

‘I followed the two of you back to your hotel after you left the café – I guess he didn’t mention that either, huh?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You looked kind of fragile. I just didn’t have the heart to confront him again in front of you, so I waited in the hotel lobby. I was still there, an hour or so later, when he came out for a run – and that’s when he threatened me.’

She remembers sleeping that afternoon, the dull, dead sleep, and Greg coming back into the room, flushed with adrenalin.

‘I confronted him – I was angry – and he forced me outside and round the corner, into the alley. That’s when he put his hand round my throat and told me that if I didn’t leave him alone I’d regret it.’

She can see the tension on Alex’s face, a mixture of fear and outrage. He is not making this up.

‘Listen, I don’t make a habit of identifying him on beaches. This is the first time in thirty years that I’ve seen him and I knew him, right away.’

‘OK, I need to get going.’ She steps forwards in the hope that he will let her through the door, but he doesn’t move.

‘What was he doing in Marblehead, Tess?’ Alex narrows his eyes. ‘Was he looking for me?’

‘No – what? No. Look, Alex, it’s really cold, it’s getting late, I’m very tired. I have to get home to my son – the babysitter will be . . .’

‘A son?’ Alex frowns. ‘You have a son?’

‘Yes, yes, I do, and I need to get back to him now.’ There is nobody else in the garden. Some of the lights in the museum have been switched off and they are standing in shadows.

Alex glances at her belly. ‘When’s your baby due?’

‘In five weeks.’ She lifts her chin and looks into his eyes. He blinks and looks away, perhaps suppressing whatever unpalatable thought has just crossed his mind. ‘I’m cold, Alex, I need to go.’

There is a pause, then he says, ‘Of course, I’m sorry,’ and steps aside, holding the door open for her. She moves quickly through it and into the cloister, but he catches her up.

‘Ever heard of Jacques Cousteau?’

‘The deep-sea explorer.’

‘Yes. And you know the closest he ever came to death?’

‘No, no, I really don’t.’ She wonders how unstable Alex actually is.

‘It was on a cave dive.’

‘Really?’ She looks around for the exit, barely listening, just wanting to get away.

‘There’s this spring in the south of France.’ Alex walks next to her and keeps talking. ‘Every year, for just a few weeks in early springtime, it turns into a huge gushing fountain. For generations it baffled the village and then in the nineteenth century an underwater explorer called Ottonelli built a little zinc boat and went down to solve the mystery. He died.’

‘Oh dear.’ She decides it is best just to let Alex talk. The rooms they are passing are dark and the corridor feels longer than it did on the way in.

‘Later on another diver called Signor Negri, decided to try. Negri didn’t solve the mystery of the spring either, but he did make it back up and gave a detailed account of a network of underwater caves; he even described finding Ottonelli’s zinc boat.’

She spots the lobby, and a security guard, and feels herself relax. Alex is still talking.

‘A few years on, Cousteau decided to try. He used Negri’s detailed directions but, fifty feet down and very confused, he realized he’d been duped. Negri’s descriptions bore no relation to the topography – and there was no zinc boat. Without the right equipment, Cousteau was in big trouble. He wrote in his autobiography that it was by far the closest he ever came to death.’

‘I don’t get why anybody would want to squeeze through underwater caves.’

Alex isn’t listening.

‘He worked out that Negri hadn’t got any further than a ledge fifteen feet down – he’d made everything else up.’

She sees the cloakroom.

‘Really? . . . Well, I—’

‘Tess.’ Alex stops and puts a hand on her arm, squeezing it, looking into her eyes now. ‘Negri drew a map of every tunnel, ledge and turn. He gave measurements, precise depths, a poetic description of Ottonelli’s zinc boat – it never occurred to Cousteau to question Negri’s story. If a story is outrageous enough, complete enough, we just assume it’s true.’

She realizes, then, what Alex is saying. ‘I know my husband,’ she says, ‘if that’s what this is about.’

‘Do you? Well, I thought I knew my wife – my soon to be ex-wife – until I discovered that she’d been having an affair with my closest friend. For twelve years.’ He rubs a hand over his beard ‘Twelve years, Tess! We have three children – eleven-year-old twins, a fifteen-year-old daughter, a beautiful apartment in Back Bay, a weekend place in Marblehead, our careers are great, our kids go to great schools, we have a charmed life – and it’s all an elaborate lie.’

His skin has gone grey, his eyes sunken. She realizes then that this is not about Greg at all, it’s about Alex’s disintegrating life: the shock, pain and grief of betrayal – the loss. She doesn’t need to be afraid of Alex’s memories – they are obviously warped by this current nightmare. Memories are always shaped by the present, and Alex’s present is clearly a mess.

‘I’m really sorry. It sounds incredibly painful.’

‘Yes, well, it is. I guess I knew deep down that things weren’t perfect, but it never occurred to me that the two of them were capable of that level of deceit. My God . . .’ He swallows, as if struggling to breathe. ‘The lies they told, Tess . . .’

Alex is, she realizes, effectively back in that underwater cave – trapped, abandoned, blinded, facing what feels like annihilation. She wants to comfort him, but there is nothing she could do or say that would make this any easier for him. They hover by the glass doors. The last visitors are pulling on hats and gloves, winding scarves around their necks, talking in low voices. Behind them, a guard says, ‘We’re closing now, sir, ma’am.’

Alex’s eyes are bloodshot. ‘I’m sorry Tess,’ he says. ‘I know I’ve talked a lot, but you seem like a nice person, a kind person, and you have your baby on the way – and a little boy, too. You need to know what kind of man you’re married to. We should exchange numbers.’

She finds herself agreeing, even though she has no desire to see Alex again. He puts his phone back into his pocket after they’ve swapped numbers, and looks into her eyes. ‘You know, to see Chuck Novak again in my hometown, on the beach where I walk my dog, it was—’

She recoils. ‘What did you just say?’

‘What?’

‘Chuck Novak?’

‘Yes—’

The glass walls seem to shift, closing in on her, and she turns, without saying goodbye – steps through the doors, out into the freezing night. She walks as fast as she can though her boots are slipping on the ice and sleet needles her scalp. The city roars and belches all around, and as she gets to the corner she stops, disorientated by the lights and the noise, the teetering buildings, the smoky sky. She has to get home – she has to get home to Joe – but she can’t remember the way; all the roads look the same and she has no idea which one to take.

It takes a while, on the phone to Nell the next morning, to explain what happened with Alex.

‘The main thing is he called him Chuck Novak, Nell. Chuck – Charles, Carlo? This is feeling less and less like coincidence.’ A pallid winter sun appears low in the sky, illuminating the cold steel of the kitchen.

‘All right, OK, this is so confusing.’ Nell takes a sip of something. Radio 4 is burbling in the background. She imagines Nell standing in her messy kitchen with a cake in the oven, the wood-burner crackling. ‘Carlo Novak’s library card was from the University of Pennsylvania, wasn’t it? Is the University of Pennsylvania in Pittsburgh?’

‘No, the University of Pennsylvania is in Philadelphia, I googled it on the way home last night.’

‘But Pittsburgh’s in Pennsylvania, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but Philadelphia is in Pennsylvania too.’

Nell laughs. ‘This is baffling.’

‘I know, but the geography doesn’t matter – the point is they’re two different universities, in cities hundreds of miles apart. Greg was never at college in Philadelphia, he was an undergraduate in Pittsburgh, then he went to Harvard Med School.’ She reaches up and tucks a loose strand of Christmas lights back over the window ledge.

There is a pause. ‘So Alex is wrong, obviously.’

‘Yes, of course he is. But there’s got to be some connection between Greg and Carlo Novak; there has to be. So, what am I missing here?’

‘What you’re missing,’ Nell says firmly, ‘is Greg. You have to ask him – you have to tell him what Alex said and talk to him about all this.’

‘I was going to last night. I was planning how to talk to him all the way home from the museum, but when I got in he was still at the hospital. I made myself wait up for him, but the later it got the more unhinged this whole thing felt and eventually I fell asleep, I didn’t even hear him come in. Then this morning he was in a rush – he left at 6.15. It’s impossible.’

‘OK, fine, but you have to ask him tonight. It’s the only way you’re going to clear this up.’

‘I know. I will.’

‘Listen,’ Nell says, ‘there are all sorts of reasonable explanations for this, I’m sure. All you’ve got is a library card and Alex, who is hardly reliable since he’s going through a massive midlife crisis. This Novak thing could still be a weird coincidence. I mean, Novak could be the Polish equivalent of Smith for all we know.’

Tess feels the tension in her neck ease.

‘Just ask him, for God’s sake, because this is getting out of hand. You’re starting to hide more from Greg than he is from you.’

They change the subject then and talk about normal things: Christmas plans, the twins squabbling, Joe’s problems at school, Nell’s frustrations with Ken, the urgent need to get a Christmas tree. It is almost like being home, sitting at Nell’s kitchen table with the boys on the Xbox in the front room, Nell’s spaniel resting his nose on her feet, a pot of tea or a glass of wine and whatever cake she made that day in front of them. Missing Nell feels almost physical at times, an ache in the pit of her stomach, a longing not just for a person but for a place, a life that has suddenly slipped into the past.

‘I wish we could go and get our Christmas trees from the Scouts like we always do,’ Tess says. ‘I think that’s why I haven’t got one yet; it feels too sad without you and the boys. I’ve got almost all Joe’s presents now, and we’ve put some lights up, but no tree yet.’

‘I know, I’m sure that’s why I haven’t got ours yet either. It just isn’t the same here without you.’

*

When they hang up she goes down to the basement to bring up the box of tree decorations. The plastic crates containing Greg’s things are neatly lined up where she left them. She hesitates, then reaches up and pulls one down. She digs through it until she finds a file with ‘Harvard Scholarship’ written on it in Greg’s handwriting. She flicks through the paperwork.

All the dates stack up; of course they do. Greg finished high school at seventeen, went to the University of Pittsburgh for three years, then to Harvard Medical School. It is all here. As she repacks the file and clamps on its plastic lid she realizes that something must be badly wrong in order for her to be crouching like this in their freezing basement, checking up on his dates.

This is definitely not how a healthy marriage should feel. She heaves the box back up. As she pulls down the cardboard box of Christmas decorations she dislodges another of Greg’s crates, knocking the lid loose. She pulls it down. It is the box with the baseball things. She can’t stop herself. She reaches inside again and her fingers touch the medallion. She pulls it out and holds it between her fingers: ‘Robesville Sluggers, Junior League Champions’. Slowly, she turns it over: ‘Carlo Novak’.

It is as if she already knew that the name would be engraved there. It feels unsurprising, almost matter-of-fact to see it inscribed in the cheap metal. She slowly folds the ribbon around it and puts it back. Carlo Novak is a relative, he must be.

She feels a twinge down one side as she reaches the top of the basement steps. She should not be lifting boxes at this stage of pregnancy. The baby shifts. She puts the box of decorations down on the top step, rubbing her sides, waiting to get her breath back.

She tries to remember the things Greg has told her about his family. He told her that when he was a little boy they would walk through the town every Christmas Eve and look at all the nativity displays people had in their windows. But he never told her about Christmas Day itself. He didn’t even tell her what they ate – though, when she thinks about it, many of his other childhood memories involve food. Food is presumably safer to remember than people.

He has mentioned the Gallo family meatballs, the bread dipped in ‘sauce’ that they would eat on Sunday after Mass, the kitchen garden with rows of tomatoes to be picked and canned every year, the pączki, deep-fried, sugar-dusted Polish pastries that he would eat warm.

Other childhood memories are sparse. He has told her about the network of waterfalls where the kids would go in the summer vacation, half an hour’s hike out of town. They’d stay there, unsupervised, until sundown day after day. He has mentioned wildlife too, wild turkey and deer, black bear, bald eagles. He told her, once, about a bald eagle statue on the high school playing field. But that’s about it.

And when it comes to his undergraduate days in Pittsburgh or his Harvard degree, she knows next to nothing. He took more courses than other people as an undergraduate, because academic study was the only thing that seemed to help. But he was too modest even to tell her about his perfect MCAT score.

The only thing he has told her about in any detail is the fire. And he told her everything about that: how he was cycling home with his backpack on, his baseball cap pulled down against the evening sun and smelled burning even before he saw the smoke billowing over the rooftops. How he turned the corner into his street and heard the wail of fire trucks, and people were running towards him, holding up their hands, shouting at him to stop. And he told her how he fought them to get to the front door – and then a wall of heat hit him and hands pulled him back, dragged him away, held him down.

Whatever else he is concealing about his past, this at least is complete and true. The memory was so real to him, even thirty years on, that the telling of it altered his face and body: his shoulders collapsed, the angles of his brow sharpened, his eyes became hollow and haunted.

He was less willing to talk about the unspeakable year that followed the fire. It must have been unbearable, living in his alcoholic aunt’s apartment while he finished his senior year at high school. He can’t even say her name. The only thing that kept him alive that year, he said, was the prospect of college. He had been accelerated a year at high school too, so when he left his aunt’s apartment he was only seventeen years old.

He will always be damaged by loss: no matter how many lives he saves, how many clinical breakthroughs he makes, how many prizes he wins, he is going to carry this traumatic memory around inside him until he dies. But Alex is wrong: there is no reason to doubt Greg’s story because she has seen it written on his face and body. In fact, she saw it in his face the first time she looked at him through the viewfinder of her camera.

Greg must have been an extraordinarily resilient teenager. He didn’t let the loss destroy him. He turned the tragedy around and let it propel him to where he is now. It is an extraordinary achievement. She picks up the decoration box and goes back upstairs.

*

When Greg finally gets home it is past midnight again. She has been dozing fitfully, determined to stay awake, listening for his key in the door between brief, rapid dreams of tunnels, high walls and the smell of burning. She hears his feet treading lightly up the stairs. He goes into the main bathroom so that he won’t wake her, and she hears him crank on the shower, water hissing through the pipes. After a while the smell of his shampoo floats through on the steam. She knows that she should get up, go to the bathroom and demand to know who Carlo Novak is, why his library card and medal are downstairs in his box and why Alex Kingman thinks they are the same man.

She has to do it. She waits for him to come into the bedroom. He is barefoot. She can smell his damp, clean skin. She forces herself to sit up.

‘Greg,’ she says, ‘I’ve got to talk to you.’

He stops in the middle of the room, a towel around his waist, broad chest bare, its dark hair massed in a crucifix over his heart.

‘Shit, Tess! I thought you were sleeping.’

‘I was, sort of, but I need to ask you about something.’

He does not move and for a moment, for too long, he doesn’t respond. She can almost hear his brain spinning.

‘Greg, I—’

‘It’s late,’ he says, in a low voice. ‘You really should be asleep.’

‘I know, but I have to talk to you.’

‘Honey, I have to sleep now. I can’t even think straight, let alone talk – do you know what time it is? I have a full list tomorrow and if I don’t get some sleep now I’m not going to be able to function properly. Maybe we could talk in the morning, early, before I go? Could we do that? Or tomorrow evening?’ She can’t see his eyes, it is too dark.

Her mouth suddenly feels dry and cracked. She knows he is avoiding her now. She knows he is hiding things. She turns to look for water on the bedside table and he disappears into the walk-in closet. She shouldn’t let him walk away like this, she should get up, turn the lights on, follow him in there and demand answers, but it is the dead of night, they are both exhausted and right now everything feels very breakable indeed.

This could wait another few hours. They will both be able to think more clearly in the morning.

She lies down and turns onto her side with her back to the walk-in closet. The baby swivels and stretches busily, pushing, elbowing, poking at her sides. She hears him come back into the bedroom. She wonders if he was stalling in there, folding clothes, hanging up ties, uniting stray socks, hoping she would be asleep when he came out.

He gets under the duvet and the mattress tilts into his weight. He lies on his back, motionless. He does not try to touch her. Perhaps he thinks she is sleeping. It is as if they are suspended, side by side, in separate cocoons of tension.

But Greg can fall asleep in an instant, no matter what, with no twitching or sighs, no need for reading, release or winding down. It is the result of years of medical training, of broken nights on cot beds in hospital rooms during forty-hour shifts, alert, high-functioning, snatching sleep only to reboot. And yet right now his stillness feels watchful.

She keeps her breathing even. In the morning, in daylight, they will both be calmer and more rational.

After what feels like a long time, she hears his lengthened, whispery exhales. She waits for a few minutes more and then, gingerly, turns onto her back. The baby sinks heavily against her spine. She can see Greg’s profile in the moonlight, the carved, almost noble features, his lips slightly parted. Perhaps she is looking at his father’s Italian nose and square jawline, his mother’s Slavic cheekbones. She wonders if their baby will inherit any of these features. Or maybe it will look like her side of the family, with the light-blue eyes she inherited from her mother, the wavy blond hair from her father.

She closes her eyes, feels the walls of the house brace themselves against a gust of wind and the questions close in, like faces pressed against a window: Greg’s parents emigrated – separately – from Italy and Poland for a better life, but how did they meet? How did they end up in that Pennsylvanian town? Did they fall in love there? Or did they meet in a big city – New York, Philadelphia, Chicago? Were they happy? Did they love each other? And why – both Catholics – did they have only one child? And what about his aunt – why did she have no children of her own? The questions crowd her head, and then there is a cracking sound and the skewed brickwork of the house begins, very slowly, to tilt, collapsing inwards. The walls are toppling around her – the house is being sucked into the basement – she smells brick dust and the floor beneath her drops. Her limbs jerk – her eyes flip open – she takes a sharp breath.

She thought she was awake but she must have been sleeping. Her heart is thumping now, and she feels sick, trembly. She is wide awake. Greg grinds his teeth, just once: a sharp, gravelly shriek.

She slips out of bed and tiptoes shakily across the room, pushing through shadows to take her dressing gown from the back of the door. She lifts her laptop from the chest of drawers and glances back at Greg. He does not move. As she closes the door behind her it gives a little click.

The house is terribly cold. Down in the living room there are frost patterns on each diamond-shaped windowpane. She grabs a blanket from the arm of the leather chair and wraps herself in it, wiping condensation off the glass. She peers out. Snowflakes drift from a canopy of darkness, illuminated only by the funnel of light from the Schechters’ porch lamp. Greg said snow this early is rare – it is going to be a brutal winter.