Finding You (16 page)

20 - Charlie

‘Charlie?’ Dr Killman calls my attention back to her. ‘I don’t want to alarm you. But Hadyn is very little, and there might be some expectations you still have that you’re going to need to alter.’ I raise my eyebrows and she continues cautiously. ‘If we find that he is suffering from hostage-related trauma, we’re going to have to go very carefully and slowly with his rehabilitation. Ushering him into a nursery or a playgroup and hoping that he’ll automatically work out how to handle his peers—that’s not going to cut it.’

‘No.’ I hold up my hands, give a little humourless laugh. ‘Sorry, I was just thinking ... when you get your child back, you think it’s all over, and then there are all these other things that need taking into account. The intricate delicate balance of their life, it’s been upset and that needs ... it needs recalibrating.’

‘People are often surprised at how long that can take,’ she says gently. ‘At what a delicate process that can be. It’s something that we take for granted, that if anything happens, we’ll easily be able to slot right back into our normal lives, but it doesn’t always work like that.’

‘No,’ I agree. A vignette of Spain flickers through my mind momentarily; myself as a child, home for the holidays and out with Rob on our Uncle Ernesto’s boat. How eager I had been, running the length of that slippery deck, to show them all that I still knew what to do, that I had not forgotten. How they had all laughed at my accent, no longer exactly like theirs, more English
,
now—
El Ingles,
they called me—and how I no longer seemed able to catch a fish while my brother Rob had caught a bucketful with ease. I’d sat and watched his haul sliding around in the pail and then after, when they’d all stripped off shirts and jumped into the cool green waves, I hadn’t joined them in that, either.

I couldn’t. I remember staring into the sea. How it had heaved and pulsed, the waves seeming so much bigger than I’d remembered them from before, overwhelmingly so. And the mist on the shore had turned all the houses along the seafront into a white, wavery line like a ghost and reminded me that after all this time of being sick, my mother was finally gone. That I had been allowed home too late and that now, I would never see her again.     

‘Something changes in us when we go away, doesn’t it?’ my voice sticks in my throat. 

‘Not always, but it can, Charlie. It can sometimes take a bit of effort to feel we’ve arrived back home again.’  

I feel a pain in my stomach when she says this. Perhaps it is because I have not yet eaten lunch, though I do not think right now I could eat.

‘Whatever it takes,’ I tell her feelingly. ‘Whatever, Dr Killman. I just want him back.’
My boy, my beloved boy who looks so much like Conchita my mother.
She’d have loved him, I’m sure. She’d have been so proud. 
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand surreptitiously.

‘And I am sure you
will
have him back, Charlie. Look. Let’s start with having him checked out by the paediatrician. Rule out everything else, first,’ she says gently.

‘There’s nothing physically wrong with him,’ I assure her, taking in a deep breath now. This is safer territory. ‘I’ve had him checked out tip to toe. The ENT reports came back negative. He’s in A-1 condition.’  

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘But you know how complex the body-mind unit is. I wouldn’t want to misdiagnose. However,’ she leans over and taps me gently on the arm, ‘The key thing for you is to know that
if
intervention is deemed necessary in Hadyn’s case, he couldn’t be in more caring or better-informed hands.’

‘I’m sure.’ I lean forward a little now. We need to get down to it, don’t we? ‘So—you’ll be able to give Julia tips on how to handle him—that sort of thing?’

She nods.  ‘One of the key things we have found is that avoiding associative triggers—anything that reminds the abductee of their experience—can be crucial in enabling recovery. When we’re reminded of something, we re-live it.’

‘I understand that
.’ All those parcels and letters they’d sent me from Spain as a kid that went unopened. I hadn’t wanted reminding, had I?

‘In short, part of what I’ll be advising is that you as his parents work to help him to
forget
the time he was away,’ she tells me earnestly.

‘Makes sense,’ I agree.

‘Which leads me to my next question,’ she adds delicately. ‘I know this can be a hard place for parents to revisit, but while the abductee mustn’t be reminded of what went on,
we
must be if we’re to know what scenarios to avoid. Do you mind if I ask, do you have any idea
how
he was kept for that year, the people he’d have been exposed to, the woman herself?’  

Dr Killman puts her glass down carefully on the table between us. ‘It might help me build up a better picture if you could describe to me everything you know about what Hadyn went through.’ 

I shrug out the knots that have suddenly appeared in my back. ‘The woman’s name was Illusion. I know the kind of people she came from,’ I tell her slowly. ‘My brother informs me they’re all well-known to the police, and not just for petty crimes, either. I won’t go into details ...’ I stumble to a halt. Rob hadn’t been too forthcoming on that; he’d been careful of my feelings, but I’d got the gist.  ‘As for the woman who had care of him—Illusion—she was in her late forties, unmarried, with no children of her own.’

‘Illusion,’ she smiles softly. ‘Interesting name. What was she like, Charlie. Do you know? What were the conditions like for him, where he was being kept?’

I let out a soft moan, rubbing my forehead with my fingers. What was she like? God. Why does she ask me? Why do I have to bring this all back into my mind? I have my son back, I have him back, he is with us, he is safe, why all this need to backtrack to the place where he was all those months ...  

‘I don’t know how they normally lived. But when we picked him up, she was staying in a temporary place. She’d come up to Arenadeluna on some family business and had taken out an apartment in some God-forsaken back alley situated in the criminal quarters of the town. You know the kind of place—windowless, airless, full of feral dogs and row upon row of wet clothes.’ I draw in a breath, and continue. ‘The whole place stank,’ I recall for her now. ‘Of ... you can imagine what.’ It stank of urine and bad food odours and worse.  ‘I remember a huge pile of rubbish bags dumped at one end, an old broken mattress. Clothes ...’ I say again. ‘A lot of damp clothes hanging everywhere, hanging from ropes tethered across the windows. I remember all these rumpled, grey clothes ...’

‘That’s a very powerful visual image,’ she comments softly.

‘Illusion had a narrow front door,’ I recall for her now, seeing as she wants images.  ‘So narrow, you wondered how a large person like her could ever get through it. They were living on a ground floor apartment, so there wasn’t too far to go. It was so small … when you got in, you thought that if you laid two people down head to toe they’d take up the length of the apartment …’

‘And there was room for the two of them, in there?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Where did he sleep?’ Dr Killman asks now. ‘I take it there was only one bedroom?’

‘I only saw one bed. I don’t know where he slept. It felt cramped.’

She scribbles something down on her notes. ‘Anything else?’ she prompts.

‘She kept dogs. Large dogs, not child-friendly ones. They tried to attack me and his mother the day we went there.’   

Her face twitches slightly. ‘
Dangerous
dogs?’ she asks.

‘Quite possibly.’

‘Then I imagine dogs might be one of the triggers we need to look out for when it comes to stress-induced behaviours,’ she says earnestly. 

‘He seems to like dogs, though,’ I tell her. ‘He always wants to go up to them when we’re in the park. Julia was suggesting the other day perhaps we should get him a dog.’

‘No.’ Her eyebrows lift a little. ‘If he was being kept with dogs, then these are best avoided, I think. No memory triggers, remember?’

‘Got it.’

‘The key thing to remember is this: what he
wants
at the moment is not always going to be what’s best for him. You’re going to have to be prepared to deny him some things, be resolute, and that’s not going to come easy.’

‘No.’ I stand up, unable to sit still any longer, make a show of looking at my watch. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, and she follows my gaze to the wall clock. It’s five minutes to two already. Thank God. I’m going to need to make a move. ‘So ... the long and the short of it, Pippa, is—do you think you’re going to be able to help us?’

Pippa Killman straightens in her chair now, her eye contact direct and reassuring. ‘There’s certainly a lot of help available for the kind of presentation you’ve described, Charlie. We do have a sister clinic in Atlanta where we deal with the most severe cases in-house.’

I frown slightly. ‘
Atlanta
as in ...?’

‘Atlanta, Georgia. That’s correct. From what you’ve described that is certainly a possibility in this case but of course, we don’t need to go there just yet. For now, I’d certainly like to see Julia too, as soon as we can arrange it.’

‘Fantastic,’ I say. Because that is all I’ve really visited her today to hear, isn’t it? How to put this right.  Hopefully ours won’t be one of the cases that needs going as far as Atlanta, but if it is, that’s okay with me, too. Whatever is going to work. ‘You want to see Julia. Okay. We’ll make an appointment then. I’ll tell her.’

‘Is Julia likely to be happy with that?’ she asks unexpectedly. ‘Is she of the same mind of you—that she needs some help with her son? Sometimes ...’ Dr Killman looks down at her notes. ‘One parent recognises the need for outside help sooner than the other. It happens,’ she says.

‘Oh no, I think you’ll find Julia and I are pretty much on the same page with this, Pippa. When we spoke last night, it was pretty clear to me that Julia ... she’s totally motivated about this. She wants help. She’s the one who brought it up, in fact.’ I give a short laugh. ‘She’s a ... a totally devoted and loving mum, who’ll go to the ends of the earth for our son.’

‘As she has already proved,’ Pippa Killman reminds me softly. ‘I’ll wait for her to ring me then, shall I?’

‘Absolutely. She’ll be straight onto it, I have no doubt.’ I lean over, grasping her hand warmly, feeling the weight summarily lifted from my shoulders. Now that Dr Killman’s brought back into my mind those shitty conditions they kept my son in, it’s hardly any wonder if he’s a bit spooked now and again; if he’s finding it hard to settle. What sentient child wouldn’t, under the circumstances? This Pippa Killman, I like her, though. She’s put me at my ease, and it’s clear she knows her business. Julia will love her.

Okay, it’s going to take understanding and love and—as I understand it from this meeting today—some careful and informed intervention.  But everything’s going to be all right. That’s all I can think as I take the corridor down to my own rooms, remembering to drop off the Trinity-St Mark’s forms with Angus’s secretary on the way. One day in the future, I tell myself, when Hadyn’s captaining the rugby team, this visit to Pippa Killman will seem like nothing but a distant, bad dream.

‘Remember. No memory triggers,’ she says again, standing in the doorway as I come back down the hall.

‘Got that. Thank you again, Pippa.’

 It might take us a while, but at the end of it, my son’s going to be all right.