Finding You (29 page)
Authors: Giselle Green
‘Perhaps that is what we have really come here to find out?’
39 - Julia
‘I think I’ve done it, Jules. I’ve discovered where you’re going to be able to find her.’ When Naseem comes back from his very-early morning walk, his first words give me a shock. I am not ready to hear them.
I am not ready.
I was looking out over the balcony just now at the salmon-pink dawn spreading in the east, thinking,
The day is here already
.
It’s come,
and feeling a strange safety in the fact that I was not where I had dreamed I would be at this point, not clambering over those dangerous rocks with Hadyn, taking him back to her. But now Naseem comes in with his news. He’s been out badgering the locals, asking around. He knows where we will find Illusion. From the look of urgency on his face, I get the feeling that we’re expected to jump to it, make tracks
now
before she goes and we lose her and though I’ve been up and dressed this last hour gone, I find that, after all the hours I thought I’d taken to prepare myself for this moment ... I am not ready.
I am not; where has the time gone? There has not been enough time. There were things I was meant to have said to Hadyn before this point, surely, things I was meant to have done? I don’t know what they were. As I duck under the bed, looking for Hadyn’s sandals, I span out the moment, hiding there as I try to remember all the things, and when I pull out his shoe, I hug it to me, holding it to my heart because as soon as I put it on him, I know he is walking on his way. Out of my life.
Does he know this? He doesn’t even want to look at me this morning. He’s cheerful but self-contained, humming to himself a little again. He was singing when I put him in the tiny bath earlier. It was still dark outside, but he was wide awake and I didn’t know what else to do with him. At that point before the dawn came, I could still pretend we had plenty of time. I wanted to savour every moment with him. I wanted to etch out some more memories. Just then, I didn’t care of what: of the way his hair curls at the nape of his neck in the bath, of this new sound that I was suddenly hearing, his voice when he was singing, but all the minutes this morning, they fluttered past so quickly. Like butterflies, they all rose up as one and I could barely catch them.
I send up a prayer, sitting here, holding his sandal.
Dear God, slow it down, slow the world down just for a bit and let me have some more minutes.
When I close my eyes, I see Hadyn as he was the day we brought him home from the hospital: tiny and perfect, wrapped in his blue blanket. And Charlie and me, rapt in wonder at our own cleverness, had not been able to take our eyes off him, because what more perfect thing could there ever have been created by anyone on the planet? I remember how Charlie was fascinated by your fingers, he couldn’t stop touching them, exclaiming at the tiny size of them. How he’d stroked the paper-thin skin of your cheeks when you’d yawned, displaying your gums, and he’d laughed in wonderment just because here you were,
down from heaven
, he said,
here to complete his life.
At that time, for those first few hours and days and weeks and months, you were inarguably ours, all ours. Ours to cherish and enjoy the days with and dream up a future for.
Or so I had thought.
I know that I would never have fashioned a future for you that looked like this, but you have not chosen me for that task.
I stroke the soft leather of his sandal, wishing that I could have the simple innocence and hope of that time back. I would have been there for you, you know, Hadyn. You would never have been alone. I don’t know—I can’t imagine—what it is she offers. I have no way of knowing that. But I know what
I
would have offered you, and it is this: my undying love and commitment, no matter what came. My time, my sympathetic ear as you grew older. My presence—you’d have never come home to an empty house, all dark and cold with every light off and have no one there to greet you, ask you how your day went. You would never have been like me.
Even if our fortunes changed and I’d needed to work, I’d have found a way to
be
there. And when troubles came, you’d never have had no one there to love you or to care about you because I would have cared. Always. And I’d have never let that go; you’d have mattered till my dying day. You do. You
will
. No matter what happens when I take you back to see her today, no matter what, I have always loved you and I always will.
‘Hey, girl.’ I feel Naz’s gentle hand on my shoulder now. ‘It’s time.’ I look up at him and his face is set and serious. He doesn’t say to me, like he did yesterday,
you don’t have to do this, you know
. He only says, ‘It’s time.’
And I don’t know what the time is, all I know when we finally make our way out into the brightening morning, is that everyone else we pass along the way somehow thinks that this is just another ordinary day. An ordinary day of many minutes that can be squandered like pennies at a funfair because they don’t know,
they have no idea
, how numbered the minutes of this day are. How very precious.
And once again, I feel the terrible sadness at knowing how soon this will all be over. I want to stop and browse, slow down the moments. We could ... we could pause right here, where the Eastern European street traders have set up their temporary stalls selling fashioned leather goods and tumbled gemstones. The old ladies in black on their way to church are browsing and I want to do that too, do
anything
to slow this down, but Naz won’t let me and Hadyn is suddenly straining at my hand, his head up as if he’s scented something on the breeze and all of my minutes are flowing by too fast again. So fast. One moment, we’re hastening down the long, grey esplanade towards the seafront, and the next we’re on the sand already. It’s golden brown and only slightly wet, crusty from the night, unbroken.
And Hadyn is running. He’s running free, he’s broken clear of my hand and now ... it is happening, just exactly as I always knew it would ... because
she
is here, too. Illusion is here, Naz was right, and my heart does a strange juddering movement, threatening to stop altogether because I am out of time. And I think, all my efforts up to this point, everything I’ve ever done to try and get my boy back, to try and keep him,
what’s it all been for
?
For you, my love. Only for you.
I can spy her, the hunched figure that’s walking by the shore with her little dog—
it’s her; does he see her?
I believe he must. He is running straight in her direction, his heels kicking up the sand as he goes and for one last brief moment, a moment that will be encapsuled in my heart for all eternity, he is mine. I am his. And I feel him, I
am
him. The golden morning stretches out like a promise and I’m running for joy along the shore, running so fast I know that no one will ever capture me, my golden curls streaming out behind me and no one can ever make me stop. I know exactly what I want, arms flapping, a sound of pure joy escaping from my lips.
I give a sigh. And then...
I am back to me. Watching it all in slow motion, my minutes nearly gone and all the little daggers of pain I’ve been feeling running out like grains of sand through a timer, the wind blowing them all away from me. Let him have her then, if he can accept her love. Let him know what it is to be wrapped in the arms of the one you have longed for, the true one who comforts your soul. I let you go, my love. For your best interests are always in my heart. I let you go to her and I won’t begrudge her anymore, for she gives you the joy that is rightly yours, she makes you sing ...
And suddenly, my vision pans out and I can see the calm beach, a gentle Sunday morning. The sun is like a dancer doing pirouettes across the waves and when Illusion sees him at last, her face ... it is like all the colourful ribbons on a festival parade, it is like all the candles lit up on a special-year birthday cake, alight with love and hope and I know that I was right,
I was right
, she loves him, too, with all her heart. And now look how her arms are open wide in greeting, so wide she’d gather up the whole world if it had him in it, just like me. I glance at Naseem and he’s stopped dead in his tracks, open-mouthed, his eyes so sad, disbelieving, but I’m waiting for it, breath stopped because it is so clear that I was right. Hadyn’s never let her go. The waves to the right of them break and curl backwards. The huge flock of seagulls on the shore behind her strut their stuff and something in the wind calls my name, holding me in their heart, giving me strength as, arms out-stretched, Hadyn reaches her and then ...
My boy runs straight past her.
Naseem’s eyes go round, like mine, ‘
What the
...’ and we just stare at each other. And then at Hadyn, who’s reached the flock of birds and he’s running amongst them, laughing and hollering, flapping his arms as if he were a bird and if he tried hard enough, he’d soar up with them now, just sail out, feathers shivering, into the blue morning sky.
‘He ... he doesn’t recognise her?’ Naz turns to me, perplexed, but we’re near enough now for me to see the look on Illusion’s face. I recognise what she’s feeling, if nothing else. That resignation, that look that says,
Oh, how I have longed to have you back again and yet you ... all you are interested in is the birds ...
I swallow, taking in this new piece of information which is shocking beyond measure—and at the same time, strangely comforting. He doesn’t love Illusion, then? No more, at least, than he loves me?
I can’t believe it,
I can’t believe it,
and yet, as we walk slowly up to her, this woman who is my enemy no more, I know that it is true.
‘
El es asi
,’ she shrugs, smiling a slow sad smile at me as we reach her at last. ‘That is just how he is, no?’
It is. I see it now. What I have not been able to see before. And while Naseem goes off to grab hold of my rowdy, noisy, laughing little boy, some sunlight starts to trickle into my heart once again. I have him back, then. I have all my minutes back, the lifetime that I always wanted with Hadyn. It’s been returned as I’ve requested, only ...
He isn’t who I thought he was, is he, my strange little child? He’s someone else. Still him, but not as I’ve been seeing him all along. A different soul. A soul for whom I am beginning to see I must dream up a very different future. I sink onto the sand, my legs feeling so weak suddenly, with shock, with relief, with
gratitude
at this new chance that we’ve been given.
And after a while, Illusion comes and sits down beside me. She’s wearing the same cardigan that she wore the day we took him back. So close to me, she smells of tea and biscuits and cheap Spanish eau de toilette but her eyes are sparkling. They look beautiful lit up with her love on this early summer morning.
‘Thank you for bringing him to visit me,’ she says, her voice thick with happiness and sadness and a host of other things that I now feel only too keenly. ‘
Gracias
.’
‘
De nada
,’ I tell her. It is nothing.
But of course, it has only been
everything.
Everything I ever feared and everything I ever hoped for, but it has all been worth it. For the first time, in all these months I think,
maybe I’ve really got you now, Hadyn. I don’t understand you yet, but I’ve seen something today that I’m willing to go learn about now. And maybe, maybe this time ... I really have found you.
40 - Julia
‘I always knew that he would come back,’ Illusion says to me in Spanish. She’s scarcely taken her eyes off Hadyn since she first caught sight of him, though apart from a fleeting interest when she stopped a passing ice-cream man to buy him a cornet, he’s shown little interest in her. ‘I knew that I would not go a whole lifetime without seeing him again.’ She stops, throwing me a remorseful look and I can see that despite her jubilation, her heart is also heavy.
‘My brother Diego,’ she gets the words out slowly, and I appreciate how difficult this must be for her to admit. ‘He did you a great wrong.’ She sees it now, then? For such a long time, I had no idea whether she really believed it herself, the truth that he was mine and Charlie’s child.
‘He also did
you
one,’ I say.
‘He did.’ She thumps her chest, conceding only now the injury done to herself when Hadyn was passed off as her nephew. ‘It’s true. But I had some benefit of it.’ Her gaze is still down on the shore, where Hadyn’s romping around with her little dog Lulu and Naseem, but her tone is unmistakably—and so unexpectedly—apologetic. ‘I never did have any children of my own and he ... he is a very special one.’
I swallow. ‘He is,’ I agree softly. So very special. I hold my breath before adding, ‘He’s ... different though, isn’t he?’
She nods emphatically before her face creases into a smile. ‘
Very
different,’ she agrees. ‘You see what he is doing now?’ She gestures to my son, running up and down the shore. ‘He did that. He never came when he was called. He spat out the food he didn’t want to eat. He cried at lot.’
My heart tightens.
‘At first,’ she wipes the sand off her hands in a decisive gesture, ‘I believed that was down to
her
. To Diegos’ wife. I thought she was a bad mother—that’s what Diego told me—that the boy had got into bad habits, you understand me?’
I give a little snort. I understand, of course I understand that. It is the explanation we gave ourselves when we first got him back. Only ... so many questions are rearing their heads now, I barely know where to start. Hadyn had not been so markedly
different
when he left our care. Was it her brother and his girlfriend Maria who had him for a while before they handed him over to Illusion that somehow sparked this change off? Was it something
they’d
done to him? But Illusion hasn’t finished.
‘He was very little when I got him, though. I thought I could change those habits,’ she remembers now.
‘Except ... you found out that you couldn’t?’
‘It wasn’t so obvious at first,’ she’s admitting. ‘He was very young when they gave him to me. A year and a half, they said. It was ... after that, little things I noticed in the months after that, they made him stand out from the others.’ She lifts her shoulders, clearly unperturbed by the observations that she’d made. Hadyn was turning out to be different and she’d accepted it. He was what he was. ‘He had his own ways,’ she says enigmatically.
I lean in to her, wanting to know more, hungry now to learn everything from this woman because there’s this whole new picture that’s unfolding before me as she speaks. Listening to her, it’s as if ... all along, I’ve been trying to do a jigsaw with the wrong picture on the box. No wonder nothing made sense, nothing would fit.
‘His own ways ...’ I prompt, my breath catching in my throat. What does that mean? ‘Did he ever sleep well for you at night, Illusion?’
She catches my eye and right away, I have my answer.
‘His sleep got worse over time,’ she lets on. ‘I thought at first he might be missing his own bed ...’
‘Yes, yes,’ I nod rapidly. ‘That is what we have told ourselves, too. And what about his speech, Illusion?’ She looks at me a little confused—have I used the wrong word? My Spanish is not as good as hers; why didn’t I brush up on it before coming here? I do a fanning out motion from my throat with my hands, point at Hadyn and then lift up my shoulders questioningly.
Did he ever talk to you
?
‘Ah!’ she understands me at last. ‘He would say ‘no’ when he didn’t want to do something. He would say ‘Lulu’ when he wanted to pet the dog. He would say
coche
—car, when he wanted me to buy him another one. He doesn’t speak so much to you, either?’ She looks at me, both sad and a little curiously now.
I shake my head. ‘Not so much,’ I admit. And the sadness of what has been lost—
he was speaking before they took him—
it comes to me again.
‘Maybe he will start to learn English now?’ she says hopefully. ‘His father ... he is a doctor, no?’ I detect a strange, almost shy pride in her voice now.
‘A surgeon, yes.’
‘Perhaps he will find some way to help him?’ he suggests. ‘He may know some ways that I do not know?’
Charlie does not know any ways, but I do not need to tell her this.
‘He’s
thin
,’ she notes now mournfully as the trio march by near us. Naz is beginning to look a little worn out, but he knows how important this time is to me and he’s a real trooper, just shoots me an encouraging smile as they go past. ‘He has gotten very thin.’
‘I can hardly persuade him to eat,’ I confess, shame-faced, but she nods, understanding only too well all the troubles that I have had.
‘He was the same with me until I discovered what he would eat,’ she smiles now. ‘Come back to my house with me and I will show you how to cook for him.’
We are to go back to Illusion’s house now? I had not considered that possibility since we’d sat down here on the sand. Will this be a good idea? What would Naz think? I stand up, shaking all the tiny wet grains from my clothes. Suddenly, I want to see it. Where he lived. How he lived. I want to see the view he’d have seen from his window all those months that he was away from me. I want to smell and taste the food she cooked for him. I want to walk down the same corridors and look up at the same streaked white walls and
know
if he awoke every morning to the hiss and sigh of the surf just as I’ve imagined all this time ...
When we get there—a hot, fifteen-minute walk from the beach, it turns out that he did not. Illusion lives in the seventh floor flat of a high-rise concrete block, and the first sound he’d have heard every morning was the bell accompanying the opening and closing of the lift doors right outside her apartment. The view, when I crane my neck round the tiny balcony where Illusion hangs out her washing, tends to her canary and a few potted plants and stores everything she can’t fit elsewhere; well, it’s a view of the edge of her building and of more high-rise blocks, a tiny slither of the sky. In her tiny galley-style kitchen, while Naz keeps Hadyn occupied finding the cartoons on the Spanish telly, she shows me how she cooks
guisado—
a sort of stew. She shares with me how he’ll eat this if you cut it up into very fine pieces and let him feed himself with a certain blue plastic spoon. The spoon, apparently, is key. She hands it to me before we go. I stow it in my purse and then after a good hour’s visit and just as we’re about to take our leave, Hadyn jumps down off her settee and runs into her bedroom.
It’s a tense moment. The first sign that he’s even recognised where we are, that any of this is familiar,
means
anything to him at all. He jumps momentarily into the little child’s bed crammed into the bedroom beside her one, and a lump comes into my throat because there, sitting on the pillow looking a little jaded and floppy-eared is the elephant Bap-Bap that we managed amongst all the mayhem of the day we came for him, to leave behind. Hadyn doesn’t stay in the bed. He gets up almost immediately, as if he’d only been testing it out, remembering it, that it had once been the place where he went when he was tired. I hear her intake of breath behind me as he sees the elephant, seizes hold of it, and I know why:
it is all she has left of him.
Was I not the same for such a long time?
Afterwards, Naseem drives Hadyn and me down to the La Linea side of the Spanish border. He parks up and we cross over the border into Gibraltar on foot on a perfect sunny Sunday afternoon in June. The Rock, so tall and proud and up close now, seems to me like the prow of a battleship. And I ... crumpled and exhausted and sticky from the lollipops that have melted in Hadyn’s hand onto mine, I still feel like the returning commander must feel who has sailed into the heart of darkness and emerged triumphant.
I am taking him home!
While there was part of me that always knew this must be the case, the part of me that feared otherwise, that he would never want to leave her ... it has been silenced forever.
In the light, airy café space downstairs at the airport, we sit and drink our first proper cup of tea of the weekend and gaze at the view of the Rock outside the gleaming windows.
‘You weren’t even a tiny bit worried,’ Naz nudges me now, ‘when we took him to her place, that he’d show he was homesick?’
‘I was a tiny bit,’ I concede. ‘But I had to see it. I had to know it for myself, that he wasn’t.’
‘No, he certainly wasn’t.’ Naseem’s eyebrows go up. ‘You couldn’t have been more wrong about him pining for her. He was perfectly happy to walk away at the end there, wasn’t he? Considering how that woman doted on him, it felt—almost bizarre.’
I nod, agreeing completely.
‘He appears to have no ties or attachments to Illusion,’ I admit to Naz now. ‘Just as he doesn’t appear to have developed too many with me or his dad ...’
‘But why?’ my friend pursues. ‘
Why wouldn’t he
, though?’
‘I don’t know, Naseem.’
Naz sits back, his hands resting lightly on the table, pensive, now. ‘Does this mean—if you accept your theory was wrong—you’ll be giving Charlie’s psychologist’s theory a go? You’ll take Hadyn to Atlanta?’
I shake my head emphatically. ‘Absolutely not. We’ve also shown he totally
wasn’t
traumatised by Illusion, was he? I think we can safely say that theory has been blown out of the water, too.’
‘Then what?’ My friend opens his hands, echoing back the question that I have not the faintest answer to.
‘I don’t know, Naz. All I know is that Charlie and I were both wrong about Hadyn. It means I didn’t lose him to Illusion. I won’t lose him to Atlanta.’ I breathe out. ‘It means I’ve still got a whole lot of learning to do before I find out what’s really going on, but right now ...’ I sit back and let the sunlight streaming through the windows light up my face. Right now I can relax. ‘I did what I came for and there is nothing left for me to do here.’
‘There is
one
more thing,’ my friend reminds me. He pulls his mobile out of his pocket and places it on the table right in front of me. ‘You still need to phone Charlie.’
41 - Charlie
Yesterday afternoon, laying flat out, fully clothed on the hotel bed which Rob had booked me into, a strange thing happened to me that never normally happens. I had a dream.
I am not a dreamer. Julia has dreams. She tells me about them all the time and then gets mad at me when I laugh at her for having such a vivid imagination though the truth is, I love her for it. I love her for being able to step into different worlds. I love that she knows how to let go enough to go there; that she is Fearless Fearon. That she is an explorer and she will go to places in her heart and in her imagination even when she is scared.
I do not go there, myself. At night, the shutters go down and I, like a light, go out. I sleep. I rest. Nobody comes to me and I do not go anywhere. When the sun comes up, I get up and get on with whatever the new day brings.
But yesterday, something out of the ordinary happened. My father died and when he did ... something must have torn in the fabric of my universe because yesterday afternoon, lying conked out on that hotel bed, I dreamed I saw my parents again. In my dream, they both looked younger than I remembered them, somewhere in their thirties. They were smiling and holding hands and appeared for all the world every bit as
alive
as anyone I’d ever come across in the daytime. My father had looked over at me, unusually tender, and his look said,
It’s alright, son.
And I knew then that he
knew
. What it had felt like being me yesterday morning when all the alarms and the buzzers had gone off and he’d been lying there writhing and I’d been forced to stand and watch. To witness those last moments of my father dying, me a trained surgeon
knowing that I could have saved him
, that I’d had the wherewithal and the knowledge and I could have done it, brought him back, but he had not wished it. He’d had it written for all to see, there at the bottom of his bed: DNR. He’d wanted us to let him go. I’d had to honour that.
It’s alright, son.
It had been a shock to me, seeing them. Especially Mum. She looked so real—damn it, she
was
real. I’ve never had any truck with this sort of thing, I’ve never believed in it and yet ... In the dream, my first feeling on realising this sort of visitation was possible was a sense of hurt.
Where the heck have you been all this time, Mum?
And her answer suffused with nothing but love had drifted back to me, plain as the day.
I never left your side; can’t you see it?
In my dream, I didn’t see it. I was too hurt and cross. At the same time, my heart was bursting with relief at this newfound knowledge that they were both still there. Somewhere, wherever it was, they were there. I still couldn’t understand why I hadn’t seen her before, though. Her answer, a thought louder than words, replied to me in a flash.
You couldn’t see it because
you
went away.
I was confused. I went away ... where... to Hillstones? Is that what she’d meant?
You went.
In my dream I saw her put her hand to her heart.
You
left
, Carlos.
I’d left.
Absented my heart
is what she meant. Of course I had. She’d died! What else had I been meant to do... My mother’s eyes, filled with so much compassion and love, brought so many feelings flooding back at once, I didn’t know what to do with them. I was deluged by them. Threatened by drowning.
You left
, she’d told me firmly.
But now, you have to come back.
I did? For a moment, I’d felt myself being gently scolded. If my mother was trying to tell me that this was the time to stop running away from my feelings, then she was wrong. What better time than now to stay away from all the troubled waters of the heart? Dad had just passed away. Julia had just left me. My son ... my beloved son, he was back but so troubled and strange and estranged, how could I cope with all that was going on and
feel the anguish of it
and still survive? I still had to go out there every day and perform surgery, didn’t I? I was still required to function.
Forget it, Mum
, I told her in this dream. But she wouldn’t let me forget it.
She knew all about Hermosa, too. She was aware of it, I could tell. She wasn’t judging me for it, but there it was, pulsating in the air between us and I felt so
ashamed
...
You
are
strong enough.
That’s what I thought she said next. But how could she be right?
How
? If I’d been strong enough to bear the pain of losing Hadyn, I’d never have tried to deny him. I’d never have let myself be seduced into thinking that it was a good idea. For a moment, wringing my hands, I’d looked away in despair. When I’d looked back again, my parents had faded a little; still there, but receding somehow.
Carlos. Love doesn’t make you weaker. It makes you all the stronger.
That was the last thing she said.
I knew after that, I wouldn’t be hearing from either of them again. That they were gone. They wouldn’t be back and afterwards, I slept on surprisingly peacefully through until the dawn.
When I woke up this morning, my pillow was wet with tears.
