Stolen Child (37 page)

Hi Jessica,

Thanks for your last mail. My leg is still in the brace. It’s driving me nuts! But it’s going to be removed next week and then the physio starts. Hospital is such a drag. If I could escape I would…but not in a Boxster. Do you know what that creep once called me? A minger! I’m glad his car was trashed, not the deer, but I could have done without the broken leg. All he got was a broken nose!! It looked like a pig’s snout before the crash so the plastic surgery has to be an improvement…hope it isn’t.

I’ve so much time to think now. Carla Kelly and Robert Gardner keep coming into my mind. None of this was their fault. I look so like her, it’s weird. But my baby photograph is hideous. I look like a trout. To think it was sent around the world and used in the FindIsobel campaign is
so
humiliating.

I’ve been on a long journey and it’s still only the beginning. Your emails have helped a lot to bring me to this decision. I now accept that my ‘mother’ stole me. But I will never believe my father suspected. If you knew the kind of marriage they had, well, you’d understand how he
never suspected. No matter what they do to him, I will never accept that he’s guilty. I hope you and all your family will respect my belief.

I want to meet Carla first and then Robert and afterwards the rest of you…not so sure about the twins!! Oh my God…it’s
so
scary.

Take care.

Joy/Isobel.

The FindIsobel site is addictive, especially the first awful press conference after her disappearance. That smile, anyone can see the agony behind it. This woman is her mother. Mother…mother. Joy presses her finger against the screen, her mother’s face, her hair, the tears gathering in the corners of her luminous eyes. She wants to touch her. Just the tiniest touch to feel her skin. But there is glass between them and it is up to Joy to break it.

Dylan comes to visit her at last. He pulls up a chair and sits beside her bed. His fingers are linked, his knuckles clenched. When she tells him she has decided to meet her mother, the worry lines lift from his face and he tells her a story.

Joy imagines grey empty buildings, echoes, rats, cobwebs, rusting machinery, cops’ voices, sirens, rubble, shadows. She imagines a woman walking between the shadows, tears like rain on her cheeks. She imagines Dylan with his pockmarked arms and lockjawed mouth and his breath wheezing out of him.

The dopehead and the angel. That’s the way he makes it sound. Her mother laid her healing hands on him and he arose into the light and became…well…he became Dylan, someone she has always liked and trusted, and who is responsible for splitting up her family.

The key word that Joy had used?
Anticipation.
It had resonance, reverberations. It pulled him back to his past and she, sitting unaware in his clinic, had started the unravelling. She remembers the frantic drive in the ambulance, the claw-like grip on her hands…Anticipation baby…Anticipation baby…Joy moans and presses her fingers to her temples. She can’t speak. What is there to say? Well done, Sherlock Holmes? She wants to lie in the silence. Then she will hear the crash of her friendship with Dylan shattering into a million pieces.

But his story is not yet over. He drove to Dublin and met Joy’s mother. He alerted her, poured out his suspicions. But she was no longer the Carla Kelly he remembered. No longer the iconic image.

‘Once I got over the shock of seeing her, the resemblance was even more pronounced,’ he admits. ‘You looked exactly like her when your own hair was short.’

She tries to imagine her mother with a boy’s haircut. Impossible. Her hair blows in the wind. It streams along a catwalk. It hides her face when journalists shout, ‘How do you feel…can you describe your emotions when you saw the empty cot?’

Dylan says her hair is black now. Black and short like a skullcap. Jessica’s email…how did Joy not realise? A ghost…ghostwriter…she sees her mother’s neck bending like a swan as she keels forward across the grave of the woman who had stolen her child.

Joy bends forward and touches the cast on her leg. The itch is a burn and she will scream if she can’t ease it. She opens her mouth. Dylan draws back, suddenly silenced, and the other patients also look startled at her, as if they have been smacked by the sound rushing from her mouth. It brings the nurse running, and a doctor, too, but there’s only one person she wants to see.

He drives to Dublin the instant she phones him. He doesn’t bother about the guards or asking permission from Patricia and when he finally arrives he draws the screens around her bed so that she can cry against his chest and tell him about Clare Frazier who came like a ghost into their lives to steal back what was once stolen from her.

Carla crumpled the sheet of paper and flung it into the bin. Others followed. Finally, when words no longer made any sense, and excuses no longer had any meaning, she finished the letter to her daughter.

Dear Joy,

By the time this letter reaches you, Patricia will have told you the truth. I intend meeting her tomorrow morning and giving her permission to reveal my identity. My false identity, as you will know by now. I’m a writer, yet all my skills were useless when it came to finding the words that would make you understand the dilemma I faced.

I never meant you any harm. I simply had to be near you. What did I hope to do? Watch you from behind the drystone walls? Hide in the hedgerows? I still don’t know what I would have done if you had not walked into the cemetery. Perhaps it was fate taking the decision from me but, once I saw you, I could not let you go.

Patricia will have the right words. She is compassionate.
She will comfort you. Please don’t turn your face from me. I’ve waited such a long time to hold you.

I love you.

Carla.

Carla addressed and stamped the envelope, knowing that if she did not post it now she would tear it up in the morning and try to write a more coherent, sensible, pleading one. As she was leaving her apartment, she noticed a bunch of freesias she had purchased earlier from the flower sellers on Grafton Street. She removed them from the vase and wrapped them in paper.

The cold night air gusted around her as she walked along the canal path. She fastened the top button on her coat, pulled her hat lower over her forehead. After posting the letter, she continued walking. Hopefully, she would be able to sleep through the night. She passed the lock gate where she had once hesitated for an instant between life and death. The ghost of Anita seemed to drift into view. But it was only a swan, an ungainly waddle of feathers until it reached the water and was transformed. The reeds grew high along the bank where her body had been dumped. She laid the flowers among the reeds and stood for a moment watching the flow of water. What had Anita thought of her? Had she seen her as a friend, a mother figure, or just an eccentric insomniac, killing time until dawn?

She reached the bench opposite her apartment where homeless men and women often sat at night, sharing a bottle. Tonight it was occupied by a solitary figure. He looked up as she approached and rose to his feet.

‘It’s you.’ David Dowling stared at her in amazement. Perhaps he thought she was a sprite that had materialised from the watery reeds. A swan maiden, perhaps.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘I called to your apartment but you weren’t there.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Which of you is sorry? Carla Kelly or Clare Frazier?’ He shivered, his body braced against the wind and slumped back into the bench. ‘Dylan called to see Joy today. She knows who you are.’

Too shocked to reply, she sat down beside him. He moved when their shoulders touched, creating space between them. She hunched into her coat, the sleeves forming a muff as she huddled her hands into them.

‘Why did you lie to us?’ he asked.

‘How could I tell you the truth?’

He shook his head. ‘Ever since Joy came to us, I’ve been living a lie. And now, I find out that you are also an accomplished liar.’

‘I never intended lying…but things moved so fast…spun out of control. The night you were in my apartment, I was going to tell you then. But Joy was missing and you were gone…’ Her voice trailed helplessly away.

‘Why should I believe you?’ he demanded. ‘You came into our home and accepted our hospitality for only one reason. To destroy us. Well, you’ve achieved what you set out to do. You’ve taken her from me.’

She watched a waterhen rippling the still water. ‘If she was your child, wouldn’t you have done the same?’

‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘But I would have done it honestly.’

‘How?
Fifteen years
, David. She’ll never be my child. She’ll always belong to you…no matter what happens now.’

He stood up and walked to the edge of the canal. For a terrifying instant, she thought he was going to jump in. She rushed forward, shocked by her need to protect him, but he stood rock steady, staring into the water.

‘Come back to my apartment.’ She took his arm and moved him away from the edge. ‘We have to talk about this.’

‘What more is there to say?’ He drew his arm away and turned to leave.

‘David, do you remember the words you once wrote to me…to Carla Kelly?’

‘What do you mean?’ He stared blankly at her.

‘I memorised them,’ she said. ‘“If faith can move mountains, then you have the power to create an earthquake. What lies beneath the surface is fragile and constantly shifting. Sooner or later, and I hope with all my heart it will be sooner, the cracks will appear and you will be reunited with Isobel.’”

He was silent for an instant, his head bowed. ‘If I didn’t feel like weeping, I’d laugh at the irony of it all,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you in court, Carla.’

She watched him walk away. The waterhen disappeared into the reeds, startled, perhaps, by a group of young women defying the wind in skimpy tops and bare midriffs. Their voices carried across the water, their laughter a shrill signal that their night was just beginning.

The following day Orla Kennedy phoned to inform her that David had broken his bail conditions. He had broken an injunction and visited Isobel Gardner without the knowledge of her social worker. For this reason, he would be remanded in custody until his trial.

Her father writes to her every day. Snail mail. He orders her to be brave. He’ll prove his innocence, never fear. Sometimes Joy believes him and then her mind swings the opposite way and she’s convinced he’ll be in jail forever. He won’t have a chance in court. Not with Carla Kelly standing there looking forlorn and desperate. The judge will be putty in her hands. Joy hates her. Her hatred runs cold then hot. It shivers her skin until she feels as if tiny invisible insects are crawling under her flesh. Snitch, bitch, liar, spy, home-wrecker, heart-breaker, impostor…mother…
mother…

Patricia tries to persuade her to forgive and forget. How can she? Her heart is ice and will remain ice until her father is released. She tore up Carla Kelly’s letter. Too late…too late…too many lies. Impossible to forgive. Snitch, bitch, liar, spy…

Mary in the next bed agrees. She’s had a hip replacement and is Joy’s limping companion along the corridor.

‘Forgiveness,’ she says, ‘is written in the book of repentance. When you are ready to forgive yourself, then your forgiveness will reach out to others.’

How can Joy forgive herself? She let her mother die
then led Dylan to the truth and now her father is in jail because she sent for him. It’s as simple and as awful as that.

She dreams about her mother. Her thief mother. Joy knows she’s dead yet she looks so alive as she stands in front of the cottage with the Judgement Book open before her. Angels fly around her head. Six angels with white robes and shimmering wings, shining baby faces. Joy wants to fly with them but the plaster of Paris holds her to the floor. Her mother is smiling as she looks up from the Judgement Book and gazes at the angels. She doesn’t see Joy struggling to fly. The angels soar upwards and vanish but her mother is sinking into the earth. Joy wants to struggle free from her dream but then she realises that she is actually awake. Dreaming awake. She hears Mary snoring in the next bed. The jangle of the breakfast trolley along the corridor. The dark morning beginning to brighten outside the hospital windows. Her mother continues to sink lower and lower. She is still smiling but soon her face will disappear into the crumbling clay.

Joy rings the emergency bell beside her bed but by the time the nurse comes with the sick tray it’s too late and she has thrown up over the bedclothes. The ward is empty of angels and ghosts.

‘A bad dream,’ says the nurse.

‘It was real.’ Joy huddles in a chair while her bedclothes are changed. ‘I was wide awake the
whole
time.’

Another nurse checks her chart. ‘Hallucinations,’ she says. ‘I’ll talk to Dr Nolan about your pain medication.’

‘Medical people!’ Mary snorts when Joy is back in bed, sitting palely between the starched sheets. ‘They know how to fix bones but they are clueless when it comes to interpreting the wonderful mysteries of the mind. Your mother was sending you a message.’

‘She’s
not
my mother.’

‘No. She’s a free spirit. That’s why she’s happy.’

‘How do you know she’s happy?’

But Mary hums as she gathers her black straggly hair in her hands and pins it in a beehive. She knows exactly where each sparkling clip goes and only reaches for the mirror when she is ready to make up her face.

‘Not a good idea,’ she says, as she always does when she sees her reflection. ‘At my great age, a mirror is a dangerous friend first thing in the morning.’

Joy stretches her hands above her head and immediately lowers them again. Movement is pain, yet soon the physiotherapist will have her limping up and down the corridor, demanding impossible manoeuvres. The daily routine of the hospital makes it hard to think. She slides down in the bed and closes her eyes. Snatches of memory come and go.

‘I’m writing your name in the Judgement Book.’ How many times had she heard those words? And she heard them again in the ambulance when her mother’s mouth slanted sideways as she held onto Joy, the words sliding free but garbled, so garbled…written in the blood…written in the book…which was it? Or was it both?

‘The book?’ says Joy. ‘Or the blood?’

‘Written in the book,’ replies Mary. ‘The blood is no longer flowing. It’s found its source.’

Joy stares across at her. Mary’s face is wrinkled now but soon she will be transformed. Her lips will glisten with bright red lipstick and her dangling earrings will sparkle. Somehow, her wrinkles will smooth out and disappear, or else people are so busy looking at everything else about her, including her black flashing eyes, that they won’t notice she is actually quite old. Mary is not her professional name. She hasn’t told anyone but Joy. As a psychic she has a certain image to maintain.

‘It wouldn’t do if word got out that Miranda May is hobbling up and down a hospital corridor like Hopalong Cassidy,’ she whispers.

Joy has promised to keep her secret. The only problem is that everyone else in the hospital seems to know it too. The nurses keep asking her to read their palms and, yesterday, Dr Nolan had a tarot card reading done, but only after he drew the blinds around Mary’s bed.

‘Written in the book of repentance.’ Mary clips on her crystal earrings. The transformation is about to begin. ‘What did she tell you to do?’

‘She never spoke.’

‘Language is not always necessary for knowledge. You must read the signs she left behind.’

‘Morning everyone. Rise and shine.’ The patients resent the morning nurse. She brings the outside world with her, reminding them of swarming traffic and surging crowds and changing weather patterns.

‘Good gracious me, what have we here?’ She stops at the foot of Joy’s bed and stares at her in amazement.
‘Tears?
This will never do at all.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ says Mary and, hearing the certainty in her voice, Joy feels strong again. Susanne, she whispers. Susanne…Susanne. The name hisses on her tongue, sibilant and unfamiliar. Using her name is the first snap of a thread that has bound Joy to a lie.

When breakfast is over and the doctors have done their rounds, Joy phones Patricia.

‘I want to meet my mother,’ she says. ‘Will you ask her to visit me?’

‘The shape of a family cannot be defined by blood alone,’ says Mary while they wait for Patricia to arrive.

‘But I belong to her and him,’ says Joy.

‘You belong to yourself, child.’

‘It doesn’t feel like that. I’ve lots of relations, all looking for me to be part of them.’

‘Science has yet to measure the love our hearts can hold.’

‘I’ve no space for
her
,’ says Joy. ‘She deceived me and she made my father fall in love with her. I
hate
her.’

Mary starts to hum again.

‘
What
?’ snaps Joy.

But Mary smiles and sinks deeper between the sheets.

Patricia arrives and helps Joy into her wheelchair. ‘Carla’s here,’ she says. ‘She’s waiting for you in the dayroom. Good luck.’ She briskly wheels Joy from the ward.

‘I’ll manage the chair myself,’ says Joy when they stop outside the day room.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Positive. This won’t take long.’

After Patricia walks away, Joy sits perfectly still for a moment. She needs to compose herself but her anger continues to bubble out of control. Snitch, bitch, liar, spy…Her head aches from the power of those words. She pushes the door open and manoeuvres her way through. Carla Kelly is sitting in an armchair. A brightly striped coloured scarf is wound around her neck. Her glasses have disappeared and her hair looks longer than Joy remembers. She stands when she sees Joy. Two spots of colour appear on her cheeks. Her hands flutter, that same helpless flutter that Joy remembers from the cemetery. The sun was shining that day, the air still and breathless.

Her anger, that bubbling, sulphuric anger, suddenly evaporates. Joy has no idea where it’s gone. She grapples after it, tries to claw it back, but it keeps slipping beyond her reach and in its place, unfolding in slow motion, is the memory of Danny’s car skidding and turning over. The sensation of being suspended upside down. The knowledge that she was
going to die and that it was too late…too late to know the strength of her mother’s arms, holding her safe from harm.

Her mother shudders, as if she has peered inside Joy’s mind. Her hands freeze and she is motionless apart from the slight tremble of her bottom lip. Waiting. Her eyes are bog brown and luminous. Not green and unsettling, as Joy remembers. They belong to her face…and to Joy. Her mouth opens slightly, as if she is about to whisper Joy’s name. How many times over those long years did she call out her daughter’s name…
Isobel…Isobel…
? How many nights did she lie awake, waiting for a new day to break so that she could rise and begin her search anew?

‘Mammy…’ Joy whispers and her mother’s face breaks apart, like something has ripped through her chest and stopped her breathing. Joy doesn’t know if the rip is her own heart aching, or her own hushed breath repeating, ‘Mammy…Mammy…’ but the sound brings her mother’s face together again. Suddenly, there’s no space between them. Her mother is on her knees, her arms holding Joy with a fierce tenderness, and they cling together, crooning words that make no sense, need no language, binding, rejoicing words that were once lost and are now found.

Afterwards, there is time to talk.

‘I thought I hated you.’ Joy stares at her hands, still scarred from the accident. ‘I couldn’t hate Carla Kelly for destroying my life but it was easy to hate Clare Frazier. But it was her…
Susanne,
she was the one I really wanted to hate. But I can’t…I want to…I should…’

Her mother shakes her head. ‘You have to give yourself time, Joy. So much has happened so quickly—’

‘She wrote things down.’ Joy needs to make her mother understand. ‘She called it her Judgement Book.’

‘You told me about it. Remember? By the lake. I was so angry I had to walk away from you.’

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about it since this…’ Joy gestures at the cast on her leg. ‘I think it was
her
Judgement Book. Like a therapy, or something. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, she kept talking about it. I believe she wanted me to find it. It makes sense. If she couldn’t have me, then it wouldn’t matter who knew the truth. It’s written in the book…she kept repeating that…I thought she meant blood but that wouldn’t make any sense.’

‘Where did she keep the book?’

‘There’s lots. She used to keep them in the back of her wardrobe but the police searched our house for evidence. They found nothing. I think she buried them.’

‘
Buried?
’

‘In the cottage garden. It’s where she went when we had rows. Like it was a grotto or something. She smacked me once for following her there. Sometimes I hid and watched her. She used to kneel and pray.’

‘Oh, Joy…were you ever happy?’ her mother asks.

‘I believe I was.’ She nods vigorously. ‘But I was either clinging to her or pulling against her. Always trying to win her approval. At least now I understand why
that
was impossible. The best times were when Dad was home. I know he’s not my dad…but I can’t stop…’

‘You don’t ever have to stop, Joy.’

‘Do you believe he’s guilty?’

Her mother doesn’t hesitate. When she says, ‘He never knew,’ Joy’s body folds forward in relief.

‘But he’s in jail because of her,’ she says.

‘When he goes on trial he’ll be able to tell his story. Then it’s up to the jury to decide.’

‘Will you tell that to the judge?’

‘My word will carry weight but I’m only a witness, one of many. Everything your family has done over the years will be scrutinised and analysed. Then the jury will decide. So, you see, Joy, I’m only a very small cog in the whole process.’

‘If you had proof…they’d have to listen.’

‘What proof can I bring? All I have is a belief. That’s not evidence.’

‘The books might be.’

‘But if you’re right and she buried them, how could anyone possibly find them? I’ve seen that place. It’s a wilderness.’

‘Not in one space. There used to be flowers there, like they were planted, not growing wild. I’ve done research on the internet. If you find the journals and hand them over, the DPP will have to believe you.’

‘You want
me
to find them?’

‘Mary says…’ Joy stops, embarrassed. Her mother will think she’s a snowflake if she discovers she believes in psychics. But maybe her mother does too. Maybe they share lots of things in common. ‘Mary says the truth is hidden in a place of stone.’

Her mother tilts her head back and stares at the ceiling. She appears to be deep in thought before she meets Joy’s gaze. And nods.