When She Was Bad(102)

Shannon’s brother was indeed adopted abroad, but rather than being lost in the system as I’ve always allowed her to believe, I’ve been keeping tabs on him through Barbara Campbell, the original social worker who handled the adoption.

I’ve been amazed at Shannon’s capacity for self-invention over the years. Or is it merely self-preservation? Whatever it is, I’ve always told myself I was following her cue, keeping from her only what she didn’t choose to know. For two years before I formerly adopted her, we worked hard on exploring her feelings about her parents and about what had happened in that house. But after the age of six or seven, after the final papers had been signed and she was finally mine, she was ready to move on. By that time I was married to Johnny whom she still calls Dad, even though she doesn’t see him so much since he remarried and moved away. I would have told her the truth then, or at least I like to think I would, but she never asked me. And gradually the details of what happened before seemed to fade from her mind. And now here she is, fixing me with her inquisitive eyes and asking me, finally, about her brother. And I owe her the truth.

‘I met him once,’ I tell her. ‘Well, not really “met”. I saw him through a pane of glass.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Like you, baby. A lot like you.’

I’ve already explained the basics of his early life, trying to keep to the facts and avoid commentary or emotion.

And now she asks me the question I’ve been dreading since I formally signed the adoption papers all those years ago. All the while she is speaking, I am urging her, silently, to stop, change direction. But still she continues.

‘What was I doing while he was down there in that cage?’

I know what she wants to hear. I know she wants me to tell her she didn’t know he was there. It’s not impossible. I’ve heard of an Austrian man who kept his daughter imprisoned in the basement of his family home for twenty-four years, even having seven children with her – and all without his wife and other children suspecting a thing. It’s so tempting to lie to her. Or if not lie, to omit the truth. But I don’t. I tell her what happened and what she did. I tell her it was not her fault, and I know she understands that, but she still cries – not heaving sobs but fat tears that build in her eyes until they spill over like a slow-leaking faucet.

‘He must have felt so alone.’

I reach out and take her hand and squeeze it so I don’t give in to the temptation to tell her platitudes like ‘He was too young to fully comprehend what was happening’, or, ‘He didn’t know anything else’.

I am waiting for her to turn on me, demanding to know why I never told her this before, how I could have kept it from her. But she doesn’t. Instead she asks me about David. She wants to know why he was adopted and not her, and I try to explain about Kowalsky and Oppenheimer and about how it was back then, that they thought the younger you were, the greater your capacity to forget.

‘Was he happy?’ she wants to know then. ‘Did his new family love him enough to make him forget what went before?’

In this at least I can tell her what she wants to hear. Child D’s parents were good people. Barbara made sure of that. Though they never knew the particulars, they were told the little boy had had a traumatic start in life, the subject of abuse and neglect, and they’d done their very best to make up to him for it.

‘He’s had a good life,’ I tell her, still holding her hand. ‘He’s been loved.’

‘Then why this?’ she says, waving a hand towards the laptop, still open on the news report that bears a photograph of a man with features that mirror her own.

I shrug.

‘It could be anything. Maybe there was something personal between him and the victim and something just snapped or, I don’t know, he’d been smoking crack or something. My fear was always that if he suppressed memories without dealing with them properly, something could trigger if not the memories themselves, then at least the feelings he had from back then. Fear, anger, confusion.’

‘But who was she? The victim, I mean.’

‘She was his new boss, apparently. Barbara describes her as a bully. Says she managed people by pitting them against each other, praising some and punishing others so in the end there was no trust left and everyone suspected everyone else of conspiring against them. That might trigger someone like David.’

‘What is the British press saying? Surely the courts will be lenient, because of his history?’

‘The press can’t report details now until the trial starts. That’s the system they have over there.’