The Lonely Dead

'What kind of problem?'

'He'd be with a foster family for a few months, and then he'd be back, well ahead of schedule. At first I didn't pay much attention. It happens. But it started to become a thing. Hey, Paul's back. The temporary family couldn't… well, I was going to say 'couldn't cope', but it never seemed to be that. Not exactly. It was just, here he is, back again. And you need to bear in mind these were families who'd looked after a lot of kids, who were good at taking children in and making them feel all right. We'd have him placed and mentally wave him goodbye, then five weeks later I'd go into the home and there he'd be, sitting on a windowsill, looking out. I'd ask him what had happened and Paul would say the same thing the families did: it just didn't work out.'

She paused and took a sip of her coffee, as if considering long-ago mistakes. 'Anyway, finally it's decided that we need to step up the search for an adoptive family, some longer-term solution. So I talked to Paul, and told him that's what we were going to try to do. He nodded — he's about six, seven years old at this stage, bear in mind — and something tells me he's not agreeing with the idea, just recognizing it was what was going to happen and his role is just to let it roll on. So I asked him, didn't he want to find a permanent family? And he looked me right in the eyes and said, 'I had one. It's gone. When everything is in place, I'll get it back.''

I felt cold across the back of my neck. 'He remembered us?'

'Not necessarily. But he knew that once there'd been something else. You don't have to be the brightest firework in the box to realize his position wasn't natural, and he was a very smart kid. You could tell. That's all it was. Kids often get this feeling they've been abandoned, taken away from where they ought to be. Even the ones who haven't been adopted get it. The 'I should be a fairy princess' syndrome, or 'I am rightfully a king and when I cry the earth cries with me'. That's what I thought it was.'

I'd watched the abandonment part of the video many times without really confronting what it must have been like for the child who was left behind. In the last three months I hadn't really cared what he'd felt. I tried hard to do so now.

'Look,' I said, 'do you mind if I have a cigarette?'

'Go ahead,' she smiled. 'My husband used to smoke. I like the smell. You do know it will kill you, though?'

'Not going to happen,' I reassured her. 'Just a rumour put around by the gym addicts and health nuts.'

She nodded, no longer smiling. 'Yes, that's what he thought too.'

Something about the way she said it meant that though I smoked the cigarette down, I didn't enjoy it very much. 'So what happened when you looked for a permanent family?'

'I'll tell you.' She was quiet for a moment, before continuing. 'You know, I did that kind of thing for a long time, and I thought about it a lot. Most of me believes that where we're born seeps up into us like water from the soil, that we have leaves like trees do; and where the seed that becomes us first lands, that's who we are and that will determine the colour of our leaves — even if some bird picks us up that same afternoon and moves us fifty, a hundred miles away. Another bit of me thinks well, we're all God's children, aren't we? We're all just human. Isn't that what the Bible says? Two hundred years ago there was barely anything on this spot but birds and some animals and every now and then one of the native people, out hunting in a land so big they called it the world. Now we've taken it and call it our home and go fight wars over it in places half of us can't even spell. So what does it matter if a child is brought up by someone who isn't its kin, or in some other part of the country? Give them a good home and it could be nothing ever happened. I've seen it work hundreds of times. It isn't always easy, but it works, and it's one of the things makes me think we humans aren't such a bad lot after all.'

She shook her head. 'Finding an adopter for Paul just wasn't that simple. He was placed with three families after that. First lasted a year, another foster arrangement. They had an older daughter of their own already. I was dealing with my own things at that time, my husband got sick. I got into work one Monday morning with stuff on my mind and I was told that Paul was in a room on another floor. When people had turned up that day, he was sitting on the step outside. He hadn't run away. His family had put him there. After that, he was back and forth for a few months, then we found him someone else. That one lasted two whole years, by which time he was coming up to nine. Then one day there's a knock on my office door, and the mother was standing there. She told me, politely, that they'd had enough. That it wasn't Paul, not at all, but she had a little baby girl of her own now and they'd just decided fostering wasn't for them any more. I was mad at her, I can tell you. I nearly chewed her head off. That's not the way it works. But… you can't leave a child with people who don't want them any more.'

She picked up her cup, found it was cold, and put it back down. 'Do you…'

'I'm fine,' I said. 'Please go on.'

'I saw Paul again at the home, soon after that. I was feeling sorry for the kid. I told him I thought he'd had a raw deal. He just shrugged. 'I already have a family,' he said, again. I was concerned to hear that he was still thinking that way, and I tried to point out that wasn't the case, not really, and he had to help us in finding him a new set of people to be with. He'd once had a birth mother and father, and that would always be true. But now he had to be with someone new. 'Not them,' he said. 'They weren't real. But I had a brother. He was real. He was just like me.' He put a big stress on the 'just': just like me, was what he said.'

She smiled, faintly. 'I didn't believe him, of course. Thought he was just conjuring; there was something about him by then that was a little … I don't know. But when you turned up at the door tonight, I saw he was right after all. He did have a brother, just like him.'

I nodded, because I had to, but I was thinking that she was wrong and he was wrong too. I resembled him physically, that was all. The idea that the similarity went any deeper made me feel sick inside. I was surprised she could see the resemblance, too, if Paul had been a child when she last saw him.

'Then finally we found one that took. We got him placed with a family here in the city, and he was there a year before they moved out of state and he went with them. Whatever had been wrong, it got right. This time it worked. That's it.'

I looked at her.

'What?' she said.

I just kept looking at her.

She looked down at her hands. Her voice was quiet. 'What has he done?'

'Mrs Campbell,' I said. 'Tell me what you haven't yet said. I really have to know.'

She looked back up at me and when she spoke, she spoke fast and her eyes were flat. 'Few years later I ran into the husband from the couple who had been responsible for leaving him on the steps of the building. Hadn't seen anything of them since that day — you treat a child like that, you're off our books and going to court. Matter of fact, they nearly were, but the wife got sick, and so… it was let slide. I saw this guy across the street and deliberately looked away, but next thing I knew he was running towards me through the traffic. He came right up and stood in my way and he just started talking. He told me that his wife had a dog, back when Paul was with them. Said that most of the time the boy was good, very good, almost as if he had decided this was the way things were and he'd better make the most of it. Got along okay with their daughter most of the time. But this dog, Paul didn't get on with it, and he hated it when it barked, and said it looked at him funny. The dog was pretty old, his wife had had it since she was in college, and she loved it more than anything else in the world. Even more than him, her husband said, but that was okay: he liked the creature too. Big old dozy hound, didn't do much, just slept in the back yard and thumped his tail on the ground every now and then.'