Silent Child(33)

“Good lad. Now, why don’t you go upstairs for a little bit? I left you some books on your bedside table so you can read.” Jake smiled at Aiden as he gave him instructions. He was in teacher mode and something in Aiden was responding to it. Aiden followed his directions almost robotically. I watched him with interest as he stepped out of the room.

“What is it?” Jake asked.

“It’s probably nothing.”

Jake tilted his head to one side and gave me a questioning look.

“It’s just the way Aiden responds to your direction. There’s something weird about it.”

Jake let out a small laugh. “What are you talking about? He does the same for you.”

“No, it’s not the same. There’s something… different about the way he acts around you.” I shrugged and sipped my water. “Maybe it’s nothing. I’m being silly.”

“You’re not. You’re being a mother.” Jake stepped around the table and rubbed the small of my back. “Maybe it’s hard for you to see a man around Aiden after what’s happened to him. You’re just going into protective mode.”

But I wasn’t sure that was true. I never noticed a change in Aiden’s behaviour when he was around Rob.

“How’s Bump today?”

I pulled myself out of my thoughts to answer. “She’s fine.”

“You look tired out, Emma Hewitt. On the sofa with you. I think a foot rub is in order.”

“That does sound good. What about Aiden?”

“He needs some space, Em. Let him be.” Jake took my hand and led me through the kitchen into the living room. It didn’t even occur to me until long much later that he’d called me Em for the very first time.

*

We became our own little world in the days that followed. We turned off the television, we ignored the newspapers. We put our phones on silent. Only Jake was brave enough to leave the house, fetching us food from the suggestions Dr Schaffer gave me. But I added comfort food: chocolate, ice cream, white bread… I couldn’t help myself We shut the curtains and unplugged the landline from the wall. Our family liaison officers would come for meetings and ask us questions that didn’t seem relevant. Questions about our daily routine. After the questions stopped they tended to hover awkwardly around us during the daytime. For the most part they were useless, seeing as the police hadn’t found anything.

The only people I had telephone conversations with were Rob and a far too cheerful woman from a PR company who offered to help us write a statement to the press. I decided that the generic ‘please respect our privacy at this difficult time’ would be enough. And when it came to offers of appearing on television, I decided silence was the best option. I couldn’t stand the thought of an interview appearing on YouTube after doing its rounds on the news, free to be judged by the hordes of people following Aiden’s case. Instead, after speaking to DCI Stevenson, it was agreed that he would issue a statement appealing to any witnesses from the night Aiden was found wandering along the back road.

“We’re extending the search,” he said. “We’ve started looking into houses in the area with large basements as well as anyone who might have put in planning applications for unusual builds a decade ago. It’s going to take some time.”

This was the countryside. There were plenty of wealthy families with extensions, outbuildings, and cellars.

“How is Aiden?” he asked. There was an edge in his voice. We both knew it was there, but neither of us acknowledged it.

“He’s not talking yet,” I replied.

After hanging up the telephone, I closed my eyes and tried to wish it all away. For a while, I almost did. None of it mattered because we were an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. We were off the coast of Australia, and every morning I greeted Aiden with a ‘G’day, mate’. Then we’d spread out the picnic blanket, put Netflix on, and pretend we were sat on the top of the tallest mountain, with the world below us. I chose some of my favourite films that I’d always wanted to watch with Aiden but had been waiting for him to get a little older. The Neverending Story, Bugsy Malone, The Goonies. More than once I almost turned off those innocuous films when any character was in peril. I reached out for the remote with my heart racing, but Aiden never reacted. He sat, and he chewed his food, and he didn’t say a word.

“You can’t do this forever,” Jake said from the sofa. He had an art history textbook in his hand, and his glasses pushed high up his nose.

“I know.” I pushed the ice cream around the bowl. “Okay, time for a game of basketball.” It was something we’d played when Aiden was little. I used to take pieces of paper, screw them up, and play at throwing them through a hoop I’d made out of a wire coat hanger. In fact, all of the games were rehashed versions of what we had done when Aiden was a toddler. Like the indoor picnics, which inevitably occurred in fictional versions of the Great Wall of China, or Kilimanjaro, or Cairo, or anywhere but Bishoptown-on-Ouse. It had been the only way to curb my wanderlust when I was a teenage mum without the same prospects as my friends.

“He’s not going to want to play basketball.” Jake uncrossed his legs and stared down at us. “Look at him.”

“What else am I going to do?”

“For one thing, I don’t think it’s good for you to be on the floor on that scabby picnic blanket when you’re eight months pregnant. For another, you’ve eaten nothing but ice cream for two days. That’s not taking care of your baby. Get up, stop messing around, and face what’s going on.”