Chapter 21 Marc #2
Oliver went into the system but Riley had been right, he was a cute kid.
A family in Arizona wanted him, even without half his leg.
He got a new name, Marc Villeneuve, and a new language.
He was happy about those things. As time went by Marc realised it was too difficult to keep two selves in him at once.
He had to erase the boy who once had a sister who chose an empty mountain over her living little brother.
So he put Oliver down into the dark deepest places of himself.
Marc was easier to live with than Oliver.
Marc had no past. The next year the family moved to Quebec and Oliver was gone.
Marc holds Riley gently at arms length. It’s hard to look at her, but he can’t stop. ‘I came for a reason.’
He takes the photograph from his wallet. Silvie looks out, serious, from the garden. He feels the usual tug and horror of it all. Her small face, upturned, the field daisy in her hand.
‘This is my daughter.’
‘You have a daughter?’
‘Yes.’ Marc’s hands won’t stop trembling.
Riley takes the picture with gentle, careful fingers.
Her name is Silvia, really, it’s from the Shakespeare play.
Her mother Claude likes all those things.
Marc met her on a shoot for a reality TV series in Germany.
She is very French and lives in Paris in a studio near the Marais.
She makes fun of Marc’s Quebecois accent.
Marc fell hard while they were on location and then he came up for air.
When the project ended he did what he always did and left.
Then he thought better of it. By the time he came back she had given birth to Silvie.
Marc has only fallen in love once in his life and it happened the moment he saw Silvie.
Even as a baby her gaze was mistrustful yet direct, as if she already knew that life was a slippery thing.
Her dark eyes are Riley’s eyes and the shock of that was terrible, at first, like a ghost walking in from the night.
But Silvie isn’t Riley at all. Silvie is just herself.
He and Claude became friends. Their daughter was the sun and they revolved around her.
Silvie was diagnosed with Berger’s disease when she was seven. It was already advanced. Her kidneys were failing.
‘It’s ok,’ he kept telling Claude over the phone. ‘It’s ok.’
‘Shut up,’ Claude said. ‘You have no understanding of ok. You’re the most damaged person I’ve ever met.
’ There had always been an edge to their talk but since Silvie’s diagnosis it has become stinging and hurtful.
Marc and Claude give one another their anger because there’s nowhere else for it to go.
Sometimes Claude calls and just screams, and Marc understands that. It’s how he feels too.
Claude donated her kidney first. It lasted a year before Silvie’s body rejected it.
Marc gave his next, which lasted two. There was a donor but that didn’t work out.
She needs a third transplant. Claude’s parents are dead and Marc’s parents are not related by blood. They were running out of answers.
‘Are there any other family members?’ her doctor asked.
‘No,’ Marc said automatically and then he stopped.
It had been so many years since he had been Oliver that he sometimes thought of it as a dream. But he knew, whenever he allowed the memories of Riley to surface, that she was real. So the rest of it probably was too.
Marc went back and forth. It felt like being split in two. Maybe it was all irrelevant anyway. Maybe she was dead. Riley never seemed like someone who would make it to old age. But anything was worth it for Silvie.
He was frightened of seeing Riley again in the way you’re frightened of childhood nightmares.
Riley killed people. She left him on his own.
He was scared because Riley has something he desperately needs and she could say no.
He was terrified that maybe she was in fact dead.
Most of all Marc was afraid of what he would feel if he saw her.
Love doesn’t die just because you stab it in the heart.
It can walk around, wounded and bleeding, for years.
The documentary Marc is making is not about Leaf Winham or the Nowhere children, although those things are in it. It is about his daughter. This story is about finding a donor for Silvie.
The camera is supposed to look at its subject down the lens. Marc knows it actually points the other way. Everything you film is really about you.
Riley is still staring at the photograph wide-eyed.
‘You want me to know your daughter?’
‘Yes.’ Marc shuts down all other thought. He has to get out of here.
‘It’s hard to be a parent.’ Riley hands the picture back. ‘I know about that.’
‘I saw you on the CCTV at the dumpster,’ he says. ‘All the baby formula. Blood in the land?’ He wonders how Riley, with her wasted frame and stick-like arms and legs, took Annie Lyons all the way up the mountain on her own. But she might have a cart. Maybe she even has someone helping her in Ault.
‘Yes,’ Riley says. ‘And Una likes to pretend to eat.’
‘Riley,’ he says, hopeless. ‘They don’t like anything. They’re gone.’
‘You don’t know who they really are, Marc.’ She shakes her head. ‘They’re my responsibility. All of them. Hallie, Whitey, Rufus, Peach and Una.’
Something gives on the peaks above, a cracking yawn like the world opening. Through the window, the valley tosses like the sea in a gale. A tree falls across the clearing, a tall pine, graceful and slow. Lightning makes a white crack in the sky.
‘Riley,’ Marc grabs her hand. ‘The way out, the one we took last time. Where is it?’
Riley looks up at the shattered sky. She turns, pulling him into the depths of the house.
Riley and Marc run through the dark halls. Memory rears up strong. Marc is suddenly seven again, he is Oliver and he’s scared of Leaf Winham whose ghost roams here.
As he runs he sees a bright unicorn blanket thrown over a rotting couch. A Barbie with no head on the mantlepiece, a basketball in a dark corner, plastered with leaves. He feels the sick punch of sadness.
They come to the long gallery. Marc looks at the broken floor, the sunken place. ‘It’s down there, isn’t it?’ Memory and time are sliding together.
Riley puts her arms around his neck. ‘I can’t go with you,’ she says into his ear. ‘I can’t leave them alone.’
Marc takes her bony shoulders in his hands. ‘You have to.’
She shakes her head. ‘They need me.’
‘They’re not here, Riley,’ Marc says, desperate. ‘They would all be adults by now. They’re not real.’
‘They’re here,’ Riley says, confident.
‘Where?’ Marc can’t stop his voice rising.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Riley says. ‘But trust me.’
‘No.’ Marc shakes his head. He takes her face in his hands. ‘Have you ever heard five children be this quiet? There is no one else in this house.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Riley says, smiling.
Marc takes a long breath. ‘Don’t make me say it.’ He can hear the pleading in his voice.
‘Say what?’ Riley asks
‘Those children died in the fire you set,’ Marc says, ‘along with all the others. Did you think I didn’t understand, even back then?
I saw you do it.’ His throat catches when he thinks of it – walking away from the flame and the screaming.
He feels a stab of anger – imagine if someone tried to do that to his Silvie. ‘No one survived.’
‘The children didn’t die,’ Riley says. ‘They were already gone. They lived here a long time ago, they were killed by their father.’
‘You’re talking about the apple farm,’ Marc says slowly. ‘That woman confessed on her death bed that they had covered up the deaths of five children. So you think that’s who they are? Hallie, Rufus, Whitey, Peach and Una? Ghosts of the children from the apple farm?’
‘They live here,’ Riley says. ‘It’s their place.’
‘No.’ Marc’s voice trembles. ‘Those were real kids, who I knew. I played with them. I touched them. They were not ghosts.’
‘You could only touch them because of this.’ Riley fingers the leather thong at her throat. A glimpse of bone against her clavicle. ‘It’s their bones. That lets them know you.’
‘I thought I could do this,’ Marc says. ‘Speak to you. But maybe I can’t.
’ He covers his eyes with his palm. ‘The night we ran, Noon put the kids to bed. She locked them in the stall to stop Peach wandering. I saw her do it. Then I woke up and you were there. You set the stables on fire. No one got out. They died, Riley.’ He takes a deep breath.
‘The five children at the apple farm,’ Riley says, patient, ‘are—’
‘They are nothing to do with this.’ Marc almost wants to hurt her now. ‘Angela Smith talked about taking the children’s names off the chest of drawers at the apple farm. Those children were called Harriet, Elijah, Sarah, Anne and Charlotte. No Peach, no Whitey …’
‘I know,’ Riley says. ‘They don’t use their given names. They call themselves by new ones they made up themselves.’
‘When do you see them, the children?’ Marc asks. ‘Why can’t you see them now?’
‘You wouldn’t understand—’
‘Do you only see them when you’ve eaten those?’ Marc points at a dirty bowl which sits against the wall. ‘This whole house stinks of mushrooms.’
‘The mushrooms are just a doorway,’ Riley says. ‘The children showed me that.’
There is a rumbling from below. ‘We have to go,’ Marc says. ‘Both of us, now.’ It might already be too late.
‘I know you don’t understand,’ Riley says. ‘But they’re my children.’
‘Fine.’ Marc throws his hands up. ‘If you’re right, they can’t be killed. But you and I can die, and I won’t leave without you.’
Riley wipes her eyes and nods. ‘Ok.’ She avoids his gaze. Marc sees her eyes glisten with feeling as she jumps down into the hollow place in the earth. Riley thinks he came back for her. She doesn’t understand yet why Marc needs her.
He brushes that thought aside as the house flashes up white with lightning.