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’sbody 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?’
