Page 41 of Stolen

chapter 22

alex

Kirkwood Place. I knew it’d catch up to me, sooner or later.

If we could just go back to a time when we were spiteful and judgemental, but only behind one another’s backs. If we could stop scolding each other in public, accept that for some women it’s possible to love your spouse more than your child, acknowledge there are those of us whose lives are not completed by a baby, but ruined by it.

If there was space for women like me, would that have made a difference?

Before our divorce, Luca was the one who took Lottie to daycare. I had to be at work by seven-thirty and the Montessori nursery Luca had insisted on was twenty minutes in the opposite direction. Luca set his own hours and often worked from home, so it made sense for him to be the one to drop her off. And helikedtaking her. If he wanted to sit in traffic singing ‘Baby Shark’ every morning, he was welcome to it.

I was singularly unsuited to be anyone’s mother, let alone the mother of a child like Lottie. She erupted from my womb angry and indignant, as if she’d absorbed my ambiguity towards parenthood like nutrients through her umbilical cord. For Luca, it was love at first sight the moment he saw her, but for me it was always more complicated. There was theurge to protect her, of course; the biological pull to nurture, a hormonal surge that tugged my nipples with silver fishhooks every time she cried. But side by side with that was a lingering sense that with every feed I was diminishing, dissolving, like a bar of soap.

I never minded that Luca was the person Lottie turned to when she needed her nose wiped, or to whom she raised her outstretched arms to be carried when she was tired. She was growing up in a household where a woman held down a complex, difficult, important job, and a man cooked homemade ravioli and took her for swimming lessons. I couldn’t think of a better example to set her.

Two or three times a year, Luca had to visit the family’s coffee plantation in Brazil, since his mother’s dementia and father’s failing health made it impossible for them to travel. Normally, when he was away, an experienced childminder called Rachel helped out with Lottie.

But when Lottie was about sixteen months old, Luca had to make an unscheduled trip to Rio at the last minute, because of some production problems at the plantation. Rachel was away on a cruise around the Norwegian fjords with her sister, and Mum was still recovering from surgery after her second brush with cancer.

So I was left, quite literally, holding the baby.

At the time, I had a number of complex cases on my desk. But with no one else able to look after Lottie, I had no choice but to make the best of it.

I juggled my schedule so that I could drop her off at nursery on the dot of seven, and arranged to leave the office early for three days until Rachel got back, so that I’d be there in time to collect her at six.

The night Luca flew out, I couldn’t sleep. Our marriage was in deep trouble and I knew we couldn’t go on the way wewere. Luca wasn’t in Rio alone. He’d had flings before, but none of the others had lasted more than a few weeks. Juiliana was different. He hadn’t troubled to hide this indiscretion, for a start.

I’ve never been a jealous person, appreciating the distinction between sex and love, but the disrespect hurt. It was becoming painfully obvious to me I couldn’t keep looking the other way over Luca’s infidelities; I had to make a decision, and soon. Lottie adored her father and I hated the thought of subjecting her to the back-and-forth of divorce and two homes. But what kind of feminist role model was I if I tolerated a man who treated his wife like this? Mum’s argument that he was ‘just being Italian’ had long since worn thin.

My response to stress, as always, was to throw myself into work. The next morning I was at my desk at Muysken Ritter, head down, trying to make sense of a risible response by the Crown to our objections over deportation when my secretary knocked on my door around lunchtime. It was closed; Jade knew that meant I was only to be disturbed if the building was on fire.

‘Excuse me,’ Jade said. ‘But there are two policemen to see you.’

Looking back, it was like a macabre rehearsal for what was to come. A year later, almost to the day, two different police officers arrived at my office to break the news that Luca had died in the Genoa bridge collapse.

Oddly enough, on neither occasion did the sudden appearance of the police at my place of work cause me to panic. I hadn’t yet learned to fear the ambulance that passed me on the way home or the unexpected knock at the door.

I can’t remember what I thought when I looked up and saw them standing behind Jade, their faces grave. I probably just assumed it was something to do with one of my clients.

It never occurred to me they’d come to arrest me.