So there we are.
Benjamin Elmys, the man I thought I knew, the man Beth and I had entrusted with our son, the man I’d come to call brother, suspected of our murder and imprisoned for the death of another. And our boy, left in the care of a killer, now shunted onto his next guardian, our former housekeeper, Cynthia Hughes. I can hardly bring myself to think about the suffering my son endured and the trauma of being abandoned in such circumstances.
My days are numbered. Or so goes the cliché. I look back on my crooked, broken path and long for things that can never be. If you’re reading this, the chances are you’re familiar with my work. My publishers tell me I have a loyal fan base, and the messages I receive from around the world certainly wouldn’t make liars of them.
Laurie from Manhattan wrote to me a few years ago and asked why so many of my novels involve the abduction of a child. Have you ever been looking at a painting only to have someone sidle up to you and say something that makes you see it completely differently? Laurie’s email was such a sidle. I’d been writing books without ever really thinking about them, but when I look back through the catalog of twenty-three thrillers that forms my modest contribution to literature, I realize many of them, particularly the early ones, involve a missing child.
Have you ever seen an ouroboros? It is a snake with its own tail in its mouth. A symbol of the eternal, the cycle of death and rebirth. Writing is a little like that. Writers learn about themselves through their words, and that education feeds our work, making it richer. Our lives leave an impression on the page, but the page marks us, and each word we write prompts change, so in the end it is impossible to tell whether the writer or the imagined world is most altered by the process. Like the ouroboros, the end and the beginning, cause and effect, cease to matter.
Perhaps that’s why I’d never reflected upon my subconscious choice of subject matter? I was too close to see clearly, and it took a stranger with a broader point of view to notice.
They say there are people who feel no love. Sociopaths, psychopaths, pitiless souls. They look like the rest of us, but they’re very different. I can’t imagine being such a vessel—having form, but being empty, experiencing nothing when looking down at my newborn son. I wouldn’t have been able to feel anything as I watched his eyes wide and unfocused, taking in the uncertain forms of the world, his other senses alert to the sounds and textures of the delivery room: the urgent voices of doctors and nurses, the metallic smell of disinfectant and surgical solutions, the touch of my hands against his buttery-smooth skin.
As it was, I experienced nothing but the most profound love for Elliot in the moment of his birth and felt more complete than at any other time in my life. A firstborn child. Life created. Magic made mundane by frequency, but still magic nonetheless.
Sometimes I wish I was an empty vessel, that I wasn’t able to feel. Sometimes, in the darker hours, I dwell on what was and long to be free of the memories of the life I left behind. Was it cruel to leave Elliot? Yes, but it was as cruel on me as it was on him. I had no choice, or at least I didn’t realize the choice I was given. Not until it was too late. I struggle with it every single day. I pray to a god in whom I don’t believe to help me change the unchangeable, but what’s done cannot be undone, at least not by me.
This isn’t an appeal for pity. It’s not supposed to be therapy on a page. I just want you to know that guilt rots my waking moments and that I am as tormented as you are likely to be when you read what comes next.
Some regrets are so large, they create their own gravity, and all emotion is drawn towards a singularity of pain. I spent a long time there, caught in a crushing, dark storm of depression, and I’m afraid if I think about my young son too long, I will return to that hell.
When I went back to my early work and read the words I’d written so long ago, I realized my reader knew more about me than I did. Laurie was right. The absence of a child was a common theme in my first books. In my second novel, The Constant Child, I wrote:
We are bound to the past, links in a chain that stretches into the infinite unknown. The death of a parent is natural. It is the passing of a soul into history, another link that ties us to the ancient beginning, but the loss of a child breaks that chain. It is unnatural and abhorrent, for the child’s loss is felt in the past and future.
The child is mourned by the souls of their dead ancestors because the chain of which they are a part will go no further. All the hardship those ancestors endured, all the suffering, all the love that forged new links, was for nothing, because their story is now at an end.
The child is lamented too by all the future souls who will never be born who are doomed to exist only in the netherworld of imagination, in the minds of those who ponder what might have been.
And while the ghosts of our ancestors and the specters of an imagined future mourn, the loss is felt most profoundly of all by the child’s parents, who miss hair to tousle, a smile to brighten their day, and a warm body to hug.
When we read, it is sometimes easy to imagine the words have simply materialized on the page. We can lose sight of the author, and if we do catch a glimpse of him or her, we may consider them a dispassionate chronicler of events. This is far from true, and among the handful of authors I know well, there are few who aren’t as moved by their work as any reader. Tears are shed, anger boils, and laughter erupts even on the tenth reading.
As I look back on my earlier work with wiser eyes and see my words in the context of what my life was, I can’t help but shake with the sadness of it all, but most of all I see echoes of what happened to my son. I had laid out his suffering without ever consciously intending to do so. But you’re not here for my sorrow.
You want to know about my son.
The child I left behind.