Chapter Sixty-seven

I WALKED. I hunched my shoulders, buried my hands in my pockets and grappled once again with the contradictions of Cumali’s life.

I had left the hotel, wandered through a maze of small streets and, by the time I had tried a hundred different ways to square the damned circle, I found myself at the beach. It was late afternoon and still warm – the last flicker of summer before autumn really blew in.

I sat on a bench and looked across the foreign sea, turquoise and almost other-worldly in its brilliance. A father was splashing water with his three kids in the narrow zone where the water met the sand. Their laughter filled the air and, from there, it was only a small step for me to start musing about a little boy who had no father to splash water with and didn’t even know what Down’s syndrome was.

The kids’ mother walked close to take a photograph of her children just as I was thinking about Cumali and the quiet heartbreak she must have experienced when she saw the telltale single crease across the palm of her newborn baby’s hand and realized that he was the one in seven hundred.

The whole world seemed to slow: the glittering water from the kids’ buckets hung suspended in the air, the father’s laughing face barely seemed to move, the mother’s hand froze on the shutter. My mind had run aground on a strange thought.

Evidence is the name we give to what we have, but what about the things we haven’t found? Sometimes the things that are missing are of far greater importance.

In all the time I had spent searching Cumali’s apartment I hadn’t seen one photo of her with the baby. There were none of her with him as a newborn on her desk, not one of her playing with him as a toddler and no portraits on the wall. I hadn’t found any in the drawers and I had seen none in frames beside her bed. Why would you keep an album of photographs of a failed marriage and have nothing of you as a family or of the little guy as a baby? Weren’t they the things mothers always kept? Unless …

He wasn’t her child.

Still the water hung in the air, the mother kept the camera to her face and the father was caught in the middle of laughing. I wondered why I hadn’t considered it before: she had arrived with her son in Bodrum three years previously with her husband left far behind and no friends or acquaintances to contradict her. She could have told people whatever story she wanted.

And if he wasn’t her child, whose was he?

The water fell to the ground, the mother took her photograph, the father threw a splash of water back at his kids and I started to run.

It was dinner time and I figured if I was fast enough I could get to Cumali’s house before she did the washing-up.