Stacey comes home from school with a small wooden box. It has a hinged lid and is slightly smaller than a shoebox. It’s varnished and is quite dark in colour, but not black. The design is very simple and rustic. It’s the kind of box someone might make in a woodworking class, but Stacey’s only nine and they don’t do woodworking in school at that age. When I pick her up at the gates we go to the car and that’s when she shows me. I ask her how she got it and she says she found it by the fence at the back of the playground. It was just sitting there in the dead leaves, she says.
I tell her she shouldn’t pick up things that don’t belong to her. She says the box doesn’t belong to anyone. It was abandoned, she says, like I’m stupid, and maybe I am.
That evening, at the dinner table, Stacey’s ears begin to bleed. Daniel is telling her to eat her mashed potato when the first trickle comes. It’s from her left ear, and because of where I’m sitting I see it while Daniel doesn’t. What is it, Thomas? he asks when I quickly reach across the table to Stacey. When I touch the tip of my index finger to the bright red liquid dribbling out of our daughter’s ear. He asks me the question again, but then he sees the redness on my fingertip and he looks then at Stacey and he says, Oh my god.
The drive to the Accident and Emergency Unit is a blur. I drive while Daniel sits in the back with Stacey, who isn’t in any pain but has been made tearful by how Daniel and I are reacting. She even says it—it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt—but that only makes us panic more because surely there should be some pain, some discomfort. In the rearview mirror, Daniel’s dabbing at Stacey’s ears with a ball of tissue paper and I can see the red stains against the white whenever he pulls the tissues away from her head. Daniel tells me to drive faster and I tell him I am, but it’s dark and it’s raining.
It takes too long to find a parking space and Daniel starts shouting at me, telling me to just dump the car at the kerb by the entrance. This is an emergency, he keeps saying. I tell him he’s making Stacey upset. He tells me again it’s an emergency.
We’re walking quickly—not quite running—towards the hospital’s automatic doors when I notice Stacey has the box with her. I notice because I was about to hold her hand, but can’t because she’s holding the box. Daniel is holding her other hand. Why has she got the bloody box? I say to Daniel, not expecting an answer, and all he says is does it really matter right now, Thomas?
They conduct an initial hearing test, which is fine. Then a doctor inspects the insides of Stacey’s ears. She is a young woman with long auburn hair and tired eyes, and she tells Stacey that the instrument she uses is called an otoscope. After, the doctor straightens up and goes to the countertop on the other side of the room and cleans the otoscope with some sort of sterile wipe. When she drops the wipe into the bin, it is stained brown and red. The doctor asks us to wait in the little room and she goes out, closing the door softly. Daniel dabs at the blood smeared around Stacey’s ears. I tell him maybe he shouldn’t, that maybe the doctors need to see the quantity of blood, but Daniel doesn’t reply. Ten minutes later another doctor comes. He puts his hands over Stacey’s head and touches her with the tips of his fingers, working around the curve of her skull. He asks her how all of this feels and she says fine. No pain? he asks. No pain, she says. After this, we are sent down the corridor and up one floor in the lift, and after a short wait they run a CT scan. The technicians there are very nice to Stacey and they spend a long time explaining the machine to her before they put her on the bed and load her into it. Daniel and I watch from behind the glass. Daniel holds my hand and squeezes once before letting go. I have been okay until this point, but this gesture almost brings me to tears.
When they send us home it is past midnight and the wind is sweeping across the black car park. I carry Stacey to the car despite her really being too big for this now. But Stacey says she is tired and something my mother said, years ago, about there being a last time for everything, a secret last time you only know about years later through a sudden realisation, makes me say okay and let her up into my arms, her head resting on my shoulder. Daniel carries the box. This is the first time it has left her side. Some of the medical staff asked her about it. She told them she found it in the school yard, and Daniel and I gave the staff a discreet look, a slight roll of the eyes, and the staff smiled.
They found nothing wrong with her. No ear injuries. No trauma deeper inside her head. I asked what the source of the bleeding was, because there had to be a source, and the doctor who discharged us simply shook his head and said maybe she’s been putting pencils in her ears, or her fingers, and she went a little too deep and we can’t quite see the cut. He told us not to worry. By then the bleeding had stopped.
Stacey falls asleep in the backseat on the way home. In low voices, we decide to keep her off school the next day. She’ll be too tired, Daniel says. I’ll take the day, tell work I can’t come in. I ask if he’s sure, because I don’t mind. He says it’s fine. I reach across and rest my hand on his thigh. He puts his hand on top of mine.
I was so scared, I whisper to him later in bed. But he’s already asleep.
I am in work, on the telephone to procurement, when my mobile buzzes on my desk. It’s a message from Daniel. Look at this, the message says. An image comes through. It’s of Stacey. She is sitting on the rocking chair in the kitchen with a throw wrapped around her, and she has the wooden box in her lap. The lid is open. Stacey is looking out of the window, unaware of Daniel taking the photo. The overall impression of the image makes her seem like an old woman from a different era. I send Daniel a laughing emoji while I listen to what procurement have to say about the timescale on the order I’m chasing up. Moments later, Daniel sends another message: I know! Then he says how the box goes everywhere with her. She’s glued to it, he says.
I wind up the call with procurement and put the telephone down.
She has these phases, I reply to Daniel. It’s normal. How are her ears?
Fine, Daniel replies a few minutes later. Not bleeding. Crusted blood inside but that’s all. Seconds later, a further message comes through: we should clean the box. God knows where it’s been.
Yes, I reply. Perhaps tonight when she’s in bed, if she won’t part with it. Save there being a scene.
Stacey is in bed and Daniel and I are standing at the kitchen sink together. I want to soak the box in soapy water but Daniel says this would damage it. It’s wood, he says as though I’m stupid. He says we should wipe it down with a cloth. We should spray disinfectant on the cloth.
The box could just disappear, I suggest.
Daniel considers this. He turns the box over in his hands, inspecting it. There is a slight sheen to its surfaces, but only just. He opens the lid. The finish is the same on the inside, although the inner surfaces are a little darker.
We can’t do that, Daniel says.
You’re soft, I reply.
Sorry, who carried her to the car last night?
I ignore his raised eyebrow and crouch down to open the cupboard under the sink. I retrieve the bottle of disinfectant and an old blue cloth.
We clean the box.
Later, I creep into Stacey’s bedroom. I place the box carefully on to her bedside table, ensuring it’s at the same angle as before so that she doesn’t suspect.
It was dark when I went into Stacey’s room. It only took a few seconds to tip-toe across the carpet to her bedside table, and only a few further seconds to retreat to the landing, to pull her door shut as softly as possible so as not to wake her. It was putting the box back that I had been focused on—a sort of tunnel vision. This is how I describe it. This is how I explain it to Daniel when he’s tearing around the house the next morning. This is what I keep saying when he stands on our front lawn, shouting at the top of his voice. When he makes as if to run down the street in only his dressing gown. When he finally listens to my pleas for him to come back inside so we can call the police. It was dark, I keep saying, I was in a hurry, I keep saying. I don’t know, I keep saying, as he speaks too quickly, as he begins to scream at the person on the other end of the telephone.
Two police officers arrive. Both seem too young to solve any kind of problem. One of them insists on searching each room of the house, despite me saying we’ve already done that. He insists. He goes upstairs and leaves us in the living room with the other officer, who taps information into what I assume is a police-issue mobile. She taps our names into it. She taps our contact details. She taps our description of Stacey.
Where are the rest of you? I ask. Who’s actually looking for her?
She says there are other officers driving around and there are officers on their way to Stacey’s school. Then she asks which of us last saw Stacey.
Before I can reply, Daniel says him and gestures at me. Daniel’s on the sofa, still in his dressing gown. His eyes are red from crying. He looks exhausted. Before the police arrived, I tried to hug him but he pushed me away, hard, and I fell backwards against the dining table. That was when he started to cry.
I tell the officer about returning the box the previous night. She asks whether I saw Stacey in bed, and I tell her I don’t know. On the sofa, Daniel shakes his head. He’s looking at the carpet between his feet. I didn’t notice, I tell the officer. Did you notice the window? she asks. Did you notice whether it was open? I think about it. I try to picture it but there is only darkness, only the vague shape of the bed, the bedside table, the lit-up rectangle of the landing beyond the bedroom door.
I don’t know, I tell her.
Did you feel a breeze? Like it might have been open?
I don’t think so, I reply, and when I say this there’s a slight upward inflection that makes the answer sound like a question. This is when Daniel throws his hands up and storms off to the kitchen.
Later, when the two officers are gone and Daniel is in the hallway putting his shoes on to go out and search, I stand in the doorway to Stacey’s bedroom. I do not want to go in because I am worried that I might move or alter something that might otherwise provide a clue. It has been agreed that I will stay at the house in case she comes back. When I hear Daniel heading for the front door I call out and ask if he has his mobile. He replies with a flat yes and then the door opens and slams shut. I scan Stacey’s bedroom, left to right. There is the faint sound of our car starting. I look at her unmade bed. I look at the little box on the bedside table, its lid closed, and I try to discern whether it has moved at all, whether this was in fact the position I left it in the previous night. There is the sound of Daniel driving our car down the street, and the faint whine of the brakes when he reaches the junction, and I am looking at the open sash window that neither of has dared touch since he came in to wake Stacey this morning, only to find that she was gone.
What if someone took her? I am saying to the police operator.
The officers are no doubt considering that, the man on the other end of the line says. Do you have any evidence that someone has taken her?
I consider this. No, I say eventually.
After the call, I put on my shoes and go out into the street. I check whether the neighbouring houses have cameras. The police officers never mentioned that they would check. I don’t go far and I keep glancing back at our own house in case she is suddenly there on the doorstep, cold in her pyjamas. She is not. None of our neighbours have cameras, so I go back to the house and sit on the doorstep. Eventually I realise I am not only waiting for Stacey to return, but also Daniel, and in the sudden rushing loneliness I begin to cry.
Friends start calling and messaging. It’s on social media and local news websites. Some offer to help search and others share posts and others send love as though that might help.
I stand in the doorway to Stacey’s room. It is late afternoon. It’s getting colder and the light is going out of the sky. I go to the window and close it because the police do not think she was abducted, although I still only touch the window at the corners, minimising contact in case something changes and they need to check the window for fingerprints or DNA. Then I go to the box because what if she left a note in there? But the box is empty. I put it back down.
Downstairs, the front door opens. I run to the top of the stairs. Daniel is in the hallway, he hasn’t shut the door yet, and he has a hand to his face and he is crying. He keeps repeating that he can’t find her.
I go down and close the door. I hold him. He cries into my shoulder, into the place where Stacey’s face was two nights ago when we left the hospital.
I am out in the car, parked up, when Daniel calls me. We have split our search efforts into shifts. It is my shift. It’s nearly eleven PM. Stacey has been missing for three days.
Anything? I say. This is how we both answer the phone, now.
What if it’s something to do with the box? he says.
I picture him standing in the doorway to Stacey’s room the same way I do. He’s almost whispering. I imagine him staring at the box. I ask him what he means.
What if someone left it in the school yard for a kid to find?
I picture the place where Stacey told me she found the box. The fence at the back of the playground, the box half-buried in a drift of dead leaves. And beyond the fence: an area of scrubby ground giving way, eventually, to woodland.
What if it’s some sicko? Daniel says. What if this is how he chooses which kid to abduct?
I tell him he needs to sleep.
How am I supposed to do that? he replies.
I don’t answer. Ahead of me, at the street junction, a figure crosses the road. I lean forward over the steering wheel, straining my eyes. It’s a kid, too young to be out this late, but it’s not Stacey, and Stacey’s all I care about.
Someone could have her right now, Daniel is saying. They could have her right now and god only knows what’s happening.
Don’t say that, I tell him.
You shouldn’t have let her bring it home, he says.
He hangs up.
It’s light when I arrive back at the house, and only when I look at the dashboard clock do I realise that it is just after nine. There is a grey-silver saloon parked outside on our driveway. When I go inside there are voices, and in the living room Daniel is talking to two men wearing suits. One of the men introduces himself and explains that he is the detective overseeing the search.
They were just explaining that they’re searching the woodland near the school today, Daniel tells me. It is clear that he hasn’t slept.
We spoke to the school yesterday, the detective says. The head teacher said the pupils are always asking if they can play in the woods, so we think it’s worth checking.
I ask if we can come and the detective says no. He says this kindly. He explains that the search team needs to work in a particular way, and me or Daniel being there would compromise that. It’s only once he has left that I start to think about that. It’s only after he’s left that I begin to wonder if the involvement of detectives means anything.
Daniel doesn’t speak to me once the detectives are gone.
You can’t go out, I tell him as he gets dressed. You haven’t slept, you’ll crash the car.
He ignores me. Pulls a sweater on.
If you crash the car, I’ll have no car to use when I’m out looking for her. If you crash the car, I’ll be busy dealing with you instead of looking for her. There’s no point driving around town anymore. Everyone knows she’s missing. If she was there, someone would spot her.
Daniel brushes past me, out of our bedroom. I follow him into Stacey’s room, where he picks up the box from the bedside table. I ask what he’s doing but he doesn’t answer. He goes downstairs, only putting the box down in order to put his shoes on. He snatches the keys from the side table and opens the door, and he doesn’t realise I’m following him until I open the passenger door and get into the car as he’s starting it up.
It’s some weirdo, Daniel says. It’s some weirdo who’s taken her, who grabbed her from her own bedroom.
We don’t know that, I reply.
Daniel has the box on his lap, one hand clutched over it, claw-like and pale against the dark wood. I tell him I can take the box so he has two hands to drive. He ignores me.
We’re going to find him, Daniel says.
I ask where we’re going, but he doesn’t answer.
Eventually we arrive outside the school. He pulls the car past the main parking area, past the entrance until we’re alongside the schoolyard. A chain-link fence separates it from the pavement and the road. The fence has always made me think of prisons. The schoolyard is a vast, concrete expanse. Every few years, they repaint a hopscotch and other things on to its surface, only for it all to fade again. Beyond, hard to see through the fence and at this distance, is another chain-link fence, scrubland, then woodland.
We can’t go there, I tell Daniel. They’re searching it right now. We might mess up what they’re doing.
Ignoring me, Daniel gets out of the car and heads off along the pavement. I quickly get out and follow him. The street is quiet but up ahead there’s a figure. Daniel walks quickly, ignoring my questions. He has the box in one arm, close to his chest. He’s almost running.
Hey, he’s shouting, hey you.
Up ahead, the figure looks over their shoulder.
Daniel keeps shouting.
As we get closer I see the figure is a man. He’s wearing a hoodie and when he looks over his shoulder at us his face is pale and he has a dark, thin beard. He’s the kind of man I imagined when Daniel said a weirdo took our daughter.
Why are you hanging around the school? Daniel’s calling to him. The man doesn’t stop walking, but he’s kind of half turned, uncertain, like he doesn’t quite believe it’s him who Daniel is addressing.
I’m fucking talking to you, Daniel shouts.
When we reach the man, Daniel grabs him by the shoulder. The guy lurches away saying what the fuck, and Daniel grabs at him again with one hand, the other cradling the wooden box to his chest, over his heart. I asked you a question, Daniel’s saying, hissing really, and the stranger’s dark eyes are round, surprised, and he just keeps saying what the fuck as Daniel grabs at him, grabs his sleeve. I’m pulling at Daniel and failing. I keep saying his name. Daniel. Daniel.
Get the fuck off me, the man finally says, as though something inside of him has kicked into gear. As he says it, he shoves Daniel who falls backwards into me and I wrap my arms around him and feel his tense body, his rigid arms, the pent-upness of him. Daniel tries to heave us forward, lashing out, and together we stumble and fall down on to the pavement.
I’m on my way to work, the man says, walking quickly backwards, not taking his eyes off us.
Fucking psycho, he says.
He turns and walks away, hurrying.
We sit on the pavement. Daniel is sobbing in my arms. I hold him. He clutches the box.
Go to bed, I tell him.
Beyond the window, the morning has turned grey, blustery; it will rain soon. Daniel gets into bed as I pull the curtains shut, the room dimming to a beige kind of murk.
I stand over Daniel. The covers are pulled up under his chin. It makes him seem childlike. He has the box on top of the covers, over his chest. The lid is open and he keeps glancing inside as if he expects to see something in there. I tell him to rest. I tell him I’ll stay up, that I’ll be fine after a strong coffee. When I move as if to take the box, he closes the lid and frowns at me. I persevere, placing my hands around it and gently pulling it away. I place the box on the bedside table.
Just sleep, I whisper as he closes his eyes.
I wake up at the dinner table because Daniel is standing over me. My neck is stiff and my back clicks as I sit up straight and for a moment there’s a slight headrush from having sat up so quickly. Daniel has the box in one hand and tissue paper in the other. I realise the tissue is spotted with blood. Daniel brings the tissue up to his head and dabs at both ears.
I don’t understand, I say.
Daniel shrugs. It doesn’t hurt, he says.
When he walks out of the room he says something I don’t quite hear. He walks out and when I get up to follow, to ask what he said, when I go through the doorway into the hall, he isn’t there. There is only the box—on the floor, on its side, the lid slightly open like the slack jaw of the sleeping or the dead.
The detective sits in the living room with me. He tells me to go over Daniel’s disappearance again, and I recount it for the sixth time. I show him the tissues with Daniel’s blood. I tell him how Daniel’s ears bled. Did you two fight? the detective asks. I explain we argued in the morning but it wasn’t a fight, wasn’t physical. The detective changes tack and says one of his colleagues saw us outside the school. Pretty animated, the detective says. You got into an argument with a passerby, he says. I tell him that was Daniel, that I was trying to calm things down. The detective doesn’t say anything. I tell him Daniel was fixating on the box and as I’m talking I realise the silence was deliberate, a door left open for me to walk through. But it’s too late now so I tell him that Stacey had the box and after she vanished Daniel became attached to it. It had been Daniel’s way of coping, a way for him to feel like he was holding on to her. Is that the box? the detective asks, nodding at the wooden box in my lap, but when I tell him yes he doesn’t seem interested.
The detective asks about our relationship.
It’s okay, I tell him. Ups and downs but okay.
The detective seems to deliberate, rolling something around inside his head. Then he says, could Daniel have run off with Stacey?
That wouldn’t make sense, I tell him.
Is there a friend of yours and Daniel’s, or maybe just a friend of Daniel’s, who might’ve been taking care of Stacey these past few days on Daniel’s behalf? And now Daniel’s gone too?
The question puts me off balance. No, I don’t think so, I tell the detective. But in my mind I’m thinking how there’s really no way for me to know.
It’s a possibility, the detective says.
I’m thinking of all the times I angered Daniel. All the times I wasn’t thinking the way he thought. The looks he would give me. Drive faster, this is an emergency, just park the fucking car.
It’s just a possibility, the detective says.
And then he’s quiet again.
Eventually, they suspect me of having done something. They find droplets of Daniel’s blood in the sink and on the carpet of our bedroom. They draw a link between these things and Stacey’s hospital admission, the drops of her blood on her pillowcase, and her disappearance. I am asked many times about the household dynamic, my relationship to Stacey and to Daniel. The social worker who oversaw Stacey’s adoption provides a report to the police and the police tell me about this. I don’t know why; there is nothing untoward in her report. Sometimes I tell them about the box but they are never interested. Eventually they humour me and test it for fingerprints, but the wood is too grainy and all they find are partial prints which belong only to me.
The suspicion is never spoken outright. It sits inside the detective’s silences—silences which, eventually, I stop trying to fill.
People used to call but then they don’t. They drift away. This unspoken thing.
It is easy to harden. To become bitter.
There is a press appeal on the anniversary of Stacey’s disappearance. Nothing comes of it.
I lose my job, find a new one. I move house. Another year passes. There is a new partner, eventually, and eventually there is not, again. When he leaves, he tells me I am difficult to live with.
I am drunk the first time I try to destroy the box. The hammer bounces off the woodwork—loud, flat sounds like gunshots in an empty house. The screws securing the hinges refuse to turn and the wood doesn’t catch when I hold a match to it. I throw the box against the bedroom wall. It leaves a scuff which I do not bother to paint over.
There comes a day when I can no longer remember his voice. A day when I cannot remember the way she felt in my arms when I picked her up, her head resting on my shoulder.
Secret last times.
I find myself unable to lock the box away. Something keeps me from putting it in the attic. I put it in the bin only to fish it out later. One day I stand by a canal but my arm is frozen and I cannot bring myself to throw it.
Sometimes I believe they are inside the box. Sometimes I think there might be some way to retrieve them, or to join them, if I could only figure out how. There are times when I think that’s not what it is at all—a box, that is—and I try to understand why it does not want me. Then, other times, it is simply a box that someone abandoned and which my daughter found.
I find my way into middle age. I look in the bathroom mirror and someone else stares back: a greying man with a pinched expression, a weariness. It occurs to me that the box did take me, but in a slower, different kind of way.
One bright clear October day I am at the park and I sit down on a bench. I have the box in my lap. The ground is covered in the curled, dead leaves of the horse chestnut trees which line the path, their branches looming overhead like arms to form a guard of honour. There is a playground with a climbing frame and a slide nearby, the sound of children coming through the trees like frantic birdsong.
It is easy to become bitter.
I look down at the box in my lap. It has been some time since I have really looked at it. It is slightly smaller than a shoe box. It is simple in design and is made of a dark wood. I open the lid and look inside. A cyclist passes by. I touch my right ear, bring my hand away, and inspect my fingertips. I close the lid and look at the box a moment longer before placing it on the ground amongst the carpet of brown and orange and gold. I press down, nestling the box into the dead leaves, concealing it slightly.
Then I get up and walk away.
