Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

Molly laughed, and the sound was like a butterfly, something delicate and uncontainable flapping its wings in the cabin’s air.

“Still five hours left,” Jason said to her, squeezing her arm. “Try to get some rest.”

By the time they landed in Scotland, cleared customs, and found the hotel, the children were exhausted, their eyes circled and hollow. Judith felt a pang of guilt. This trip had been her idea; she’d wanted them to do something different from the Disney World vacations of their past. On this trip, she’d thought, they’d start becoming a family. But maybe it was too much, too far? For the millionth time she wondered if she was making a stepmother’s mistake. The room had two double beds and an extra roll-out the hotel had brought up, and the kids collapsed, Lucas in one bed, Molly on the roll-out, without fighting. They fought much less often, in fact, than Judith had expected, and she didn’t know if this was because of everything they’d been through or was just the way they were. Molly was like her father, sunny, adaptable, friendly; she liked to sit on the floor while they watched TV and have Judith braid her hair. Lucas was darker. Sullen and withdrawn, he had few friends and spent most of his time at home playing graphic, violent video games. He skirted Judith as if she were a piece of furniture in the center of the room. Whenever she tried to talk to him, he answered in grunts and single syllables until she gave up. Because he was dark, because he was difficult, he was the one whose acceptance she most craved.

At nine o’clock, the kids groggy and pliant, they ventured out for dinner. It was July and still light, a pearly, enduring twilight that made the Gothic architecture and cobbled streets look like the setting of a fairy tale. Judith had been to Edinburgh once before, the summer after graduation when she and a girlfriend had Eurail-Passed through ten countries, but all she remembered was meeting some guys from Portugal at the hostel and staying up drinking with them all night, trying to teach them how to pronounce “Loch Ness Monster” correctly. In the morning they’d gotten back on the train. Now she was pleased to be here, with this new family of hers — an instant, add-water-and-stir family, as her friend Maggie had put it. They chose a homey-looking pub and ordered sandwiches. Outside, tourist couples strolled past the window fronts. She looked at Jason and smiled.

· · ·

They slept late and missed the complimentary breakfast, which Judith thought was perfectly fine, given what she’d heard about its black pudding and haggis. In a coffee shop around the corner they outlined a sightseeing plan for the day. Molly wanted to know if they could see some sheepdogs; she was the kind of girl who had pictures of kittens and horses in her room. When Judith asked Lucas what he wanted to do, he shrugged.

“There must be something,” she said.

He shrugged again. “I don’t know anything about Scotland,” he said, “so how can I pick?”

Instantly, she felt a tidal wave of unreasonable annoyance wash over her. With his intractability, Lucas drew from her a volatile, explosive emotion such as she’d never experienced with another person. She was trying so hard and he would never even meet her halfway. She wanted to yell at him, Why won’t you cooperate? to shake his arm, and he looked at her and could see it in her eyes. His lip curled, taunting her. I dare you, his expression said. Between them was the electricity of unspoken anger. Meanwhile, Molly and Jason were buttering their toast.

“I guess if there were Scottish video games, ” she said, “you’d want to play those.” And instantly regretted it: she, the adult, was supposed to keep her cool.

But Lucas’s lip curled further into a sardonic smile, and his dark blue eyes — they were an otherworldly color, almost purple — twitched and he said, “Scottish video games are probably, like, Grand Theft Bagpipes.”

“Or Killer Haggis,” she said.

“Black Pudding Attack,” he said, and then they were all four laughing, Judith’s tension snapped and gone.

Everybody had warned her about the hardships of a blended family, but nobody had mentioned its pleasures: how fun it could be to sit in a coffee shop with your family, all of you jet-lagged and laughing at some dumb joke.

Just as quickly as it had arrived, the moment slipped away as Lucas put his cutlery back on his plate, his breakfast untouched, and stared out the window.

“Okay,” Jason said, doing his best to move them all along with his warm, sunny smile. “Let’s hit the sights.”

And they did: the castle, the Royal Mile, the parliament building. The kids yawned through various tours and were placated with gift-shop trinkets and snacks. Jason bought Judith a cashmere shawl when she wasn’t looking, and she scolded him for the expense and then hugged him; though they’d been married a year, she still felt strange kissing him in front of the kids. Sometimes she thought about Maggie’s reaction when she told her she was dating a divorced guy and that the kids seemed “great.”

“Those poor children,” Maggie said, and Judith, who’d only just met them, felt defensive on their behalf.

“They seem to be coping pretty well,” she said. “They say kids are resilient.”

“Yeah, they do say that,” Maggie said. “But is it just because the kids don’t, you know, actually explode?”

Judith imagined she meant that kids can’t explain themselves, because they often have no words to describe the things that had happened to them. “I don’t know the answer to that question,” she said. She still didn’t, and thought that probably nobody did.

“Hey,” Jason said, “come back to us,” and she realized that she was still holding the soft, pale blue cashmere to her cheek.

But all in all it was a good day, and they slept well that night and felt better the next morning, when they climbed the 287 steps to the top of the Walter Scott memorial, panted with the accomplishment, heard from a tour guide about his famous Lady of the Lake, then looked down at the gardens below. The Edinburgh skyline was shrouded in a gentle haze. And then it was time to climb down. Jason was holding Molly’s hand, and they glanced around for Lucas, but couldn’t find him.

The panic was not immediate. They just assumed he was exploring somewhere and had forgotten to let them know he was wandering off. They walked around for a few minutes calling his name. Then Judith and Molly stayed put while Jason canvassed a broader area. He was gone for fifteen minutes, then half an hour, then came back and left again for another half an hour. As Judith and Molly sat there, other tourists came and went, taking pictures, chattering, and she was offended by their blithe ignorance. Finally she saw Jason climbing back up the steps, and he was holding out his hands in a hopeless, empty gesture. Even though she was too far away to see his eyes, she could feel his heart turning over, and his alarm ignited hers, and her heart was pounding and she allowed herself to actually think the terrible thought that Lucas was missing.

Such a sweetheart was Molly that she stayed silent and polite through the lengthy interview at the police station, downed the muffin and milk a kind secretary brought for her, and didn’t cry. Jason, on the other hand, was falling apart. Judith had never seen him like this. She thought he’d permanently exorcised violent and dark emotions from his life but it turned out that they were all simmering underneath. When the police officer said they couldn’t do anything right away, his recognizable personality, the self she knew and loved, disappeared, and he became an entirely different person.

“Listen to me, you Scottish motherfucker,” he said. “My son’s somewhere out there, in a city he doesn’t know, in a foreign country, and he’s nine years old. You need to find him, do you understand? I’ll stand right in front of you and yell my fucking head off hour after hour until you do something about this.”