Among the Missing (12 page)

I lay back on the bed in the dark room. Reflections from the screen danced in muzzy patterns over my hands, folded across my stomach. In the next half hour the video was run another four times, with slight variations in the commentary as a range of people gathered in the studio to give their viewpoints. Then live footage appeared. In the background rescue teams with boats and helicopters and ambulances scrambled around under emergency lighting. A reporter in an overcoat stood on a roadside clutching a microphone and said that the number of vehicles believed lost in the water continued to rise. It was feared that it might never be known for certain how many, for in such strong tides and deep water, cars and bodies could be swept out to sea and never found. But, on a more optimistic note, nobody was giving up hope, the reporter said. Some people had made it out of their cars and swum through the freezing water to the bank of the river, where they were being treated on the spot for shock, exposure, and injuries. There was severe road congestion, and police were urging people to keep away. Anyone concerned for a loved one should stay by the telephone and not attempt to come to the bridge.

Then the screen filled with different images, dark and grainy. I was looking at more video footage, which, said the news anchor, relieved to have something new to show, had just been made available. Another, more solemn, voice said that what was about to be shown captured the vital seconds before the collapse. It might provide evidence as to the cause, and help with identification of fatalities. Some viewers might
find the images upsetting, and at this stage police were not confirming the identities of any of the vehicles shown. In silence the new pictures rolled, blurred and gray like old newspaper photographs suddenly animated, but lit by a kind of innocuous afternoon light. The vantage point was a fixed bird’s-eye view of a road whose broken white line in the tarmac stretched away through the center of the image. This was the vital footage, said the voice, from the speed camera at the top of one of the arches of the approach on the southern side, only a hundred meters from the start of the bridge. The back view of a blue car swelled into the picture and receded, leaving the road empty again. The commentator remarked that the time, midafternoon and midweek, meant that traffic on the bridge had been light. A van and another car appeared, slowed, moved beyond the reach of the camera. For a few moments there was silence again, and the empty road. Softly, the voice said viewers were witnessing the procession of the last vehicles known to have passed under the arch when the bridge was still standing. The timing of the footage and the recorded moment of the collapse meant that these cars could not have made it all the way across; seconds after these images were caught, they would have been on the bridge. Moments later, they must have been plunged into the river. Two more cars emerged into the picture, paused, and drove on. Then speckles of gray and white invaded the screen, it turned black, and the video wound back to the start, with the bird’s-eye view of the empty road.

The footage ran again; cars came into view, moved across the screen and out. This time the video was stopped, trapping each vehicle for a moment in the center of the screen, in a fuzzy blizzard of static. The studio voice stressed that police were not releasing any details. Anyone concerned for a relative was urged to stay by the telephone. Emergency information lines would be operational soon. Slowly each car came forward, and each time the camera froze. And there, a few seconds after a black four-wheel drive and in front of a white van, was my car, the silver Vauxhall. It edged its way on and out of the picture.

My telephone blinked with another message:

I listened again to the voice from the television saying emergency lines would be open soon. Another message came through.

I switched off the television and sat in the dark. I didn’t move at all. I didn’t dare move, for fear the least flutter of my hand or blink of an eye would alert someone to my continued presence in the world. I ought not to be here. It was through some error of fate I was still here; it was a mistake. Someone else instead of me had driven my car onto the breaking bridge and straight into the force that had twisted the road away from under its wheels and flung it into the river. I tried to control my shaking. It was essential I remain still. I ought not to be here.

I switched on the television again. In silence, the bridge camera video ran once more. The numbers for emergency information lines flashed on the screen between the cars crawling sporadically up the approach road. Again, my car passed under the arch and on toward the bridge. Along the flat lower edge of the muzzy rectangle of the back window, I saw the merest soft, dark curve: the dome of Anna’s head.

The next pictures were from a village hall on the north side of the bridge where a shelter had been set up for casualties. A pale, young, shivering face peered from the hood of a blanket and spoke to the camera.

“Suddenly there’s no road, there’s nothing in front of me and then I’m going down and I’m thinking this is it I’m going to die, but I got myself out I don’t know how, next thing I’m in the water, it’s cold it’s really freezing but I get to the surface and then I’m trying to swim and I’m just thinking keep going, keep going. I saw people in the water, there was all this wreckage and cars and stuff, then I couldn’t see them anymore. You just keep swimming and keep your head above water and hope for the best and I hope they made it.” His face crumpled; he looked five years old. “I’m lucky to be alive.”

I scanned the people in the background of a sight for Stefan. They must be there. He and Anna could not have died that way. What was the use of it, love like that, unless it achieved at least the keeping alive of the beloved? I thought of them in the car together and of the money in my bag and why it was there, and I felt sick. Could it be that I had bought my own child’s life at the cost of theirs? I thought of my mother and the price she believed had been extracted from her, and paid. Did nothing change?

Another text message came.

The light from the television flickered across the leg of the dressing table and over one of Col’s sneakers lying against it with the laces tied and a wad of dead leaves trapped in the sole. On the chair in the corner I could make out the outline of his heap of clothes, big overstitched things with copious pockets and zippers and gadgety little clips and features to meet a couple of dozen Boy-Scoutishly anticipated variants of weather and carrying requirements. On his bedside table were a baseball cap, his phone charger, and a book of word puzzles.

Tonight, sooner or later, he would come back here and look around and see that this room contained everything he needed. Sooner or later, maybe not until tomorrow if he collapsed in bed too drunk to find out where I was, he would learn that our rental car had been on the bridge. If I had died in the river, this room would still contain everything he needed. If I got up now and just left, this room would still contain everything he needed.

He would probably spend some time feeling numb, even sad. He would spend some time (to his private surprise, rather little) adjusting his expectations back to those of a single man, gaining a touch of celebrity among people who knew him for the improbably lurid bad luck of losing his bride in a freak accident. He would let them describe it as tragic. He would allow them to think he minded that there couldn’t be a proper funeral; he’d go along with a modest memorial service of some kind. He would never tell a soul that I had been pregnant, and soon he would not mention me at all. Within a few months he would look back on being married as a botched experiment in becoming somebody else. Relieved, mildly ashamed, he would go back to the chat room on the Internet, but he’d be very careful never to get caught out that way again.

I straightened the bed so it looked untouched, emptied the kettle, and switched off the television. I deleted all my text messages and voice mails and turned my phone off. I put it in the shoulder bag I had left with that morning and walked from the room. I slipped downstairs. Everyone was in the bar or the restaurant. I let myself out by the door into the garden and made my way toward the road.

I walked away not just from Col but from my failure to become a
wife he wanted to keep. I walked away from having to justify wanting my baby. And for my baby’s sake as well as mine, I walked away from the humiliation of counting out money to its father as if this or that sum were an opening offer in a haggle for its life. I wasn’t just walking away; I was also bearing my baby, hidden in the warm, fleshy pod of my body, to safety. I was saving both our lives, and we were together.

Nearly a mile out from the collapsed bridge, men in fluorescent jackets milled around the Road Closed signs, directing cars back to the bridge at Netherloch. Ron moved quietly among the stricken, displaced little bands of people roaming around on the sides of the road and among the trees, like mourners or refugees. A bright moon in a silky, deep violet sky shone above the road, but in the distance arc lights lit the river ominously, as if illuminating a stage for more spectacle and greater violence; the limbs of the bridge, jagged and black against flashing orange and blue emergency lights, jutted out above the water. Helicopters roamed overhead, sending down vapory cones of light, hovering low enough for gusts of air from the rotors to blow trembling circles of flecks across the impenetrable, mercury-dark river.

The drift of people carried Ron along into a denser crowd at the forest’s edge, where spectators stood facing a television crew and a spotlight under which a reporter was shouting into a microphone. An exhausted-looking man in a safety helmet was led forward to be interviewed. The crowd began solemnly to applaud him, and as he started to speak, Ron stepped away from the throng and slipped under the barrier tape. Expecting to be stopped at any moment, he passed quickly into the pines that covered the sloping land between the river and the road. There was no path so close to the forest edge; keeping within the darkness of the trees, he scrambled down through a prickly mesh of branches until he was almost at the water.

When he emerged from the trees, he saw that crowd barriers now separated the forest from the site of the collapse. He could have climbed them quite easily, but he remained outside, watching. There seemed
surprisingly few people at work on the riverbank; about a dozen who looked like paramedics and rescue workers came and went around a tent that had been set up, as far as Ron could tell, as a first aid station for casualties; he saw two men carry a stretcher from the tent and up the uneven bank toward a helicopter standing on the last strip of the bridge approach road. Ron had learned first aid when he became a driver, but he did not dare go forward and present himself. He would be ejected at once as
unauthorized
. There was no place here for simple willing hands; this was not a neighborly effort. The operation was professional and, for all he knew, efficient. He drew farther back into the trees. Once he was more familiar with what was going on, once it was daylight again, he would find the courage to ask if he could help.

As the night wore on, the rescue settled into a regular rhythm, determined and unspectacular. Under the arc lights, boats and helicopters made their forays to the river in droning, dogged circles. Ron hunkered against a damp tree trunk and grew drowsy. He dozed until the cold woke him. Then he got up and moved back farther into the trees, where the wind did not cut so keenly. He didn’t want to spend the night in the open, but he was reluctant to walk the seven miles back to the Land Rover; without knowing where he was going, he slipped deeper still into the forest’s shelter. He was afraid of losing his way, and remembering that the road above him followed its path, he kept the river always in sight on his left, shining through the fringe of pine branches. He was cold. After a while he came upon an area where trees had been felled, but not recently; years of hard weather on the rutted ground had left it almost impassable with dank troughs and exposed, torn-up roots. From here the bank rose steeply to his right; there was no clear route up to the road. So he made his way instead down to the gleaming river, and when he reached it he saw he must be almost a mile from the bridge. The sharp arc lights had softened to a glow in the night sky. That was when, almost at the water’s edge, he came across the derelict prefabricated cabin. The door on the river side was padlocked, but at the back he found a small, warped door, locked and jammed tight with damp. It was soft with rot and sagged against his shoulder when he pushed it. After several heaves, the lower of its two hinges split from the frame and he was able to squeeze through. The place was unfurnished and comfortless, cold and dirty, but it was a roof for the night and out of the wind. By the moonlight through the smeared windows he saw there was a
stove and some fuel, but he had no matches. He curled up on the floor and lay listening to the sounds from the bridge; the motors and sirens had faded to remote purrs and squeals that mingled with the river flowing close by outside. Yet the fright and injury of the day reached into him, or maybe he had brought it with him, and suddenly his heart, a berg of ice, seemed to shatter and burn within his chest. He began to shiver violently, and he curled tighter, trying to tell himself this was physical stress, nothing more. A fragment of his first aid training came back to him:
When people experience trauma, one of the first things to go is the ability to fend for themselves
. It calmed him to realize that he was fending for himself, to a degree; at least he had found shelter. But why, he thought, was he steeling himself at all against the disintegration of his heart? Let it burn, let it melt. Let it even break again, if only he might no longer be alone.