Among the Missing (26 page)

An hour later, the weather broke. Gusts of wind, suddenly cold, banged the door shut and pushed and pulled the trees. Then I heard distant groans of thunder, and the sky that had been oppressively still for days began to move, first with a crazy, pinkish yellow shimmering in one high eastern corner and then with clouds, darkening and roiling together low and close to the land. Slow, huge drops of rain hit the river. The thunder advanced, shaking the ground and crumpling the air, and
after the second or third shot of lightning, rain began to stream from the sky. It spiked the ground around the cabin, obliterating the river and the far bank. A sheet of water cascaded from the edge of the roof and poured past the windows. From the door I could hear nothing but the drumming of rain over my head and the gurgle of the overflowing gutters. Ron dashed up from the jetty, carrying the ax and some tools he’d rescued from the boat. He dropped them just inside the door, grabbed his jacket, and ran out again, heading downriver. I waited, watching the sky throb with lightning, and after about twenty minutes he came back with Silva drenched and clutching his arm, shivering under the jacket.

I heaped more sticks into the stove to try to get a blaze going, and fetched towels. Silva changed into dry clothes, and Ron stripped down in the kitchen and wrapped himself in a blanket. I arranged his sodden things over chair backs. Then, because lightning was fizzing all around the cabin, I thought it best to turn off the electricity, so I made tea on the gas burner, and then we sat by the stove in candlelight, and the storm went on and on. There was some whiskey that Ron had brought ages ago, and he and Silva both took some to warm them up.

Silva had retreated into herself. I said she looked tired out, and she sighed and said she did need some sleep, and went to bed. Ron and I stayed by the stove. There was nothing to talk about, this late; we had made every remark it was possible to make about the weather. The thunder was distant now, and the rain had lessened but went on falling. Our candles burned down and went out one by one until I looked up and saw by the light of the last one that Ron’s cheeks were wet.

“Is it the smoke?” I said. “It’s got very smoky.”

He wiped his eyes but didn’t answer.

“It’s late now,” I said. “There might be more lightning on the river. You can’t go back tonight.”

He didn’t. Picking up the candle, he followed me into the room where I slept, and I rearranged the cushions and mattresses so we could both lie down. Without a word he took me in his arms in an embrace that was natural and warmth-seeking, nothing else. The smell of his skin was male, pleasantly sharp, like clean metal.

The rain pattered on the roof over our heads, and after the candle had burned down and died, he said quietly, in the dark, “A baby.”

He reached out and just once, over the covers, stroked his hand gently across my stomach, and then we slept.

This is what I learned after you went missing. I learned I would not die of my distress, not even when I wanted to. I would not altogether lose my mind, not even when I was afraid I must.

To begin with, the passing of time with no news sharpened the pain to the point that I couldn’t bear any more. Then there came a day when the passing of more time with no news blunted the pain a little. No news was better than bad news, it meant hope, and it brought a little calm. This was the beginning of fooling myself, the beginning of knowing that fooling myself was what I must do. A way must be found to survive, and it was in my nature, then, to find that way.

And after another little while, the pain, which I didn’t expect would go away, burrowed deeper into my life. It found its place and made its home there, and I let it. It took up room that everything else in my life moved over and made for it. It was just with me, like the sound of my own breathing, while I did all the other things that happen every day. I brushed my hair, counted change, put on my shoes, took off my shoes, and it was there alongside me: pain, and no longer shocking. It became ordinary, as familiar as the mug I drank tea from in the morning. By the time it was like that, that was how I wanted to keep it. I was grateful to be at least used to it.

I discovered also that I could not lie awake weeping forever. Sleep came, if only in short, fretful waves, and when it did, it brought dreams that were sometimes merciful. I dreamed once of walking into a small, bright field, sunny and sweet-smelling, and all at once I forgot the way I had come to arrive there and did not want ever to leave it. And that was how it was also sometimes when I was awake. I could be busy in the
shop, or talking with Ron, listening to some story of Annabel’s, or just sitting on the riverbank watching the birds on the rock, and suddenly I would notice that for the past little while I had been carefree, as if I’d been standing in my small, bright field. I had let go of everything in my mind that lay behind or ahead of the little pleasure of that moment. Then I would be ashamed. For what sort of mother and wife enjoys herself when her child and husband have disappeared? By being careless of you even for a minute, maybe I had made it harder for you to come back. As soon as I could, I would hurry to my room and place fresh flowers for you, light a candle, and pray for your return, but also for your forgiveness. I would swear never to let you out of my thoughts again, I vowed to walk a thousand miles barefoot to find you. And when, as it always did, my despair returned, I gave in to it quietly, knowing I deserved it.

Yet the world goes on, and I went on. I rose every day and managed to dress myself—in the wrong clothes, clothes that were happy and summery, soft old cotton skirts, sneakers for getting up through the forest in the morning—I even tied up my hair with that plastic flower you bought me last year at the service station. The tourists had come, so the shop was busy and I was working more hours. Vi was having one of her good spells. The warmer weather helped her. She stayed sober, mostly, and sometimes even took half days off and disappeared in her rusty red van, coming back with her hair done, and once a birdbath from the garden center. But she was also harder to please. One day she told me if I didn’t learn to smile at the customers, I could make myself scarce, and I did try, by thinking of the cabin and imagining you back there with Anna, counting the geese on the water. I told myself the world goes on, and the river and the sun go on, and if I also could go on, and even smile, then you could, too. You were still in the world, and you would come back. It could not be otherwise. Now, after all these weeks, the way that I walked each day up through the forest to the road had become a path, well worn and easy to tread.

Watching Annabel grow big made all this both better and worse. Everything she was becoming was a mirror of my own childbearing and of my aching. Her belly began to swell as mine had, sooner than she thought it would, and I also watched her become happy in a way she wasn’t expecting. But I was. I know what it does to you to carry a child you love before it is born. When you love that way, the baby knows it,
and grows. I remembered a woman from our village; they talked about how she married a brute, a real rough brute, because of his land and businesses, and her misery to be carrying his child. She couldn’t bear the bulk of it, its weight in her like his weight upon her, they said. She couldn’t forget her disgust over how it got there, that boulder of a child filling and stretching her. Blameless thing, that baby withered and died inside her, and they said it was hatred of its father that killed it.

Never mind. That was a long time ago and far away. There was much to do here, and Annabel was not as good at thinking ahead as she thought she was. She had nothing to do all day but take care of things at the cabin, and she did, in her way. Not in the way I would, but I didn’t complain. It was important not to upset her, so I did not let her see that her standards were not my standards. I was glad to have Ron there in the evenings. He kept the peace without knowing it. He was so sweet and quiet and grateful, and he did so much for us.

I wasn’t surprised when I got up the day after the storm to find him in the kitchen making three cups of tea. Too dangerous last night to go back in the boat, he said, so he’d slept in front of the stove. I was sorry he hadn’t had a mattress, but I liked it that he stayed. With the storm going on outside, I had lain awake for a while thinking that if our cabin had been put here for just this purpose, to be filled with people who needed a haven, there would surely be another place like it somewhere that was sheltering you and Anna. I prayed for your arms to be around her, wherever you were, and I fell into a deep sleep. I was sure a part of me had known Ron was there all night, and that was why I slept.

The weather had cleared, and Annabel got up and went down to wave him off from the jetty. When she came back I said to her that Ron was a blessing, it was good he had stayed. She nodded.

“It would be good if he could stay more,” I said. “We should get something for him so he doesn’t have to lie on the hard floor.”

For once Annabel had been thinking ahead, because she agreed with that as if she had already planned for it in her mind.

To keep her happy, I let her go off shopping the next Sunday with Ron. I wanted to be by myself, and with her gone I could attend to some of the cleaning she hadn’t done very well. There was nothing I wanted to buy anyway, but she needed some bigger clothes, and there were places in Inverness where they could get folding beds, some pillows, and other things. She was excited about going out, and I tidied
her up, I brushed her hair myself. But I couldn’t do anything about the sleepy, foolish look that had come into her eyes. She hadn’t been away from the cabin for many weeks, and she looked strange and distant, drugged on solitude. Ron had the Land Rover waiting on the road, and she set off up through the forest in her unironed man’s clothes with her belly large and her hair thick and springy, panting with every step. Soon she wouldn’t be able to make it up the steepest part. As I watched her go, I was anxious. I hoped she wouldn’t attract too much attention. But I was also afraid to be letting her disappear out of my sight and into a world that could swallow up the people I loved.

As Ron drove toward Netherloch, my excitement disappeared and I felt only fear. The people at the Invermuir Lodge Hotel would certainly know that one of those lost on the bridge had been a guest there; quite probably the press had turned up to interview the staff about the tragic couple. What if one of them, the nice waitress, say, saw me and remembered me? And don’t people always notice pregnant women anyway? I would have to spend the entire day with my collar up, staring at pavement, my heart thumping and sweat pouring down my body. I gazed out of the window and wondered if my mother, noticeably pregnant with me, had once ventured out like this and also found her courage melting away the moment she left the shelter of the house.

Ron said, “Some year for foxgloves, this. Just look at them all.”

There were lots of them, growing tall in the banks among the bracken and at the forest edges in under the shade of the pine trees. I agreed, pretending I had noticed them, too.

“Sure sign of a good summer, foxgloves,” he said. “A hot, dry summer.”

“Lovely,” I said, not meaning it, imagining the hot, dry summer when my mother was carrying me and Annabel Porter died. Maybe someone raised an eyebrow at her rounded stomach and crossed the street, maybe a neighbor, bitter on the Porters’ behalf, hissed
“child slayer”
as she walked past. Or did the people she met assess her with remote, grieving eyes and say nothing? Perhaps things like that happened, perhaps none did. It’s possible that every bit of evidence of my mother’s defamation she conjured up herself out of nothing but her sense of sin.

“A hot, dry summer. We don’t get many of those,” I said.

“Not like we used to. Not like the summers you look back on, when you were a kid.”

I wanted to tell Ron that I never did look back on them, at least I tried not to. I wanted to tell him about the later summer, when I was thirteen, the one my father said sent my mother over the edge, though in truth the weather had had little to do with it. We both knew it had been coming for years, but we needed an additional factor, one beyond our control, to blame for an occurrence that we had failed to prevent.