Among the Missing (29 page)

She spoke in a firm but faded voice, as if she were under a kind of hypnosis of both hope and dread; an entranced, defiant look had entered
her eyes. She got through the next few days at Vi’s, returning exhausted to her candles and photographs and incantations. On the fifth day, she did not go to work because she woke after a vivid dream of Stefan, who had borne a message that the answer to her prayers was nigh. This would be the day they came back. She waited at the cabin all day, and the next, and the next.

For the entire week Ron’s workmates at the bridge traded rumors about the occupants of the car. People sat on in the canteen past their break times, talking and arguing. Ron just listened; nobody asked for his opinion, and he gave none, and least of all would he have said anything about Silva and her vigil for Stefan and Anna, or about the husband of the missing woman and his presence at every bridge walk. Even if he could have strung the words together, Ron believed he had no right to offer up for their scrutiny any stories, and such desperate ones, that belonged to other people.

One rumor was that the child was strapped in the back and nesting in a tangle of blankets as if asleep and the man’s body was floating free and twisting, arms outstretched, toward her. Another had it the other way round, the child reaching for him; another, that the child was cradled in his arms. And who were they, the workmen speculated, and where was the woman who had been or should have been driving? Were they hitchhikers? No sane woman alone picked up hitchhikers. But had she stopped for these two (had it been raining that day?), either for the child’s sake or because the very presence of the child had made her feel safe? But suppose the man was just a car thief, albeit one who operated with a child in his care, and he had stolen the car; where then was the woman? Was the man also a murderer? Had he killed her in front of the child? So where was her body?

The word went round that, when the car was hauled from the river, the driver’s door had not been closed. Ron sat quietly and heard the theories: the door lock must have burst on impact with the water; it had been broken in a collision with other wreckage; it had been corroded and prized open by the tides. But the favored version was that a third occupant, the woman driver, had managed to open the door and get out but had not made it to the surface. She must have been drowned and her body dragged out to sea. The bridge workers had it all worked out, they reckoned, on the balance of probabilities; meanwhile the police investigation continued with what they considered perverse slowness.

Ron was grateful that the patterns of his physical life—work on the boat, food, jobs at the cabin, sleep—kept him immersed in practical tasks and with little time to think. Whatever had happened to the woman, and whoever the man and child had been, all three were lost. And while the deaths of people he had never known were losses abstracted and at a remove, loss recalled all losses. He was sad for their deaths and felt they should be contemplated in silence, in the unshared privacy of his own mind; the thought of their suffering hurt and frightened him. He returned gratefully at the end of each day to the cabin, where such matters could not be discussed.

After two weeks, no next of kin had come forward. On its front page, under the headline
POLICE APPEAL TO FAMILY OF MYSTERY VICTIMS
, the Inverness
Herald
printed a photograph of the man’s neck chain and the half-perished remains of a toy giraffe. It also reported that DNA tests showed the bodies were overwhelmingly likely to be those of a father and child. Ron brought the paper with him that evening as well as a can of diesel for the generator, a tub of leftover coleslaw, and a bottle of whiskey. Silva was once again at her devotions. He showed the front page to Annabel, who was peeling potatoes at the table. These days she sat down to do such tasks.

“Oh, God, no,” she said. “Don’t let her see it. Oh, God, what are we to do?”

“She has to see it,” Ron said. “She’s bound to see it sometime. It’s better if we’re the ones to show her.”

“Why?” Annabel said. “What good will it do?”

Ron was taken aback. “If it’s not Stefan and Anna, think how relieved she’ll be,” he said simply.

“But it is them … I’m sure it is. She won’t be able to bear it.”

“If it is, she has to know. She’ll have to know sooner or later.”

Annabel gazed at the door to Silva’s room, her face suddenly white. “She’ll have to know sooner or later,” she repeated stupidly. She turned to Ron. “Don’t leave tonight. Stay. Don’t leave me alone with her.”

Silva’s door opened and she wandered in, casting a severe little smile at Ron. Her eyes were overbright, and her hair, as it always was these days, was pulled back under an exuberant purple plastic chrysanthemum that looked doubly absurd above her pinched face. She glanced at the pan of potatoes and slumped into a chair at the table.

“Not hungry,” she said. Then she caught sight of the paper lying under Annabel’s hand and snatched it up.

“Silva, wait. Don’t. Silva!” Annabel said, getting to her feet.

Silva cried out, once, and in the next moment she was at the door. She flung the paper down and was off and running, sobbing, stumbling over the rocks to the jetty, her screams sounding back across the wet stones of the shore.

She was simply trying to get to them. I do not believe a thought of her own death was in her head. I still think it was blind need that drove her to the water, a need to be where they were, where they had died, and that was all. It was not an actual intent to kill herself.

Ron dashed after her, ahead of me, but he wasn’t quick enough. I came out of the cabin just in time to see her throw herself forward off the jetty. The strange thing was that, from the moment she surfaced, everything was very quiet. She had stopped screaming. There was no kicking and flailing of arms, no splashing or wailing. Perhaps it was the shock of the cold water that stilled her. Then her head sank. The purple chrysanthemum in her hair bobbed for a second and disappeared, and the back of her pink cardigan floated up behind her and for a moment billowed across the surface of the river before its own waterlogged weight pulled it under and around her submerged shoulders. By then Ron was in the water, and I ran down to the jetty as he dived under and seized her by the jaw and struggled to drag her face up to the air. If she’d fought him harder and got a few feet farther out and into the current, she would have been swept away, but the strength went out of her. She surrendered. He brought her to the side of the jetty and dragged her out of the water. She collapsed against him as if all her limbs were broken.

I got her out of her wet clothes and dressed her in a thick, dry shirt and pajama trousers. Ron heated whiskey with sugar in it and made her drink a lot of it. She sat for a while by the stove until her shivering and sobbing subsided, and then I put her to bed, leaving her candles burning and her door open. She fell asleep, and Ron and I sat up for a long time, wondering how she would be when she woke and what we might do for
her. I stopped him wondering aloud about Stefan and Anna and how they had come to be in the car. For shame, I could not tell him my part in it.

“Don’t go on about it,” I told him. “It makes no difference. It won’t bring them back. We’ll probably never know.”

My back had begun to ache, and Ron said I looked tired and should go to bed. He kissed me on the forehead and once, gently, on the lips, and he settled himself on the sofa bed in the main room so as to be nearby if Silva needed us in the night.

She slept until daybreak. It must have been the
click
of the door that woke me as she left the cabin; as soon as I discovered her bed empty, I hurried to follow her, leaving Ron asleep. But this time she hadn’t gone to the jetty. She was standing on the shore some yards from the water, mirror smooth under the early light. She’d picked up some stones and was studying them or counting them in her hand. I started to go to her and nearly called out, but stopped myself and drew back to the doorway. She didn’t move. Her head in cameo stillness against the sun’s silver and lemon sheen on the water was bowed and sorrowing. I was helpless—worse than that, culpable.

All of a sudden she looked up and flung the pebbles from her hand, and they landed scattershot, wrinkling the water with hundreds of colliding circles. She watched until the water was smooth again, and then, her lips working and her arms wrapped tight around herself, she turned and wandered down the riverbank. Now and then she lifted her head and paused, looking at the river and all the time talking to herself. Or maybe she was talking to Stefan, to Anna, to a God who let such things happen. Who could tell?

I couldn’t go back to sleep. I went inside and wrapped myself up warmly and found some shoes, and then I left the cabin, intending to follow her at a distance to make sure she was safe. But by the time I came out of the cabin again and had got down to the river edge, she had already turned and was walking slowly back. She looked up and must have seen me, but she walked past me as if I weren’t there, still mouthing words nobody could hear. When she reached the cabin, she went straight to her room. I heard her lie down, and then, at last, she let out a low, desperate moan and her weeping began.

Ron was awake and had to leave; it was one of the Saturdays for the bridge walk. I went down with him to the jetty and made him promise
to come back as soon as he could and to tell no one about Stefan and Anna. He looked puzzled for a moment, I think because the idea of doing otherwise had never crossed his mind. I didn’t want him to leave, but I couldn’t say if that was from a desire to be with him or because I was afraid of coping with Silva alone. Two weeks ago we had made love, he and I, but not since, nor had we talked about what happened. So we were not lovers, exactly, but what were we? The question was tangential now; Silva was our only concern. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. He promised to return in the afternoon.

In the boat going over, Mr. Sturrock, huddled in his waterproof jacket, said, “Did you see that, the wean’s giraffe? In the paper?” He wiped a fleck of rain from his cheek. “Wee soul.”

Ron nodded. He wanted to tell Mr. Sturrock about Silva, bereft and weeping. He wanted to tell anyone who would listen how she was suffering. It grieved him that Stefan and Anna were to be unclaimed and dispossessed in death as they had been in life, the small history of the family as erasable, finally, as a drawing in an exercise book.

“The poor mother,” he said.

“Aye, whoever she is,” Mr. Sturrock replied.

Rhona was waiting under a lime green umbrella. She had pacified the irate customers from the last tour with lunch vouchers for the service station and had also cut the bookings back down. The small gathering now with her stood with the somber decorum of the previous groups; despite their garish wet-weather clothes, they looked like people at a funeral. The big, reticent widower from Huddersfield was there again, aloof in his sadness.

Summer was already in decline. The early morning sun had vanished, and there was a spit of rain in the chill wind that blew up the estuary, raising short white combs of spray off the water. The tree shadows cast on the river margins had grown longer, and in the forest a single stand of larch trees was turning from green to bronze.

Mr. Sturrock introduced himself and began his talk, counting the same points off on his fingers, inserting the same statistics, breathing in the same places. Ron stood at the back with Rhona, who was absorbed
in sending text messages. The audience stood lulled, reassured, a little bored. Following Mr. Sturrock, they tramped with a scraping of feet between lines of hazard cones along the bridge approach to the farthest point of the old, ripped-up roadbed. At the barrier a few dozen feet from where the jagged edge of the tarmac dipped down toward the river, they halted and gathered in a semicircle. Collars and hoods went up; out here, squalls from the river blew hard around their heads and down their necks. Calling above the wind, Mr. Sturrock launched into his lecture on the nature of estuaries and the design options for the estuary bridge designer.