Among the Missing (24 page)

My mother came to believe, once she could no longer deny that the disturbance in her own body was a pregnancy, so late and unlooked-for it felt unnatural, that she had taken Annabel’s life as surely as if she had
choked the child or driven a blade through her chest. Because there must have been a moment when she had sucked the life out of the baby’s unconscious body and drawn it up, somehow, into hers; that must be why she had left the darkened nursery forgetting to whisper “God bless you,” and feeling even more nauseous and drowsy and faint.

And it wasn’t enough that she believed she’d done it, my father told me, she still had to know how God could have let her. She spoke to her priest, not that it helped. He couldn’t convince her that some force within her had not stolen the child’s life. It must be, she reasoned, that in smoothing Annabel’s hair with too much yearning, she had tapped a well in herself that was not love at all but some distortion of love, something visceral and needy and covetous. She had craved her own baby too much, and there had been nothing to protect Annabel from such aching, unguarded cupidity. The child had been christened, and had that done a thing to keep her sanctified soul moored within her body? I imagined a flummoxed young minister reaching for the orthodox comforts about baptism and the life everlasting. But my mother would have shaken her head. No, God had declined to lift a finger to save Annabel, and so where did that leave it, the soul? Unprotected. Anywhere. Nowhere. There was nothing eternal, or still, or unique about it. It did not—it could not—belong to God. It was not merely unsanctified but unsanctifiable. She knew.

She left the church. Henceforth her soul, unsafe like every other, would have to look after itself just as Annabel’s soul, taking its chances, had proved itself restlessly and promiscuously fluid, capable of passing from person to person, its tenure always provisional upon the beckoning of its next nascent host. So it was that my mother, slaking some ancient thirst for her own child, had drawn Annabel’s supple, migrant soul out of her sleeping body and into her own, where it was to alight, and embed, and animate the simmering, multiplying cells that were even then readying themselves to be expelled exactly thirty-seven weeks later as me, the deplorable little thief whose veins raced with lifeblood stolen from Annabel Porter.

Cot death or not, new phenomenon or not, it was a cruelty of nature on a scale that was medieval, a calamity so woeful and mythic that it had, in fact, brought a chorus of women wailing onto the streets to prize the corpse of an infant from the arms of its deranged, barefoot mother. I think it might have saved my mother’s sanity had her part in
the affair been condemned outright as diabolical; an explanation, however anachronistic, that blackened her reputation with the name of witch might have been preferable, in the months that followed, to her neighbors’ askance looks and hasty crossings of the street. The Porters moved away. I was born, and for the next thirteen years my mother did not leave the house to go any farther than the back garden visible behind the fence in the photograph.

When Ron began to help us, I thought it was because he is kind; now I think it is because he likes us. We are doing very well. Annabel is eating like a pig. He has noticed it, and that must be why he brings us so much food as well as all the other things. But I do not think he has noticed why she is so hungry. Her stomach is beginning to show, but he doesn’t look at her body, or at mine. He watches our faces. When he finds out Annabel is having a baby, I think he will help even more. He is a good man. When you come back, he will be like a grandfather to Anna.

Sometimes, when Annabel is thinking about something far away, or is asleep, the look on her face is so smooth I could cry with envy. Sometimes my stomach and throat shut themselves tight when I think of her body getting ready, the way mine did with Anna. I feel a prickling in my breasts the way I did when our baby was suckling. When you come back, I want us to have another baby.

Of course I have wondered if you are dead, but you aren’t. It isn’t possible. I need you too much for you to be gone forever. You can’t be dead because if you are, Anna must be, too, and that isn’t possible, either. I need her too much for her no longer to exist. There is no other need or purpose or reason in this world stronger than my need to hold you both in my arms. You are coming back.

Until then, I’ll watch Annabel grow heavy and lazy, and I’ll take care of her as if the child inside her was mine. We can stay here for a long time, as long as we like, as long as we need. Until you come
back and we have our own new baby, there will be Annabel’s to look after.

I didn’t know until now how beautiful the forest is. The trees stand all around us like guarding giants, and they have a smell that is strong and clean, and the sound the branches make at night is a safe sound, like me saying
shoosh-shoosh
to Anna when she cries.

The Porters left; why didn’t we leave, too? There was nothing about the house or my father’s job at the council that could not have been replicated elsewhere. Was it heroism that made my father choose to stay and stand by his wife in front of the whole town, or was it simple obstinacy? Or was it a failure of imagination—at a time when every family in England that wasn’t doing it themselves knew of some other family, someone at the office or down the street, that was packing its life into oceangoing containers and emigrating to Australia or Canada—that he could not envisage the three of us embarking on a journey even as far as the next county? I think it most likely that by the time he thought of moving us anywhere it was already too late. Our lives were too ingrained in the causes and effects of my mother’s entrapment to withstand any such uprooting.

He cycled everywhere; his bicycle clips were as redolent of his presence in the house as the sound of his voice. They would be on the draining board, or hanging out of the top pocket of his jacket over a kitchen chair, or (to my mother’s consternation) balanced on the Wedgwood clock on the side table in the hall. He went to work and shopped and ran the errands on his bicycle; he fitted a seat to the back of it, and until I was old enough to ride my own bicycle, he fetched and carried me to and from all the excursions of my small life: school, the dentist, the cinema now and then, or a school friend’s birthday party. He would take back to my mother an account of films we saw; he brought her news of happenings in the town: businesses opening or closing, interchanges and supermarkets springing up, the switching on of the shopping center Christmas lights, new benches along the riverbank. Over the years
we all grew used to this rhythm of excursions and reports, but he never gave up suggesting gently she might care to see these things for herself, and she always said when she felt a bit more like it she might just do that. But she preferred to stay at home
for the time being
.

I found myself wishing, those first weeks in the cabin, that I had known then what I was discovering now: that it is possible—not easy, but possible—to draw a life to a close in one place and start another not only somewhere else but as someone else. It would have helped my parents to believe in just the possibility; to dream of it, even if it had remained always a dream, might have saved them. And I still wanted them to know, as if somehow they had time remaining to them to change anything, that with the right moves it could be done, and so I went about the cabin as if they were watching. I wanted all the tasks of cleaning and clearing and getting the place fit to live in to look transparently sensible and natural to them. I wanted to convince them, by taking the strangeness out of it, that I was making a success of this odd turn of events. You see, I was trying to say, it’s all about taking a risk, getting out while you can, finding somewhere to fix up and call home. You can just
go
. They were present to me every bit as much as my baby was, and I was sure they were pleased to see me perform this act of reinvention for the sake of their grandchild.

The weather improved, and this, too, I could not see as anything other than approval, a kindly warmth cast on my enterprise. During the first two weeks, I scrubbed the cabin from top to bottom: ceilings, walls, floors. I carried out bucket after bucket of filthy black water floating with dead insects and cobwebs and dumped it all in the pit we had dug at the back, a little way into the trees. I unstuck the windows and kept them as well as the doors open all day, and the sun dried out the place and left behind a smell of soap and resin and sawdust. I washed the curtains and hung them back up (they still looked shabby but would have to do for now). I pulled out the linoleum flooring completely, and Ron took it away in the boat to dispose of. At the end of each day, Silva came back down through the trees with pine needles stuck to her shoes and in her hair, and I would make a point of spending the first hour or so showing her all I had done. She needed distracting when she got home at the end of another day without word or sight of Stefan and Anna.

Ron would come later, after his work on the river, either with something
we had asked him to get for us or more often with something he had seen we needed: oil for the creaking doors, a pane of glass and some putty, kerosene lamps, a plastic picnic table. I gave him money for the things I asked him to get, but usually he shrugged and refused it, as if the notion of paying for things just didn’t interest him for the moment. He had access to all kinds of tools and materials; he secured both doors and cleared the roof and gutters and got the water collection tank off the roof, cleaned out, and working again, with new pipes. He was looking for a small generator, he told us, so we could run the fridge and use the shower instead of heating up water in a tin bath outside. He brought containers of drinking water every day, saving Silva the trouble of getting it at Vi’s and carrying it down through the forest. Often he brought leftover food: big slabs of lasagna or bags of meatballs, half a cheesecake, for which I was grateful because I was always hungry. He was staying in a kind of bunkhouse for the workmen who lived on-site during the week, and the catering was crude and generous.

By the middle of April the bridge was secured, the salvage work scaled back, and the investigation into the cause of the collapse, as far as Ron could tell, all but concluded. For the time being, the diving teams had been disbanded and the five vehicles still in the water left wherever they might be lying; strong spring currents were pushing what was left of them to and fro among hunks of submerged rubble and steel, making further recovery dives impossible. Ron heard people say they would never be brought out. They and the bodies in them would probably be washed all the way down the estuary by underwater currents and devoured by the sea.

On the site there was a lull while what Mr. Sturrock called “the fuckin’ powers that be” considered bids (“twiddling their fuckin’ thumbs”) for the rebuilding of the bridge. But Ron was if anything busier; almost every day he took Mr. Sturrock and groups of surveyors and engineers out to examine the bridge piers that were still standing, and every day he overheard them discuss the latest analyses of the wreckage.