Among the Missing (8 page)

I got out of the car and waited in the freezing wind for him to make his way down. We were quite a long way from the road now and well below it, hidden by a thicket of frost-bound undergrowth. On the far side of the river, the thickly wooded land sloped steeply all the way to the shore. It was hard to tell how wide the river was until I saw a frail-looking wooden hut set into a curve in the bank and a white rowing boat moored to a little jetty nearby, both standing out brightly against the silvery whorls and eddies of the tide. All at once I understood what I was seeing on a human scale, and then I saw that the wind in the pinewoods around the hut was restless and quick; branches jerked and trembled with none of the dreamy enchantment of swaying trees seen from a distance. And I thought, if someone were to appear from the door and walk down the jetty to the boat, I would be close enough to call out, and she might look up and see me standing and waving, offering as clear and perfect a picture to her as she did to me. I looked downriver to the bridge, maybe a mile away, arching over from the city to the forest side. I walked a few yards down the shore. Now, closer, I could hear above the shirring of the water a stately, faint thrum from the traffic crossing over it, and carried by the breeze that blew across, there came an eerie, soft booming that I supposed had to do with the disturbance of air through the steel spans stretching up into the windy sky.

Suddenly there was a rattle of stones and a shout behind me. I turned in time to see the man struggling to keep his balance, sliding sideways on the slope of loose rocks and puddles. Falling, he let go of the child, pushing her away from him so as not to squash her under his weight as he toppled. I ran toward them. The child was a rolling bundle of unraveling clothes and wrappings, and I reached her just as she began to scream. The man tumbled several feet and landed heavily, letting out a long cry just as the child screamed again. She wasn’t hurt, but she was frightened and indignant, and when I picked her up, she was so puzzled she stopped crying abruptly to stare at my face. I saw her eyes register that she didn’t know me, and then she writhed in my arms and took a deep breath, ready to roar her head off. I jounced her up and down and smiled and chuckled, and turned her around so she could see her father getting to his feet.

“There, there, little one, there’s Papa, ooh, look, oops-a-daisy! Silly Papa! Look!” I crooned, and the child gave me another assessing look before she burst out wailing, stretching her arms out to her father. He came toward us breathless, unsmiling. I handed the child over, but he had hurt his arm or shoulder and winced under the weight of her.

“Oh, here, I’ll hold her for you,” I offered, and tried to draw her to me again, but she curled up crying into his chest and he took two long steps back. He spoke a few words to her in a foreign language I couldn’t identify, then cast me a pained look and nodded toward the trailer. “I can manage that far,” he said.

At the trailer door, the child scrambled down without a word, plonked herself on the bottom step, and lifted up first one foot and then the other to her father, holding on to her socks while he pulled off her boots. Inside, he unwrapped her from her layers while she craned round, staring at me. She clambered up onto the window seat and settled herself into a nest of soft toys, pulling a rubbery-looking giraffe onto her lap, and the end of its tail into her mouth. The wall above her head was covered with pictures in crayon, some wild, colored scribbles that had torn the paper, and some done by an adult for a child, of cats and houses, flowers and boats and birds. She kept watching me, no less suspiciously. She was beautifully and magically the image of her father: the same curly, slaty, blue-black hair, the intense gaze from strikingly clear blue eyes, long, fragile hands. The man, nursing his wrist, nodded to me to sit down, and as I took the place beside her, she raised her eyes
and smiled at me. I looked away. She made me nervous, more nervous than he did. Her beauty was close to overwhelming, but it wasn’t so much her beauty as her physical, breathing existence that moved me. I was sitting close enough to reach and touch her hair, and a few hours ago I had been almost ready to rob myself of even that small gesture toward my own child.

“Hello,” I said, turning to her. “And what’s your name?”

“No names,” the man said. We both looked at him. “Better we have no names, okay?” he said, a little more gently.

The child poked one finger at her chest and said, “Anna.” She beamed at me and then pointed at her father. “Papa!”

There was a pause, and then Anna declared her name again, and then the man laughed and he shook his head. Anna and I laughed, too. I hesitated, and then I said, “And what’s Papa’s name?”

I saw at once I had made a mistake. There was another pause, tighter than before; the man looked suddenly terrified and angry enough to hit me. Then Anna stretched out her giraffe toward me and said carefully, “
Jee-raff
. Anna, Papa,
Jee-raff …
”

He took the giraffe and waggled it at her, then thrust its head at her and cuddled it into her neck so it tickled. She tried to grab it, giggling and squealing.

“Okay, okay, Anna,” he said, letting it go and looking at her, and then at me. “Okay, so what? I’m Stefan.”

Whatever it was that had caused him to be so tense, his daughter released him from it as if she had let go of a bird trapped in her hands. She was sucking again on the fronded tail of the giraffe and staring at her father. She already knew something about adoration, but she didn’t have an inkling of her power. She didn’t understand that just the sight of her fingers flexing and pointing at a stranger’s face and her voice experimenting with a stranger’s name could do this. She made him believe that nothing else mattered, that he could handle anything. He sank down on the seat on the other side of the trailer, leaning gingerly on the table.

“You hurt your arm,” I said. “Let me see.”

When I asked him to make a circle with his wrist, he hissed with pain.

“Can you move your fingers?” I asked. “Can you bend your elbow?” He could, but when he tried to turn his forearm, the pain shot up and down between elbow and wrist. The redness of his hands had got worse since we came inside the trailer, and they were now mottled with blue,
and he was shivering. He might have been quite ill; at the very least he was frozen, and probably shocked by the fall.

“You need a hot drink,” I said.

He wiped his uninjured hand across his face and didn’t reply. I got up and moved to one end of the trailer where there was a double gas burner. I filled a small saucepan with water from a plastic canister, lit the burner using a box of matches on a shelf, and set the pan on it. I opened cupboards and found grassy-smelling herbal tea bags of some kind. I decided that he needed sugar but there didn’t seem to be any, so when the water was poured, I stirred in some honey. As he drank, the trailer filled with balmy, hay-scented steam, like when the sun warms leaves and wildflowers after rain. The fumes reminded me of the kind of summer day almost impossible to imagine looking at his sore, pinched hands while, a few feet away outside the trailer, the air splintered with cold and the river ran past swollen by the wintery, dark flow of melted ice.

He saw me glance past him through the window. As if remembering what I was there for, he pushed his cup aside and looked at his watch.

He said, “There isn’t much time. Come outside. Anna, stay here a minute and be a good girl.”

He stepped down from the trailer; I followed. He was in a hurry now, but Anna scrambled after us to the door and wailed to be lifted down and kept near him. He got her boots on again and buttoned her into her coat.

We walked all around the car. He kicked at the tires and peered in the windows, and he tried all the doors and inspected the trunk. When he asked to see the engine, we had to fish out the manual and look up how to release the catch under the hood. I could tell he knew no more about car engines than I did.

When he’d finished looking, he said, quietly and without surprise, “Rental car. You steal it? You come to sell me a car that’s not yours?”

“I need some money, that’s all. You said no questions.” I turned away, pretending to cough, so he wouldn’t know that my voice trembled and my eyes were filling with tears.

“Okay, you didn’t steal it. You rent it. And this—” he tapped with his foot on the license plate—“this is the real number?”

“Yes.”

He blew out his cheeks. “Okay,” he said. “So. If you sell, you have to tell them car was stolen. Because you are a thief.”

“No. Yes. I know.”

“So if I buy, I need to change the plates, maybe change the color. So I pay less for car.”

“I need three thousand,” I said, without thinking. I was guessing; it sounded like enough to ask, enough to change Col’s mind.

“Maybe. Maybe not so much. It drives good? I need to drive it. If it drives good, I pay. No receipt, no documents.”

“How much?” I asked. “How do I know you’ve even got any money?”

He glanced at Anna, who was absorbed, digging a pebble out of the tread of one of the tires. Turning from her, he produced an envelope from inside his jacket. He drew out just enough for me to see the top edge of a wad of banknotes.

“I got money.” He stood watching my face as I tried to control another wave of tears. I had begun to tremble. I was horrified at myself, bartering a car that wasn’t mine for money to keep a baby. How flimsy it was proving to be, the border between the kind of person I was before this, whose life had never strayed off the path of the conventionally law-abiding, and the kind of person I was turning into; it was terrifying to learn how irresistible, how effortless was my descent. Could I have offered in mitigation of my wrongdoing the plea that I had no choice? Of course I had a choice. Having taken it upon myself to judge that the legal destruction of my baby was the greater and truly unacceptable wrong, I was choosing to break the law. But I was not acting out of principle in pursuit of a finer moral good. My reasons, circumstantial, quite possibly hormonal, were a clumsy, misshapen clump of love, need, fear, and in the end, self-interest. I was going about getting what I wanted.

“Okay, listen. You’re selling me rental car, you need money that bad. I need a car. For my wife. For a surprise, big surprise for her, big difference for her life.” He gave me a hard grin. “So, smart lady? You need the money, you owe it somebody?”

“I just need it. No questions.”

“Okay, right. No questions. We go now to drive car around. If car okay, we agree price, I pay.”

I shivered. “Okay.”

He went back inside the trailer and brought out a heap of bedding. He arranged it in a mound on the backseat, then lifted Anna on top of it and began to fiddle with the seat belt.

“That’s not very safe,” I said. “Small children are supposed to have those proper car seats when they go in cars.”

He clicked the seat belt in place and straightened. “Do I ask you for help? What can I do about it right now? You keep your mouth shut!”

Anna started to flail. “Jee-raff! Papa, Jee-raff!” she said and burst into tears. Stefan returned to the trailer and brought back her giraffe.

“You will get her a car seat, won’t you?” I didn’t care that I was making him angry. “You’ve got to get her a car seat so she’ll be safe.”

“You drive it back up the track,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “Any damage then you don’t blame me.”

I drove very carefully up the track and stopped at the top, and we swapped places. He turned the car toward Inverness, nudging it back onto the road nervously, unused to having the controls on the right and possibly to driving at all. Anna dropped her giraffe and began to bounce and squirm on top of her heap of bedding in the backseat, and he spoke to her sharply, in their own language. I retrieved the giraffe for her, and she pushed it into her mouth; her eyes began to close. In silence Stefan drove us past the service station and onto the roundabout as if to turn left across the bridge, then reconsidered and swerved round to drive straight ahead, to the outskirts of Inverness. The traffic grew heavier, and it unnerved him. A couple of miles farther, cursing under his breath, he made a complete circuit at another roundabout and headed back the way we had come. At the bridge roundabout, he took us back onto the Inverness road, where he picked up speed. Then he turned back in the same place as before.

“Car okay?” I asked, and he nodded.

“I go back to service station now,” he said.

But when he pulled in, he shook his head and inched past the rows of parked cars. “Too many cars, too many people,” he said. “I don’t stop here.”

At the far end of the car park, just at the start of the entrance ramp back to the road, a disused track jutted off to the left toward the ground near the bridge, the wrecked and abandoned place I’d seen from the window of the café.

“More quiet here,” he said, turning the wheel. The track crossed an empty field and then opened out onto a vast stretch of cracked concrete where factories or warehouses had once stood. He stopped the car. We got out into a terrain of piled-up rubbish: lumps of masonry, rusted
metal spars and gutters and old window frames, warped boards, buckled machinery, shattered glass, and heaps of what looked like sodden old clothes. In the distance a man shuffled out from a broken shed clasping what looked like a piece of carpet around his shoulders like a cloak. Without seeing us, he wandered away in the direction of three or four plumes of smoke rising from behind a half-demolished wall.

“Bad place. Junkies,” Stefan said, glancing in at Anna asleep on the backseat. “Hurry up. Bad place.”

“Do you want it or not? If you want the car, you have to pay me. Now.”

“First I need promise. I need favor,” he said. “No, not a favor. For both of us.” His eyes were anxious. “I have to change license plates. It’s okay, I can do, there’s a guy I know. So you don’t tell police the car is stolen straightaway. You report the car later, okay? Wait till I got new plates. Wait till six o’clock.” He looked at his watch, then pointed back to the service station. “Up there you can get the bus. You go in bus to Netherloch, you say you left the car in Netherloch. The bus comes there soon, fifteen minutes.”