The Missing One (28 page)

‘It's just kind of curious, to see you all grown up, I guess.'

‘So you knew me as a baby?' I blurt it out. She doesn't answer.

Somewhere far off, thunder rumbles. A gust of wind bashes against the French window, and one dog, in its basket by the range, looks up sharply. ‘It's just, I don't know a single person other than my parents who knew me as a really little baby, before I came to England. I've never even seen a picture of myself as a baby.'

‘Huh? Is that right?'

‘So, what was I like?'

‘As a baby? Oh, you cried all the time. They said it was colic, but I always thought you were just objecting to being born. I used to walk you round outside to give your mother a break. You sure had some lungs on you.'

She says it so casually. I must be staring at her because she gives a harsh laugh. ‘What can I say?' Her eyes are wintry, the pupils sharp and black. ‘You were a screamer.'

‘I just … you're the only person I've ever met who knew me then. This is completely weird.'

‘Well, your mother knew you then.'

‘And my father.'

She shrugs and turns away again.

‘Do you have any pictures of me as a baby?'

‘No.' She washes a glass.

I take it from her, carefully. ‘Oh. I just thought you might have … '

‘Well, I don't.'

‘I've always wondered, Susannah, whether my mother resented me in some way. She had to stop her PhD because she got pregnant. Maybe that was the root of our issues. I mean, I basically ruined her life, didn't I?'

‘That's a little simplistic, don't you think?' There is a clap of thunder, louder, flatter, but no lightning. I peer through the archway at the sofa. Finn doesn't even twitch. ‘Women did have careers and babies in the seventies, you know,' she is saying. ‘In fact, I happen to know that your mother read
The Female Eunuch
, because I gave it to her myself.'

‘Yeah, but not many women had a career chasing killer whales around the Pacific Northwest. You can't exactly get day care for that, can you?'

She goes over and begins to wipe the table.

‘So am I why she gave it all up?'

She keeps wiping; big jerky movements. I wonder if she's angry.

‘Susannah?'

She walks past me, throws the cloth into the sink and begins pulling on her boots.

‘Where are you going?'

‘I have to get something in before it rains.'

I look through the archway into the front room. I can see the sofa. Finn's bum is in the air: his best sleeping position. There are cushions all around him. He'll sleep for at least an hour. Susannah is hooping the grey scarf round her neck. This is turning into a conflict, and I have no idea why. But I don't want this conversation to end yet. For the first time, I feel like I'm getting somewhere with her. She steps through the French windows with the dogs behind her.

I yank on my boots and follow her into the icy air. The sky roils overhead, and another clap of thunder makes me jump. Waves thrash at the rocks below. Three rooks or maybe crows – fat black birds – circle the tree tops behind the house, jet black against the troubled sky. She is walking away, fast, down the path along the side of the house towards the trees. I hurry along the deck.

It is not clear why she is so reluctant just to tell me things. Why can't she tell me everything she knows about my mother? What's the big secret?

I jump from the deck onto the path that leads into the massive pines. I run faster, catching her up. The wasp hair clasp is almost out, and the veins on the side of her neck bulge. I can hear her breaths as she strides along. The path leads us deeper into the forest. A few quick drops of rain tap down through the prickly branches above us. Another clap of thunder – lower, closer, louder. I mustn't leave Finn – not with a storm about to break over us. Not in the same room as a Chihuly. I'll have to go back – I'll turn back in a moment.

‘When I was little, my father was away a lot,' I half
shout at her, though I'm not sure she can hear me, or is listening. ‘He set up his own architectural firm in London, he's a total workaholic. My mother was basically a single parent. Even when he was there, at weekends, he was mostly working. She ran the house – she did everything, she was very practical. She even fixed the plumbing. And she had her art – but you'd never know she'd studied marine biology, or researched killer whales up here. I don't know why she never told me any of this. What I want to know, Susannah – are you listening?' I know she is. ‘Susannah, what I don't understand is why she didn't say anything about all this. Why was it such a big secret?'

There is a clearing up ahead. It's raining now, droplets coming through the prickly branches, soaking into my hair, so cold they sting my skin. The chill slices through me and I hug myself as I stumble along behind her. I'm going to have to get back to the house for Finn. I can't leave him there.

Susannah, in her brown fleece and big scarf, seems unconcerned by the cold, the storm or my voice. There is a sharp crack above us, and I hunch, rabbit-like, and then lightning illuminates the patch of land we're standing on, the skeletal trees around us.

She doesn't even flinch. She strides towards a wooden building. It is Swedish-looking, built in light pine, with large windows and solar panels on the roof and outside, spread out on the ground, are three paint-stained sheets, no doubt set out to dry earlier. She picks one up and begins to fold it. I run across to her. The rain is getting faster, dripping down my neck.

‘Are you planning on leaving that baby alone in a thunderstorm for long?' she shouts.

‘I'm about to go back! But just tell me one thing. Just one thing. I just want to hear it for sure. She gave up her PhD because of me, didn't she? Because she got pregnant with me?'

Susannah tosses the folded sheet onto the small deck of the studio, where the dogs huddle, and scoops up the next one. I can't see inside the building because it's dark in there, and the door is closed, slat blinds down, and the windows are streaked with rain. She doesn't seem to notice the weather, even though the wind lashes the tops of the trees above us. She just keeps folding. I have to go back.

‘Susannah?' I yell. ‘Can you just answer me?'

‘Holy shit. You really don't give up, do you, Kali? Not even with that baby alone inside a … ' I don't catch the words – I think she says ‘strange house' but it might be ‘stranger's house'.

‘He's sleeping!' I yell through the rain. But I know she's right. ‘It's been five minutes! And I'm about to run back! As soon as you answer me—'

‘Quitting the PhD was nothing to do with you,' she snaps. ‘She quit to come up here.'

I wipe the freezing rain out of my eyes. ‘You mean the mapping project wasn't her PhD?'

‘Her PhD was on the play vocalizations of the Sea Park dolphins in California.'

Another clap of thunder cracks through the air right above us. My jeans are sticking to my thighs and the rain is
soaking into my sweater. I'm shivering violently. Susannah tosses the sheet with the others, but instead of going towards the studio, as I expect her to, she turns and walks away, back towards the trees.

‘Wait!' I run. The dogs bound after her, tails whirling like propellers. Lightning flashes, shifting a whole patch of air above me and I freeze, involuntarily. She disappears into the pines.

*

As we peel off our boots in the kitchen, I slide the French window shut. I can see Finn, oblivious to the thunder and lashing rain, his bum still in the air.

‘See.' I nod towards him, breathless. ‘He sleeps like a log. When he was nine months old he slept through an entire fireworks display that shook the walls of the bedroom he was in. He didn't even twitch.'

The rain is closing in now and there is no visibility outside at all, just layers of falling water. I'm soaking and very cold. But I'm not giving up. ‘Susannah, I'm confused. I don't really understand the timescale – what she did, and when – and why, come to think of it.'

She pushes her hair back with both hands. Looking down at me, close up, she seems taller, her bones sharper, the lines on her wet face like carvings; her forehead high, like a priestess. ‘Fine,' she snaps. ‘Your mother's research was in southern California, near the university.' She grabs a tea towel and throws it towards me then takes one herself and wipes rain off her face. ‘This was before you came along, a long time before. You want to know what happened to make
her quit her PhD? OK. Sure. I'll tell you. Sit down.' She points at a stool. ‘Sit.'

I sit.

‘She got interested in the two captive orcas at the park where she was studying the dolphins.' She dries the straggling ends of her hair. ‘The female orca was due to give birth, and Elena persuaded the park authorities to let her record the sounds it made during labour. It was one of the first captive killer whale births ever to happen in the States. Your mother put a hydrophone in the water and sat by the pool throughout the labour – two days. She watched the orca give birth, recorded all the sounds, and then she watched as everything fell apart.

‘When an orca is born it swims right away – the mother noses it to the surface for its first breath, then they swim together. They surface and dive together, and breathe in synch – the mother alters her breathing pattern so the baby can mimic it. And she feeds it as they swim. But this baby at the Sea Park didn't have the motor control to cope with swimming round and round a tiny tank so it kept bumping the sides. The mother was worried that the calf was going to brain itself. She was so busy nosing it away from the tank walls that she couldn't feed it. In the wild, the other female whales will help a new mother, kind of like village midwives, they point the calf at her mammaries, they nudge and shepherd the baby until it can feed reliably on its own, and they support the new mother – but in captivity she didn't have any help, she was on her own. I guess the instinct to protect outweighed the instinct to feed.'

I am struggling to understand why Susannah is telling me this, but I nod along, hoping that the point will emerge.

‘So, the Sea Park guys eventually yanked the starving baby whale away from its mother and put it in a separate tank to try to get it to feed – and then of course the mother went crazy. Imagine, a killer whale hurling herself against the side of the tank, yowling – barking – for hours on end. The Sea Park guys had no idea what to do. They tried, pretty ineptly, to force-feed the calf with a tube, but it starved to death after a few days. The mother never recovered. She keened and screamed and bashed herself against the tank non-stop for two days – and then she just gave up. She lay still, not feeding, moving only in slow motion to breathe. She died not long after.'

‘That's a horrible story.'

‘Yeah, well. I'm telling you this because it changed everything for your mother. It altered her outlook. And that's when she met … she met the others, the conservationists, who were involved in the orca-mapping project. They introduced her to the issues with the wild orca. She quit her PhD, dropped out overnight, and came up here to join them.'

‘So, dropping out of university had nothing to do with me?'

‘You weren't even
born
, Kali.'

I hug myself tightly. My damp clothes stick to my body and I have goosebumps, though I'm not sure whether they are from the cold or Susannah's words.

I look at her. I wonder if she has any idea of what she has just done for me. It's as if this restless, hungry thing that has been inside me all my life has vanished – someone has opened the doors and it has galloped away. I think about what she's said: my mother, dropping everything, furious with the sea park, upset, but clear-eyed, certain of her future.

‘And what about my father?' I say. ‘They were together, right? What did he think about her change of plans?'

She gives a chilly laugh. ‘Oh, Gray didn't really have a say. None of us had a say. That's Elena for you. Totally single-minded.'

‘She left him in California?'

‘He was finishing up his scholarship at the time, looking for a job. He was in London, I think, interviewing – he didn't see it coming. Neither of us did.'

She is agitated now, pacing between the stove and the French windows. A flash of lightning fills the room and the electrics dim; I glance through at Finn, but he still hasn't moved. There is a pause, then a clap of thunder that seems to shake the glass. Susannah doesn't seem to notice.

Then something occurs to me. ‘What was my father like in those days?' I watch her face closely.

‘Gray?' Her voice comes out high. She stops moving. Then she shrugs. ‘Oh, he was nice: serious, very proper, very clever, lovely Scottish accent. But, well, I … hardly knew him. Your mother was an excellent compartmentalizer.' She looks at me, blankly, then spins round and strides out of the room.

Now I've got her. It's like pressing an injured limb until you find the fracture point – and I think I have it. I must have it. I lean against the range. The warmth spreads up my back. It is obvious: Susannah didn't have an affair with my mother. She had an affair with my father.

She is behind the letter he sent my mother before he brought her to England – she is the source of the guilt that was there, behind every word he wrote. Susannah was the reason my mother hated America and wouldn't talk about the past. No wonder my mother cut her off.

The scenario isn't hard to imagine: my mother takes off with a bunch of obsessed orca researchers, leaving my father and Susannah on campus together, both feeling abandoned and lonely and hurt.

I just have to get her to admit it. Then I'm done here.

Rain lashes the windows, but the thunder and lightning seem to have swept back out to sea. The dogs are in their beds, noses down. Finn is still motionless. Behind him, over by the big windows, Susannah stands with her back to me, staring out at a wall of water.