Among the Missing (34 page)

To his surprise, Colin meekly swallowed some tea, then took another mouthful.

“No point falling apart, is there,” Ron said. “Doesn’t get you anywhere.”

“Sorry. Gets to me, that’s all.” Colin drew a hand over his face.

“Nobody’s to blame,” Ron said again. “Miscarriages aren’t anybody’s fault.”

Colin drank more of his tea in silence. After a while, he said in a flat voice, “She was pregnant. I didn’t tell the police. Nobody knew but me.”

“Why not? Why make a secret of it?”

Colin let out a massive sigh. “I felt guilty. Ashamed. Too ashamed to say.”

“I’m telling you, a miscarriage isn’t anybody’s fault, mate.”

Colin sighed again and took a deep breath. “I’m trying to tell you. There wasn’t a miscarriage. She was pregnant. When she died. What happened, see, I told her to get rid of it. The day before she died I told her she couldn’t have a kid and me as well, I said I’d leave.”

Ron stared at him. Colin’s face was pulpy and unwell-looking; his eyes had an off-center, uneven way of blinking. It occurred to Ron that remorse was, literally, a sickness. Colin was so sick, so unbalanced by it, he looked in danger of falling apart.

“She was my wife. She was going to be the mother of my kid, and I said that to her. I can’t believe I said that to her,” Colin said. “And now there is not one single reason I don’t want that kid. I want them both, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Ron said quietly, “Do you have a photo of her?”

“No. To be honest, I can’t stand to see her face. Only had a few pictures, anyway.” Colin tapped his head. “She’s in my mind. I see her face in my mind. But only here, I only see her when I come here. She hated Huddersfield, she didn’t like the house. I didn’t really listen. I should’ve done a lot of things different.”

Ron let his breath out slowly. “We could all say that, mate.”

I think a lot about Col, lying here. Not anymore in the panicky, guilty way of a few months ago but with a strand of regret I follow right back to the day I chose to disappear, a day I now perceive as marked as much by regret as by catastrophe. Not that Col will be feeling that. I’m certain he is back sympathetically engrossed in the caregivers’ chat room, untroubled by ever having known me.

I think of our early days together, how to begin with I did not feel very much at all except embarrassment at living with a near stranger. But now I’m almost nostalgic for that early awkwardness, our misdirected attempts at endearments, my pursuit of some improved neatness in the arrangements of the house, his wordless, ritualized moves in bed. It touches me to remember the way every night he launched himself at me without speaking, his efforts to please, his mountainous heavings on and off. I forgive myself my mute acquiescence (I thought it sophisticated to have nothing to say at such times), which matched his lack of words. I can imagine the conversations we should have had, the conversations we lay so self-consciously
not
having afterward, in the dark, but our silence strikes me now as more like generosity tongue-tied than disappointment throttling itself before it can cry out.

Anyway, it will surely happen that one day I’ll be called upon to give some account to my child of its father, and by then words will have come to me and I shall have them waiting, as if written down and placed in an envelope, sealed and put by. I do not have them ready at present, but it will be years before I need them. When the time comes, I will know what to say, surely.

Ron comes into the cabin scraping his feet and dumps a heap of damp
wood by the stove. This is what he does every evening; after he’s tied up the boat, he collects an armful of logs from the pile by the sawhorse he’s set up between the jetty and the cabin and trudges up with it and adds it to our store. He’ll make several more trips over the evening; against the thin cabin wall, on either side of the stove, an inner wall of logs is building up. It is shoulder-high already and rising in an uneven wave, and Silva keeps telling him not to make it much higher as we can’t stand on chairs to get logs down every time we need to stoke the fire.

“How are you doing today?” he asks me routinely, as he starts to stack the new batch of logs.

Silva appears from the kitchen with a knife in her hand. “She got too tired,” she answers for me. It so happens she is wrong; I was out of doors and out of her sight for over an hour, that’s all that
too tired
means. But I don’t contradict her, I just smile.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “I went for a nice long stroll. I sat down and rested every five minutes,” I add, before Silva can lecture me again about drawing blood away from the baby.

She gives a snort. “Look at the color of her; she’s white like a sheet of paper. Ugh, don’t put that log on, it’s filthy. Don’t make it any higher there, the whole thing will fall over.” She returns to the kitchen, and Ron continues to stack.

When I’m resting here and watching him, I like to conjure animal faces out of the rings and whorls of the newly sawn log ends he puts in place: one looks like an owl, another is a baboon, another is a cat wearing spectacles. When this wall’s complete, Ron intends to start on the adjoining wall, and once that’s done he’ll replenish our stocks as they go down. Not only will we have good, dry fuel all the time, he says, but double wooden walls provide excellent insulation. It’s what they do in Norway, and there’s not much you can teach a Norwegian about insulation. I’m sure this is true, but of course as the wall goes up our room grows smaller. You might even say it’s closing in on us; it does smell blocked and earthy, with an end-of-year whiff that carries a note of decay. And the new wall is full of trapped, trembling insects. Whenever I lift a log to put on the stove, it comes away from the pile with a gauzy trail of tearing spiderwebs, gritty with rotting bark and mold and sawdust. Silva says mice will move in, and Ron laughs and says even mice need to live somewhere and at least the wood will stay dry enough to burn.

“So you are all right?” he asks, as he’s putting the last logs in place.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m so lazy, I’m too heavy to do anything much,” I say.

“He was there again today, that bloke from Huddersfield. Colin. The bloke whose wife died.”

I pick up my knitting from the floor and fiddle with it. “How is he? Did he speak to you?”

“He says he’s going to keep coming. Every weekend.”

“What’s the point in that now the walks are finished? He should stay away.”

“There’s a point in it for him. They still haven’t found her. Have you ever been to Huddersfield?”

“No, never.” I haul myself up till I’m sitting on the sofa bed and I start on a row of knitting. “If I go for it, I think I could get this sleeve finished by bedtime.”

“Annabel, where is it you’re from?” Ron asks. He is breaking the rule. No matter that the rule is unstated, it has held us together for months. The rule is that the three of us ended up here by ways and means we don’t have to explain. Ron knows that.

“What does it matter?” I say. “I don’t ask you questions like that. I don’t have the right. There’s no need for me to know. And what about her?” I nod toward the kitchen, where the radio is blaring music. “Are you going to start asking her that kind of question? She’ll run a mile. You shouldn’t—”

Just then Silva walks in again, carrying a plate of bread. She looks tired in a way only a much older person should look. I can’t be sure what she heard or didn’t hear. She waits for me to finish what I was saying.

“You shouldn’t stack the logs so high. Silva’s right.” I put the knitting aside and get up. “I need to stretch my legs,” I tell them, and leave.

It’s too cold to stay out without another sweater, and in fact I am too tired to walk far. I go down to the jetty and look back at the cabin, its windows glowing with firelight, squares of soft yellow in the grainy, gray dusk. The baby’s weight makes me breathless. All I want is to go back inside, all I want is to carry on living by the rules that have served us well enough, but what awaits me in the yellow light is altered now. The door opens, and Ron steps out. I turn away and stare at the river, listening to his footsteps on the stones coming nearer and then the hard
clump as he walks along the jetty and stands next to me. I am too angry to say anything.

He sighs, lifts a hand and strokes my hair. He is crying.

“He wants you back” is all he says before he unties the boat and climbs in, starts the motor, and moves off into the tide flowing down toward the bridge. I wait until I’m shivering before I go back to the cabin. Silva is coming out of the kitchen with three plates, and when I tell her Ron has left she thinks it is because she spoke sharply to him about the logs. She is peeved and irritable all evening. In truth she exhausts me. Later I go to bed, and although the baby kicks and kicks, I fall asleep. I’m glad I’m too tired to dwell on the strange truth that now that Ron may know who I am, I feel more unknown than ever.

She lies there. She lies there breathing with her mouth open while the stove burns low and the knitting comes apart in her hands, because her hands feel nothing, not the metal knitting needles that are hot from the fire or the stitches slipping off past her fat finger ends or the unraveling wool settling over the creases at her wrist. The hands don’t move. The fingers look boneless, like stuffed tubes; her nails are sunk into the tips like flat baby buttons pushed into dough. She’s on her back like a sleeping sow, her breath whistling in her throat, eyelashes twitching on her pink face. Her chest moves up and down, her breasts lift and collapse over her bulging stomach. Her giant bare feet look too lumpy to walk on. They still carry semicircular ridges across the fronts where the swollen flesh has bulged from her overtight shoes, which lie splayed and distorted on the floor beside her.

I watch her for more than an hour.

“I told you you were too tired,” I say in a loud voice, and I go to the table and make a noise clearing our plates and taking them to the kitchen. Her phone is also on the table, and I clear that away to the kitchen, too. I have to do everything. Every evening I check that it’s charged and working. She can’t be trusted to.

When I come back, she is awake and sitting up with the knitting in her lap, trying to push her feet into her shoes.

“You’ll split them,” I tell her. “You can’t get them on anymore. They don’t fit.”

“I know they don’t,” she says calmly. “But it’s not worth getting new ones now. They’ll fit me again as soon as the baby’s born.” She smoothes a hand over her belly and picks up the knitting, frowning at it.

“Oh dear, you shouldn’t have let me fall asleep,” she says, yawning, picking at the yarn with the needles. “Look at this mess.”

“Don’t blame me,” I say. “I told you you were too tired.”

She pauses with the knitting and looks at me, then gets up, sighing. “I’m not blaming you, Silva. I’m going to bed.”

“I suppose
I’ll
clear up, then,” I say.

Another sigh. “I’m happy to do it in the morning, but I’m very tired now. Please leave everything. I’ll do it in the morning.”

“Leave everything dirty all night? No. That’s not how I am. You can go to bed if you like.”

“Just leave it, Silva, it won’t matter. I’ll do it in the morning. Good night.”

She shambles off without another word, bent over with her hands on the small of her back, her fat feet half out of her shoes. She doesn’t walk like that when Ron is here. I want to tell her I know about them. Does she think I’m stupid? I see their faces, I know they whisper away together. I heard them at it this evening, and when I appeared she pretended she was talking about the logs. I want to tell her Ron is as much mine for the taking as hers, I could have him if I chose to. Then it would be me he gives whatever I ask for on a plate, it would be me he’s ready to drop everything for, take anywhere I want. She has everything, and she deserves nothing.

She must be making all her plans. She must be feeling very clever. I am so angry I am going to have to cry. But I can’t bear to go to my room, where I have nothing of you but your photographs, while she lies on the other side of the wall stroking that belly of hers, thinking of that baby, smiling to herself. I go back to the kitchen and pick up her phone. I check it, and it’s just as I suppose: she’s got it on silent. That will be so she can carry on text conversations with him all day, even while I’m around. Making all their plans for after the baby. How and when they are going to leave me.