The Missing One (58 page)

And the truth is that I played a part in all this, too.
Perhaps they would have told me when I was older, if we had been closer, if I had been more reasonable. But I wouldn't let my mother anywhere near me, and I never made the effort to connect with my father.

I shift and a white-hot rod of pain shoots up my leg so that I have to grit my teeth and concentrate hard on breathing. I can't fathom how I ran to that rock – how did I do that? Motherhood really is a triumphant, extraordinary force, not to be messed with.

*

I sit upright. Something has been staring me in the face all this time. I scrabble through the debris in my bag until I find the crumpled wedding photo. I hold it up to the jaundiced airport lights.

His head isn't visible, the photo is creased down his face, which is in a triangle of shadow cast by the building. Her face is turned up to him, and there is a look of absolute joy on it. My mother is in love. But this body is not my father's – it is broader in the shoulders, more muscular, not nearly as tall. And it isn't raining: there is bright sunlight above the roof behind them. The man in this wedding picture isn't my father at all. This man is Jonas Halmstrom.

There is a sense of possession and loss, both at once, and I have to bend over and rest my hands on my knees just to get my breath back.

I have travelled halfway across the world looking for my mother, putting Finn in terrible danger, and myself and this unborn baby, but the truth has been staring at me all the time from the crease in this wedding photo. I just couldn't
see it because I was too busy running away, spinning stories and pressing them into the blanks.

Elena Kalypso married Jonas Halmstrom. They had a little boy, and then a girl.

I have to show the red file to Alice. This is not something to talk about on a mobile from an airport. Everything I have discovered is going to release Alice, too. These are the secrets that both of us need to know. It is easy to forget, when you're running away from something, that you are always running towards something else.

The orca carving is sitting in my bag still – I never took it to the museum in Vancouver. I will take it into the Pitt Rivers, and, if it is valuable, then I will have it sent back to Canada where it belongs. The grinning demon is still unsettling, with its square rows of teeth, and popping little eyes – but it doesn't spook me so much now. I put it back in the box next to the piece of blanket, with the blue
K
. Kit's or mine – I will probably never know. Then I pluck out the folded notebook that started all this. And I remember my mother's diary – tucked in the inside pocket of my North Face parka, on the headland at Black Bear Island, along with my boots and Doug's warm wool sweater.

For a moment, a sort of panic seizes me – I can't just leave them there. My mother's precious diary is on a rock in British Columbia and I didn't even get to read it properly. The parka that protected me and the jumper that connected me to Doug, the boots that took me to Finn. I can't just leave them all, piled like a totem on a rock.

Then I remember the article I read on the plane on the way out, about Pacific Northwest totems – how they can symbolize quarrels, murders, debts, bereavements – things the people could not talk about but needed to express and remember. Those totems were built to disintegrate, slowly, over time. I lean my back against the uncomfortable plastic airport seat. Maybe it is OK that my mother's diary and my belongings should stay on that rock, to be reabsorbed by the landscape.

They are sending out the call for the delayed BA flight to Heathrow. I shove everything back into my bag – all this evidence, this proof – and then I turn to wake Doug.

I take a sip of the hot chocolate he's made, blow on it, take another sip. Then I lift my painful leg very slowly and inch it onto Doug's lap, flinching as I lower it down. I need more, better, painkillers. Tomorrow I will have it X-rayed at the John Radcliffe.

I can see that Doug has been eating himself up. He is exhausted. He rests his head on the back of the sofa and shuts his eyes. The anxiety of me taking off like that with Finn – and presumably the anger – must have been unbearable. He's still angry, too, rightly so – he is alarmed at how far and fast I went from him. To get that phone call, and think something had happened to Finn – then silence. I have put Doug through hell. It's amazing that he's still here. His hair is all over the place, like a field in a gale. He looks just as handsome, but wrecked.

I look around the room – just the same – why wouldn't it be? The scruffy white sofa that needs a wash, the Union Jack cushion, the oil painting of the church where we got
married, the butterfly picture that Doug gave me for my birthday last year, Finn's fingerprints, the sail-white walls above them. Our room is lined with books we've collected separately in the years before we married, and together in the eight years since. And there are Finn's toys, his ride-on tractor, his blocks and lego, his teddy bears, his big box of cars.

He turned away from all this; just briefly, he considered the alternative – but I can't blame him for that, because I'd been pushing him away for months. What is extraordinary is how far I jumped in fear, how swiftly I fell – and how deep. I almost lost everything. The tiredness seeps outwards from my core and it's all I can do to hold the blue-and-white striped mug and drink the hot chocolate. There's no way we can talk about all this now.

Finn yelled, climbed, poked and toddled the entire nine-hour flight – and Doug had to cope with him for most of it, because I couldn't walk around, or even stand for long, with my leg. So we didn't get to talk on the plane. So far all Doug knows is that there was a mix-up, and Susannah took Finn to her floathouse, I followed her, she turned out to be unstable, there was a fight, I fell. It doesn't quite cover things, I know. Tomorrow I will tell him the whole story from beginning to end, leaving nothing out, but right now I am way too tired – and Doug is unconscious.

I rest my hands on my belly. And then, from deep inside me, I feel a familiar flicker – tiny butterfly wings. I close my eyes tight. There – again – the little wings unfold and shiver. ‘So you are still there,' I say to the baby inside me. ‘You made it home, too.'

‘Seriously, though, how could you think I'd have an affair?' Doug opens his eyes, as if we're mid-discussion. ‘How could you actually believe I'd do that to you?'

Doug's eyes are the exact same brown as Finn's. I am flooded, suddenly, with the vastness of what I have, right here in this ordinary little terraced house. ‘I was in shock,' I say. ‘I somehow created a whole, convincing story from those two texts and I believed it – utterly – probably because I was so afraid that it might be true. I shouldn't have run away, I know that. But I was in a state.'

He cups my chin. ‘Kal,' he says. ‘I didn't stop her from texting me, and I'm ashamed of that. I was an arse, but I would never, ever … '

‘I know. I know you wouldn't. You might have been an arse, but I was far, far worse. It's all over now. The good thing is, I'll never be that scared again.'

This, above all, is what the whole nightmare has done for me. I have found the part of myself that lies beneath the babble of stories and fears and hopes and insecurities; beneath the threatening chaos of everyday life. I have found the powerful part of myself that remains when everything else has been stripped away. And now I have located it, I will never forget that it's there.

Sometimes you need to run away in order to get to the right place. If I had let Doug come to Sussex with me the day my mother died, then we'd have talked about the texts at some point and I never would have got on the plane. I would have come home to Oxford and we would have gone back to our routines, the resentments and the growing
distance. The truth would have sat for ever in my mother's jewellery box.

And then where would we all be? I realize that I don't regret what has happened, despite everything – I can't. I am sensible enough not to say this to Doug. Not yet, anyway.

‘Doug.' I'm so tired that my voice is slurred. ‘I know we need to talk about all this, it's huge – there is so much to talk about and I've got so much to tell you but I need to sleep so badly … '

He steers my face towards his again. ‘What the hell happened to you up there?' He leans closer. ‘You're different. It's not just your hair, though that's amazing, but you are … changed.' He touches my cheek.

The exhaustion rolls over me like a fog. I still have so much to say to Doug. If we really are having another baby then things have to be different this time. I know now that I don't need to sacrifice absolutely everything – my identity, my career, my sanity – to prove to my babies that I love them, constantly, and always will. But I also know that very soon I'm going to fall asleep. I put the cup down, and rest my head back on the cushions.

Doug gives my good knee a tiny shake to bring me back. ‘Kal?'

I blink slowly at him. ‘We can talk about everything. We will. But first we really do need to get some sleep.'

‘You're right.'

*

We climb the stairs to our bedroom, me hopping, leaning on Doug. We stop at Finn's room and stand, side by side at his
cot, watching him sleep. He is on his back with both arms by his head. His eyelashes are thick and beautiful. He is just perfect. And safe. Then we go up to our room.

Our bed is soft and white and smells of Doug. His boxers are on the floor. His books are strewn around the place as if he's been up, pacing through the nights. We lie down and I put my head on his chest and for the first time in weeks, months, even years, I know that I am exactly where I belong. Every little bit of me is now in the right place.

My body hums, as if it is still suspended above the Atlantic. My leg aches like hell. But I am here. Home. I lay one hand against my belly and feel the firm rise of it under my fingers, pressing into Doug's flank.

Half of me is Swedish – but not the half I thought. I am not English. And I am completely American. I have met my ancient senile grandfather. I had a brother, a brother who died.

Doug strokes my hair. ‘Don't go to sleep yet.' His voice rumbles under my ear. ‘I've got to tell you this realization I've had – I just don't care if we have another baby. We are enough, just the three of us. We are more than enough. I can't believe how lost we got. Nothing else matters but this.'

I try to answer but I can't make my mouth move in the right shapes.

‘Are we going to be OK?' he says. ‘Kal?'

I make a superhuman effort to speak. ‘Yes,' I say. ‘We really are.'

Rain taps quietly on the roof of our small home. And they flicker across the back of my brain, all of my family,
alive and dead: Finn, Doug, my mother, Jonas, Kit, Harry Halmstrom, my father, Alice – then they begin to recede, growing murkier until only one thing is left, sending its little echolocation pulses out through an ocean of sleep.

‘Doug.' My voice sounds alert. I open my eyes and look at him. ‘About that baby … '

Whenever life got too much – and it often did – she would take herself back to that first day on the boat, the summer of '76, when she woke up certain that someone was on the deck – and she went up there alone, and leaned over the railings and the whales came.

Sometimes this was the only clear point in a head jumbled with unbearable memories. She never had managed to shut it all out, though she had certainly tried. But that one morning – her first as Jonas's wife – always stayed simple and pure, like a white stone in a beach of complicated pebbles. Right to the end that memory was her place of refuge.

*

The cedar planks were cold underfoot as she pulled his fisherman's sweater over her pyjamas, found wool socks and tugged them on. She stood and listened at the bottom of the stairs, but she could only hear Jonas's deep breaths from their bed, and faint snores coming from Dean's cabin.

She looked at him in the half-light for a moment. He had rolled onto his stomach when she got up, and was lying face down now in the warm space that she'd left. His face was half buried in the pillow and his beard was in shadows, but she could see the rise and fall of his shoulders and the constellation of freckles across his broad shoulder blades; his skin always tasted of the sea.

When he had sat down opposite her outside the campus café that day, and pushed up the sleeves of his blue shirt, she'd known, right away, that he was her future. When he stood on the stage and talked after the film she hadn't noticed much about him, but two days later, in the sunlight at ten o'clock in the morning, when he started talking about the orca-mapping project, she knew she had to be with him.

It wasn't just the handsome face – his strong nose, the solid chin under his rough beard or the dark-blue eyes that never seemed to look away, or how he leaned forward to make a point and the muscles of his forearms tensed and the tendons shifted. It wasn't just what he said about the whales – though she listened hungrily to it all. It was his voice – his voice vibrated all the way inside her, making every cell in her body sing and come alive. Hearing his voice, she was home.

*

She tiptoed over to the galley stove, found the matches and lit the gas to brew a pot of coffee. She never believed that she would marry anyone, let alone a man she'd known for just a few weeks, in an impulse wedding ceremony witnessed by strangers. She wore her one dress and they bought wild flowers
from Pike Place Market. They asked a passing tourist to take their picture, and they celebrated with the wind battering the sides of the camper van and the sound of the sea outside the fogged-up windows. And now, on this first day as his wife, on Dean's boat, heading north, none of it made rational sense. But it was completely right.