by Morag Joss
“Aren’t they just trying to help?”
“They think I should be getting over it. Some people tell me I’m lucky, I should be glad I wasn’t in the car with her.”
He blew his nose into a rag of used paper handkerchief with an embarrassing, piteous honk that blasted little wisps of tissue across his chin and cheeks.
“So, anyway, that’s the last of the bridge walks,” Ron said. “No more trailing up and down from Huddersfield. You’ll be getting your weekends back, a bit of time to yourself. Any plans?”
Colin glared at him. “I’ll still be coming. Why would I not still come? She’s still here.”
“Oh. Okay. Sorry, I didn’t mean-”
“You know the worst thing people say? They say be glad we weren’t married long enough to have kids. Because imagine what that’d be like, they’d have lost their mother and I’d be left to cope on my own.”
Ron knew how this line of thinking went: grief for loss of what you did have, beside grief for loss of what you did not but might have had, is a lesser grief. He also knew this thinking for what it was, the well-meaning, ill-contrived, and fatuous condolence of outsiders, people uninitiated in loss.
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“No,” Colin said, his voice faltering. “They don’t know how stupid it is. They don’t know how cruel.”
“They don’t mean to be cruel. Nobody understands what it’s like to lose somebody until it happens to them.”
“I don’t mean that,” Colin said. Then his face collapsed and his shoulders started to shudder. The used tissue went up to his eyes, but huge, splattery tears were already dropping on the front of his clothes. Ron watched them roll like raindrops down his barrel chest. “I mean, don’t they think I’d be glad if there was a kid? Don’t they think I’d want to bring it up? I’d do it now if I could, I’d do it right, by both of them. I wish she knew that. I wish we’d had the kid. But we didn’t and now it’s too late.”
“The kid?” Ron said. “You mean you lost one, you lost a baby? I’m really sorry. That’s really tough.”
Colin nodded and cried noisily into his hands. “I never thought I’d want them both so much. They’ve both gone, and it’s my fault. Nobody knows. Nobody knows.”
“It’s not your fault, mate. Listen, it happens. Miscarriages happen. Nobody’s to blame.” Ron now wanted to offer comfort to this large, off-putting man, but his words were having no effect. “Here,” he said, pushing Colin’s mug toward him. “Here, go on, take a swig of that. You need to calm down.”
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.
I look at the In box, and yes, of course there’s a message from Ron, and in the Sent box is her reply.
Held up in queue. See you car park 4:30. Did you get bandage for s?
Thx OK. Yes. Also getting savlon + aftersun.
Both messages are from a Sunday in late August, not long after she tried to see the doctor in Inverness and I’d made her start carrying her phone again. On the Sunday morning I’d cut my hand with a chisel, chipping stones for your memorial. It was baking hot by the afternoon, and I came back to the cabin with my shoulders and nose red and sore and my hand wrapped in the bloodied folds of my skirt. Annabel patched me up using small bandages and tissues and asked Ron to take her to the pharmacy in Netherloch. Ron said he needed some white spirit anyway, so they went together, and she bought bandages and also lotion for my shoulders.
When they got back, she cleaned the cut and dressed it, then she dabbed the sunburn lotion on me. She put the bottle in the refrigerator so it would be extra cold an
d soothing for the next time I needed it. She thought I was crying because my skin was sore, but I was crying for her kindness and how cared-for I felt. How long ago that is.
There are no other text messages from Ron since then, and only three or four from me. That means the ones they’ve been sending each other since, she’s been deleting as she goes, in case I find them. If she’s doing that, I must be right to worry. Maybe it started longer ago than I think. Suddenly I recall the day in July when Ron brought the paper with the photographs of your chain and Anna’s giraffe. They sat up that night together, waiting for me to sleep. Was that when they began to say to each other they would be better off without me? How long have those looks between them being going on, those conversations that stop the moment I come into the room?
There is nothing on her voice mail. Now I scroll through the call records, and since late August there are no numbers either received or dialed except mine. There is nothing recorded between then and the eighteenth of February.
But on the eighteenth of February she called another number. On the nineteenth, she missed and received calls from the same number. It’s a number so familiar to me but so out of place and time that at first I don’t believe what I’m seeing. I get my own phone and look. Of course I know I am right, I am merely putting off the moment of acceptance. For a time I look from one number to the other, a phone in the palm of each hand, checking every digit, until I cannot deny it.
The person who called her on the nineteenth of February was you. Were you replying to her calls to you on the eighteenth? There are none before that and, of course, none since. My mouth is dry, and a kind of creak comes from my throat. Something is robbing me of the strength to call out. I drink a cup of water, and another.
Less than three hours before you and Anna were thrown off the bridge in a car rented by a woman whose body has never been found, you spoke to Annabel. This Annabel who lies in the next room, who that night wandered the choked roads with nowhere to go and came knocking on our trailer door. Annabel who collapsed sick and helpless in front of me the next morning and after that never left, and has never said who she is. She attached herself to me as if her arrival did not need explaining, and by the time I thought to ask her about it, she told me that she stayed with me to help me. If I shook her awake now she would say the same thing, in her flat, lazy way. She says she found the trailer by accident. But the trailer was not in a place she could have found by accident. I calculate quickly.
