Among the Missing

by Morag Joss

  On the Friday five days after the photograph in the garden was taken, on an identical, shriveling hot afternoon after everybody had stopped saying the weather was lovely, my mother went next door to mind baby Annabel while Marjorie popped out to pick up the developed film from the pharmacy. Annabel had been difficult all day—too much sun, probably—but she had gone down to sleep in her cot at last, and Marjorie didn’t want to risk setting her off again by putting her in the pram and lugging her on and off the bus in the heat. But she was desperate to get into town that afternoon for the pictures because the pharmacy was closed on Saturdays. There were lots of new ones of Annabel, as well as last Sunday’s tea party in the garden.

  None of these details was mentioned while my mother was alive. I heard them from my father afterward, over the years, in faint, unintentional allusions and references and little wisps of fact, never the whole story at once. And in retrospect, the thirteen years of my childhood before my mother died, before I knew a single thing about Annabel Porter, seem to have been a strange kind of waiting time, when I was learning, without understanding what it was, to live half-drowned in the backwash of an old disaster. It was always there, never spoken of but still the reason why certain words and phrases could bring conversation to a halt: Inquest. Heat wave. Died in infancy. It hung around like a kind of eerie damp rising up from a long-ago flood that was now a stagnant pool in the cellar of a house where the words flood and cellar were unmentionable.

  On that Friday afternoon, Marjorie wouldn’t, she told my mother, take so much as a peek at the photos before she got them home, she’d wait and they’d look at them together. I thought of all the pictures I would take of my own baby, and I could imagine Marjorie, glowing with the kindness of her gesture, sitting on the bus with the packet warm in her hands, the crackly waxed paper around the photographs still sealed. Brave, barren Irene, she was thinking, so disappointed and deserving and sweetly interested in Annabel, a perfectly sensible woman when she wasn’t going overboard on the religion. A book of illustrated Bible stories when the baby was a week old, honestly! She could be given at least this, a little share in the immaculate newness of the newest baby photographs.

  Had Marjorie really thought all that, sitting on the bus? I didn’t know, and my father had no patience with that kind of conjecture, but in those early days at the cabin, I was certain that she had.

  And now here she comes, openhearted Marjorie, through her own back door, calling out to Irene to get the kettle on and they’ll look at the photographs over a cup of tea. She drops the packet and her handbag on the kitchen table, kicks off the shoes that have made her feet swell, and peels away the chiffon head scarf from her soft tower of hair. Irene, looking frowsy and blue about the gills, walks to the sink with the kettle. She’s been feeling off since the heat wave, everything turns her stomach, it must be her age, once upon a time she would have been in the sun all day and loving every minute. Over the running of the tap, she says she looked in on Annabel twice and she’s sound asleep and there hasn’t been a squeak; the mite must have worn herself out this morning with her colic. Marjorie lights the gas, takes the kettle from Irene and sets it over the flame. She puts a saucepan of water on to a gentle simmer and lowers in the sterilized bottle of baby formula. She pulls at two or three escaping strands of hair and tucks them back into the nest of her hairdo, then heads up the stairs in her damp stockinged feet to bring Annabel down for her feed.

  It begins as a high keening, a wail that strangely comes and goes as if Marjorie’s whole body is spilling away into a place that’s bottomless and echoing, as if she is drowning in her own agony and also trying to struggle up out of it, screaming with terror. It rides over other sounds: the whistle of the kettle on the gas, the last bubble of water boiling dry in the unwatched pan, and the snap of glass as the feeding bottle bursts, the hiss of milk curds roasting on searing hot tin.

  And Irene is rooted in the kitchen doorway and has no words to meet anything as fearsome as this, Marjorie with that look on her face, clutching her dead baby against her and screaming, Marjorie bursting her way out the front door and making off down the road still screaming, holding out her child to people who are now coming from their houses to see what the noise is about. Irene cannot follow. She is trying to stop her bones from shaking themselves loose inside their thin wrappings of muscle, she has set her jaw against letting her own screams escape; she holds on to the doorposts, but sudden pains are shooting inside her and she can’t control the noxious rocking in the cavity of her stomach, which now is slopping with vomit and disgorging it, without warning, all over the floor.

  Though she survived another thirteen years, I am certain my mother was never free of the noise of that afternoon in her head, its heat on her skin, the taste of it in her mouth. It made no difference to her that the inquest concluded three weeks later it was a cot death. She had never heard of cot death. Babies sometimes just stopped breathing for no known medical reason, it was mercifully rare but becoming more common? That was no explanation at all. The doctor and coroner were merely giving a name to some newly invented peril for healthy babies. Cot death? The child had died in Irene’s care. She should not have touched her. She should have picked her up. She should have covered her, uncovered her, turned her on her side, not turned her, opened the window, closed the window. She should have kept her alive. In taking the blame on herself, she was not discouraged by the Porters nor, it seemed, the whole town. Nobody else had heard of cot death, either.

  My mother came to believe, once she could no longer deny that the disturbance in her own body was a pregnancy, so late and unlooked-for it felt unnatural, that she had taken Annabel’s life as surely as if she had choked the child or driven a blade through her chest. Because there must have been a moment when she had sucked the life out of the baby’s unconscious body and drawn it up, somehow, into hers; that must be why she had left the darkened nursery forgetting to whisper “God bless you,” and feeling even more nauseous and drowsy and faint.

  And it wasn’t enough that she believed she’d done it, my father told me, she still had to know how God could have let her. She spoke to her priest, not that it helped. He couldn’t convince her that some force within her had not stolen the child’s life. It must be, she reasoned, that in smoothing Annabel’s hair with too much yearning, she had tapped a well in herself that was not love at all but some distortion of love, something visceral and needy and covetous. She had craved her own baby too much, and there had been nothing to protect Annabel from such aching, unguarded cupidity. The child had been christened, and had that done a thing to keep her sanctified soul moored within her body? I imagined a flummoxed young minister reaching for the orthodox comforts about baptism and the life everlasting. But my mother would have shaken her head. No, God had declined to lift a finger to save Annabel, and so where did that leave it, the soul? Unprotected. Anywhere. Nowhere. There was nothing eternal, or still, or unique about it. It did not—it could not—belong to God. It was not merely unsanctified but unsanctifiable. She knew.

  She left the church. Henceforth her soul, unsafe like every other, would have to look after itself just as Annabel’s soul, taking its chances, had proved itself restlessly and promiscuously fluid, capable of passing from person to person, its tenure always provisional upon the beckoning of its next nascent host. So it was that my mother, slaking some ancient thirst for her own child, had drawn Annabel’s supple, migrant soul out of her sleeping body and into her own, where it was to alight, and embed, and animate the simmering, multiplying cells that were even then readying themselves to be expelled exactly thirty-seven weeks later as me, the deplorable little thief whose veins raced with lifeblood stolen from Annabel Porter.

  Cot death or not, new phenomenon or not, it was a cruelty of nature on a scale that was medieval, a calamity so woeful and mythic that it had, in fact, brought a chorus of women wailing onto the streets to prize the corpse of an infant from the arms of its deranged, barefoot mother. I think it migh
t have saved my mother’s sanity had her part in the affair been condemned outright as diabolical; an explanation, however anachronistic, that blackened her reputation with the name of witch might have been preferable, in the months that followed, to her neighbors’ askance looks and hasty crossings of the street. The Porters moved away. I was born, and for the next thirteen years my mother did not leave the house to go any farther than the back garden visible behind the fence in the photograph.

  When Ron began to help us, I thought it was because he is kind; now I think it is because he likes us. We are doing very well. Annabel is eating like a pig. He has noticed it, and that must be why he brings us so much food as well as all the other things. But I do not think he has noticed why she is so hungry. Her stomach is beginning to show, but he doesn’t look at her body, or at mine. He watches our faces. When he finds out Annabel is having a baby, I think he will help even more. He is a good man. When you come back, he will be like a grandfather to Anna.

  Sometimes, when Annabel is thinking about something far away, or is asleep, the look on her face is so smooth I could cry with envy. Sometimes my stomach and throat shut themselves tight when I think of her body getting ready, the way mine did with Anna. I feel a prickling in my breasts the way I did when our baby was suckling. When you come back, I want us to have another baby.

  Of course I have wondered if you are dead, but you aren’t. It isn’t possible. I need you too much for you to be gone forever. You can’t be dead because if you are, Anna must be, too, and that isn’t possible, either. I need her too much for her no longer to exist. There is no other need or purpose or reason in this world stronger than my need to hold you both in my arms. You are coming back.

  Until then, I’ll watch Annabel grow heavy and lazy, and I’ll take care of her as if the child inside her was mine. We can stay here for a long time, as long as we like, as long as we need. Until you come back and we have our own new baby, there will be Annabel’s to look after.

  I didn’t know until now how beautiful the forest is. The trees stand all around us like guarding giants, and they have a smell that is strong and clean, and the sound the branches make at night is a safe sound, like me saying shoosh-shoosh to Anna when she cries.

  The Porters left; why didn’t we leave, too? There was nothing about the house or my father’s job at the council that could not have been replicated elsewhere. Was it heroism that made my father choose to stay and stand by his wife in front of the whole town, or was it simple obstinacy? Or was it a failure of imagination—at a time when every family in England that wasn’t doing it themselves knew of some other family, someone at the office or down the street, that was packing its life into oceangoing containers and emigrating to Australia or Canada—that he could not envisage the three of us embarking on a journey even as far as the next county? I think it most likely that by the time he thought of moving us anywhere it was already too late. Our lives were too ingrained in the causes and effects of my mother’s entrapment to withstand any such uprooting.

  He cycled everywhere; his bicycle clips were as redolent of his presence in the house as the sound of his voice. They would be on the draining board, or hanging out of the top pocket of his jacket over a kitchen chair, or (to my mother’s consternation) balanced on the Wedgwood clock on the side table in the hall. He went to work and shopped and ran the errands on his bicycle; he fitted a seat to the back of it, and until I was old enough to ride my own bicycle, he fetched and carried me to and from all the excursions of my small life: school, the dentist, the cinema now and then, or a school friend’s birthday party. He would take back to my mother an account of films we saw; he brought her news of happenings in the town: businesses opening or closing, interchanges and supermarkets springing up, the switching on of the shopping center Christmas lights, new benches along the riverbank. Over the years we all grew used to this rhythm of excursions and reports, but he never gave up suggesting gently she might care to see these things for herself, and she always said when she felt a bit more like it she might just do that. But she preferred to stay at home for the time being.

  I found myself wishing, those first weeks in the cabin, that I had known then what I was discovering now: that it is possible—not easy, but possible—to draw a life to a close in one place and start another not only somewhere else but as someone else. It would have helped my parents to believe in just the possibility; to dream of it, even if it had remained always a dream, might have saved them. And I still wanted them to know, as if somehow they had time remaining to them to change anything, that with the right moves it could be done, and so I went about the cabin as if they were watching. I wanted all the tasks of cleaning and clearing and getting the place fit to live in to look transparently sensible and natural to them. I wanted to convince them, by taking the strangeness out of it, that I was making a success of this odd turn of events. You see, I was trying to say, it’s all about taking a risk, getting out while you can, finding somewhere to fix up and call home. You can just go. They were present to me every bit as much as my baby was, and I was sure they were pleased to see me perform this act of reinvention for the sake of their grandchild.

  The weather improved, and this, too, I could not see as anything other than approval, a kindly warmth cast on my enterprise. During the first two weeks, I scrubbed the cabin from top to bottom: ceilings, walls, floors. I carried out bucket after bucket of filthy black water floating with dead insects and cobwebs and dumped it all in the pit we had dug at the back, a little way into the trees. I unstuck the windows and kept them as well as the doors open all day, and the sun dried out the place and left behind a smell of soap and resin and sawdust. I washed the curtains and hung them back up (they still looked shabby but would have to do for now). I pulled out the linoleum flooring completely, and Ron took it away in the boat to dispose of. At the end of each day, Silva came back down through the trees with pine needles stuck to her shoes and in her hair, and I would make a point of spending the first hour or so showing her all I had done. She needed distracting when she got home at the end of another day without word or sight of Stefan and Anna.

  Ron would come later, after his work on the river, either with something we had asked him to get for us or more often with something he had seen we needed: oil for the creaking doors, a pane of glass and some putty, kerosene lamps, a plastic picnic table. I gave him money for the things I asked him to get, but usually he shrugged and refused it, as if the notion of paying for things just didn’t interest him for the moment. He had access to all kinds of tools and materials; he secured both doors and cleared the roof and gutters and got the water collection tank off the roof, cleaned out, and working again, with new pipes. He was looking for a small generator, he told us, so we could run the fridge and use the shower instead of heating up water in a tin bath outside. He brought containers of drinking water every day, saving Silva the trouble of getting it at Vi’s and carrying it down through the forest. Often he brought leftover food: big slabs of lasagna or bags of meatballs, half a cheesecake, for which I was grateful because I was always hungry. He was staying in a kind of bunkhouse for the workmen who lived on-site during the week, and the catering was crude and generous.

  By the middle of April the bridge was secured, the salvage work scaled back, and the investigation into the cause of the collapse, as far as Ron could tell, all but concluded. For the time being, the diving teams had been disbanded and the five vehicles still in the water left wherever they might be lying; strong spring currents were pushing what was left of them to and fro among hunks of submerged rubble and steel, making further recovery dives impossible. Ron heard people say they would never be brought out. They and the bodies in them would probably be washed all the way down the estuary by underwater currents and devoured by the sea.

  On the site there was a lull while what Mr. Sturrock called “the fuckin’ powers that be” considered bids (“twiddling their fuckin’ thumbs”) for the rebuilding of the bridge. But Ron was if anything busier; al
most every day he took Mr. Sturrock and groups of surveyors and engineers out to examine the bridge piers that were still standing, and every day he overheard them discuss the latest analyses of the wreckage.

  Mr. Sturrock also had a new task. The trouser-suited young woman called Rhona, whom Ron had seen from time to time in the site office (there were few women on the site and no others as memorably glamorous), turned out to be in charge of public relations for the project. However preposterous he thought the very idea of public relations, every other Saturday, Mr. Sturrock had to “keep the community updated” by meeting groups of people who signed up for guided walks of the reconstruction site. Ron would take him over by boat, and all the way across Mr. Sturrock would complain his job wasn’t being a fucking tour guide. On the other side, Rhona brought the people who had assembled at the service station down to the bridge end, from where, wearing an assortment of hard hats and clutching information packs, they would walk along a section of the old roadway, listening to Mr. Sturrock.

  Ron listened, too, and he learned that the bridge had been old for its type, opened in 1956 and due for replacement in 2011 anyway. This was fortunate, because work that was already in hand on a provisional new design could be brought forward for almost immediate adoption, with a great saving of time. Not that the bridge’s collapse could be directly related to its age, nor had anything been discovered that pointed to faulty structural design or construction. The maintenance records were up-to-date, and the routine repairs, neither critical nor urgent, that had been completed three months before the bridge collapsed were not considered to have been in any way connected with the accident. Metal fatigue due to heavy traffic had been ruled out.