The Missing One

by Lucy Atkins

  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.

  I walk slowly into the living room. Rain drums against the roof and lashes the glass. A rumble of thunder sounds in the distance. I stand by the arm of the sofa. The rug is stained under her feet where rain has dribbled off her clothes. I can see her face, reflected in the darkened windows. I realize she is looking right at me.

  ‘Susannah. Was my mother very in love?’

  She stiffens. ‘Who with?’

  ‘What? With my father, of course.’

  She laughs, throwing her head back. It is a weird, barking sound. ‘Shit!’ She spins around. ‘Holy shit, Kali! Didn’t she talk about any of this to you? I mean, nothing at all? Seriously?’ She wipes her hair off her face. ‘This is NOT my job.’

  Finn sits up with a start. He opens his mouth and the wail is like the build-up of a long, slow siren. I go to him, bend down. He looks at me, baffled and sweaty. I hug him tight, and over his head I say to her, ‘She ran off, leaving you and my father together, didn’t she? Why can’t you just tell me what really happened? It was years ago, it doesn’t matter any more. I won’t judge you. I just want to know.’

  I heave Finn off the sofa. He wraps his arms around my neck and sobs into my ear.

  ‘It’s OK, love.’ I pat his back. ‘It’s OK. Just silly shouting. It’s OK.’ But I don’t take my eyes off Susannah.

  ‘I thought nothing woke him,’ she says, nastily.

  I ignore this. ‘My mother is dead, Susannah! I just want to know what happened in her life to make her who she was. Can’t you give me that much? Did you have an affair with my father, Susannah? Or was it my mother?’

  The windows reflect the room and I see the dogs coming from the kitchen behind me. For a moment I think they’ve heard the aggression in my voice and are coming for me. I brace myself, hanging onto my sobbing child, and wait for their teeth to sink into my calves. But they go straight past me, over to Susannah.

  And she just walks away with them, down the corridor, towards her room with her chin up like an empress.

  I am trembling as I try to calm Finn down. The poor little boy. First we shout and wake him up, then we snipe over his head. Poor, jet-lagged, disorientated little boy. This is no place for him. There really is no point in this. It’s futile. Susannah is only going to give me what she wants to give – and that, apparently, is almost nothing.

  I hug him, and kiss his wet face. ‘Shhhh, shhhhh, it’s OK, love, it’s OK.’ His sobs subside. He smells milky and sweet – always more babyish when he just wakes up. His hair is soft and static. I smooth it off his forehead. But then Susannah reappears. She stops at the entrance to the living room.

  ‘This isn’t any of your business.’ She
leans a hand on the doorframe. ‘But I’ll tell you anyway just so we’re clear here. I did not have an affair with either Gray or your mother. Gray loved your mother very much. He was,’ she pauses, glancing upwards as if searching for exactly the right word, ‘a fucking saint.’ She turns, again, and stalks away.

  So, she won. If this was a battle, then right now she’s standing over my corpse, waving a bloodied machete. I look down at Finn and he hiccups. We should just go. We might make the last ferry – if it leaves when it should, though, granted, that’s a pretty big ‘if’.

  But here she is again, striding up the corridor towards us. This is becoming positively farcical. I brace myself for another announcement, but she walks right past us, through the kitchen and out the French windows – I feel a blast of cold air. The dogs follow her into the rain. She slams the doors shut. The handmade plates shiver on their shelves.

  My head throbs. Finn hiccups again, just once. I stroke his hair out of his eyes again. ‘Let’s go, love,’ I say.

  He looks up at me with Doug’s chocolate-brown eyes and I kiss the end of his nose. I need to change his nappy. Pack up our stuff. Give him some milk. I seem to spend my whole time leaving these days.

  Then I force myself to stop. This time, I have to think. I’ve done far too much running from this to that, bouncing across oceans, standing on freezing doorsteps. I have to make a proper plan this time. Am I really going to drive Finn through a thunderstorm across this godawful island only to miss the ferry, or to find that it left six hours earlier than it was supposed to – or not at all? Then we’ll have nowhere to stay, and I can’t imagine having to crawl back here and beg Susannah for her spare bed again. It would be far more sensible to stay tonight, make amends like a rational adult, then leave calmly in the morning. This, undoubtedly, is what Alice would tell me to do right now.

  I shift Finn onto my hip. I am still damp and cold, I need to change my clothes; but as I start to move, a blackness rushes from behind my eyes and my ears buzz. I sit down on the sofa before I fall over.

  Something is wrong. Something is off-balance deep inside me. I shut my eyes and the world spins. Only Finn’s body on my lap is firm and solid and warm and definite.

  But of course something’s wrong: I’m jet-lagged. This is stressful. I’m confused. My mother just died. My husband may or may not be having an affair with his glamorous ex-girlfriend. I’ve blown a large proportion of our savings on a plane ticket to the middle of nowhere. It would be frankly abnormal to feel normal at this point.

  I feel Finn’s hands on my face, patting my cheeks. ‘Mama?’

  I hug him tight. I want to talk to Alice. I need to tell her what I’ve discovered about our mother’s awful childhood and the orca-mapping project. Perhaps she already knows some of this. But I don’t think so. I’m sure she would have told me about this if she’d known. Alice is as much in the dark about our mother’s past as I am. The two of them were harmonious and happy, but it seems that my mother’s secrets were unbreachable, even by Alice.

  Finn slithers off my lap and toddles away chatting to himself, ‘Bah, bah. Dat?’ Then I realize he’s making for the Chihuly. I launch myself after him, sweeping him to the right, so his legs fly up towards the bookshelves. I whisk him into the kitchen and put him down. My head wheels.

  ‘Again! Again!’ He starts off again – a tripping, lurching, full-nappied run, towards the French windows.

  ‘Come here, you cheeky monkey.’ I grab him from behind and whoosh him up again and my head whirls as if I’m the one in the air, not him. I hug him to me. He laughs, and reaches out his hands. He holds my chin. ‘Bah.’ He smiles. ‘Again!’

  My legs feel very weak. We look at each other for a second.

  ‘How about some nice warm milk?’

  ‘Again! Again! Up! Up!’

  ‘Milk first, OK?’

  *

  Finn takes the cup and shoves the spout into his mouth. He gazes up at me and his eyes glaze over a little as he sucks. It takes so little to comfort him, really. He doesn’t care whether we’re in British Columbia or Oxford High Street. He doesn’t care about the big sky or the waves crashing onto the slimy rocks below. He just cares that I’m here every morning when he wakes up, that I pick him up when he’s hurt, that I swing him through the air to make him laugh, and give him milk and food, and sing him to sleep with ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ every night. I think about the black-and-white pictures I used to show him as a tiny baby; the endless playgroup conversations about ‘stimulating’ our babies, ‘cultivating’ their musical tastes, ‘developing’ their linguistic skills. How did motherhood become so fraught and extreme? This is what matters. Just being here. This is all he really needs from me.

  I carry him back into the living room and sit on the sofa again, Finn on my lap, his chubby legs sticking out, both hands on the handles of his cup. I have to make a plan. But the truth is I don’t know where to go next. I certainly have no interest in visiting the Vancouver aquarium.

  There is a book called The Magnificent Orca on the coffee table. It is heavy and glossy. I lean over, with one hand, and flick it open.

  There are pictures of black-and-white whales, leaping through stormy seas against a snow-capped mountain backdrop. The male dorsal fins, I read, can be more than six feet long. Taller than Doug.

  No. I can’t think about Doug now. What good would that do?

  The first chapter is called ‘Myths of the Orca’. I read over Finn’s head. The name is down to the Romans: ‘Orcinus: belonging to the kingdom of the dead’, and ‘orca’ from ‘Orcus: Roman god of the underworld’. I scan the names the whales have been given throughout history. Like the landscape up here, each name represents a little pocket of human fear: ‘killer demon,’ ‘feared one,’ ‘blackfish,’ ‘sea wolf.’

  I skim a section on the stories told by the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest. One tribe had killer whales living in houses and towns beneath the ocean. One believed that orcas ruled the undersea world. Another believed that the orca embodied the souls of the tribe’s dead chiefs. Others thought the whales were the spirits of their men who had been lost at sea: when an orca was seen near the coast it was the dead man, coming back to check on his loved ones – or to confront his enemies.

  One Alaskan tribe did see the orca as benevolent, though – a gentle benefactor, watching over the tribe and keeping its people safe. In fact, the author says, this myth is closer to the truth. The only incidences of killer whales harming humans have taken place in theme parks. He goes on to describe moments when captive whales seem to ‘snap’, dragging a trainer down to the bottom of the tank and crushing them against concrete. One seized a trainer by the leg then whipped him round and round underwater like a rag doll, eventually pushing him to the surface, semi-conscious, moments from death. One orca killed her trainer after being forced to perform while her young calf cried for her in a nearby tank. Given the decades of torment these animals have undergone at the hands of greedy parks the really astonishing thing is how kind these animals are and how deeply tolerant. It only ever happens, the author says, when they are pushed to the furthest edge of their sanity. Perhaps, he suggests, killer whales feel a sense of responsibility or even kinship towards humans. There are reliable accounts of orca pods guiding lost ships to safety through the fog, of saving drowning pet dogs, or befriending us as we sail across their seas. If this is the case, then we have sorely let them down.

  Finn has finished his milk, but is content to sit for a moment, sucking on the spout. It’s rare, I realize, for us to just sit together like this. Normally, I’m rushing around, cleaning, making food, or dragging him out somewhere. We hardly ever just sit together.

  I stare at the cover of the book – the beautiful black-and-white body of the whale. If you take a killer whale out of the water it will self-destruct. After a while its body will simply collapse under its own weight. It strikes me that there is no truth about killer whales. There is just layer upon layer of stories, memories
and opinions; of fears, hopes and beliefs. The whales are our story-keepers; they exist in another realm, always out of reach, imploding if we get too close. The whales are fiction.

  Unless you are a scientist. If you are a scientist then killer whales are raw data – black-and-white tubes of sound and behaviour and markings to be documented and decoded. If you are a scientist all the stories don’t matter. What matters is data. What was it Susannah said? No picture, no proof.

  Chapter nine

  I decide to stay.

  The ferries are too unreliable, and I shouldn’t leave like this anyway. I have to smooth things over. Presumably, Susannah has gone to her studio. I’ll bundle Finn up in his suit and wellies and get outside again for a bit. The rain has almost stopped. It’s no doubt freezing, but he’ll be happy outside, and he’ll sleep better tonight if he gets fresh air.

  *

  When we come in again, after a long time poking at wet stones and throwing sticks at tree trunks, it’s almost dark. We walk up the corridor to the living room and the dogs are sitting by the sofa. They watch as we come towards them, but they don’t move. Their amber eyes are fixed on my face. Suddenly, my skin prickles. I scoop Finn up.

  ‘Good doggies,’ I say.

  They stare at my face in the half-light, their glassy, teddy-bear eyes unblinking. ‘Bloody hell. Good boys.’ Their tails don’t twitch.

  There is no sign of Susannah. I edge past them with my back to the window. They keep their eyes on me and their noses turn to follow as I creep away down the corridor. Finn senses the threat, too – instead of wriggling to get down and play with them, he holds onto me with legs and arms, in a baby chimpanzee grip.