The Missing One

by Lucy Atkins

  His face is pallid and unshaven, and I can see in his eyes how shaken he is by the past few days, how deeply worried he’s been and how shocked he is, of all things, that my hair is gone.

  ‘I know.’ I run my hand over it, grinning stupidly. Are we really going to talk about my hair?

  He puts Finn down. ‘What the hell is happening, Kal?’ he says. ‘What are you doing?’ He looks me up and down, and despite himself, he smiles. ‘And what in God’s name are you wearing?’

  I feel as if he might vanish if I take my eyes off him.

  ‘How did you get here?’ I say. ‘How on earth are you here?’

  ‘Well, I literally just got off the ferry from that port, what’s-it-called … ’ He looks at me. ‘And I was trying to work out how to get the next boat. Christ, your hair is short.’ He pulls me to him again. ‘Jesus, Kal. Jesus.’

  ‘But how? I can’t believe you got here so fast. I mean, how … ’

  ‘After you called, and then your phone was dead I went to Heathrow and got on the first flight to Vancouver,’ he says. ‘Then I got a taxi to the port, and the first island ferry. And I was about to get on that ferry to whatever it is – Raven Island. What the fuck has happened, Kal?’

  Finn tugs Doug’s hand. ‘Carry ’oo?’

  He bends and sweeps Finn up and round and they laugh. ‘God, I missed you, matey.’ Doug buries his face in Finn’s neck. ‘My God, I missed you.’

  Finn pulls at Doug’s chin. ‘Lorry!’ he calls, pointing across the dock. ‘Dat!’

  ‘Wow,’ Doug looks at it with him. ‘Now, that’s a big one. It’s got a crane, see. For lifting cargo. And look, there’s another one, down there, look.’

  For a moment, they discuss transportation, and I just look at them, and my heart feels as if it will burst out of my chest and soar skywards like a helium balloon.

  I don’t know what Doug is going to tell me, when we get a chance to talk. But I know that I can face anything he has to say. I can handle just about anything now, though the pain in my lower leg is definitely a challenge.

  Behind them both, I can see the main street. There are a few more people out today, carrying shopping bags, crossing the road, stopping to chat. I can see the big pink cupcake sign for the Rock Salt bakery. A woman about my age with an Afro sticking out from under a woolly hat comes out carrying a coffee, with a loaf of bread tucked under one arm and a long woolly scarf the colour of cornflowers.

  Then Maggie comes out of the door next to the bakery. Her hair is a blood-red halo, splintering in the sunlight. She smiles at someone and she has the dogs with her, on leads, one on each side of her. They look like two perfectly well-behaved pets, trotting to heel, their golden coats rippling. She turns down a street and disappears.

  I will never know how much Maggie understood about what Susannah was up to. I will never know if she is as naive as she seemed about her unbalanced friend.

  Doug comes back towards me, hugging Finn, who looks even smaller in his dad’s arms. ‘We can’t talk now, but we have to.’ He gives me a look. ‘Soon.’

  ‘I know.’ I reach up and pull Finn’s hat down over his ears. ‘I’ve made some horrible mistakes. But I needed to do this – I can’t explain now but I will. OK?’

  ‘You needed to do this?’

  I hop closer. ‘Yes.’ I look at him. ‘I really did.’

  He peers down my leg. ‘Why are you hopping? Why can’t you walk properly? What happened to your leg? Jesus – what has happened to you?’

  ‘All I know is I really need to go home. Is that OK? I know you just got all the way here, but … ’

  He looks at me and I can see that he has been – and possibly still is – distraught.

  ‘I came,’ he says, ‘to take you home.’

  *

  We get standby seats on the overnight flight to London but it is delayed because of lightning storms.

  Finn and Doug are sleeping on an uncomfortable airport chair, Finn flat on Doug’s chest, Doug with legs splayed, his head lolling, and two protective arms round Finn’s back.

  But I can’t sleep. My leg is agony and everything is churning through my mind and it’s all too much. I get out my phone. I have to email my father. He orchestrated a systematic, monumental campaign of dishonesty for thirty-eight years. They both did. Either of them could have told me at any time, and they chose not to. My parents were in this one together.

  To: Dad

  From: Kali

  Subject: I know

  Dear Dad,

  I am at the airport, on my way home, and I know everything.

  I know about Kit and Jonas, I know about the accident, I know who I am and I know I’ve been lied to by you and Mum for thirty-eight years. Presumably this is what you were trying to stop me finding out when you told me not to go and see Susannah? Or were you planning to finally tell me, because you had to, when I got home?

  You were right about one thing: Susannah is dangerous. Finn almost died at the floathouse – that’s where I’ve been – and I could have died too. The truth – from you – would surely have been a lot simpler, not to mention safer. I don’t know what I think about any of this, it’s way too soon to process it all. I think I’m probably very angry with you. But everything is overwhelming right now. Doug came. We are on our way home. Finn is safe. I am safe. But my God, Dad. How could you both lie to me like this?

  Love, Kal

  I put my phone away and, to distract myself from thinking, I hobble over to the airport bookshop. On a low table, at the front, among the souvenirs of Vancouver, is the same coffee table book I saw at Susannah’s. The Magnificent Orca. I pay for it and take it back to sit next to Doug. And I read it, cover to cover, as Doug and Finn sleep on; as the travellers come and go around us, my leg throbs beneath layers of ibuprofen, and our plane delays are relayed across the speaker system.

  The killer whale, I learn, is not a whale at all, but a type of dolphin. I learn about orca social organization, the matriarchal culture, powerful mother–child bonds, orca ceremony and traditions. I read about how orcas forage, sending out pulses of sound through the ocean to locate food. I learn how these echolocation clicks allow the whale to effectively see through miles and miles of ocean – to see with sound.

  Then I get to the chapter called ‘The Language of the Orca’ and the first sentence catches me: ‘The complicated vocal, social and behavioural cultures of the Orcinus orca have no parallel in the animal world – other than among human beings.’

  Like humans, killer whales, I discover, have a natural language. Researchers – my mother’s academic descendants – have now identified their complex linguistic structures. They have mapped dialects to different pods and clans. They now understand that there are not two but three main orca communities, residents, transients and off-shores, and that these communities essentially don’t speak the same language. Though nobody can ‘speak’ these orca languages, researchers have documented a whole lexicon of burst-pulse sounds that signal different states and, probably, emotions.

  I realize how precious my mother’s notebook with those transcribed vowel sounds is. It is a historical document. My mother was a pioneer of this research, at a time when even the notion that whales were intelligent seemed fanciful. I wonder whether she sat at her desk in Sussex and followed these developments with a pain in her heart. But no. I don’t think she did. I think the only way she could have possibly survived that degree of loss – of my brother, and Jonas, and also her beloved whales – was to cut off completely for ever.

  She became a different person in order to survive. She became a Sussex housewife, with me and Alice and the dog and her easel, in our solid red-brick Victorian house, with the apple tree outside and my father’s unwavering routines. And this reinvention might have worked – if it hadn’t been for me. I was the bridge between her two worlds.

  Day after day she would have seen my brother’s face growing up, in mine. She would have seen Jonas in me too, presumably: in my
dark-blue eyes, or maybe my gestures or my voice or my moods. I could have any number of Halmstrom traits – but I will never know, now, which ones. She loved me but it must have so been hard to look at my face every day. I think I understand why, when she found the lump, she sat with it, watching it grow.

  I wonder if she ever let herself imagine what would have happened if she and I had stayed on in the floathouse after the accident. Maybe she would be one of these researchers – maybe she would have written a book just like this one.

  Perhaps it’s the lateness, or the exhaustion of the past few days, but as I sit there, I feel as if she is living that life after all, and I have just paid her a visit. She is in her little floating house in the archipelago. She is silver-haired and fit and strong, without a cancer gnawing through her insides. Her floating house is dry and secure, with red geraniums at the windows, water and electricity – maybe even wireless communication by now. She still cuts wood for the log pile with a chainsaw, and collects fungi and herbs and wild fruits from the forest behind the house. And every day she goes out in her boat with headphones and a camera, photographing the whales, listening to them, watching them surface, breathe and then submerge, gathering data. The grief is in her, it always will be, but like the whales, it comes up with smooth, unhurried breaths and submerges again, without a fuss.

  At home she keeps her hydrophone dropped through the floor so that she falls asleep at night to their creaks and whistles and squeaks and clicks and wakes in the morning to the sound of orca mothers calling their babies, siblings squabbling and playing: the soundtrack to a world that few of us ever think about. Like the whales, my mother lives in two worlds: breathing in one, then diving beneath.

  My phone pings. I know whose email has just come in.

  From: Dad

  To: Kali

  Subject: re: I know

  Dear Kali,

  I am profoundly sorry that you found out this way, and from that woman. Your mother and I were only trying to protect you. All I can say is that we wanted you to feel normal. Your mother was deeply damaged by her loss, but in truth, so was I. This has been a difficult burden for both of us to carry. Our decision not to tell you might not have been the right one – in retrospect it was wrong, since it has endangered you and Finn – but we decided we did not want you growing up with a tragedy hanging over you. We didn’t want you to feel different from Alice. You have always been – will always be – my daughter. I am sorry that you found out in this way and from the very person your mother and I both wanted you never to meet. To hear that you and Finn were in danger from that woman distresses me more than you can know. I am very tired now. I have found the past week extremely trying. I am sorry this has come out in this way. We will, indeed, talk when you touch down.

  Your father, G

  I reply straight away, wiping the tears off my face with the back of one hand.

  Dear Dad,

  It’s OK. Finn and I are both fine and you’re right, we can’t do this on email or on some long-distance phone call. We’ll work this out. It’s too soon for me to get my head around it all or to know what I feel, really. Please just get some rest. The flight is delayed but should go soon and we will be home tomorrow and I will call you then.

  Love, Kal

  I am surprised to find that, beneath the anger, I feel protective of my father. It must be agony for him that all this has come out now, when he must feel so alone in the world. He is getting old and he has lost the love of his life. He must be afraid that he will lose me too. And Finn. And maybe even Alice.

  From now on my job is to forgive. At some point I’m going to have to go to Sussex, or meet him at a London restaurant, and we’ll talk about all this. And whatever he says, I will have to believe that all they wanted was to protect me.

  I suddenly remember Susannah’s account of the disastrous Sea Park whale birth. The captive orca was trying so hard to stop her baby from braining itself on the sides of the tank that she forgot to feed it. The instinct to protect trumped the instinct to nurture.

  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.

  Chapter twenty

  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. H
e 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.