The Missing One

by Lucy Atkins

  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 … ’

  Elena, 1976

  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.

  She looked down at her hands on the countertop – the sea grass he’d twisted around her finger on Cannon Beach, turned into gold. She poured out a coffee. She knew someone was up there on deck, wa
iting for her. She felt them up there. She listened again, but all she could hear was the creak of timbers, the slap of waves on the hull, the distant cries of gulls and Dean’s soft snores.

  She climbed the stairs with the tin cup in one hand and as she pushed open the heavy door she waited for somebody to step out and block the light – but she stepped outside and she was blind.

  It was as if a cold muslin had been draped across her eyeballs. Somewhere out to sea a foghorn sounded; she rubbed a hand over her eyes as if she could pull the fog away. Invisible gulls let out ghostly cries. She stepped further out, sipping the coffee and peering into the greyness. There was still that sense of a presence, very close by, waiting for her.

  *

  They’d anchored off the tip of the island. It occurred to her that in this fog they must be invisible. She thought about the gigantic cruise ship they’d seen the day before, steaming towards Alaska. Maybe there was a lighthouse nearby. Or maybe nobody moved boats around in this weather. Presumably, Jonas knew which places were safe and which weren’t. He’d sailed the Salish Sea his whole life – he wouldn’t anchor somewhere dangerous. She realized that she trusted him. It was a novelty, but she did.

  She’d been standing on deck for a moment or two, sipping her coffee and staring into the mist, when she heard a giant, exasperated huff. It was so close and so immense, that she jumped and coffee sloshed onto her socks, scalding her toes. She listened, gripping the rail with her free hand; another prehistoric exhalation bounced out of the mist.

  She should go down and wake them both – but she didn’t want Jonas to come up and explain things, or get out a camera. She needed to experience this for herself. She felt as if they’d come for her, and nobody else. She put down the tin cup and held onto the rail with both hands, squinting through the greyness, willing the whales to surface again.

  Another vast exhalation – so close she caught the stink of fish and sulphur on the blow and its droplets covered her face. Then it loomed out of the mist, right below her – no more than ten feet away from the boat. She watched its huge curving back, topped with a dorsal fin at least the size of a man. It was surprisingly noiseless, moving in slow motion, slick and smooth.

  There was another exhalation – this one slightly further away – as if someone out there was making a tremendous effort to lift a heavy object – and then a second orca surfaced. All she could make out was the dark shape of its fin as it cut through the waves – a slight pause – before it submerged again. Then a third – just to the right – an explosion of breath and another colossal fin rolling through the water. She leaned over the edge, dangling forwards so that she could feel the spray on her face and taste the salt, and – as she hung there – she had the powerful urge to jump.

  She forced herself to hold on tight, to stay on deck where she belonged. A whale surfaced so close that if she’d reached out she could have run her hand along its glistening flank, and as it passed, it rolled onto its side and looked up at her. She looked back into the steady brown eye and in that instant, she felt an unmistakable jolt of connection between them, of recognition and understanding. She felt as if someone had held her very close, just for a moment. Then the whale submerged again, and passed right under the boat.

  The thud of footsteps from below – Jonas burst on deck.

  ‘Hey! You see them?’

  ‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘They’re here! Three, maybe four of them.’

  *

  He came over and put his arms on either side of her and pressed his body against her back so that her stomach lodged on the railings. When the next one came up, he pointed out a scar on the dorsal and explained that these were the things they’d be looking for – any distinguishing marks, and the saddle patches.

  ‘One went right under the boat,’ she said. ‘She looked right at me.’

  ‘Up in Blackfish Sound the fishermen say there were once so many orcas in the water that you could walk across their backs to get to the shore.’ He sighed. ‘Shame we can’t get photos in this soup.’

  They stayed like that for a long time, but the whales had moved on.

  *

  That first summer, each morning, the three of them hauled themselves out of bed, made flasks of coffee, gnawed on stale crackers and peanut butter and loaded their daypacks and the camera equipment onto the Zodiac, then motored out to sea, talking to other researchers or fishermen or tugboat operators via the crackling two-way radio.

  On clear days you could see them several miles off – a blow coming up in the distance, or the sunlight catching a dorsal fin. But sometimes she’d hear their voices through the headphones long before they were visible – she’d catch a long, ghostly cry, bouncing through the ocean and she’d raise her binoculars to scan the surface for a blow or a fin.

  There would always be that first moment of awe when they appeared. Just for a second, she would remember that she was only separated from them by a thin fibreglass hull. And then she’d get to work, scanning for marks and scars, following their voices as they played, or foraged, or communicated to each other about things she did not yet understand.

  *

  For years after the accident she had nightmares and waking flashbacks when she would find herself standing on the Zodiac again with Kali in the papoose, and Susannah pinning her arms behind her. The images came at her like a horror film: trying to get the papoose off, trying to give Kali to Susannah, but Susannah gripping her arms and bellowing in her face, ‘You can’t jump! You can’t leave Kali! Kali needs you!’ And of course, Susannah was right.

  So she clung to the side screaming into the wind until her voice was gone, searching the waves for their faces, for a flash of clothing, skin, anything at all – as the boat tipped and lurched and the storm closed in on them and Susannah radioed for help and the waves scooped skywards, the colour of tin.

  She often wondered whether the orcas dived down with her little boy as he sank; whether they swam all the way to the seabed with him. That would have comforted Kit because he always loved the whales, and was never scared of them.

  In those early, unstable years in England, she was sometimes filled with fury – she hated the orcas for what they didn’t do. She’d heard first-hand stories of pods saving stranded boats, kayakers – even drowning dogs. They could have nosed Jonas and Kit to the surface. They could have rescued them but they chose not to. Later, she wondered if this was justice – or perhaps even revenge. After all, humans had been destroying orca families for years, taking their babies from them. It made her think of Bella and her mother. Some people might call it karma.

  She knew that Jonas would not have been afraid of drowning if it hadn’t been for Kit. She tried to believe that the two of them were together at the end – that Kit was in his daddy’s arms, nursed by gentle, curious whales. She read somewhere that drowning could be a peaceful death.

  Gradually over the years, she taught herself to replace these unthinkable thoughts, when they came, with that first simple memory. She’d feel it all closing in and she’d take herself back to the time when she woke on a borrowed boat with a ring on her finger, and felt their presence out there – and walked upstairs into the mist; leaned overboard.

  She would go back to that throughout her life, right to the very end. But the last time, when the world had shrunk to the contours of her skin and she leaned over the railings, it wasn’t the whales that she saw in the water. And so she jumped.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Enormous thanks to my agent, Judith Murray, and my Editor, Jo Dickinson – I am so lucky to have found you both. Also, I am very grateful to Kathryn Taussig and the excellent team at Quercus, and to my helpful early readers (and often re-readers): Claire Pickard, Prof. Richard Francis, Jenny Atkins, Sue Atkins, Lucy Shaw, Leanne Kelly, Katherine Sherbrooke, Richard Kerridge. I’d also like to thank Lisa Hynes (for that idea), Jo Frank ( … a room of one’s own); and Dr Hadine Joffe, Dr Nick Haining and Dr Mary McCullins for your medical tips. Finally, thank you Mum, Dad
, Pat and Jod for putting up with me all these years, and of course, my very own John, Izzie (the title!), Sam and Ted.

  This novel also owes a lot to one incredible book: Listening to Whales by Alexandra Morton (Ballantine, 2004). Morton’s account of her scientific work studying the language of killer whales, and of her life on a floathouse off the British Columbian coast has been an invaluable source of inspiration, detail and information. My Elena is not, of course, Alexandra Morton; my story is pure fiction (and all the killer whale errors are mine too). The real and venerable Alexandra Morton still lives and works in the Broughton Archipelago, BC, where she is dedicated to stopping the ecological devastation caused by salmon farming in the region. To find out more go to: www.raincoastresearch.org

  For more information about The Missing One,

  author events and forthcoming books visit

  www.lucyatkins.com