Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

Porter happy and joking on the second or third day of a heat wave: of course they had no idea what was coming, how could they? Their unawareness is the most tremendous thing in the picture. I used to scan their faces for a flicker of fear assailing any of them as they posed in the blinding sun; I searched for one of those microscopic, momentary twitches of dread that can descend on someone on a summer’s day, the dread that nothing can last. I never found it. If only they could have remained there forever, in their grainy, bordered ignorance, clicked and shuttered into rectangular place by Mr. Porter’s Box Brownie, trimmed and untouchable; if only they would not be propelled, in the coming days, into the imprisoning, defining series of events that would capture and frame them in their misery for as long as they lived. And of course, in that picture, they knew nothing whatsoever about me, for there was nothing yet to know, least of all that I was, in my way, in it with them. I thought that strange, too, that I could be conceived yet not conceived of, and this was not egotism on my part but a regret that I was powerless to turn them all in another direction altogether, even though I was there. I longed to shake them all alive again and make everything come out differently. But my wish was futile, and perhaps also paradoxical; my mother would have claimed that I could only have come alive to have such a wish because what happened did happen.

When Anna’s mother put her blanket around my shoulders and drew me against her, I was begging her silently to ask me nothing more than my name. She didn’t. When I got into the trailer, everything seemed very simple. I had no strength left, and I lay down. I knew I would sleep before long, but I lay with my eyes closed for a while, wondering about the name I had given myself-Annabel-and about the photograph.

I didn’t have it anymore. I had put it along with everything else on a bonfire in the back garden, the same garden beyond the fence in the background of the picture, though the fence had long since been replaced by an ornamental cinder-block wall. I had been in a hurry to be done with my father’s things and get going; in three weeks I would be married. I had watched the trembling air above the flames suck the photograph upward, curl and blacken it into weightless fragments of ash, and I had been impatient with myself for noticing at all that it was fragmenting away to nothing in the very place it depicted, our back garden captured in Kodachrome more than forty years before. But I hadn’t let myself ponder any further on my strange in utero status in it, both invisible and present, or on the absence in it of any omen of the tragedy into whose tainted echoes and rhythms I would be born and grow up. I just watched it burn, and I trusted it to disappear.

I woke her in the early afternoon. Her face was puffy and white and not healthy-looking at all, and she would have gone on sleeping, but I’d had enough of waiting. I was curious. Also I needed something else to think about, because although I knew you would be back before dark, I was puzzled at what was keeping you. I could hear that the traffic was moving again up on the road. You must have taken Anna over to the other side of the bridge, I was hoping, or maybe even to Inverness. You knew I didn’t like you doing that, and that would be why you hadn’t called. Or your phone battery had died. You’d confess to it when you were back, and after a time you’d try to make me forgive you, and after a time I would, in our usual way. Or maybe you’d caught the bus to Netherloch and got stuck there when the roads jammed up. Wherever you were, you’d be trying to get back. You would both be home soon.

While she’d been asleep, to keep busy and warm I had wandered up the bank and brought back some wood and laid a fire, and I’d dragged over the old enamel bathtub and set it there on top of the circle of big stones. Then I hauled water up from the river in plastic canisters and filled the tub and lit the fire. When the water heats up, it sends off great clouds of steam into the cold air. All that took hours.

When her eyes opened, I expected her to be shocked to find herself there in our trailer. I thought she would immediately be ready to go. But she lay there drowsy and half-awake and watched me as if she was in no hurry while I sorted through a bundle of clothes. I wasn’t sure if I liked or disliked that.

“You’ve been asleep. Are you feeling better now?”

She raised her head a few inches and shook it, then grunted and lay down again.

“I don’t know.” She rubbed her hands over her face, then sat up. “I’m still so tired.”

I picked out some things of yours and Anna’s for washing and went back outside to the fire. I drew off a few jugfuls of hot water into a basin, then I stirred in some washing soda crystals and added a few grains of detergent, for the scent. The soda is cheap and makes the powder last longer. I dropped your clothes in and let the slippery, bluish scum lap over the wet material. It always amazed me slightly, the chemically floral smell rising from a basin on the ground outside the trailer, where the real smells were of river mud and woodsmoke and sometimes frying onions and the rain drying on stones. I loved it, that house-proud, indoors scent of laundry.

She came outside and stood watching while I kneeled down and swirled the things around, pressing Anna’s little clothes against the sides of the basin.

“I was wondering… I mean, the bridge, if you knew,” she said. “Yesterday-I mean, you can see it from here. Did you see it happen? Has anyone-”

“I was at work. I heard it.”

“So you weren’t here? But was there, I mean, was there anyone-”

“Look, who are you? What do you want?”

“Nothing! Nothing, honestly. That is, I wanted… Are you here on your own?”

“My husband is on his way back. With my daughter. Right now.”

“On his way?” she said.

“Right now. I’m expecting them soon.”

I turned back to the washing. Now it came to it, I didn’t want her calling the hospital for me. Even asking her to would be like believing you and Anna weren’t safe and already on your way back to me. I went on knead, knead, kneading your saturated things, lifting, rubbing, squeezing, submerging them, over and over and over. She didn’t move. I looked up. She was staring at the basin of wet clothes. Tears were running down her face.

“Oh, thank God. So it’s all okay. Well. I should go.”

But she didn’t go. I stood up.

“Who are you? What do you want? What were you doing down here last night?”

“I’m sorry, I’ll go. I just needed… I was tired, I feel so sick sometimes. I’ll go.”

“What’s the matter? Are you ill?”

“I just wanted to make sure. Your husband… is he, I mean, where is he?”

“My husband is fine. What is it to you? We can take care of ourselves,” I said.

She was looking at me with her frightened, watery eyes, and suddenly she turned away and doubled over, trying to catch and hold her breath. She was going to throw up again.

“Oh, for God’s sake! Sit down. What’s the matter with you? Sit down and get warm.”

“Thanks. Just for a minute.” She hunkered by the fire and wiped her eyes, then pulled a ragged bit of tissue from her pocket and blew her nose. She stuffed the tissue into the fire and held her hands over the steam for a while to warm them, rubbing her fingers together. She looked hard at her palms, then rubbed them down her jacket. Her hands displeased her. There was disgust in her eyes at the way dirt and cold were starting to cling to her.

“Did you say your name was Annabel?”

She nodded. She was still rubbing her hands.

“Well, thanks. I’ll be off in a minute,” she said.

She lifted her head and looked out beyond the yellow ring of the fire and across the river into the raw afternoon. There were a few geese on the water, and the old gray cabin stood lonely as always, the sky collapsing with the weight of low cloud into the sloping tree line above it. Sounds from the bridge and the road were muffled by cold and fog.

“Oh, for God’s sake, look at you. You don’t have anywhere to go.”

She looked surprised. “Oh, well, not really, not anywhere permanent… I suppose I’ll get myself organized, find somewhere.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I didn’t know it would be this hard. I didn’t think I’d feel this bad.”

“There’s hot water.” I nodded at the fire. “I need some of it for rinsing, but you can wash up if you want.”

She moved in a bit closer, waving the steam away with her arm, and peered in. The river water is dark with peat, but the silt stays at the bottom. She probably didn’t know that the salt water that comes in on the flow tide is