are daily pulled and rolled up the beach by the methodical tide into an arrangement of ridges, the boulders lodged farthest up, a scree of stones you can walk on, and little pebbles and broken seashells shirring to and fro at the water’s edge.
Here is where I sit most often to think about you, close in by the trees in the deepest part of the curve and hidden from Ron or Annabel, who might just be (though seldom are) strolling along the river from the bridge or from the cabin. Here is where I began, without knowing that was what I was doing, to build.
One day I saw two stones side by side not far from where I sat, and it so happened I noticed them in a spell of numbness when I was neither talking aloud to you nor crying. In fact I was caught off guard, when I was not thinking of anything at all. Of these two stones, one was large and dark and squarish, and had a ribbon of quartz running through it. The other was pale and much smaller, and its rounded surface sparkled with dots of mica. It was touching the other one in a way that made me think of a person whose forehead was resting against the chest of someone bigger. They leaned toward each other, joined and motionless, arrested in the moment just before they would embrace. That was the remarkable thing, that their absolute stillness held within it an intimation of a movement yet to happen. Father and child. I moved closer, my eyes traveling across every line and plane, gauging the shape of the empty space around them, measuring the distance between. And as I gazed at the point where the two stones tilted and met-the touching of forehead to chest-I felt the world shrink around me. This was surprising, because what I was looking at were, after all, lumps of stone.
Yet I wanted them kept exactly this way, leaning together, and I wanted to be able to find them again the next time I came. So I got up and gathered a pile of the biggest stones I could lift and I set them, one by one, in a wide circle around my stones (and they were certainly, after my concentrated attention to them, mine, as if I had sculpted every angle myself). Then I saw that one of the large stones I’d placed in the circle was crusted with dead strands of waterweed, blackened and brittle from the sun. This displeased me. I carried it down to the river and cleaned it and set it back in its place.
Now inside their circle, my pair of stones looked diminished and without distinction. So I began clearing the space between them and the circle, lifting away pebbles and digging my stones in with my hands to fix them precisely, and so elaborating, without changing it, their relationship to each other. My mind was absolutely clear about how these two figures should look. Yes, they were now
After that, every time I came there I set to work, adding a few more stones to the circle. To protect the figures, I told myself. I went up and down finding shards of slate and flat stones to keep the ring stable as it grew, then I added bulky stones again, for height. I made mistakes and learned as I went. I had to build, dismantle, and rebuild. As the circle rose up around the figures, there were collapses to deal with. I needed to use smaller and smaller stones as it went higher, and I don’t know why I didn’t abandon the whole thing when it became irksome to go searching for just the right stone to keep going. Instead, feeling very clever, I started to bring Ron’s hammers with me so I could break stones to the size I wanted. Nor did I know, when I loved the sight of my father and child stones, why I went on with a task that was going to conceal them from me. Because by then I had recognized that the ring of stones was a wall going up around my beloved ones.
After a few weeks, and almost imperceptibly at first, the wall began to incline inward upon itself. At last I could see what was happening. With much trial and error, and slow and careful chipping, I fashioned long pieces of stone and slate and devised a way of laying them so they overlapped and evolved, finally, into a domelike roof over the figures beneath. I had built a tomb.
I stayed away for a while after that, afraid that I would be too restless to let it alone, afraid I might take the whole thing down. But I drifted back, because now that you have a memorial, there are repairs to attend to, most days. I like to sit under the trees, to sit near you, the figures of you, invisible but close by and in the shadow of the trees. I like to be here at the time of the incoming current and watch the black rock disappear under the river until there is nothing to see except a patch of silver on the surface, strangely glassy and unrippled amid the running waters of the flood tide.
On the evening after the visit to the doctor in Inverness, Silva was full of a hard, snappy energy. Only six weeks to go, and was she the only one who was concerned? Six weeks! Her impatience, her air of unspoken superiority (what did either of them know about childbirth?), made Ron feel he had been lackadaisical in some way, while Annabel was simply worn-out. While she dozed and half-listened, he watched, startled, as Silva talked, words flying from her mouth, about the new plans they now had to make. Though in fact she had made them already.
Annabel handed over her mobile phone, not used since the first night she’d turned up at the trailer. The next day Ron went after work to Inverness and bought a new charger for it, and that evening, when it was working again, Silva entered her own and Ron’s numbers and explained once again how the system was going to work.
“We have phones switched on all the time, all day, okay? You don’t go anywhere without phone, not even two minutes to the jetty,” she told Annabel. “You’re so heavy now, and what do you do if you fall? You take your phone in your pocket everywhere. Then, so, if I am along the river and there is a problem, if the pains come, straightaway first you call me. Straightaway, okay? Me first.”
Annabel smiled and nodded from the sofa bed, where she lay every evening now, her bare feet on two pillows. By the end of the day her ankles were swollen and her shoes tight.
“Then, if the pains are coming, I call you,” Silva said to Ron. “So same for you, you keep your phone on. I call you, and straightaway you come to us here, in the boat. You bring her in the boat to the bridge, then we take her up to the Land Rover and we all go to hospital.”
Ron nodded, too. Earlier that day, on Silva’s orders, he had warned Mr. Sturrock he might need to take some hours off at short notice.
“Or I might not, it depends,” he’d said, not sure what mood Sturrock was in. “I’m on standby. To take a… someone to hospital. She’s having a baby.”
“Fuck’s sake. You having a wean? Congratulations in order, eh?” Sturrock had said.
Immediately Ron not only corrected him but had an elaborate lie ready. No, he wasn’t the father, in fact he hardly knew her, she was the partner of a friend of his. She wasn’t due until early October, but the friend was working on the rigs, putting in all the hours right through till the end of September, and they’d just moved and she had no family here. The friend could get off the rig in under three hours if the baby came early, but his partner was nervous. Ron was the backup to take her to hospital in case he was delayed. Almost certainly he wouldn’t be. It was just for her peace of mind.
Mr. Sturrock had grumbled a little, then told him to inform the office if he had to go off-site and keep his time sheet straight, and be grateful he worked for a fool ready to let him away at the drop of a hat to be a fucking ambulance service.
Afterward Ron wondered why he had lied at all, never mind so extravagantly. There had been no need to pretend that the mother was almost a stranger; he could have said that she and the baby were close to him without going into the peculiarity of their arrangement. Why, when every part of him wished he could be the child’s father, was he so afraid that someone might suppose he was? Because he didn’t deserve to be, that was it. What he deserved was what he most dreaded, to be found out for what he was instead: a man who had killed children. If that happened, Mr. Sturrock-everybody-would turn on him, outraged that he was trying to pass himself off as fit to take care of anyone ever again. All he deserved was to feel like a monster for the rest of his life.
He and Annabel continued to bow under Silva’s dictatorship. It was the price they paid to have her reanimated and back with them. It was lovely, they said to each other privately, to see her looking forward so much to the baby. A new life is a healing thing.
One day at low tide Silva untied the partly submerged white boat from the jetty and dragged it onto the shore. Ron hadn’t looked at it in months, but now she wanted it fixed up.
“Suppose the baby starts coming and we can’t get hold of you?” she said.
She bailed out the rainwater and tipped the boat over, and Ron cleaned off enough of the clinging green weed to inspect the hull. It was sound, but the boat was barely eight feet long and made of a light plastic. An oarlock was hanging loose, and one of the oars was split at the handle end; although the paddle was in one piece, it would be difficult to use.
“We can mend it. Or we’ll get another one,” Silva decreed.
