The Missing One (37 page)

‘That,' I try to smile at Finn, ‘is a truly huge cookie.'

His brown eyes are enormous beneath his fringe, looking steadily up at me as he chomps. I can see the doubt behind them. He is thinking ‘when is she going to take it away?' He is preparing to defend that cookie with his life. I take a sip of coffee; it burns my lips. Then I look down at the drugstore bag in my hand.

I need to do it now I've bought it. It's a waste of ten dollars otherwise. I might as well. ‘Let's go to the loo, love,' I
say. ‘Come on, come with Mummy.' I put down the coffee, take his hand and we go into the toilet. I lock the door. The automatic fan comes on. The room smells of lavender. There is soap and hand cream on the wall, both Aveda, and a little scent diffuser with aromatic sticks pointing out of it. I know that I shouldn't let Finn eat a cookie in the loos, but if I take it away he'll howl, and clearly I can't leave him outside with the ceramics. I imagine him shinning up the shelving, a deft little mountaineer.

‘Don't touch anything in here, OK? No touching.' He munches, ostentatiously, then bashes the bin with one hand. It makes a satisfying clank. He bashes it again.

I leave the cubicle door open so I can see him.

‘We'll do your nappy in a minute, OK? After I go to the loo.'

‘No,' he says, through a mouthful of cookie.

I pull the packet out of the paper bag. This is Susannah's fault – the comment about ‘feeling' things the moment I walked through the door. This is her fault.

*

When I come out of the toilets, Susannah is at the window, looking out at the rain. Her hair is looped and twisted in its silver wasp clasp and she is upright and broad-backed. She turns as she hears the bathroom door.

‘Everything OK?' She looks down at Finn, at the half-demolished cookie. I know she's wondering what sort of mother gives her child a cookie that size at breakfast time, then lets her child take that cookie into a toilet. But I can't feel my feet on the floor. I am floating.

‘You OK?' she says again.

‘Fine, thanks.' Astonishingly, my voice sounds relatively normal.

‘So you guys went to the bakery?'

I nod.

‘Did you … ' She raises her chin. ‘Did you meet Maggie?'

I nod.

‘What did she say?' Her eyes are fixed on my face.

I lean down and slowly pick up the bag of muffins. ‘She gave me these for you.' I hold them out.

She takes a muffin. I take one too and bite into it, but I can't taste anything. The seeds are gritty and my mouth feels dry. The whole room seems to have shrunk and I am hovering now, very tall and straight, a few feet above the floor.

Susannah turns away, munching, and points to the ceramic fish. ‘So, this is by a young Vancouver potter.' Her voice is bright and efficient. ‘Huge talent.' I haven't experienced this version of Susannah yet – the gallery owner, the expert, the authority. I follow her over, holding tight to Finn's sticky hand.

The fish are rounded like satsumas and they shimmer, each scale delicately glazed in silvers and blues. I examine them from all angles. Their scales catch the light and glint as if they are twitching.

‘Look at the fish,' I say to Finn. He looks up at them, not terribly impressed. He has cinnamon whiskers.

Susannah explains something about glazes and firing methods, oxidizing clay.

Above them, on a shelf, is a bigger, fatter fish, this time with blue-grey scales. It is hollow, and there's something inside it. I lean closer. It is a light-blue speckled egg. For a moment, we all just gaze at it. And I think of the tiny thing inside me, right now, its busy cells multiplying, expanding, swelling.

Then I remember my mother's bone carving – the fish with the leering man inside its belly. It is still in the jewellery box, back in my suitcase at Susannah's house. I'd forgotten all about my mother's box. I forgot I even brought it.

The floating feeling stops abruptly. I look at Susannah and she glances sideways at me. Her eyes, I notice, are the colour of the lightest, most iridescent scale on the biggest mother fish.

She didn't make it to the hospital. When her waters broke she was on her own on the boat, at the sink, scrubbing burnt milk off a pan. ‘Shit.' She looked down. ‘No. Not yet.' She felt wet warmth spreading down her legs and then her bare feet were soaked. It was three weeks too soon; he wouldn't be here till tomorrow. This could not happen now.

She forced herself to think rationally. It could be hours before anything happened. She would get her coat on and go to the boat next door; Ted would call the midwife. She wasn't alone really. The dock was full of people who would do anything to help out.

But then it became obvious that this was not going to be like the pregnancy books said it would be. The first pain seethed round her lower belly almost as soon as she'd turned away from the sink to dry her hands. She leaned against the counter, gripping the edge as pain radiated out from her pelvis, round her back, down the fronts of both thighs. Then it passed. She stood up. She went towards the bed for her
pullover, but before she got to it, another contraction came, even stronger than the first.

This shouldn't happen. It was supposed to start slow. It wasn't supposed to hurt like this at first. If this was early stage labour she was not going to survive the pain later on. The contractions seemed to be rolling in, one after the other, with almost no break between. Perhaps it was because she was in the belly of the boat – this dark, safe, primitive cave. Perhaps if she got up on deck, in the cold night, they'd stop. But then she forgot about her coat or getting to the next-door boat because it took over – she met each pain on her hands and knees with her head down, swaying and bellowing like a cow. The only way to survive this was to surrender. In a semi-lucid moment she glimpsed what the whale must have felt giving birth in that small tank – and it was a sort of liberation. It wasn't like being trapped at all because with each pain, the walls of the boat, the rain on the roof, the clink of the mooring ring and the sea against the hull faded to nothing – there were no boundaries or walls any more. Her body – and what was happening inside it – became the whole world.

She had no idea how long this went on for, but suddenly, she felt the energy shift – for a few minutes, nothing happened at all. She may even have slept. Then a force gathered inside her, and she began to push with a strength she didn't know she had. There was a wild burning and she put both hands down there and, with a shock, she felt a hard, round, wet bulge between her legs. She lost all awareness for a bit; something rushed through her and then she was propped
up against the wall. She looked down at the streaky baby in her arms – a cord trailing between her thighs – so much liquid all around, like the sea. She gazed at it – a real baby – her baby – the colour of a pale bluebell, streaked with curds, festooned with blood.

She wrapped herself around the little body and there was a yowl – ten tiny fingers shot up, making star shapes in the air, and she felt herself fill up with oxygen – she heard herself, laughing and crying at the same time – and then she started to shake. Violently. She shook so hard she was afraid her baby would slip out of her arms.

Ted burst down the steps. He paused in the doorway, ‘Holy Mother of God, Elena. You had the damned baby.' He came and knelt down, grabbing a blanket from the chair to cover them up. His platter hands were shaking too. ‘You had the damned baby, Elena!'

‘Ted.' Her voice came out bizarrely normal. ‘I need you to call the midwife. The number's by the stove.'

Sandra came down as Ted thundered up to go to the call box. She instantly became practical – mother of four herself, grandmother of two, she found towels. There were deep worry lines on her forehead, but she moved calmly around, getting things.

‘It's OK, Sandra,' she said. ‘Don't worry. We're fine.' But she still couldn't stop shaking.

The midwife arrived and suddenly there was a boat full of people, all bustling and talking at once. The midwife was a thin woman, wrinkled and creased, with long, clean fingers, and she didn't waste any time – she checked the baby over,
then took Elena's wrist and counted seconds on an upside down watch before gently examining between her legs.

‘Came fast, huh?'

Elena nodded.

‘Couldn't even wait for Daddy.'

Elena smiled, weakly. Her teeth chattered.

‘You're OK. It's shock,' the midwife said. ‘You'll be fine, but you need to deliver the placenta now.'

She laid out towels and a sheet and gave instructions – as if coaching, at this point, were really necessary. But Elena couldn't take her eyes off her baby – pink now, smelling like dew on grass and fresh air – the midwife said something about the power of endorphins. ‘There you go,' she murmured. ‘There you go. One more push.'

Everything calmed down eventually. Ted made toast and butter, muttering through his grizzled beard, while Sandra cleaned up. The midwife helped Elena to get up off the floor and onto the cabin bed. Before, she'd felt nothing, but now there was a burning, battered feeling. Her legs were still shaking. Someone put a mug of hot, sweet tea next to her.

The baby was diapered and in a white Babygro and hat, and wrapped in the blue blanket that Susannah had knitted, completely certain of a boy. The midwife helped Elena onto one side, firmly arranging her limbs, and then the little mouth suctioned around her nipple.

*

In the days and weeks after the birth, each time she breastfed, Elena felt the walls close in. It wasn't possible to move; she just had to sit there until the feed was over. It was
torture. She wasn't used to being immobilized, or to having this much time to think. Sometimes, sitting alone in the cabin for what seemed like the hundredth time in just a few hours, she felt as if she might explode into thousands of shards of glass, each one sharp and vicious.

She soon realized that the problem wasn't the baby or the need to feed the baby apparently constantly; the problem was that now their baby was actually here – this perfect little being – she couldn't picture their future any more. There was no future that worked for all three of them. And there was far too much time to think about this.

One night as she sat up in bed in the dark, feeding and feeding with waves slapping on the sides of the boat and the wind howling outside making everything creak and rock and bend, she realized that this might be the end. And she felt a flood of panic surge through her.

She had been ridiculously certain of everything during the pregnancy. Looking back, the naivety was staggering. Perhaps it had been hormones or pig-headedness. Or maybe they'd just been too busy to think it through. Despite the speed with which her life had changed, the pregnancy had felt right. But now it was as if someone had switched on the lights to reveal that an apparently serene room was, in fact, a shambles.

They both believed in living in the present, and pursuing their own thing – he still did. But now there was a very real and pressing baby to care for, to plan for. He seemed to be able to carry on living in the moment, but she could not.

He was right that, for now, nothing much needed to
change. Babies are portable. They don't really care where they are. When the weather improved, she could probably carry on going out on the Zodiac. Back at the boat she could work on her sound data during nap times too. The coming summer would be manageable. She thought back to last year, with Dean and Jonas, going out all day on the ocean, sometimes camping out by the fire. They could do all that with a baby.

By the time the fall storms closed in she'd become adept at photographing and documenting the whales – she could even recognize a few individuals from a distance by the shape of their dorsals, or their particular style of play. She understood the pods and the matrilines, and could remember many of the whales' names. But most of all, she had begun to listen. And she needed to get back to that.

It was only February now, but in a couple of months people would start filtering back up to the islands again. By the time the orcas gathered for the salmon runs there would be the little community of marine biologists, photographers, whale enthusiasts, kayakers – even the odd film crew – up there. These orca pilgrims were her tribe now. She couldn't imagine not joining them again this year. And she could – this year, at least, she could.

But after that the future was a looming blank, and it scared her.

She had to be realistic about the summer – the damp, the bugs. Even in midsummer there would be filthy days when they'd huddle with flasks of coffee in heavy rain gear, waiting for the radio to crackle to life, staring at marine charts,
growing more chilled and damp and frustrated. But they could rig up a rain shelter on the Zodiac. She'd wrap the baby in layers and layers of insulation. Weather was not the deal-breaker.

But growing up just might be. With a crawling baby the picture became more complicated. You couldn't keep a crawling baby on a twelve-foot Zodiac for ten hours a day, in all weathers. Or could you? A toddler? A school-age child? And what about money?

There had to be a solution. She had only just discovered what she needed in order to live. Her future had seemed so definite from the moment she ran across campus that day, with her backpack, and dawn spreading pink across the sky. She thought of Dean's placid face by the fire as he told her that his wife had given up her career as an anthropologist to stay home and raise their child.

She looked down at the little head at her breast. She could not give up. Without her research what sort of a mother would she be? Without her work motherhood would become a slow strangulation. She needed both.

She needed to think rationally, because there had to be a way forward. But a voice in the back of her brain told her there was a reason that all the main orca researchers were men.