Morag Joss - Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

Tonight, sooner or later, he would come back here and look around and see that this room contained everything he needed. Sooner or later, maybe not until tomorrow if he collapsed in bed too drunk to find out where I was, he would learn that our rental car had been on the bridge. If I had died in the river, this room would still contain everything he needed. If I got up now and just left, this room would still contain everything he needed.

He would probably spend some time feeling numb, even sad. He would spend some time (to his private surprise, rather little) adjusting his expectations back to those of a single man, gaining a touch of celebrity among people who knew him for the improbably lurid bad luck of losing his bride in a freak accident. He would let them describe it as tragic. He would allow them to think he minded that there couldn’t be a proper funeral; he’d go along with a modest memorial service of some kind. He would never tell a soul that I had been pregnant, and soon he would not mention me at all. Within a few months he would look back on being married as a botched experiment in becoming somebody else. Relieved, mildly ashamed, he would go back to the chat room on the Internet, but he’d be very careful never to get caught out that way again.

I straightened the bed so it looked untouched, emptied the kettle, and switched off the television. I deleted all my text messages and voice mails and turned my phone off. I put it in the shoulder bag I had left with that morning and walked from the room. I slipped downstairs. Everyone was in the bar or the restaurant. I let myself out by the door into the garden and made my way toward the road.

I walked away not just from Col but from my failure to become a wife he wanted to keep. I walked away from having to justify wanting my baby. And for my baby’s sake as well as mine, I walked away from the humiliation of counting out money to its father as if this or that sum were an opening offer in a haggle for its life. I wasn’t just walking away; I was also bearing my baby, hidden in the warm, fleshy pod of my body, to safety. I was saving both our lives, and we were together.

Nearly a mile out from the collapsed bridge, men in fluorescent jackets milled around the Road Closed signs, directing cars back to the bridge at Netherloch. Ron moved quietly among the stricken, displaced little bands of people roaming around on the sides of the road and among the trees, like mourners or refugees. A bright moon in a silky, deep violet sky shone above the road, but in the distance arc lights lit the river ominously, as if illuminating a stage for more spectacle and greater violence; the limbs of the bridge, jagged and black against flashing orange and blue emergency lights, jutted out above the water. Helicopters roamed overhead, sending down vapory cones of light, hovering low enough for gusts of air from the rotors to blow trembling circles of flecks across the impenetrable, mercury-dark river.

The drift of people carried Ron along into a denser crowd at the forest’s edge, where spectators stood facing a television crew and a spotlight under which a reporter was shouting into a microphone. An exhausted-looking man in a safety helmet was led forward to be interviewed. The crowd began solemnly to applaud him, and as he started to speak, Ron stepped away from the throng and slipped under the barrier tape. Expecting to be stopped at any moment, he passed quickly into the pines that covered the sloping land between the river and the road. There was no path so close to the forest edge; keeping within the darkness of the trees, he scrambled down through a prickly mesh of branches until he was almost at the water.

When he emerged from the trees, he saw that crowd barriers now separated the forest from the site of the collapse. He could have climbed them quite easily, but he remained outside, watching. There seemed surprisingly few people at work on the riverbank; about a dozen who looked like paramedics and rescue workers came and went around a tent that had been set up, as far as Ron could tell, as a first aid station for casualties; he saw two men carry a stretcher from the tent and up the uneven bank toward a helicopter standing on the last strip of the bridge approach road. Ron had learned first aid when he became a driver, but he did not dare go forward and present himself. He would be ejected at once as unauthorized . There was no place here for simple willing hands; this was not a neighborly effort. The operation was professional and, for all he knew, efficient. He drew farther back into the trees. Once he was more familiar with what was going on, once it was daylight again, he would find the courage to ask if he could help.

As the night wore on, the rescue settled into a regular rhythm, determined and unspectacular. Under the arc lights, boats and helicopters made their forays to the river in droning, dogged circles. Ron hunkered against a damp tree trunk and grew drowsy. He dozed until the cold woke him. Then he got up and moved back farther into the trees, where the wind did not cut so keenly. He didn’t want to spend the night in the open, but he was reluctant to walk the seven miles back to the Land Rover; without knowing where he was going, he slipped deeper still into the forest’s shelter. He was afraid of losing his way, and remembering that the road above him followed its path, he kept the river always in sight on his left, shining through the fringe of pine branches. He was cold. After a while he came upon an area where trees had been felled, but not recently; years of hard weather on the rutted ground had left it almost impassable with dank troughs and exposed, torn-up roots. From here the bank rose steeply to his right; there was no clear route up to the road. So he made his way instead down to the gleaming river, and when he reached it he saw he must be almost a mile from the bridge. The sharp arc lights had softened to a glow in the night sky. That was when, almost at the water’s edge, he came across the derelict prefabricated cabin. The door on the river side was padlocked, but at the back he found a small, warped door, locked and jammed tight with damp. It was soft with rot and sagged against his shoulder when he pushed it. After several heaves, the lower of its two hinges split from the frame and he was able to squeeze through. The place was unfurnished and comfortless, cold and dirty, but it was a roof for the night and out of the wind. By the moonlight through the smeared windows he saw there was a stove and some fuel, but he had no matches. He curled up on the floor and lay listening to the sounds from the bridge; the motors and sirens had faded to remote purrs and squeals that mingled with the river flowing close by outside. Yet the fright and injury of the day reached into him, or maybe he had brought it with him, and suddenly his heart, a berg of ice, seemed to shatter and burn within his chest. He began to shiver violently, and he curled tighter, trying to tell himself this was physical stress, nothing more. A fragment of his first aid training came back to him: When people experience trauma, one of the first things to go is the ability to fend for themselves . It calmed him to realize that he was fending for himself, to a degree; at least he had found shelter. But why, he thought, was he steeling himself at all against the disintegration of his heart? Let it burn, let it melt. Let it even break again, if only he might no longer be alone.

It was cold, so I hurried. In Invermuir village, the main road was jammed with traffic bound for Netherloch and Inverness, but the other side, heading west to Fort Augustus, was choked, too. I don’t know why I set off in the direction of the bridge, but I walked eastward along the roadside into the night, at a pace hardly slower than the crawling line of cars. There were emergency vehicles stationed here and there with their lights flashing and policemen standing in the middle of the traffic, attempting to keep it moving. Drivers were sounding their horns and turning around, maneuvering back and forth and sending up plumes of exhaust, headlamps looming and crisscrossing the darkness with restless beams of light.