Morag Joss - Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

You weren’t at the trailer when I got there, but I knew you were coming back. You were stranded somewhere, like everyone else that night, and you must have lost your phone. You took perfect care of Anna, always. I knew you were coming back.

First I told myself you had taken her out for a bus ride somewhere and got stuck in the traffic. When it got past nine o’clock that evening I knew you would be trudging toward me along the road, cold and tired, with her asleep against your back, her hair tickling your neck. I didn’t like to leave the trailer, but I climbed up the track to meet you, going quietly so I would hear the scrape of your feet or the rattle of the gate, your voice calling from up ahead that you were home at last. I didn’t go as far as the road, just to where I could hear the cars and see their headlights splitting the dark. I stayed back in the trees and waited and waited.

The traffic was moving almost as slowly as before. It was four hours since I’d walked from the shop down to Netherloch and got a lift with an elderly couple trying to get back to Inverness. They’d been to see his sister in a nursing home in Fort Augustus. The man had said nothing and the woman had tried to be nice, but I pretended I couldn’t speak English because I couldn’t have told her much that was true about me and I didn’t want to lie. They weren’t big talkers anyway. In two and a half hours we traveled six miles in silence except for the radio news and their soft remarks of despair, about the tragedy and the inconvenience equally. I got out at the service station and walked back so they wouldn’t see me set off down the track. It didn’t look like a suitable place for people to live.

I waited for you at the gate until I was so cold I either had to lie down where I was and burrow under leaves like an animal, or go back, and when I turned away and thought of the empty trailer I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop. When I got back, I threw myself onto the bed and lay sobbing, and after a while I lit a candle, as if it could make me feel less alone, and in a strange way it did. I think that’s why we light candles when we think of the people we really have lost, supposedly to God; we need to fill the emptiness of churches and the space their absence makes with small flames. By then I was warm again and I managed to fall asleep. It must have been hours later when I heard noises outside, feet on the stones and then on the trailer steps. I was up and nearly crying out for joy before I realized there was something wrong about it. If it had been you, you would have been calling to me long before you got to the trailer. For a moment I wondered if it was a deer. Then there was a knock on the door. My throat went solid. I tried to speak but my voice wouldn’t work. Then the door opened. Everything it is possible to feel at once-rage that it was some dirty, crazy stranger and not you and Anna, terror that she could just knock and walk in like that, relief that it was a woman and not a gang of men with knives-everything surged into hatred and I attacked her.

I remember thinking in the seconds after I’d scared her off that she hadn’t really threatened me at all. She was pathetic, not dangerous. She must have wanted something, because she left behind an achy feeling about herself, some powerlessness. I felt almost guilty. I never saw her face clearly, but if I had seen her eyes, I think they would have been saturated with want. But I thought these things only after enough time had passed for me to be sure she wasn’t coming back. I felt calmer, even though I was weary and confused. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning, and I was wide awake.

I found the number of the hospital in Inverness and called it again and again. When I got through, I was given another number for inquiries about the bridge victims. I kept calling that number until finally somebody answered. I asked, quite calmly, because it was of course foolish to worry, if any buses had been on the bridge. No, the man said. Or, I asked, were there people killed or injured who had been crossing the bridge on foot? He asked for names, and although I was taking a risk I gave them, your real ones, vowing to myself that I would never, ever tell you I did this. I had to wait a long time. Then he came back and said they did not have those names on any lists. I could hardly speak, I was crying so hard. But then, I thought, how stupid of me. Of course you would have given false names. So I asked was there any man of about twenty-five with a little girl-any man and child at all-injured or, I whispered, lost? He told me that three adult cyclists were in hospital and two had been killed, and all the other casualties had been in vehicles. So far. There were cars still unrecovered, he told me, gently, and I should call back in the morning.

I didn’t sleep again. But before daybreak I knew even more certainly you were coming back. It was foolish to worry. Something had happened to keep you from getting home, but you hadn’t been on the bridge when it collapsed. You were safe, somewhere. You’d had to stay the night somewhere where there was no telephone signal, and you were coming back.

I went down to the river edge as soon as it was light, with half the bedding wrapped around me. From downstream, echoey metallic sounds dented the air above the water. In the distance the arms of the bridge reached through the haze toward each other, apart and still. I hunkered down and picked up a handful of stones and started chucking them, sending them with short flicks of my wrist one by one into the river and humming some old tuneless thing along with the rhythm of their little splashes.

It was very cold but I kept sitting there, hugging the blankets and humming and tossing stones and remembering what the man in the hospital had told me about the casualties. I was also keeping a tight grip on something else I knew. You had never taken Anna near the bridge, not ever. It was over a mile along the busy road from here to the start of it, too far for her to walk, and anyway, yesterday had been much too cold. Oh, you did get sudden ideas, but even if you’d had the thought of taking her along the bridge to stand and look at the river and out to the sea, you would have been turning it into a plan for a summer day. You would have come to me with your eyes shining and the whole thing worked out. We would wait for fine weather and get the bus as far as the southern end of the bridge. We could walk all the way across because Anna would be a few months older and a bit more able to manage. It would be windy whatever the time of year, but never mind. We would find a way down through the pine trees on the opposite bank and have a picnic at the water’s edge, almost under the bridge. We’d be able to see our trailer way over on the other side! You would fish, and Anna would splash in the water, and I would doze in the sun. I chucked more and more stones in the river and thought of this, and as I gazed, the bridge ends began to soften and float against a watery yellow sky and the far bank wavered and sparkled with light. I could see us, little figures in summer clothes clambering down through the dark pine trees to the shore, our shoulders skinny and bare and warmed by the sun. I could hear Anna playing in the water and squealing, our voices calling out to her. I could hardly tell if I was imagining it or remembering a day we’d actually spent. But we certainly would spend a day like that, I decided, when the summer came. I smiled, thinking that such a day was now my idea, not yours.

There was a sudden sound behind me, a low, human bellowing. I turned and saw the mad woman from last night throwing up on the ground, staggering away from the trailer. By the time I reached her, her stomach was empty and she was gasping, watching me through scared eyes. Her hat had slipped off, and she was using it to clean vomit out of her hair and wipe her steaming mouth. The poor thing looked terrified and half out of her mind, staring and dribbling and moaning apologies. I couldn’t make out what she was trying to say. I didn’t know what she wanted. Maybe she had people to find, too.