Morag Joss: Among the Missing aka Across the Bridge

Not long afterward it was Anna who broke the silence with her creaky, waking-up noise that was not exactly crying but a test of her voice, a call of emergence. Although she was nearly two, when she fell asleep it really was still a fall, a sheer drop into that fathomless well of baby sleep; it turned her body solid, so her chest hardly rose and fell and her eyelids did not even flicker. It seems fantastic to me now that I could watch her like that without feeling panic at how far away from me she went in her sleep. I loved her waking-up noises; to me they sounded like the snuffling of a small creature returning from the lost, clambering back up through undergrowth from a foray a little too far from the nest. The real crying would start a few moments later, when she was awake enough to know she was hungry.

You tried to ease yourself away from me, but I caught hold of the chain around your neck and pulled you back for a kiss.

Oh, you’ve got me on the end of a chain, you said. Haven’t you? A chain that I’ll never take off.

Good. That’s why I gave it to you, I said, as I let you go.

You stepped back into your jeans and went to her, laughing softly. You lifted her up high and crooned- oh, Anna, Anna, Anna -and the crying stopped at once. You carried her outside, sending me a single look over her head that signaled you were giving me some time, a moment or two to shake off the thought of any more of you for now, to get out of bed and dressed and ready to balance myself against the day. I sat up and watched you through the trailer window. You put her down on her feet in front of you and walked her along, holding both her hands. Her arms were raised and outstretched, and you were edging her along on her wobbly, sleepy legs, her bare feet curling on the cold stones. You were asking too much of her. Sometimes you did that, forgetting she was so little. You wanted to show her the geese, but she had other ideas, she wanted her breakfast.

Look, Anna, look, you said, lifting her up again and pointing across the water. You made the wark wark noise of the geese against her cheek, and she laughed and twisted away, patting the stubble on your chin with both hands. I pulled on clothes and walked down to the end of the trailer and set out bowls and cereal and milk on the table. I put a pan of water on to heat for coffee. I got out spoons, juice, cups. I stood in the trailer doorway for a few minutes longer, watching you before I called you in.

You never knew I did this. Every day I watched you together, keeping myself apart while you were absorbed in each other and busy with this or that little thing around the place. I liked to study you, your resemblance to each other, with that identical tangle of dark hair, so different from mine. I liked that simple evidence of how much you belonged to each other, the everyday fact of it. The mother is blond and the father dark, the child inherited her father’s coloring-it’s the kind of remark that gets made about families. It helped me pretend our life was like other people’s, easy and regular.

I tried to keep them all in my mind, these pictures I made of you then. You feeding Anna, carrying her about talking nonsense, drawing pictures and singing songs. She gazing so seriously with her giraffe in her mouth and then chuckling back, reaching for your hands, tugging your hair. She left the wet trails of her kisses all over your face. Each of these pictures had to stand for something, had to be a sign that our life would go on being possible, so I could say to myself, look at this life we have, so natural and loving. We are not defeated, we are not despairing.

That day I watched you. You dipped her hand in the river and waggled her wrist, sprinkling water drops from her fingers all over your face. You spluttered and screwed up your eyes; she laughed and laughed. You turned her hand and sprinkled her own face, too. I memorized you both for later that day, to bring you to mind when I was at work at Vi’s general store over the bridge on the other side of the river. I needed to save you up like this; it was the only way I could spend the day away from you.

When I had put my hair in a ponytail and brushed my teeth, I still had some time before I had to set off to get the bus.

Silva, come on out, you called.

Anna was sitting on the ground with an old spoon in her hand, digging into tufts of grass that sprang up between the sand and pebbles of the shoreline. You led me a little farther down so I could see the geese bobbing on the river. The sun was up by then and still bright through a mist of cloud. I had to shade my eyes to see. On the far side, the old wooden cabin looked silvery gray, as if it were made out of water rather than from pine trees like the ones that grew steeply all around it. It shimmered like something wet, scooped out of the current and set up on the bank, solid but made of water all the same, shining in the sun just like the sheeny membrane of the gliding river. The white rowing boat moored at the little jetty sat as it had always sat. It hadn’t moved in all the time we’d been here.

Stefan, see? That cabin, it’s still empty. Nobody’s even been there in over a year, that boat never moves. It’s deserted. We could find the way down to it through the trees on the other side. Why don’t we? It would be great to live there. At least for the summer.

You tugged on my hair. And then what? you asked. You think next winter we’ll be better off there? First storm that comes, the roof blows off, then what? We’ll have nowhere at all.

But the trailer leaks anyway. And the roof doesn’t look so bad, it looks okay. We could do repairs. It’s bigger than the trailer.

Don’t keep going on about it, you said, tugging again on my ponytail. You can’t even tell if there’s glass in the windows. And it’s not that much bigger.

I caught hold of your hand and pulled your arm around my neck, wrapping myself within a circle of you. You curled your other arm around my waist, and we stood swaying together, gazing across the river. Behind us Anna was talking to herself in a singsong and scrabbling with her spoon in the pebbles.

Anyway, you said in my ear, it must belong to somebody. Any day they could just show up. We’d go to jail.

I know, I said. Worse. They’d send us back.

Then what about Anna?

Oh, I know. Don’t talk about it.

I raised your hand to my mouth and kissed it, then I nipped at your fingertips. I didn’t want you to start on again about borrowing money to get us out of our trouble. We’d been over and over it. You drew away, cupped your hands around your mouth, and hallooed, and the call rolled across the water and startled the geese off the rock in the river, all in a flurry. This was our way. We kept ourselves restless on purpose, distracting each other with these innocuous forms of disturbance: making love, sudden bursts of song and silly games, scaring geese into the sky. Anything that kept us from talking about it too often, about living in a leaking trailer hidden from the road, never having enough money to change anything. Being illegal in a foreign country, such a beautiful country but one that yet could give us no resting point; one we occupied like flies on the surface of a painting.

The geese were gliding back down to the rock. I clapped my hands and they rose up again, flapping their wings.

Silva, I’ve had an idea, about the car.

I wouldn’t let you speak. I shook my head and clapped and hollered across the river, and then I walked over to Anna and picked her up. I didn’t want to hear it again. No jobs for illegals that pay enough, you kept saying, we should get a car, run a cab, you knew guys who’d lend cash and do false papers, you’d work nights. You’d pay the loan back, we’d get a proper place to live. And I kept saying, the kind of people we’d have to borrow from, the amount they charge, you don’t get out of trouble that way. I kept saying we had to be patient and save up the proper way, owing nothing, we already had just over three thousand, I’d remind you, and then you’d lose your temper and tell me that way it would take ten years to get enough. We never got anywhere, did we?