“You shouldn’t stack the logs so high. Silva’s right.” I put the knitting aside and get up. “I need to stretch my legs,” I tell them, and leave.
It’s too cold to stay out without another sweater, and in fact I am too tired to walk far. I go down to the jetty and look back at the cabin, its windows glowing with firelight, squares of soft yellow in the grainy, gray dusk. The baby’s weight makes me breathless. All I want is to go back inside, all I want is to carry on living by the rules that have served us well enough, but what awaits me in the yellow light is altered now. The door opens, and Ron steps out. I turn away and stare at the river, listening to his footsteps on the stones coming nearer and then the hard clump as he walks along the jetty and stands next to me. I am too angry to say anything.
He sighs, lifts a hand and strokes my hair. He is crying.
“He wants you back” is all he says before he unties the boat and climbs in, starts the motor, and moves off into the tide flowing down toward the bridge. I wait until I’m shivering before I go back to the cabin. Silva is coming out of the kitchen with three plates, and when I tell her Ron has left she thinks it is because she spoke sharply to him about the logs. She is peeved and irritable all evening. In truth she exhausts me. Later I go to bed, and although the baby kicks and kicks, I fall asleep. I’m glad I’m too tired to dwell on the strange truth that now that Ron may know who I am, I feel more unknown than ever.
She lies there. She lies there breathing with her mouth open while the stove burns low and the knitting comes apart in her hands, because her hands feel nothing, not the metal knitting needles that are hot from the fire or the stitches slipping off past her fat finger ends or the unraveling wool settling over the creases at her wrist. The hands don’t move. The fingers look boneless, like stuffed tubes; her nails are sunk into the tips like flat baby buttons pushed into dough. She’s on her back like a sleeping sow, her breath whistling in her throat, eyelashes twitching on her pink face. Her chest moves up and down, her breasts lift and collapse over her bulging stomach. Her giant bare feet look too lumpy to walk on. They still carry semicircular ridges across the fronts where the swollen flesh has bulged from her overtight shoes, which lie splayed and distorted on the floor beside her.
I watch her for more than an hour.
“I told you you were too tired,” I say in a loud voice, and I go to the table and make a noise clearing our plates and taking them to the kitchen. Her phone is also on the table, and I clear that away to the kitchen, too. I have to do everything. Every evening I check that it’s charged and working. She can’t be trusted to.
When I come back, she is awake and sitting up with the knitting in her lap, trying to push her feet into her shoes.
“You’ll split them,” I tell her. “You can’t get them on anymore. They don’t fit.”
“I know they don’t,” she says calmly. “But it’s not worth getting new ones now. They’ll fit me again as soon as the baby’s born.” She smoothes a hand over her belly and picks up the knitting, frowning at it.
“Oh dear, you shouldn’t have let me fall asleep,” she says, yawning, picking at the yarn with the needles. “Look at this mess.”
“Don’t blame me,” I say. “I told you you were too tired.”
She pauses with the knitting and looks at me, then gets up, sighing. “I’m not blaming you, Silva. I’m going to bed.”
“I suppose I’ll clear up, then,” I say.
Another sigh. “I’m happy to do it in the morning, but I’m very tired now. Please leave everything. I’ll do it in the morning.”
“Leave everything dirty all night? No. That’s not how I am. You can go to bed if you like.”
“Just leave it, Silva, it won’t matter. I’ll do it in the morning. Good night.”
She shambles off without another word, bent over with her hands on the small of her back, her fat feet half out of her shoes. She doesn’t walk like that when Ron is here. I want to tell her I know about them. Does she think I’m stupid? I see their faces, I know they whisper away together. I heard them at it this evening, and when I appeared she pretended she was talking about the logs. I want to tell her Ron is as much mine for the taking as hers, I could have him if I chose to. Then it would be me he gives whatever I ask for on a plate, it would be me he’s ready to drop everything for, take anywhere I want. She has everything, and she deserves nothing.
She must be making all her plans. She must be feeling very clever. I am so angry I am going to have to cry. But I can’t bear to go to my room, where I have nothing of you but your photographs, while she lies on the other side of the wall stroking that belly of hers, thinking of that baby, smiling to herself. I go back to the kitchen and pick up her phone. I check it, and it’s just as I suppose: she’s got it on silent. That will be so she can carry on text conversations with him all day, even while I’m around. Making all their plans for after the baby. How and when they are going to leave me.
I look at the In box, and yes, of course there’s a message from Ron, and in the Sent box is her reply.
Held up in queue. See you car park 4:30. Did you get bandage for s?
Thx OK. Yes. Also getting savlon + aftersun.
Both messages are from a Sunday in late August, not long after she tried to see the doctor in Inverness and I’d made her start carrying her phone again. On the Sunday morning I’d cut my hand with a chisel, chipping stones for your memorial. It was baking hot by the afternoon, and I came back to the cabin with my shoulders and nose red and sore and my hand wrapped in the bloodied folds of my skirt. Annabel patched me up using small bandages and tissues and asked Ron to take her to the pharmacy in Netherloch. Ron said he needed some white spirit anyway, so they went together, and she bought bandages and also lotion for my shoulders.
When they got back, she cleaned the cut and dressed it, then she dabbed the sunburn lotion on me. She put the bottle in the refrigerator so it would be extra cold and soothing for the next time I needed it. She thought I was crying because my skin was sore, but I was crying for her kindness and how cared-for I felt. How long ago that is.
There are no other text messages from Ron since then, and only three or four from me. That means the ones they’ve been sending each other since, she’s been deleting as she goes, in case I find them. If she’s doing that, I must be right to worry. Maybe it started longer ago than I think. Suddenly I recall the day in July when Ron brought the paper with the photographs of your chain and Anna’s giraffe. They sat up that night together, waiting for me to sleep. Was that when they began to say to each other they would be better off without me? How long have those looks between them being going on, those conversations that stop the moment I come into the room?
There is nothing on her voice mail. Now I scroll through the call records, and since late August there are no numbers either received or dialed except mine. There is nothing recorded between then and the eighteenth of February.
But on the eighteenth of February she called another number. On the nineteenth, she missed and received calls from the same number. It’s a number so familiar to me but so out of place and time that at first I don’t believe what I’m seeing. I get my own phone and look. Of course I know I am right, I am merely putting off the moment of acceptance. For a time I look from one number to the other, a phone in the palm of each hand, checking every digit, until I cannot deny it.
The person who called her on the nineteenth of February was you. Were you replying to her calls to you on the eighteenth? There are none before that and, of course, none since. My mouth is dry, and a kind of creak comes from my throat. Something is robbing me of the strength to call out. I drink a cup of water, and another.