The Waiting Game

"Hope reached me down a phone line, and I took it in both hands and did not once stop to ask why it had come so quickly."

I let myself back into the house, into the silence that had been waiting there all day for me to come and stand in it. It was not the ordinary quiet of an empty house. It was the other kind, the kind that had moved in on the Saturday and made itself at home — the quiet of things that should have been making noise and were not. A hall where a jacket should have hung over the banister. A kitchen that should have smelt of Nial burning something with too much confidence, and smelt instead of the spray my mother had scrubbed it down with. Sammy's shoes should have been kicked off anyhow at the foot of the stairs. They were at Rowena's, on Rowena's mat, side by side in their neat little pair.

I stood in the hall with my keys still in my hand and made myself breathe. Then I went up.

I had not meant to go into the bedroom. My feet took me there the way they had been taking me to the wrong places all week — to his side of the wardrobe, to the drawer, to the places that hurt. Nial's lamp was still on, on his side, because I had not been able to bring myself to switch it off; some stupid animal part of me had decided that a lamp left burning was a thing he might steer himself home towards in the dark. His cologne stood on the dresser where it always stood. I picked it up before I had decided to, and took the cap off, and breathed him in — and for the length of one breath he was in the room, the whole warm ordinary bulk of him at my back — and then the breath ended and he was not, and I was only a woman standing in a cold bedroom holding a bottle of scent up to her face as though it might answer her.

I put it down. I went back out onto the landing before the room could do anything else to me.

My phone went in my pocket, and my whole body clenched around the hope of it — it was going to be Nial, it was always going to be Nial, right up until I looked — and it was my mother.

"Jenny, darling." Rowena's voice, careful and level, the voice she kept for occasions. "I wanted to be sure you'd eaten something. And to ask whether you'd like me to keep Samuel another night."

She had never once in his life called him Sammy. Samuel, always, because she held that a name given in full was a kind of respect and a nickname a kind of laziness, and on any other day it would have made me smile. "I've eaten," I lied. "And no — I'll come for him tomorrow, like we said. He needs to be home."

I needed him home. I needed the noise of him, the endless narration, the small hot weight of him going to sleep against me on the sofa. I needed one thing in that house that was still alive.

"If you're sure." A pause, the delicate one she set before the things she had already decided to say. "Jenny — is there any news?"

The question everyone asked, in the same lowered voice, waiting for the same answer. "No. Nothing."

"...I see. Well. He's perfectly happy here — but children do need their own beds, their routines. Even when things are —" she had no word for what things were, and did not reach for one.

"Especially now," I said. "He needs to know home's still here."

Still safe, I did not say, because I was no longer sure the word applied.

"Would you like to speak to him? He's just finished his tea." A note of faint despair entered her voice. "Chicken nuggets. He was immovable on the subject."

That did make me smile — the first thing that had managed it. "Put him on."

A clatter, a fumble, and then: "Mummy!" — and his voice went through me like warmth into cold hands, all at once and almost painful.

"Hello, my love. Did you have a good day?"

"Grandma let me help in the garden and I found worms, I found three worms, and one was really long, and Grandma says worms are good because they make the dirt healthy for the plants, and I gave them all names but I've forgotted the names except one was Squiggly because he squiggled the most —"

I sat down on the top stair and closed my eyes and let him go, all of it pouring out in that headlong way he had, the whole of his day needing to be told at once and told to me. For as long as he was talking I did not have to be anywhere in the world but on the phone to my son.

"Squiggly is a very good name for a worm," I said.

"Mummy, when's Daddy coming home? I want to show him. Well, I putted the worms back, so I can't show him the worms, but I can show him the hole they live in —"

There was the question I had known was coming and still had no way to hold.

"Soon, my love," I said, and the word went down in me like a swallowed stone. "I'll come and get you tomorrow and we'll be at home together, all right?"

A small silence. "Mummy, I miss him."

"I know, sweetheart. I miss him too."

"But he's coming back." Not quite a question. He was still small enough to believe that the people he loved could not simply stop being where he had left them; that his mother saying yes and a thing being true were one and the same.

"Of course he is." The worst of the lies, and the easiest, because there was nothing on this earth that would have made me say anything else to him. "Now, you be good for Grandma. I love you all the way up."

"Love you all the way up too," he said — our thing, the last thing, always — and then he was gone, and Rowena was back for a moment saying something about the morning that I did not take in, and the line went down, and the silence came up around me again like water closing over a head.

I sat on the stair a while. Then I made myself stand, because somewhere on the other side of the city Sharon Pafistis was on her knees in her husband's study going through twenty years of paper, and I had told her I would do the same, and there was one room in my house I had not set foot in since the Saturday.

Nial's office. The little room off the laundry that he called an office and I called the glory hole, where the ute paperwork and the tax and the warranty booklets for every appliance we had ever owned lived in a filing cabinet he was proud of and a slow drift of receipts he was not. It was where I had found the notebook. That first day — that first raw, scrabbling day when I still believed that looking hard enough might simply turn him up — I had gone in there and pulled the room apart, and down in the second drawer, under the manuals, I had found the little black notebook with his jobs in it and Luke Smith's name underlined twice, and I had taken it, and I had not been back in the room since. I had kept the door shut on it. I had not been able to make myself look.

I put my hand flat on the door and made myself open it and put the light on.

I stood in the doorway and could not make the room sit right in my head, because it was emptier than I had left it. The filing-cabinet drawers hung open, and there was half of what there should have been inside them. The shelf where the box files had stood in their fat important row had gaps in it now, like a mouth with teeth gone. The corkboard over the desk, that had been shingled three deep with quotes and dockets and a child's felt-tip drawing of the ute, was nearly bare. I stood there and tried to hold it as it had been that first day, when I had knelt on this floor and gone through everything — and I was almost sure, as sure as I could be of anything in a week where I could no longer trust my own memory of which side of a door I had been standing on, that there had been more. That things had been in this room a week ago that were not in it now.

The thought arrived cold and whole: someone had been in here. For a moment I believed it entirely — someone with a key, someone who had come through this room after me and carried things out of it, the same hands that had folded a stranger's underwear in among my own and lifted Nial's shirts off their hangers, someone building me a story room by room. But just as quickly the other voices started up, the ones that had been arguing in me for days and would not stop. That I had been half out of my mind that first day, tearing the place to pieces; that I had very likely bagged things up myself and not remembered doing it. That a woman who had stood in her own bathroom breathing in another woman off a scrap of cloth had no business trusting a single thing her mind handed her about a room. That the plainest reading of an emptied office was a man packing to leave, and that I was standing in a cold room inventing a burglar to keep from having to know it — the plain reading Sandra Langley had settled on in my own lounge that first afternoon, kind and sorrowful, her head tipped to one side.

I went in anyway and went through what was left, down on my knees on the thin carpet the way I had done before, and there was nothing. No address for Luke Smith. No second notebook, no letter, no diary, nothing soft-edged and secret waiting under the manuals to be found. Whatever had been in this room was either already in my coat pocket — the one small black book I had taken and told no one about — or it was gone, carried out into the same dark that had swallowed everything else. I knelt there among Nial's emptied drawers with my hands smelling of dust and old paper, and I found precisely nothing, and the nothing was its own kind of answer, and I could not have said to what.

That was when the phone went again.

I had it out of my pocket before the second ring, and it was not Nial and it was not my mother. It was Sharon.

"I've found him," she said. No hello, nothing before it. Her voice was tight and fast and running out ahead of itself. "Jenny. I know where we can find Luke Smith."

The floor of the little room seemed to shift under me. "How? Where? Sharon, what did you —"

"Not on the phone. I'm coming to you — I'm in the car now, I'll be twenty minutes. Be ready to go the second I'm there."

"Sharon, wait — where are we even —"

But she had gone. The line was dead in my hand, and I was standing in my husband's stripped office with my heart going and no idea in the world what I had just said yes to.

I should have felt only the one thing. Hope — clean, enormous, uncomplicated hope. Somewhere in the last two hours, while I had been kneeling in the dust getting precisely nowhere, Sharon had gone into Adrian's study and come out the far side of it with a name turned into a place, and that was everything. That was the first firm ground under my feet since he went.

I did feel it. But it did not come by itself. It came tangled up with the other thing, the thing I could not put a clean name to — that she had done in two hours what I had not managed to do at all; that she had sounded so certain, so ready, already in the car with the engine turning over before I had even said the word; that I had known this woman for the length of a school lunch hour. I stood there and felt the suspicion come up in me, and I was ashamed of it in the same breath, because I knew exactly what I was by now — a woman so far gone in fear that she had frisked a child over a forgotten script and stood in her own mother's kitchen watching the way she held her son — and here it was again, the same sickness, turning itself on the one person in the world who had held both my hands while I fell apart. Sharon was frightened, and Sharon was grieving, and Sharon had simply been braver and faster than me, and the thing in me that wanted to make that sinister was not some clear sight the rest of them lacked. It was the sickness. I knew it was the sickness. It would not let go of me all the same.

I moved fast, because moving was better than standing still with all of that. I found my coat and checked the pocket and felt the hard little corner of the notebook against my hip, and I left it where it was. I found my keys, my phone. Then I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the knife block, and the rolling pin on its hook, and the torch in the drawer, and I understood what I was about to do and did it anyway — I slid the drawer open and took out the big rubber torch Nial kept for the power cuts, long and heavy, solid enough to swing at someone, and I put it in my bag.

I did not let myself look too hard at what that was: a woman arming herself to get into a car with someone she trusted, to go and find a man she was afraid of, on the strength of a phone call she could not have explained to a living soul. There was no version of it a sensible person would have recognised. I had stopped, somewhere back in the week, being a sensible person. I had become a woman who would get into any car and walk through any door on earth if there was the smallest chance that Nial was on the other side of it.

Then there was nothing left to do but wait for her.

I turned the lamps off in the kitchen and the hall — and left Nial's burning on its own upstairs over the empty bed, because I could not make my hand do the other thing — and I stood at the front-room window with my coat on and my bag over my shoulder and the torch a dead weight inside it. Out on the street the ordinary run of things was going on without me: a light coming on behind the Kinghorns' curtains, old Mr Pyke down at number forty-three wheeling his bin in off the verge, somebody two gardens over calling a dog in. Not one of them with the first idea that a woman was standing three doors up at her own window, done up in her coat, waiting to be driven off into God knew what.

There was nothing left for me to do but watch the top of the road where it bent out of sight, and wait for a pair of headlights to come round it. So I stood at the glass and did that. I stood there with my heart going like a thing trying to get out, and I watched the bend, and I waited for the light.