‘Any problems, Mrs Elliot?’
‘No, all good,’ she calls back.
She watches them leave with the passports, with her signature.
You are a fool, she thinks.
* * *
After school, she sits on the bench at the edge of the soccer field and watches Essie drill the ball up and down with her squad. Sam does flips on the small playground with one of the other little brothers, but Mim has moved herself away from the other parents. She feels brittle. The small talk could snap her into pieces.
She is unnerved by the Department visit. There is too much that doesn’t add up. A scratch in her mind, snippets of Ben’s voice, coming out into the kitchen late one night and seeing him there, in front of his screen, his head in his hands. That time, last month, he got ridiculously drunk, then angry, then maudlin, lamenting the weakness of his own dad, long gone.
‘He was piss-weak. Never went out on a limb. Never took a stand.’
She had humoured him. To be honest she wanted drunk sex, the uninhibited kind they hadn’t had for years. ‘Come to bed,’ she’d said, quietly.
But he’d wanted to talk. ‘You’ve got to do what’s right. That’s all you’ve got in the end, isn’t it? Huh?’ He’d touched her face and she’d thought they might get somewhere, but he’d opened another bottle of wine and she’d gone to bed, pissed off and sober and horny.
People don’t disappear accidentally. You do it yourself, or someone does it for you.
What did she sign? Why the fuck did she hand anything over? What other choice did she have?
She picks up her phone. ‘Please call Raquel at The Advocate,’ she enunciates slowly.
A beep to indicate a recorded message: ‘You have called The Advocate. Please be advised this line may not be secure. If you would like to leave a confidential lead please go to our website and follow the links to the encrypted messenger service. If you would like to speak to one of our staff, you will be redirected now.’
Then a voice, ‘Raquel.’
Mim stumbles, feels stupid. ‘Hi, it’s Miriam Elliot here, you wanted to speak to my husband… at Golden Arc.’
‘Yes?’
She almost hangs up, feels the humiliation swelling in her. ‘Sorry, I just, he’s still missing and I wondered if you might be able to –’
The journalist cuts her off. ‘I’m sorry, Miriam, but unless you’re able to provide an update on the situation –’
‘No, I –’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’
Mim notes she does not sound sorry.
‘Get in touch via the website if there’s any new information. Good luck.’
And the line cuts out.
‘What the fuck,’ she says under her breath, and then, ‘What the actual fuck?’
Her phone buzzes in her hand. A message from an unknown number.
It takes a moment to register what she is seeing, scribbles on paper.
She holds the screen closer to her face, using one hand to shadow the sun.
Don’t call again.
Get out of town.
They will come for you.
From across the playground, Sam calls her name and she tears her eyes from the screen to wave and smile at him.
What if, instead of looking for her husband, they come looking for her?
* * *
Her mother’s voice is so familiar it startles her.
‘Mum! Hi.’
‘Hello, darling. I was beginning to think I wouldn’t get a call this week.’
‘Sorry, it’s been busy.’
‘Of course it has. How are the children?’
‘Good, we’re good. Sorry, Mum, I’ll be quick.’ She needs to babble out the idea before she changes her mind.
She rushes on. ‘Remember how I told you about that job? With Heidi?’
‘At the university?’ Her mother stretches out all the syllables. She’s like that, old-fashioned, a bit of a snob. My daughter, working at the u-ni-versi-ty. Never mind that it’s an underfunded regional shithole. It bears the same name as its big city sister and that’s enough for her mother.
‘Yeah. I’m going to come up to meet with Heidi about it. We’ll be up tomorrow. That okay?’
‘Of course. Ben coming with you?’
His name, so normal, the sting of it.
‘Nup. Maybe later, he has to work.’ It is a version of the truth.
‘I’ll get the rooms ready.’
‘No fuss, Mum, okay?’
‘None at all.’
She ends the call as Essie runs towards her. ‘See that, Mum? See what I just did?’ She holds her screen up in front of her to capture a selfie with the soccer field behind her.
Mim smiles, dazed. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘amazing.’
* * *
When the kids are in bed, she pours herself a glass of white. She wants Ben. Feels fear gripe in her guts. In the toilet, she shits liquid and feels relief for the light-headed emptiness in the wake of it.
They will come for you.
Fuck, Ben, what have you done?
She imagines opening the door of the bathroom and turning in the hall and into their room and seeing the bulk of him there in the bed. Pulling back the covers and sliding in next to him and feeling the weight of his arm go around her. Even in sleep, that sour warmth, the recognition of skin on skin – like sleep itself – as familiar as that. She can smell him. She feels as though she can conjure him up through the force of her need.
* * *
In her memory, that first autumn they were together is blown with light, wind and fingertips creeping in to touch skin under t-shirts. She is constantly distracted by the thought of him. She drops coffee cups. Overfills pots of beer. Thinks that she had better pull herself together or she will have a car accident. Sometimes Ben comes and sits at the corner of the bar where she works and when she knocks off they do not make it home; he pulls her against the dark wall around the corner, or in the shadows of the playground at the end of the street and they are all hands and mouths, frantic with desire. It is unsustainable, she knows, this fire. It will burn itself out. In some ways she is relieved by this. If it continues she will not be able to get her head straight. They do not speak about what it is, because it just feels as though it should be. They are cocooned in the blinkered way of lovers. No one has ever felt like this.
* * *
Sam calls out in his sleep. She wipes herself. Washes her hands. Pads down the hall to his room. The sheet on his bed is pulled back, and even when she squints against the darkness she can see there is no one there. Her breath catches. She switches the light on, says his name, steps into the room, then rushes out and opens Essie’s door with both hands.
There, in the bed, the two of them.
Sam’s blond tufts tangled in with Essie’s dark hair. Mim stands over the bed and is astonished to see how, in sleep, Ben’s face appears to be growing out of the children’s bone structure. The arch of Essie’s eyebrow, the length of space between nose and lip, the curve of it on Sam. She feels as though she might commune with her husband through the shadow of him in their faces.
And then? What would she say?