The Missing One Read Free Page A

itself for another day.
    The desk is rickety, with curlicues of woodworm running across the surface. There are two drawers. I slide one open and peer inside, as if, miraculously, the birth certificate will be lying there, waiting for me. But the drawer is packed with postcards. I prod at them.
    There are pictures of pottery vases, a few Native American paintings, mostly cubic-looking fish in bold blacks and reds, square faces, square eyes, thick black outlines and curling designs on their bodies. I notice a painting of a man’s face and turn it over. It comes from a chapel in Ecuador. There is a single sentence written on the card:
    Thinking of you today,
    Susannah
    I turn the others over, one by one, and for a moment I think I have lost my mind: my brain is short-circuiting. Every card says the same thing, in the same cramped hand.
    Thinking of you today,
    Susannah
    Most of the postcards have Canadian stamps, though one is sent from Taos, New Mexico, another from Seattle and a few from even further afield – Quito, Moscow, Durban. Not all the postmarks are visible, but every one I can read was mailed on the same date: May 6th. The earliest I can make out was posted thirty-seven years ago. My mother’s birthday was in June, so these aren’t birthday cards.
    I notice that most of the later postcards, from the early nineties onwards, come from the Susannah Gillespie Gallery.
    Thinking of you today,
    Susannah
    I push them all back into the drawer and shut it, then open the second drawer. It contains pencils and rubbers, a paring knife, a packet of Orbit chewing gum, a nail file, Post-its, a stapler, a box of Swan matches, an ancient silver lipstick.
    The base of my skull throbs and I feel the fury massing in my chest: who ignores a lump in the breast? Who sits and watches it grow beneath the surface of their skin and does nothing? Tears are coming down my cheeks, and I give inand lean on the desk, gasping for breath as they roll off my face and into her drawer.
    Then I stop, almost as abruptly as I started. I slam the drawer shut, stand up, wipe my nose on my sleeve, swallow, breathe in and out. There is no reason to believe that my mother actually wanted to die. Maybe she just thought that she was invincible. I wipe at my damp face with both wrists. She didn’t believe in illness. When we were young, if we ever complained of headaches, shivers, fevers she’d say, ‘If you think about being sick, you’ll get sick.’
    *
    I think of the time before this – the last time I saw her properly. It was August, just after the diagnosis. We were in the garden. Finn was on his haunches by my chair, putting dirt into his mouth then spitting it out. My mother was thinner and bone-pale, as if her skeleton were sucking away at her flesh. Her old jeans were rolled up, feet bare as usual, but her hair was lacklustre, curls looser, scraped back, more silvery. She looked intensely small, with blue flowers towering behind her.
    We sat with a pot of tea and a lemon cake that she had baked, but didn’t eat. On my one day in the office that week I’d had to interview three women for the new ‘living with breast cancer’ section. While they told me their intimate, awful stories, all I could think about was my mother and what she must be going through and how she would never – ever – talk to me like this. Afterwards, one of the women, about my mother’s age, clutched my hand and said the website was a ‘life-saver’. When she logged on and watched thevideos of others talking about their similar situations she realized that she wasn’t alone.
    But my mother, sitting upright on her white wooden garden chair, was so alone that it hurt to look at her. She would never find comfort in videos of other people talking about this disease. The new section on the website wasn’t even worth mentioning to her. I couldn’t bear to look at her, so I looked at Finn