FOUND MISSING
FOUND MISSING
S he’s alive.
But now I’m worried I might have killed her.
I lean down toward Abby, still feeling dizzy and unsteady on my feet. I’m exhausted but suddenly feel wide awake, my heart thudding so loudly I can hear it in my ears. I stare at her and wonder if this is my fault, whether I might have fallen asleep at the wheel. I think I was reaching for the radio when it happened, but I’m so tired I’m not sure. Either way, I’m to blame for this. My mind is already editing the moment, rewriting what happened, trying to relieve the overwhelming stress of what I think I am seeing.
People are found missing all the time, but missing people are rarely found.
I reach out a hand to touch her face; I need to know if she is real. Her eyes fly open before my fingers make contact and she slaps my hand away. Then she sits up and glares at me.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asks, leaning away.
“It’s me ,” I reply, but she stares at me with wild eyes.
Her eyes are the only thing that doesn’t look right about her. They’re brown, which is wrong. My wife’s eyes were the bluest I’ve ever seen. Her hair is longer than it was before too, but it would be after all these months. Her face looks exactly the same, except for a small cut on her forehead that is bleeding. I can’t process what I am seeing. Or hearing.
“Stay the fuck away from me,” says my wife who never swore.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I tell her. Abby stares at me as though I might be crazy.
She might be right.
Long-term insomnia can cause permanent damage to a person’s brain, and in extreme cases, death. Confusion and paranoia are early warning signs of the mind starting to unravel. My doctor said he’d had insomniac patients who had seen the faces of dead relatives. Some had entire conversations with people who were not there. They even heard the other person talking, insisted that they were there in the room. What if that’s what this is? A hallucination as a result of grief, stress, and extreme exhaustion?
I reach to touch her, again. She slaps my hand away, again. I think she’s real.
Abby tries to sit up and is clearly in pain. I should help her but I am still frozen to the spot. I have so many questions but she beats me to it with one of her own.
“Who are you?” she demands again.
Another trickle of bright red blood starts to crawl out of the cut on her forehead and run down the side of her face. Someone needs to put some pressure on the wound and in the absence of anyone else I guess that’s me. I take a clean hankie from my pocket and lean toward her, but she jerks away.
“It’s me , Grady,” I say.
“Okay, Grady . Why are you driving Whitty’s old car, and why did you run me over?”
“Whoa! I didn’t run you over!”
“The only reason I’m not dead is because I dodged you. You drove the car straight at me and knocked me off my bike.”
“No. I didn’t see you. The mist...”
“What mist?” she asks.
I look around and of course the mist has completely cleared now. But she must have seen it before she came off her bike; it was almost impossible to see anything else. She takes a tissue from the sleeve of her red coat and holds it to her head. Then she looks at all the blood on it and turns an even paler shade of white.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says. “Maybe I imagined you knocking me over. Oh, hang on, I’m lying in the middle of the road and bleeding. Are you off your meds?”
My wife used to say that too.
This is too much to process. She is too much.
“I don’t understand what is happening. You’re alive ,” I say.
“No thanks to you.”
I stare at her. “Do you really not know who I am? You’ve been gone for over a year, have you been here all this time?”
“Gone? What are you talking about?”
Maybe I am losing my mind.
“Why are you acting as though we know each other? I don’t know you,” she says.
I feel like someone just turned my world upside down and shook it.
“ Know each other?” I say. “I’m your—”
“Look, I don’t wish to sound rude,” she interrupts. “But I have somewhere I need to be and, thanks to you, I don’t think I can ride my bike.” The bike is on the side of the road. It has a large wicker basket on the front and is clearly very old. It belongs in a museum—like most things on this island—but otherwise I can’t see anything wrong with it. Not even a scratch. “Given you almost killed me, do you think you could give me a lift?” she asks and I hesitate. “If it’s too much trouble—”
“No, of course I can give you a lift. I just... maybe we should call a doctor.”
“The doctor only visits on Tuesdays,” she says, attempting to stand. I try to help her up but she makes it clear that she can do it on her own.
She looks like my wife.
She sounds like my wife.
She is my wife.
My mind scrambles to come up with possible explanations for what is happening.
Maybe she has a concussion from what just happened.
Maybe when she disappeared a year ago she lost her memory?
Maybe she’s lying.
I don’t understand what is going on but I have to know the truth.
I lift the bike into the boot of the Land Rover, then tell Columbo to get in the back seat before Abby and I climb inside the front. She even smells like my wife; she’s wearing Abby’s favorite perfume. I thought Columbo might jog her memory but it’s as though she’s never seen him before. He is very happy to see her, but he’s happy to see everyone.
“Cute dog,” she says, barely looking at him.
My mind is too full of questions. I decide to start with an easy one.
“Have you lived on the island long?” I ask, turning on the engine.
“Long enough,” she replies. She fastens her seat belt, checks it twice. “If you head toward the village I’ll guide you from there,” she adds, as though not wanting to tell me her address. As if she is scared of me. As though I am a stranger. Her hands are neatly folded in her lap and I take my eyes off the road just for a moment to look at them. They look like my wife’s hands except that she isn’t wearing her wedding ring, and instead of varnish, her nails seem to be covered in splatters of blue-green paint.
“You don’t sound like you were born here,” I say.
“How observant. You don’t sound like a hit-and-run driver.”
“I didn’t see you until your bike collided with the car, and I didn’t run.”
“I’ve lived here for as long as I can remember,” she says. Which doesn’t mean anything given I don’t know how much she can remember. There might be no ring on her finger, but I think I can see a slight indentation on her skin where she used to wear it. I notice that she picks the paint off her nails, the same way Abby used to pick off her polish. It was something she did when things were stressful for her at work. A coping mechanism. A nervous tic.
I remember the newspaper articles that were left in the cabin and the car, maybe that’s why someone wanted me to see them, because they knew she was here. My mind is now filling with all sorts of explanations for how and why Abby might have ended up on the Isle of Amberly. My wife’s obsession with her work was one of the only subjects we ever argued about, and there were things I said before she vanished that I longed to take back after she was gone. I’d tell her that now but she doesn’t seem to know who I am. Abby looks up as we approach a junction.
“Ignore the turning for the village and turn right instead, along the cliff road.”
I’m on the cliff road.
That’s what she told me the night she disappeared. It’s one of the last things she said before she vanished. This feels like a total head fuck. I go along with it, with her , and I take the turning, but I can’t seem to stop myself asking the question again.
“Do you really not know who I am?”
She stares at my face while I stare at the road, and I feel her eyes boring into me.
After an almost unbearable silence, all she says is, “Should I?”
I shake my head. Silence resumes.
“Wait, are you the author ?” she asks then.
“ Yes. Yes, I’m an author. Do you remember now?”
“I don’t get out much, but I do remember Cora Christie telling everyone who came into the corner shop that another writer had come to Amberly. So that’s you, is it? The author?”
“That’s me,” I say, trying to hide my disappointment. Either my wife has become an amazing actress or she really doesn’t remember me.
“It’s just down this lane here,” she says.
I turn down a bumpy track and soon I see the sea. “This is where you live?”
“No, this is where I work. I like being close to the ocean. I find it calming.”
But she hates the ocean.
There is a small white wooden building in the distance, in front of a vast white sandy beach. There is nothing else here. No other buildings. No other people.
“What is this place?” I ask. “It’s beautiful.”
“If you mean this part of the island, it’s called Dead End Bay. If you mean the building, it’s the island pottery.”
I try my best to keep the conversation going. To find out as much as I can.
“Looks like a lovely spot. How long have you worked here?”
“I’ve owned the place for almost a year.”
It couldn’t be any longer because she was still with me before that.
My mind is a mess of thoughts I don’t know how to untangle. Feelings I know I should have but can’t quite reach. I don’t understand what is happening or whether this is real.
But she looks real.
And she sounds real.
We park up and I stare at the sign above the building. It seems the name of my missing wife’s new business is the name I just borrowed for my book: Beautiful Ugly.