The Missing One by Lucy Atkins Page A

house is eerily quiet, except for the far-off moan of the wind and the occasional creak and tick of the radiator. I feel as if she might pop her head in at any moment, and ask why I’m sitting here, all alone. Is something wrong? Has something happened?
    I open the notebook. Maybe there is something in here that will give me a clue about who she really was. Maybe this book will help me understand why the two of us were so twisted and knotty.
    But it is just lists and scientific jargon. I flip through pages of incomprehensible notes, tables of numbers and columns consisting mainly of vowels. Then I realize that there are little scribbled comments dotted here and there.They are often written vertically in the margins, or scrawled along the bottom of the page – little hints of a life outside the research. I flip from one to the next.
    4 p.m. tomorrow
 –
S
    Find out about OMP
    S bday
    Where is B’s family? Puget Sound/Salish Sea?
    I notice that the initial ‘S’ crops up frequently, but I can only find one reference to what could be my father:
    G to NY Friday?
    The last fifth of the book is blank – old, empty lined pages, waiting for something that never came. I wonder if it stops because she got pregnant. Maybe this notebook represents her last days as a scientist. Is that why she kept it?
    Then something connects in my head. This
S
could be Susannah, the postcard sender. There were thirty-seven annual postcards, which means Susannah started to send them the very first year my mother got to England.
    If there are old friends out there, like this Susannah person, then maybe there is family somewhere too. My mother was an only child, her parents are long dead, but maybe there are cousins, or at least old family friends. There must be people out there who knew her as a young woman, as a child. Perhaps one day I could take a trip out to the Pacific Northwest and find the people who knew her.Maybe it’s not too late to understand my mother – and if I can understand her, then perhaps I will be able to let her go. Then something occurs to me. I could go – now. I could take Finn and get on a plane and go.
    The metal band that has been clamped around my heart for days immediately feels less tight. Just the thought of getting away is a huge release.
    And I could do this. I really could. Why not?
    If I leave then I won’t have to sit in our home and listen to the man I love explain how he fell for his ex-girlfriend all over again – or worse, how he has longed for her since college. I won’t have to hear him tell me how motherhood has changed me, or how having Finn has exposed the cracks that were always there in our relationship, I just didn’t see them. And I won’t have to hear him tell me that he understands, now, that he never should have left her in the first place and that marrying me was a mistake. He doesn’t love me in the right way. He loves her. He’s so sorry.
    I put my mother’s notebook on the coffee table. My hands are shaking. An escape plan has dropped from the sky, and I must pick it up and use it before it shimmies away again.
    I get up and go through to the kitchen and my laptop. I pour myself a large glass of red wine and take it back to the sofa, pulling the blanket back up as it falls to the floor.
    My mother kept her maiden name, Halmstrom, slotted before my father’s: Elena Halmstrom MacKenzie. I have no idea how people go about searching for family members –there are probably millions of websites dedicated to this. But, not knowing where to start, I just google
Halmstrom, Seattle
.
    Some long-ago Ellis Island slip must have turned a vowel because there are ninety-five Holmstroms in Seattle, but not a single Halmstrom. I feel the disappointment settle solidly in my belly. Maybe there really are no surviving members of my mother’s family.
    I skim down the Google links for Halmstrom, and then something