The Open State

Gareth disappeared on a Saturday in March. My first thought when they told me was who would fix the leaking tap now, which I immediately regretted because that’s not the sort of thought any loving wife should have when she hears her husband is missing.

But the tap had been dripping for weeks. Drip drip drip. Not particularly loud, but the sort of noise you can’t unhear once you’ve heard it.

He had stood in the kitchen that morning, tying the laces of his boots, already halfway up the mountain in his head. I think that annoyed me almost as much as the drip.

“You said you’d fix the tap,” I said.

“I said I’d try to fix the tap.”

“And did you?”

“Well I had a look at it.”

He grinned at me. Sometimes I hated that grin, though when we met it was what I told people I loved about him. But he’d used it as a get-out-of-jail-free card too many times, and now I went tight whenever I saw it.

He had packed egg sandwiches, two apples and a flask of coffee. He could be quite self-sufficient when he wanted to be. I hadn’t eaten anything yet that morning and my cup of coffee was cold.

“Come with me,” he said.

“I’m busy.”

“You’re always busy.”

“Yes, and maybe I’d be less so if…”

I didn’t finish the sentence. It would only mean another argument.

He kissed my cheek. His beard scratched my chin.

“Back by five,” he said.

“Really?”

“Well maybe half five. I’ll play it by ear.”

I think he drove to Pen y Fan after that. I say think because I never asked where he was going, and later, when people asked me, I had to tell them I couldn’t confirm which route he took because I didn’t know exactly where he’d been headed. And it wasn’t because I hadn’t listened properly. It was because I hadn’t asked, and I still don’t know which is worse.

At six I rang him, but there was no answer.

At seven I rang him again. Still no answer.

At quarter past seven I started to get angry. By eight I was scared. I called his brother David. I called the police. I gave them his description and our car registration and said I thought he was wearing an orange waterproof jacket, though I couldn’t swear to it.

The policewoman on the phone told me to try to stay calm. He was probably just delayed. These things happen.

I told her I was calm, but he had never been this late. Not strictly true, but those times had been for other reasons and we were well past that.

They rang me again an hour later. They had found the car at the Storey Arms, so I had been right about Pen y Fan. Search teams were dispatched with dogs and torches. David came over and made me tea.

“I bet he’s twisted an ankle,” David said.

I nodded.

“And then got turned around in the dark.”

“Yes.”

By the third day, the police had stopped saying the word “search” but had not yet started calling it something else.

On the fifth day, they found one of his boots near a sheep track.

One of the police officers showed me a photo and asked if I recognised it. At least this time I could confirm yes, it was his boot. I remembered him tying it that morning when I asked him about the leaking tap, which David had now fixed.

“It’s from a pair,” I said stupidly.

No body was found.

People talked about gullies and bogs. An old mine shaft was even mentioned, though no one knew where one was so no one searched it. They told me the mountain could turn on you. I heard a lot of clichés like that. I hate them. Don’t get me started on *Sorry for your loss*. He’s lost, so it’s not a loss, I wanted to say, though I knew that would confuse them.

After two weeks they stopped searching. No one said presumed dead, but David took me to a solicitor to discuss the processes around death in absence. Apparently I needed to get it sorted for insurance and the mortgage.

After a time they returned his boot to me. I kept it by the back door even though I tripped over it every time I went to peg the washing out.

---

The first time I saw him, I was in Tesco trying to decide what coffee to buy. He had his favourite blend, but that didn’t matter anymore, so I was thinking of trying something new.

He was standing by the tea section reading the back of one of the boxes. He was wearing an orange waterproof and his hair looked wet.

I dropped the coffee.

It split open when it landed and beans spilled everywhere.

An assistant restocking shelves turned to look.

“Oh dear,” she said.

I walked towards him.

“Gareth,” I said.

He turned his head.

It wasn’t him. This man had a different nose and although he smiled at me it wasn’t Gareth’s grin, though I still felt that tightness in my chest.

“Sorry,” I said.

He held up the tea.

“No problem.”

I went home with our usual coffee blend.

And that was how it started. I started seeing him everywhere after that.

At the train station waiting for the London Paddington train with an unfamiliar rucksack on his back.

On Wind Street, reflected in the window of our favourite Italian restaurant.

Once in a puddle in the middle of the road, facing away with his hood up.

Every time I called his name he turned and changed into someone else. A young man. An old man. Once a woman with a pram. There was no predicting what he would become once I called his name.

I learned to walk towards him slowly and keep quiet. When I did that he kept his face turned away from me, but other people would notice me and try to lead me away, and every time they did, when I turned back, he had disappeared.

“You’re grieving,” my sister Megan said. “So you’re bound to see him everywhere.”

“It didn’t happen when Jimmy died.”

She smiled. “He was a dog. Not the same thing.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You’re not sleeping, Beth.”

“I sleep.”

Megan came every week for a while. She brought soup and told me about her children as she opened my curtains, emptied my bins and brought in the washing I had left pegged out for days.

One night, six months after he disappeared, I dreamt he was sitting at the kitchen table eating pizza. He had tomato sauce on his fingers, crumbs in his beard and the tap was dripping again. Drip drip drip.

“You’ll be too full to hike,” I said.

“I’m not going back out,” he said.

“You really should,” I replied.

Then I woke up.

I wrote the dream down because Megan had told me journalling might be helpful. In fact I was already journalling, noting the times and places of every sighting and how near I got before someone led me away.

The newsagents had been the worst.

I had stopped for milk. On the screen above the till, the CCTV view showed the corner of the shop, right by the wine. There Gareth stood examining a bottle of rosé. I do not drink rosé. I remembered who did, but I didn’t want to think about that.

I started walking towards him. Don’t say his name, I told myself.

The freezer hummed as I walked past it. A schoolboy was choosing an ice lolly. I walked towards the wine.

He turned, not fully, just enough for me to see his profile. It was him. Finally he looked at me and grinned. He was thinner now.

“Hey, your card was declined,” called the shopkeeper.

I turned to look, then turned back and Gareth had gone.

At home I rang the number the police had left me. I was put through to the same policewoman I had spoken to the night he didn’t come home. She listened to my report before speaking.

“And you’re sure it was him?”

“Yes.”

“Is this the first time you’ve seen him?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. I felt she would not understand about the tea, the railway station, the window reflection and certainly not the puddle.

“Yes,” I lied.

She told me she’d log my report and talk to colleagues, but then she started asking if I was eating, sleeping, talking to anyone, so I hung up.

She never called me back and I never called her because that was the last sighting. Gareth in the shop, holding the rosé wine.

---

Years passed. Gareth would have turned forty-five. Then fifty.

His mother died.

David remarried a woman who referred to me as “Betty” and kept inviting me on girls’ nights out.

I got older and started dyeing my hair. My sister told me it looked good though I should try a lighter shade next time.

Sometimes I’d dream of him. Always sitting in the kitchen. Always eating. Though once he was at the sink fixing the tap, even though by then I’d had the kitchen remodelled.

Then came the news announcement.

The presenter said researchers from several universities had published findings on anomalous observational events. They showed a graphic of overlapping circles and a scientist explained that certain events appear to remain probabilistically open when no definitive observation of death has occurred.

I sat down on the arm of the settee.

The scientist continued.

“We’re not saying missing people are alive, but our data suggests under certain conditions, where death is unobserved, multiple outcomes may persist.”

“And this means…?” asked the interviewer, pretending to understand.

“Some people might experience encounters with the missing.”

My phone started ringing. I knew it was Megan even though I’d stopped mentioning the sightings years ago.

“What happens if death is confirmed?” asked the presenter.

“Observation collapses these multiple outcomes,” said the scientist.

I didn’t move for a long time, not until the door opened and Megan entered.

“You didn’t answer your phone.”

“No.”

“Did you see the news?”

“Yes.”

“Iit could mean…”

“I haven’t seen him for years Meg, and the last time was with the rosé.”

“That doesn’t mean what you think it means. She’s long gone.”

“So what are you saying, Megan?”

She came and sat beside me. She handed me a printed article. There was the diagram with the overlapping circles and beneath it another diagram of branching lines and dots.

“They’re studying cases.”

“There’s a lot,” I said.

“The article says in cases with an emotionally attached observer there are more anomalies. You stopped seeing him after the shop.”

“Yes.”

“So what if you were wrong?”

I hesitated then spoke. “I don’t even know if I want to see him again.”

She tried not to look shocked. “You could say goodbye”

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

“Well, what if it’s hurting Beth?”

---

The university wrote to me in April inviting me to participate in a study of unresolved bereavement-linked observational phenomena.They said Megan had given them my details. I was too tired to be angry.

Two weeks later I met with Dr Nia Jones. Her office had cream walls, a plastic fern and a monitor.

She asked about the mountain and my last conversation with Gareth. I told her about the tap. She then showed me images on a monitor. Just normal public CCTV images. Most were of nothing. Figures that could have been anyone. Then she showed me a frame from a bus station in Swansea.

Gareth stood beside a timetable looking right at the camera. His hair was wet, he wore his orange waterproof and he was drinking from a paper cup. His face looked older.

“When was this taken?” I asked.

“Three months ago.”

I shook my head.

“That’s the timestamp.”

I looked again at the image. There he was. Stood on his own and staring directly into the camera. His hair had thinned. I noticed the orange waterproof looked worn.

“He’s alive,” I said.

She took off her glasses.

“That’s not how we are describing it.”

“He’s older.”

“Yes.”

“How can he age if he’s dead?”

“We don’t know.”

“What happens if you find him?”

She turned off the monitor.

“If we find him alive, that resolves the event.”

“And if you find his body?”

She hesitated before speaking.

“That resolves it in a different way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Multiple outcomes would no longer persist.”

“Even dreams?”

She nodded.

I stood up to leave.

“Some families find resolution helpful,” she said.

“Yes. I imagine some do.”

---

The call came in November.

A police officer asked if I was sitting down so I sat on the sofa and said yes.

They had found remains in a gully below a ridge near the route Gareth might have taken. A group of teenagers had gone off path and stumbled upon them.

The officer said there were items with the body. Two broken walking poles. Fragments of orange fabric. A boot.

They needed formal identification as soon as possible.

Megan came with me to the hospital even though I had barely spoken to her since the university.

“You don’t have to look at it,” she said.

“I know.”

“They can use dental records, I think.”

“Probably.”

“If you look…”

“I know, Megan. But I’ve not seen him since the shop…”

“What about the university? The monitor…”

“I mean in person.”

“Yes, but if you look and it’s him…”

I didn’t reply.

At the hospital Dr Jones was waiting for us. I hadn’t expected that.

“You didn’t need to come,” I said. “Is this more research?”

She didn’t reply.

“Do you want me to come in or wait here?” asked Megan.

“Stay,” I said, as if she were Jimmy.

“I’ll wait too,” said Dr Jones.

A mortuary assistant led me down a short corridor and opened a door into a small room. There was a curtain and behind the curtain a trolley with something beneath a sheet.

“Take your time,” said the assistant, but he stood beside the trolley, hands lightly touching the sheet.

I walked forward. Suddenly I saw a reflection in the trolley’s metal edge.

Gareth stood behind me. He was wearing his orange waterproof.

This time he looked no older than he had the day he left. His hair was dry. He raised one hand, palm out..

The assistant lifted the sheet but I couldn’t see what was underneath. I was still too far away.

“Mrs Pritchard?”

Gareth’s reflection shook its head once.

The assistant waited.

I thought of the mountain. I thought of the boot they’d found all those years ago, the boot I’d kept for ages by the back door until Megan had put it away. And I thought of that tap dripping. Drip drip drip.

“Whenever you’re ready,” the assistant said again.

I looked at the reflection and Gareth grinned that grin.

I walked nearer the body.

“It’s him,” I said to the assistant, though I still couldn’t see.

The assistant lowered the sheet.

I looked back at the trolley’s metal edge.

Gareth’s reflection was walking away.

Something pink caught my eye, it glinted in the light.

I turned to the assistant, “Can I take one last look please?”

He sighed and lifted the sheet.