They Buried an Empty Coffin and My Best Friend Took My Husband · Mira Lang

Chapter 1: The Doorbell

I rang my own doorbell at twenty past four on a Thursday in October, and my best friend opened the door.

Nadia had my ring on. Not a similar ring — mine, my grandmother's, the one with the chip in the left shoulder of the stone that we used to joke about. She had it on her right hand, which is what people do when a dead woman's ring doesn't quite fit the finger it belongs on.

She had a dish towel over one shoulder and a child on her hip.

The child was mine.

"Yes?" Nadia said. "Can I—"

And then she stopped, because a woman was standing on her step who had been dead for three years.

I have imagined that half-second in perhaps four thousand different versions. In every single one of them she screams.

She didn't scream. Her face went white in a wave, from the hairline down, and her arm tightened around my daughter, and her eyes went past me to the road — to the road, to see who else was out there.

That was the first thing I learned. She looked for witnesses before she looked at my face.

"Hello, Nad," I said.

Ivy — four years and two months old, in a purple sweatshirt, with a rice cake in one fist — looked at me with mild interest.

"Mummy, who is it?" she said.

To Nadia.

* * *

Here is what happened, in the order it happened, because for three years I could not put it in order and now I can, and it has cost me a great deal to be able to.

On the ninth of September, three years ago, I got on a ferry from Lisbon to a small island where I was supposed to look at a hotel with a view about a photography commission. There were eleven passengers. There was weather that the port authority later described as within operating parameters and that everyone on board would describe otherwise.

The ferry lost power and went onto rocks at 2:40 in the afternoon. Nine were taken off. Two went into the water.

I went into the water.

What came out, four hours later, three kilometres up the coast, was an unconscious woman of about thirty with a skull fracture, a shattered orbital bone, no bag, no documents, and no fingerprints on file in any European system, because I am a British-passported American who has never been arrested and has never worked in a school.

They called me Doente 4. Patient 4.

I was in a coma for nineteen weeks. When I came out of it I had no language for two months, and when the language came back it came back in pieces, and my name was not among them. I knew there was a child. I knew that with an absolute physical certainty that made the nurses cry, and I could not produce her name, or mine, or a city, or a face.

It took eleven months for the first real memory, and it was not a name. It was a doorbell.

Ours has a broken chime — it goes ding and then a half-second later a sort of apologetic thud, and my husband had been going to fix it for two years, and I lay in a bed on the Portuguese coast and heard that sound in my head and started to cry, and a nurse called Sofia held my hand and said, "Bom. Bom. That is a house."

* * *

It took another two years to get from that is a house to a doorstep.

I am going to skip that part, mostly. Not because it doesn't matter — it is the whole of my thirties — but because what people want to know is the doorstep, and because the practical summary is short: no papers, no name, no money, a face that had been rebuilt twice, and a hospital that had done everything right for three years and had no legal mechanism at all for a person who did not exist.

Sofia found my name in the end. It took her four months of her own time. She started with the ferry manifest, which had eleven passengers on it, all of whom were accounted for.

All eleven.

That is the detail that has never once let go of me. There was no missing person on that manifest. Whatever name I gave when I bought that ticket had been marked off as disembarked.

But there was a British newspaper piece from the following January about a woman lost in a ferry accident off the Portuguese coast, with a photograph, and Sofia stood at the end of my bed with a printout in her hand and said, "Rachel. Rachel Vance. Rachel, is this you?" — and something in my chest fell over.

Presumed drowned. A memorial service will be held in—

Presumed.

* * *

The consulate took six weeks and were kind. There is a process for this and it has been run perhaps four times in the history of the department, and the woman who ran it, whose name was Priti, cried in her own office and then apologised for crying.

She also told me two things, in that office, that I have not been able to put down since.

The first: a declaration of presumed death was granted at fourteen months. Not seven years — fourteen months, on an expedited application supported by "documentary evidence of death."

The second: the life insurance had paid out in the nineteenth month. Two million, one hundred thousand dollars, to my husband, Daniel Vance, as sole beneficiary.

"Documentary evidence," I said. "What documentary evidence? I was in a hospital ninety minutes from where the boat went down."

Priti turned the file around on her desk so I could read it.

A death certificate. Issued in Portugal. Dated the fourth of November — eight weeks after the ferry.

It named a woman aged about thirty, unidentified, deceased of injuries following a maritime incident, at a clinic in Faro.

And at the bottom, in the box for the certifying physician, was a signature and a printed name.

Dr. A. Camões.

I knew that name. I had known it for three years. He came round on Tuesdays, and he was the one who had signed off on my second reconstruction, and he had held my hand once, in year two, when the fear came at three in the morning.

Antonio Camões had certified my death eight weeks after the accident.

And then he had gone on treating me, by name — by the name they'd given me, Doente 4 — for three more years.