I was about to return to Elsa when I felt the phone in my pocket vibrate.

CELEBRATE

That same word. Another film clip that was not a film clip. This was either a mistake or a cruel joke. I deleted the clip and blocked the number from my phone.

There was one child on this last boat. A boy, shockingly young, statue-like in the bow, arm in a blood-blackened sling. The officer at the wheel took the key from the ignition; his colleagues moored the boat to concrete posts on the jetty.

“Oh please, God, no.”

Every face turned toward Elsa. The boy stared at her, eyes wide. She had spoken the words loudly and clearly. I took my wife by the shoulder, drew her away from the group toward a rocky spit that pointed out toward the sea.

She looked across at the jetty. I followed her eye, saw the boy carried up into the air, held tightly in his mother’s arms. The arc lights picked out the wetness of their faces, the relief, the love.

“I mean,” Elsa said, her voice level, “we don’t know, of course, because no one has told us. But actually we do know, and every other parent here knows.”

She looked over her shoulder at the other parents. The group had scattered. Some stood looking out across the ink-black fjord. Others sat huddled in groups, blankets around their knees, clustered around the arc lights and the heaters. Elsa sat down, stretched her legs out along the rock.

“How many of us are there left?” she said.

“Sixty?” I said. “Seventy?”

“So that’s, what? Forty missing kids? Fifty?”

“These are just the parents who live near Oslo,” I said. “I’m guessing.”

“So it’s more?”

“I don’t know.”

“So strange,” she said. “Right now I feel calm.”

“Because we aren’t out of hope.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, actually we are.”

The boy looked smaller than ever. He sat bolt upright, saying nothing, still in his orange life preserver, as his mother talked to the medical crew.

“Cal,” said Elsa, “you need to understand this: that boy is the last of the children.”

As the next boat drew near we saw the shrouded bodies on the deck and turned away.

A new wave of adults began to arrive. The parents of the missing, contacted by the police, setting out across the country, desperate for news.

Farther up the rise were four rows of white tents. Officers were leading people inside, singly or in pairs. Lights on metal stands threw vast shadows. You could see the stark outlines of the parents on the white nylon walls, as they stood and identified their children. We saw hands raised to faces, saw shoulders bend and heads shake in disbelief.

When our turn came, a police officer led us to the nearest tent on the first row. On the canvas wall silhouetted figures slid a gurney into place.