Nobody Is Ever Missing (12 page)

We didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

He’s a mathematician
, I said.

You said you didn’t have a husband.

I only said I didn’t have a family.

Werner nodded as if I had just told him the punch line to a riddle. We were holding mugs of tea too hot to drink. I held mine close so the steam put sweat on my face.

What does your husband think about you staying in the center of no place at all with an old man you’ve only met once?

He was smiling as if this was another part of the riddle, but I knew the answer to this wasn’t going to make me look like a particularly nice person. Possibly it was too late for niceness. I started to say something but wasn’t sure what to say, so I shut my lips again and I nodded and tried to smile a little. A husband—ha.

He actually doesn’t know exactly where I am.

Where does this husband believe his wife has gone?

It isn’t exactly clear
, I said.

And how long will this wife let this husband be uncertain of her whereabouts?

I’ve been trying to understand a way to understand that.

Werner tilted his head to the side like there was some nice music playing.

Oh, Miss Elyria. Whatever has gotten into a person like you? Whatever is it that makes a person do a thing like this?

There was no way to answer that question and I’m not the kind of person who tries to explain a thing that has no explanation so I went to the garden and I pulled things out of it, until I could feel the sun putting color on my scalp, until the muscles in my back were twitching in little fits, until the weeds were all wilted in a heap, and all I could think was how there would be more weeds tomorrow and wouldn’t it be easier for the world if everything just stayed still, just stopped growing altogether? Maybe it would, but we won’t do that, we won’t stop, plants don’t, people don’t, we keep showing up and living and trying to do something and dying and what was it that all these vines and leaves were struggling toward year after century after eternity? Because, really, they would be strangled dead by another weed or else scorched to death or frozen to death or eaten by possums or bugs or people. And I also wondered what it was that had gotten into me, or a person like me, and I wondered what it was that made me do these things, leave my life so abruptly, and I didn’t know then what it was because I couldn’t know then what I was and I barely know now what it was or still is that made me leave. I think brains might be machines that turn information into feelings and feelings back into decisions and I’ve discovered that my machine has been put together in a strange way and it translates life in a strange way but I have no way to fix this—I’m not a brain-machine fixer, I’m just a haver of a brain, like anyone, and none of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.

Now I know how to sit still, how to accomplish my job, how to walk home, how to order a sandwich at the diner, how to pay a bill, how to sleep in a cold bed, but I still don’t know how to fix my brain, make it turn life information into calm feelings, responsible actions. I know, now, how to ignore everything, how to not talk to strangers, how to not get on one-way planes to countries where I don’t belong and that’s all I can expect of myself these days, but back then that was all beyond me, that was life at a level that I wasn’t able to reach.

*   *   *

I managed to stay completely out of Werner’s way for a few days—waking early to work, staying in town all day and sneaking in late, but on that last morning he came down to the garden while I was working and it was clear I had lost my use to him.

You are a sad person
, he said,
and I’m not a person who can tolerate other people’s sadness.

I’m not sad.

It’s very clear that you are.

Maybe you’re projecting. I’m a happy person. I am fine.

I’m not a projector. I am twice your age. I know sadness. Yours is inextricable. It is terminal. I know these things.

I didn’t say anything.

It’s okay
, he finally said
. I get it. You’re trying to find yourself.

I don’t want to find myself
, I said, but I don’t think he heard me.

Who understands what has gotten into women these days—trying to find themselves somewhere, like they’ve split in two and they’re chasing the other part. You’re one of those women who thinks nothing is good enough for you, the entire human experience is not good enough for you and you want something impossible.

I didn’t say anything but my face must have.

I’m sorry
, he said in a tone that said he wasn’t actually sorry.
It’s really time you left.

22

Werner—

I am asking you to remove yourself from my automobile.

I was still. I stayed in my seat.

Werner, this is ridiculous, you know I don’t have anywhere else to go.

Werner took the keys out of the ignition, got out of the car, opened the trunk, and put my backpack on the sidewalk, gently, as if it was living, then he got back into the car.

Remove yourself from my automobile.

It was hard not to take it personally, how fast he drove away.

A man sitting on the library steps waved as if he’d been expecting me to show up. I looked at him and half-waved back, but then he realized that we didn’t know each other so he shrugged and turned back to talk to the man sitting beside him.

Light left the sky quickly when a fat cloud came. A yellow phone booth across the road was so bright, I wondered if it had just been painted.

It was possible, I thought, that my husband had simply replaced me after I left him, that he had simply gone out and found another woman, a simple fix for his wifeless life. Someone to understand his situation, to understand his needs as a human man in this world. I thought of my husband sitting on a bench looking at the river down the way. I thought of him running in the snow. I thought of him eating an apple and how his jaw could stretch out almost like a snake’s, fitting a whole half of it in his mouth, then he’d chew for a full five minutes as he clacked at his blackboard. Across, across, across, and pause, then across some more, next line, more acrossing. I could see him exactly as he had been on that night months before (a Tuesday, I think) when I had gone to bed early but I woke up in the middle of the night, got out of bed for a glass of water, and stopped at the doorway of his office to look at him writing on his blackboard, clacking away at it like he was some kind of machine, and as I watched him doing his calculations it occurred to me that I did love him and that despite loving him I was still leaving and isn’t that what people always roll their eyes at, say,
That doesn’t make sense
, say,
It’s misguided, selfish, stupid
, whatever. The little lamp in the corner of my husband’s office made his fair skin seem golden and he smiled at me and I thought this was how I would always remember him. This is the little piece of my husband that I will store permanently in myself.

Did it wake you? Am I working too loudly?

No, I like it. It’s a good noise.

I thought you hated the chalkboard.

I do, but the sound of you putting things on it makes it okay.

I know that when other memories of my husband have gone threadbare and splintered, this will be the one that lives. When I am eighty and explaining my life to someone much younger I will pause when I mention my first marriage and this will be the version of my husband that I remember. Smiling his tiny smile, his I-am-in-the-middle-of-something-but-I-love-you smile.

Remembering this, I put myself inside that phone booth and didn’t expect him to answer, or if he did I was expecting not to recognize his voice, like he might be using a new one by now. But that didn’t happen. He answered. He said hello like there had been no change in his life, like his life had gone on completely and normally without me being around, like he could just keep waking up and having coffee and clacking at the blackboard and jogging in the park and saying the same words in the same way and sleeping on the same side of the bed and making the same steaks in his skillet and turning on the lights in the same bedroom when the sun went down and reading a book in his same reading chair and all the while his voice wouldn’t get up and leave his throat and his body wouldn’t take itself apart and fall into a little heap on the floor and his brain wouldn’t turn to mud and pour out of his ears. He could do all the things that he did when I was there, even when he was doing those things without me being there.

Hello
, he said.

Hello?
he said.

I said his name.

I said,
It’s Elyria
.

He said,
Ha
.

Then we were quiet for I don’t know how long. A big truck drove by. The man who was driving was hooting at the radio, the sound of a crowd cheering.

I went to New Zealand.

I know.

And I should have told you
.

My husband inhaled fast, tried to make a word and didn’t.

Well?
he asked.

Well, what?

Do you have something to say?

I don’t know.

You don’t know.

I’m not sure.

He did the inhale thing again.
Well, if it’s all the same to you I’m going to get back to work now. The next time you call you might want to have something to say.

And the line went dead and a machine woman started speaking, asking for more money, saying,
Please
, saying,
Have a nice day
.

I slung my backpack on, walked down an alley, put my backpack down, and crouched over it to have an almost-human moment. I felt like I got close to being a rational person right then, phlegm dripping in my throat, face turning red. In this situation, any rational person would be hurt, would feel lost, and being hurt and feeling lost would cause her to do a real thing, to really cry. A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset. Her feelings would show up in her body as if she had no choice in the matter and this would cause her to realize she needed to find a way back to her home, to her real life that was somehow going on without her. She would immediately go to an airport and buy a plane ticket. She would start practicing her apologies on the flight and when she got back home she would start seeing a therapist to prove to herself and everyone else how sorry she was, how wrong she was, how much she needed help. And if she was lucky, her husband would work hard to forgive her—he would work at forgiveness every day like it was an extremely difficult equation. And slowly, eventually, they would go back to being okay, to being a two-piece team moving through life. And when this rational person was in therapy she would talk about things like her dead sister and her monster mother—and where the hell
was
her father, anyway?—and through all this she would make progress in her therapy and when someone asked how she was she would say,
I am okay; I’m in therapy; we’re sorting things out; we’re making progress.
But first this rational person would need to get to an airport and buy a plane ticket straight back home and before she could do that she would need to have the courage to do that and before she could have the courage she would need to want to have the courage, to need to want to try to have the courage to say,
I give up, I was wrong, take me home
.

In my almost-human moment, I felt the tears building up behind my eyes, bubbling there, humming like a teakettle before it boils, but I didn’t cry. Blood rushed around in my body like it was being chased, but then it stopped—maybe it realized there is nowhere for blood to go but around and around and as I thought this I knew I wasn’t always a rational person, or even a nice one. I stood up straight, put myself back in order, and tried to figure out where to go next.

23

He said the night terrors had never happened before me and I could never decide if that was comforting or not comforting, if it meant I brought the worst out in him or if it just meant that the majority of my husband was a mostly nice thing—and maybe the realest part of my husband was unaffiliated with the screaming, violent version that shook us both awake some nights. Still, I couldn’t forget that there was a distinct possibility that it was me and the way I handled or not quite handled my wifehood that had unhinged this part of him. I had disrupted him. I was the catalyst that began the bad in his life, and I would continue to be a long series of disruptions to him and I was always going to bring out his ugliest side, and my sleeping beside him would always stop him from being able to really
sleep
.

In the early months the night terrors just made sleeping a kind of roulette and there was something perversely satisfying about waking up to his frayed screaming (when life seemed more like a soap opera and less like a life) but that was before the choking began, before the nights his hands would creep across my collarbone and tighten around my neck, and though it usually only took a few small hits to his chest or face to make him stop, a few nights I had to hit him harder than what seemed safe and though he never shut my trachea long enough for me to pass out he sometimes came close, pressing down for a moment, a wink in my throat. When he slipped out of a terror, eyes still shut and jaw slack, he’d fall limp back to his side of the bed and sometimes he’d go immediately back to sleep, and on those nights I’d get out of bed, shaking with adrenaline, and go to the living room couch with my neck bent against the armrest, chin on chest, mind on husband, eyes on window, waiting for some kind of sign, some kind of evidence, some kind of kindness or understanding to tell me,
Self, it is all fine and okay. Close your eyes. Tomorrow it will all be fine.
But I never have been the kind to keep a back-stock of that kind of kindness, the way that other people do, taking care of themselves and others, being ready to forgive.