Nobody Is Ever Missing (2 page)

Um, to the South Island?

The South Island?

Yeah?

Well, you’re a long ways off—where you coming from?

The airport?

I was saying everything like a question because everything was a question.

Yer all wop-wops, aren’t ya, all the way out here in Ness Valley?

Someone left me here
, I said, and wondered if the nurse hadn’t liked talking about work, about blood. I couldn’t remember if I had even told her where I was trying to go.

The bloke drove me back up the hills I’d come down with the nurse, past the petrol stations, the fields of sheep, the repeated green plants, the narrow roads turning into more little roads, and what was the point of it, I wondered, of all this world, these plants, these sheep, this place?

The most beautiful country in the world
, the bloke said a few times, but I knew that lots of people tell themselves things like that but there is no country that is the most beautiful country. The bloke let me out where one road met another road.
Lots of cars
, he said, and there were lots of cars but none of them stopped for me. The sky went dark and this was not the kind of place where streetlights were, this was a bring-your-own-light kind of environment and I didn’t have any light, hadn’t brought any light, hadn’t thought about how I’d need light. It was the first of many things I was unprepared for.

I saw a little shed on the edge of a field with a large hole ripped in it, so I crawled in, ran my hands along the inside looking for snakes or rats, but I just found a rusted-up hammer and a horseshoe and an empty glass bottle. It is best to sleep through the dark, I thought, so I am doing the best I can. As I fell asleep I thought that the appropriate feeling would have been fear or regret or some soup of both, but that wasn’t what I felt; I reminded myself that once I got to Werner’s farm my life would become small and manageable and wouldn’t involve sleeping in sheds or hitchhiking, so I slept like I was already the simplest woman in the world.

The next morning I woke to an unfamiliar noise happening outside the shed and it reminded me of a familiar noise: Husband in the other room, his office, the rhythmic chalk clack, a pause, more clacking. There was something about the smell of it, the color of it, he said, that loosened up his brain, let the numbers fall out in the right order.

I thought you hated the chalkboard
, I imagined him saying to my nostalgia.

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

My husband, smiling in the back of my brain: I remembered him this way.

I rolled up my makeshift bed, folded the towel and T-shirt back into my pack, and climbed out of the hole to find that the unfamiliar noise was sheep swishing in the grass, but the sheep stampeded away because sheep are smart enough not to trust anyone for anything, especially not people who sleep in and crawl out of sheds, and I couldn’t disagree with those sheep because I would run away from me, too, if I was a sheep and not me and even if I was me, I’d still like, some mornings, to be the thing running far from me instead of sewn inside myself forever.

*   *   *

I heard an engine behind me as I was walking down a road’s shoulder, so I stuck my arm out but when I turned around I was surprised to see a school bus; it hadn’t sounded that large. I pulled my arm in, stepped farther away from the road, thinking it wouldn’t be right to get a ride from a bus if it was full of kids, to expose young lives to me since I wasn’t yet convinced that I wasn’t a form of radiation. But the bus stopped and the driver cranked open the door.

It’s not safe here. Get in.

No, it’s okay. I should just wait on a regular car.

Nah, nah, nah, get on in.

Are you sure?

I’ll just take you up the road where it’s safer. Can’t have you out here on this part of the road. Too dangerous. It’s not right.

I found an open seat and a pigtailed girl leaned across the aisle to say,
I’m ten
, and I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said,
I’m twenty-eight
, not quite thinking.

You’re not twenty-eight
, a girl with red hair said, laughing as if I had claimed to be an elephant.

I’m not?

Noooo.

How old do you think I am?

A hundred
, pigtails said.

No, she’s not! She’s probably fifteen because my sister is sixteen and she’s bigger than her.

What are you really?
pigtails asked.

I forget
, I said.

Where are you going?
the redhead asked.

I don’t know. To a farm somewhere.

Are you a farmer?

Sure
, I said.

Where’s your farm?

I pointed south, or I think I pointed south, but I could have pointed west, or even north, and what would it matter? If you made enough turns it would take you to the same place. The girls in the back were chanting something and slapping their hands together with increasing speed and volume.

Quiet back there
, the driver yelled, and so they were.

The redhead leaned around the edge of my seat and put her face near my elbow. She had skin the texture of cheap toilet paper and luminous green eyes, little luxury items planted in her skull. The bones in her face were more pronounced than you’d expect on a girl her age—either underfed or a natural look of vulnerability.

Can I tell you a secret?
she whispered.
We’re runaways. We all ran away from our homes. He’s taking us to the police.

I peeked over my shoulder at the other girls. A few leaned their swan necks into the aisle looking toward me. I could hear some high voices dipping low to whisper.

What’s your name?

Elyria. What’s yours?

Alison. Where are you from?

New York. Where are you from?

A different planet. I ran away from outer space. Nebulas don’t interest me.
She smiled with all her tiny teeth.
You want to know another secret?

Sure.

I have two hearts. A regular one and a little baby one underneath it. And you know what else? I have a third eyeball stuck in my brain but it can’t see anything because it’s too dark in there. That’s what the doctor told me. He showed me a picture of it they took in a big white room with a robot. Have you ever seen a robot? Because I have.

Her face had pinched into something serious, and I didn’t know what to say and I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth about the robot, the doctor, the extra eye, the extra heart—what a terrible thing to have too many of—but the bus stopped and the bus driver put his arm up and waved me forward.

Bye
, I said.

See you later
, Alison said.

When I got to the front of the bus the driver was just staring forward, and I looked at his gnarled hands ten-and-two-ing and I saw how the flesh hung on his face like it was clay pressed on in a rush, all uneven and loose, and something in his jaw clench and nostril flare made me worry he was doing something with his life that was bloody, something that involved heads pressed against concrete or mouths filled with something that shouldn’t be there and I wondered if this was true and if it was true I knew he would continue to plow over life, continue to chop lives like a tractor, and he would keep doing that forever unless I killed him right here with my bare hands in front of all the girls, then threw his corpse out the door and drove these girls straight to the hospital for post-traumatic stress treatment, and though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn’t have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.

Thanks
, I said to the bus driver, to cover up what I was thinking, and one of the girls in the back shouted,
Takes one to know one
, and it made me gasp even though I knew she wasn’t talking to me and I worried that what I had seen in the driver was something I’d seen in myself, that it took me to know me.

The bus driver said,
You’re welcome
, and I wondered if he knew what else I was.

4

I walked roadside for a few hours, wondering if it was possible that Alison really did have an extra eye, an extra heart, if a person could ever live with that kind of surplus, and something about the way Alison spoke reminded me of how Ruby spoke, or how Ruby said something once about having two hearts. Or maybe I was misremembering some more complicated thing Ruby said, something that made it clear we didn’t speak the same language, that we couldn’t fully translate ourselves to each other. There was a night I realized this, how we could no longer or perhaps had never quite been able to hear each other—

Who lets a sixteen-year-old move to New York alone?

We were smoking cigarettes in the backyard after a late Thanksgiving dinner (Mom’s cigarettes, of course, the
who
to her question) and I didn’t know whether I should ask her about college life as a child prodigy—Was she lonely? Had she made friends? Were her classes, finally, challenging enough? I knew I wouldn’t understand her answers to those questions, that she’d allude to philosophical concepts I’d never heard of, that she’d make references I couldn’t place and I’d just stare, baffled and unable to keep up. I was barely passing the high school classes she’d been exempt from.

As we smoked I pushed Ruby on the swing set, and we could see Mom passed out and drooling on a love seat in the sunroom. She’d been at a fever pitch all day, swigging Beaujolais, burning all the takeout in a reheating attempt, calling Ruby the
renegade genius
and accidentally ashing onto her plate.

There’s our little genius, our little renegade teenage genius! How does she do it? I just don’t know how she does it!

But finally everything was quiet, just the swing creak and our faint exhalations and even though this was one of the thousands of chances I had to have a meaningful talk with Ruby, something sisterly and emotional, I didn’t take that chance: I stilled the swing and held out an imaginary microphone to her:
Tell us, Ruby, how do you do it?

And Ruby ran with it because she also wanted to live in a fiction, to keep playing pretend.

Well, I’ll tell ya, Bob. The secret of my success is to make a plan and act fast. I don’t second-guess myself. I’m never of two minds about anything.

Well, folks, there you have it
, I said, but there were no folks.

*   *   *

A van slowed and stilled beside me and this memory sank away. The driver leaned out his window, his right arm was covered in tattoos, matte-black vines blurring into dark skin.

Simon
, he said.

Elyria
, I said.

Elyria! That’s a helluva name. Hippie parents?

Not really.

I didn’t tell him, like I didn’t tell anyone, that Elyria was a town in Ohio that my mother had never visited. That was all my name meant: a place she’d never been.

The basic idea of a mustache was hanging over Simon’s mouth, and there were these odd wrinkles around his eyes that didn’t agree with the rest of his machine-smooth face.

I stared at the pointless hills rippling around us—the trees all captive to the ground, a grey mountain in the distance, stoic and bored—and Simon started a monologue on himself, his autobiography—

Been traveling for seven months on the North Island, did some wine work for a while to save money, but I’ve been on my own for a long time. I separated from my parents when I was sixteen. My father clobbered the shit out of my little brother one night, put him in the hospital, and I said … you know … check, please? All done with this, thanks. Ever seen a ten-year-old with a black eye from his own pops? It’s not something you want to ever see.

I almost liked how much he talked, how he answered his own questions, how simple it all was, like television. I hadn’t said more than ten words and maybe those were the last words I was ever going to say for the rest of my life, I thought, as Simon went on about how his parents were put in jail, something to do with fraud, with some kind of real estate scheme, houses in Miami, London, L.A., all confiscated, and maybe this was it—this was all I needed—someone who just naturally filled in all the silence that life has in it.

Pops tried to blame it on me and even the judge knew he was pulling a porky. My pop had a stink-eye. Anyone with half a thought in his head could see it. It was in the news then, tabloid shit mostly. You know, Tattooed Teen Divorces Parents—Violence Alleged—that kind of shit.

He let himself laugh weakly.

That’s terrible
, I said, stepping out of my silence.

Is what it is.

People say that when they mean something is terrible.

You’re right. It is terrible.

5

Another terrible thing was how I met my husband.

He was wearing a suit that day and his deep red tie made his eyes seem even greener and brought out the pale pink in his face. He was thirty-two, but still looked boyish. I was barely twenty-two but everyone guessed older. We were sitting in a small and brutally lit waiting area in the university police office. We sat next to each other for maybe twenty minutes without saying anything and we didn’t even bend a glance at the other because it’s hard to do that when you’re thinking about what a woman can do to herself and how a brick courtyard on a nice autumn afternoon can so quickly become a place you’ll never want to see again. Police officers were speaking into phones and walkie-talkies and one of them walked over to ask me my name.