Nobody Is Ever Missing (3 page)

Elyria Marcus.

Ruby was your sister?

Adopted, yeah
, I said, in case they knew that she had been Korean and could see from looking at me that I wasn’t.

The officer nodded and made a note on her clipboard. She looked at my husband, who was just a stranger sitting next to me at that point and it hadn’t yet crossed my mind to wonder why he was there or who he might be.

Professor, we need to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind
, she said.

Of course
, he said, following her to the back of the office.

While he was gone Mother showed up, limp and sleepy on whatever Dad was slipping her those days. Dad wasn’t there of course; he was still in Puerto Rico doing cheap boob jobs or something. Mom fell into the seat beside me.

Oh, it’s waaarm
, she slurred.
What a nice surprise.

She snaked her arm around mine and put her head on my shoulder.

Baby, baby, my little baby. It’s just you and me now. No more Ruby ring, Ruby slippers, Ruby Tuesday. Oh, our Ruby, Ruby.

It’s normal, I’ve heard, for people to talk a little nonsense at times like these, but she wasn’t even crying or seeming close to crying, which made me feel worse because I wasn’t either. I tried to seem like I was in shock, but I wasn’t, not really. Mother didn’t even try to pretend she was in shock because that’s the kind of beast she is. An officer came over to offer condolences or have her sign something, and she offered him her hand like she expected him to kiss it. He shook it with a bent wrist, then slipped away.

My precious little Ruby … What was it she always said, Elyria? Am I your favorite Asian daughter? Elly, you know she was my only Asian daughter. What on earth do you think she meant by that? I never understood it. Was that just a joke? Did she ever tell you what she meant?

I wiped a smudge of lipstick off my mother’s nose. It looked like she had put it on while talking and driving, which was probably true.

It was a joke, Mom.

Elyria, she was so beautiful, so smart. People must have wondered how she could stand us. People must have wondered, even I wondered. I stayed up late some nights just watching her sleep, wondering how she’d ever be able to stand it. I guess she just couldn’t take it anymore, our ugliness.

Mom, stop.

It’s not our fault. We were just born like this. Well, not really you, dear, but—

She sat up, pushed her hair out of her face, and took a lot of air into her body. She let it out slow, grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye, and squeezed. It was the first tender moment we’d had in years, but it ended quickly.

I need so many cigarettes
, she said, staggering away. Through the glass wall in the front of the police office I saw her light what would become the first of a dozen. Every few minutes someone would approach her, almost bowing, it seemed.
Excuse me
, I could see their mouths say, pointing to the
NO SMOKING WITHIN 50 FT OF THIS DOOR
sign, and she would cut them off with a shout I could hear through the glass.
Have you heard of my daughter Ruby? Ruby Marcus? She died today and it wasn’t from secondhand smoke.
If that didn’t work she added,
Fuck off, I’m grieving
, which usually did.

The professor who wasn’t yet my husband came back and stopped in front of me, standing a few inches too close and looking down. His paleness was glowing. I noticed his suit was too big around the middle and the sleeves too short.

Do you want to know anything? About her? I was the last one who spoke with her. That’s what they think.

I didn’t particularly care what some professor had said to Ruby. I’d seen her that morning; she was no mystery. We stood outside the library with paper cups of burnt coffee. She looked terrible, like she hadn’t slept in days, and she said she felt even worse and I asked,
How much worse?
, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it and I wasn’t going to talk about it if she wasn’t so we didn’t talk about anything. We finished our coffees and walked in opposite directions. The blame (or at least some of it) was on me. I’d never figured out how to be related to her.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and especially not about Ruby, but the professor’s voice was so very level and calm. He sounded like some kind of radio reporter and I wanted to listen to this personal radio; I wanted his voice to play and play. Mother was lighting another cigarette outside, leaning against the glass, a dark bra visible through her wrinkled oxford.

Okay
, I told the professor.
I’ll listen.

He sat down slowly, his knees angled toward me a little.

I’d only known Ruby since the semester started, when she became my TA. I knew she was overqualified, of course. She was talented, you know, and had been working on some incredible proofs.

His sentences were hard and plain, like he had been polishing them all afternoon.

I never understood what she did here
, I said.
We never talked about it.

Well … I don’t know how to describe it, what Ruby seemed like today. I suppose I have a hard time reading faces, emotions, you know, the descriptive stuff. I’m more of a numbers person. But she seemed, just—maybe a little distracted. She gave me some papers she’d been working on. She said she wanted me to check them over, and she left.

What was it?

What do you mean?

The papers. Was it something important?

Um, no, not really. Something most grad students could do. She was capable of so much more than that. She’d been working on some very interesting stuff lately.

Oh.

I’m sorry.

No, it’s fine. I mean, it doesn’t matter that it was just regular stuff.

No, I mean, the whole thing. That she—

And I wished right then that I could gently cry, just cry—politely, humanly. Outside, my mother was screaming at someone, her breath making tiny smoke and steam clouds.

Thank you
, I said to the professor.

He nodded, put his hands on his knees, leaned back a little, then leaned forward again. He looked at my mother, who was still screaming, then he looked at his feet.

When I was twenty my mother did it the same way as Ruby and, I just, well … today I’ve been thinking about it a lot, you know. Probably the most since it happened.

I didn’t say anything. Mother was lighting one cigarette with another. A section of her hair was pushed over her head the wrong way. She turned around and waved at me with one limp, little hand, a royal dismissal. Lipstick rimmed her mouth like ice cream on a toddler.

I’m sorry for that
, he said,
for saying that. I know it’s what people always do, try to tell you they’ve already dealt with what you’re dealing with, trying to tell you how they grieved—I know it doesn’t help. I’m sorry. It was just on my mind.

You don’t need to be sorry
, I said.

We didn’t say anything for a little while.

He put his hand on my shoulder as if he was taking someone’s advice to do so and he let it stay there for a moment and after that moment water did come out of my eyes and I felt more appropriate and more human to myself. The professor put his arms around me and I collapsed a little, making a wet spot on his navy jacket.

6

Exactly
, Simon said, and he smiled and I knew that smile, and I remembered when I smiled like that at boys who smiled like that, but I hadn’t seen that smile in at least seven years, and I’d never known my husband when he was young enough to let a gesture reveal himself so plainly. We had stopped for a sandwich and Simon was still filling up all the silence, and I did not smile back at him. I was no longer listening—most of my attention was on a man strumming a ukulele at the other end of the bar. A woman was looking at a menu and trying to get the man’s attention, but he had his eyes closed. The woman waved her hands in front of the ukulele man’s face but he just kept whistling, swaying. I looked back at Simon and copied his expression—serious, but with raised eyebrows—to make him think I was listening. Maybe he was too young to catch that trick. Maybe in the world of a twenty-one-year-old boy, no one had to fake an interest in you. The woman took away the man’s ukulele. He looked, dejected, at the menu.

Here’s something that may or may not be right in front of your face
, Simon said,
you know, in front of your face in the sense that you already know it.

Simon held my shoulders with both his hands, which felt larger and denser than I would have expected.

This is important—you and I, right now. This is important.

How’s that?
I said.

What’s between people is more important than anything in the physical world. This is God, Elyria. Anytime two people can look at each other and talk honestly, that is God.

I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma. I hadn’t spoken much to Simon and what I’d said wasn’t any kind of honesty, but Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it’s easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see. I was still impersonating Simon to his face to get away with ignoring him, and that seemed almost sustainable, a way to spend a few weeks, but when he went to the bathroom I went out to his unlocked van and strapped on my backpack and started walking somewhere even though Simon had told me he’d pitch a tent outside tonight and let me lock myself inside his van—
To prove a point
, he said,
I’m not a bad guy and I trust you
—but I didn’t want to bear Simon anymore and I didn’t want to be the thing under those projections anymore because I did have somewhere to go, in a way—Werner’s farm, a place to sink into and forget about movement, about vibrations, about projections, about relying on whoever happened to pity me at that particular moment, increasingly disheveled, smelling more and more like the earth or an animal, caring less and less about how little I cared.

I walked through a forest near a highway until I found a clump of moss to sleep on and I remembered that Simon said possums were not indigenous to New Zealand, that they had been brought here by somebody a long time ago, some European, and since there were no animals here that liked to kill possums, all those unkilled possums
had fucked up the whole fucking ecosystem
by eating plants, too many plants, by wanting so much, and now there were
what?—ten or fifteen possums per person in New Zealand? Something fucked-up like that
; and I imagined my dozen fucked-up possums gathered around me, a personal audience, and I wondered which things inside a person might be indigenous or nonindigenous, but it isn’t as easy to trace those kinds of things in a person as it is in a country. I wished that I could point to some colonizer and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had made me misunderstand myself—but I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself, which made me think, again, of Ruby on that Thanksgiving night on the swings, or maybe it was another night like that night when she was talking, I thought, about how predictable she felt—
I’m Asian so I’m supposed to be good at math and skip grades and I did and I’m adopted so I’m supposed to be messed up and I am
—and I tried to tell her she wasn’t predictable, she wasn’t a cliché, she wasn’t a statistic—
You’re a person, Ruby, like everyone else—

Oh
,
thanks
, she said,
like I really want to be like everyone else, Elyria, you’re totally missing the point. I’m talking about free will
—and she went on for a long while making multitiered arguments about free will and the possibility that none of us had it. I was sixteen or seventeen and didn’t have the kind of brain that Ruby had and this was becoming increasingly obvious, that my brain couldn’t absorb as much as her brain could, that I couldn’t expound with her about free will, that I was making a C in French and failing algebra and she had mastered both those classes during weekends one summer, and now here we were, she a teenage adult and me a teenage child and she wanted to talk about free will and I didn’t have anything to say.

This was probably the moment she turned from my sister to an orphan again, and maybe I understood this then or maybe I understood this some weeks or years later, but Ruby and I were no longer two children together in an alternate universe, equally mystified by our parents and the whole world—we were now in separate alternate universes and from then on we only had rare moments where it seemed, for a second, there was some sense between us. Like that afternoon I admitted to her I’d come to Barnard so I could see her more often, and that other night when I talked her off—and I don’t want to say ledge, but it was a ledge, of sorts, a metaphorical ledge—that night I talked her off a metaphorical ledge before her college graduation because she hated how it had taken her all four years to complete a triple major—but those sweet and connected moments between us became increasingly rare, or else I have forgotten some or many of those moments, which is probably true because memories are so often made by one hand and deleted by the other, and living is a long churn of making and deleting and we all forget so much of what we could be remembering, and part of the deal with remembering those connected moments with Ruby was that they usually came with a more difficult memory, like the one from that Christmas—it must have been the one just after that Thanksgiving when we smoked on the swings. There was an evening that the three of us were somehow all sitting in the breakfast room drinking hot cocoa as if imitating some more wholesome family and even Mother had been doing a pretty good job at playing the part of the mother (she’d made the cocoa, had wrapped a present or two, and sincerely told Ruby she had missed her) but then she somehow dropped or threw her cup of cocoa and the spill seemed to inspire something in her, so she wordlessly pushed a box of ornaments from the table and left the room. Ruby and I swept up the shattered shards and sopped up the warm, dark mess and smiled at each other over this warm, dark mess but much later that night, when we found Mother shouting,
Open me! Open me!
, from inside a large cardboard box she’d taped up from the inside, we were all done with being amused, so we didn’t smile at all. I’m the child of a child, I thought, and I may have said that to Ruby and she may have laughed, or maybe I didn’t speak that thought at all. Eventually Mother got quiet and began snoring and we didn’t bother to open that box because we knew how much she hated to be woken up.