Nobody Is Ever Missing (5 page)

I knew what he’d say next, but I always listened intensely, as if I was trying to memorize his pain so I could re-create it once he was gone or dead or dead and gone, because I thought, at the time, that my husband’s loss was what I had really fallen in love with, and maybe that loss was locked up in my husband like a prison and this was our once-a-year meeting and so I had to press myself against the Plexiglas to feel the blood and body heat of his loss, stare hard at the loss so I could remember how its face was shaped, the exact color of its eyes, something to get me through the next year of living with my husband and not his loss, but the lack of his loss, a bleached-out version of it, a numb heart that hosted something with a real pulse and wildness because my husband had only the most basic pulse and absolutely no wildness, but his loss was wild, was wild and filled with fast blood, and I could understand that angry bright red thing. I knew it was possible that I was not in love with a person but a person-shaped hole.

Kids can understand sometimes
, he said.
She was missing something. I don’t know what she was missing.

Did you know that she would go the way she did?

When I was a kid I knew she was leaving, sort of slowly, but I didn’t know what that meant. Just that there was less of her all the time. Every year more of her was gone.

I asked him questions like this even though it made my husband suffer, like a child pinching leaves off a fern frond.

Did you know it was going to happen to Ruby?

No
, I said,
not really. Did you know?

We barely knew each other, Elly. We hardly ever spoke.

And this is what he always said and what I always had a hard time believing, that he barely knew her, and I thought of Ruby and my husband in his office and how he’d look at her equations, not at her face, and I thought of them in his classroom when she was his TA and how she could have heard his chalk click on the board there, and now that same noise woke me up some nights and Ruby knew this noise before I did and what did that mean? What did it mean that she knew something that I would eventually know, that her dying made my life take this turn? I sometimes thought that my husband’s pain had radiated out of him and into Ruby’s blood and turned her against herself, that it was his fault somehow that Ruby pushed out the screen in the women’s room and put herself into the air, but I also knew (though I maybe didn’t know that I knew) that she had come to this conclusion on her own, though I still sometimes imagined my husband had sent a signal out the way bats or plants sometimes do. My husband knew what a woman looked like before she threw herself out of this world and he knew Ruby before she threw herself out of this world and I will never be able to divide those two things.

I wanted him to be responsible for how Ruby went missing, and I know that no one gets back what they lose this way and he wouldn’t and I wouldn’t, but at the same time I wanted it back and couldn’t stop wanting it back and if I couldn’t get it back I wanted, at least, for someone or something to be at fault—I wanted him to be responsible for how Ruby went missing.

I am or we were (or still are) the kind of people who can never quite get away from our losses, the kind of people who don’t know that magic trick that other people seem to know—how to dissolve a sense of loss, how to unbraid it from a brain.

*   *   *

The morning after our box pasta dinner and loss thumbing, I went to the clinic to give them the blood and information I said I’d give them. It was for a study, and I didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, only that I had agreed to do it as a favor to some colleagues of my husband’s.

Reliable participants were hard to find, they said.

Reliable participants would do the following:

Arrive at seven in the morning each Tuesday on an empty stomach, bleed a tube of blood for a nurse, allow the lab technician with the large, soft hands to apply the electrodes, answer the questions he asked (
What do you believe in? What is your greatest fear? What is the point of love?
), bleed more blood, drink a blue liquid, sit in a dark room for fifteen minutes, answer questions in the dark (
Do you believe inner peace is possible? Is there an afterlife? What is something you know is true?
), give more blood, eat a complimentary pack of graham crackers and a carton of juice so you don’t pass out on the subway or sidewalk, go home, and receive a check for ninety dollars each Friday.

As they took the blood, I watched the thin, clear tube turn red and I felt it get warm against my forearm and I thought about how my hands and my husband’s hands still loved each other and how the rest of our bodies just dangled off these hands and I envied how simply those hands could be what they were—ambivalent chunks of bone and muscle that just touch, hold, and are held, repeat. And maybe, I thought, if I was lucky, this study could end up making my blood and brains feel better, less driven by dread, less stuck on what is missing. But part of the point of this study was that I not know the study’s point, which made it seem a lot like everything.

10

Have you seen that?
the old lady asked, tilting her head toward two large white buildings built to look like a sheep and a dog.

Oh, what are they?

A sheep and a dog
, she said.

But what’s inside?

Buildings
, she said.
They made them to look like animals. It’s funny.

She pulled over in front of a café with a sign that said
THE INTERNET.
I got out of the car and the old lady said,
Good luck, take care
, and I didn’t know what I was going to spend any good luck on or what I could care for, but I said,
Thank you
, because that’s what you do.

A woman was sitting at an old, beige machine while a dial tone droned and hissed and beeped and fractured into static. She glanced at me and smiled. Ambiguously familiar pop music was playing, an excited woman singing like a maniac, an excited maniac, about something exciting, about how good it all was, how good it would always be. The woman hummed along to the music, seeming so content with the static still hissing, the nothing happening. The amount of patience in this country—how long a person could spend happily waiting—maybe this was why I had come here. Not for the isolation, but the place where people can happily do very little, the world’s largest waiting room.

It took a moment for me to remember how to log into my email or what email even was, what any of those words on the screen meant. My boss’s name appeared a few times, which didn’t make any difference to me since I knew I didn’t work there anymore. There were a few emails from Husband: apologies for whatever he had done, demands of apologies from me, apologies for the demands of apologies, demands—again—for some kind of sense to be made of everything, for me to pay him what I owed him, pay him in my time and life, to pay off the hurt I’d done by stealing myself—I was his, he said, I belonged to him, to us, to our future, and didn’t I understand that? How did I not understand that? What had I done with that understanding?

The most recent was only a few minutes old:

I know you’re not at your mother’s, Elyria. I didn’t want to, but I looked through your emails, hoping to figure something out and, well, I don’t know what to say. Call me. Whatever time it is. I am barely ever sleeping now, so you won’t wake me up …

And there was also a two-word note from Mother:
Everything okay?

Those words just sat there—
everything okay?
—as if we understood each other so well that this kind of shorthand was even possible—
everything okay?
—and I knew that she knew that nothing was okay, that she wasn’t and I wasn’t and we had never been, and I remembered, too, this was also what she had asked, years ago, when I told her over lunch that I was going to marry the professor.

Oh, honey …

And she put a hand on my hand as if I was her honey—

Is everything okay?

The main thing that wasn’t okay in that moment was her hand on my hand, so I took my hand back and I asked her what that was supposed to mean, and I was thinking of how terrible it is that everyone has to be a child of a person, and why would someone want to make more people when it all just leads up to sitting in an expensive midtown restaurant on an overcast Tuesday trying to eat a poached egg that’s gone cold under hollandaise congealed like pale yellow blood, talking about whether anything is
okay
.

It just seems odd. I mean, Ruby’s professor? Like, her boss? That skinny boy with the big jacket? I mean, sure, get yourself a first ex-husband, whatever, but I just don’t think he’s right for you.

And I knew that it was possible he wasn’t entirely
right
for me, but I also knew, in some way, that probably no one was right for me and potentially no one was right for anyone, but I also felt, with uncharacteristic sincerity, that we were as right for each other as any two people could manage, and I had chosen life in the face of death, this was how the professor said it, that since his mother had died he had been choosing to
live
every day, and I took this to mean he was just trying to do the best he could do with his life, to pretend to be the better version of himself even if he couldn’t always be that better version of himself, the version that can appropriately adjust to the disappointments of life, and let go of irrevocable losses, and stay awake through entire days without falling asleep in the middle of work or the middle of a subway car or the middle of a sentence.

Everything is okay
, I told my mother back then, as someone was taking the plates away (
All done?)
and she said, again,
Oh, honey
, and I still wasn’t her honey and I clenched my jaw and she said,
It’s depression, honey, you’re just depressed. You just need to have someone give you something. You don’t need to get married, that’s not going to fix anything, believe me, it won’t.

I’m not trying to fix anything.

Oh, honey.

Stop calling me honey.

He doesn’t have anything to do with Ruby anymore and he’s not going to bring her back.

I didn’t ask to bring her back
, I said, and this may or may not have been the moment I got up and put on my jacket and Mother said,
Oh, I just don’t understand you and your moods, why you can’t just control yourself
, or maybe she didn’t say anything right then, maybe she just got out a compact to look at and powder her nose and I knew that’s what she probably did after she wrote that one-line email, that
everything okay?
She probably looked into a mirror to make sure her nose was still sitting on her face as usual, and I’m not one of those people who think of the right thing to say at the right moment, so that day at the restaurant I didn’t try to explain myself or my moods or my lack of an ability to control myself and that other day I didn’t write her any reply to her one-line email, didn’t tell her anything was okay or not okay.

I paid the woman for the minutes of Internet and she said,
Thank you so much
, and she seemed to mean it more than the average person.

There was a diner across the road and I went into it and took a whole booth for my little self. I stared at the menu and did not think of my husband. I stared at the tile floor and did not think of where I was or why I was here. A waitress came by and I told her what I wanted to eat, which seemed suddenly a very personal thing to tell a stranger, what things you were going to turn into your body. She asked me if I was traveling by myself and I said I was and she said,
Aw, good-onya
,
brave little one you are, don’t get too lonely, do you?
, and I smiled so gently and did not throw the salt shaker across the restaurant.

After a while the old man at the booth beside mine leaned over—

Where are you from?

So I told him where I was from and he asked me where I was going and I said,
The South Island ferry,
and he said,
Today?
And I said,
Whenever
.

Well
, he said,
I’m on my way back to Taupo if you’d like a ride. I make this drive fairly often and even though I’m old I’m still a good driver, so you shouldn’t worry about that.

Oh. Okay.

The reason I make this drive so much is that I put my wife in a home up here so she could be with her sister. She doesn’t like it there, but she didn’t like living with me either. She likes when I come visit, is what she says, but she isn’t really sure who I am and she doesn’t understand that I’m her husband. Isn’t that too bad?

The man looked at me then went back to looking out the window. No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.

There’s not much for me anywhere
, he said, but he didn’t sound sad.
My orchard has dried up, my wife’s brain is gone, my children moved to Australia. Even my only grandson died. Leukemia. That never made any sense to me and never will.

He shook his head and smiled.

But this is a nice place. Good pies. Nice waitresses. It’s a perfect place to stop on the way to Taupo. It’s a very nice place. There are still a lot of nice places like this, you know, even though lots of other things have gone wrong. You’re not in a hurry to get to the South Island, are you?

It seemed to take a reason to be in a hurry and I didn’t have any reasons, I knew, and maybe
that
was it, maybe I had come to New Zealand to find a reason in this quiet country where everyone was happily waiting on almost nothing, to wait with them until a reason found me or I found a reason.