Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

Did you know that no one ever calls from that flyer?

No, I didn’t know that.

Has it ever occurred to you that no one wants to ask for help?

Well , I said, wondering if that was what I was doing — asking for help. That was supposedly the first step in something, in making progress, in becoming a better person with fewer problems. Or wait — was it admitting you have a problem? But doesn’t everyone have problems? Isn’t waking up or drinking water or eating lunch admitting you have a problem? There was a long silence going on. I realized I had stopped talking in the center of a sentence.

Do you have a pen? Can you take down this address?

I was happy he let me stay in my other world where sentences didn’t have endings.

The neighborhood I walked through on the way to Dillon’s seemed like nice families lived inside all the houses, like there was always a woman cooking something inside them all and these nice houses reminded me of a story I’d heard about a woman who’d had enough of her children: One morning after her husband had driven off she dressed the children, a small boy and two very small twin girls, and she put them in the minivan and she drove the minivan to a police station and she took the children out of the minivan and she told them to hold each other’s hands and not to speak, that whatever happened, they should just say nothing, and she led the children into the police station and she told an old man at the front desk, These children — I found these children. I do not know who they belong to or where they should go , and she turned and walked out and got into her minivan and drove home and took a nap and that evening when her husband came home and said, Dear, where are the children? , she said, What children? The husband said he could see in her eyes that she had gotten up and left herself and isn’t that the worst kind of leaving? No one is okay when someone leaves like that and I knew I never wanted to leave that way. I can’t quite remember the end of the story but I thought it somehow involved the husband going to the police station to retrieve his children and finding that they hadn’t said a word all day.

Dillon’s house was slumping into itself on the edge of a hill.

Welcome! someone shouted as I stood in the street and stared.

I couldn’t see who had shouted. I looked to see if maybe they were behind me.

Over here! the same voice said.

I looked at what I thought was over there, then I looked at another there, but I didn’t see anyone.

Hello?

Come on up , someone said, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was the same voice or a different one. A tree rustled and a man jumped out of it, in a kind-of-like-falling way, and he landed on a wooden balcony on the second floor of the house. He opened the door to the balcony and went in, then came out the other side, the door at the top of the stairs I was climbing.

Are you my flyer reader? he asked.

Yes , I said, regretting it with every part of myself. He had three or four dreadlocks tailing the back of his head but the rest of his hair was cut short, shoe-polish black. A silver ring hung on one nostril and his body was put together in a way that suggested it would be easy for him to move a large piece of furniture by himself.

Are you our traveler in need?

I guess?

You guess! Ha! You’re great. You’re a great one. All right, up you come — make haste, young rabbit! Make haste!

Looking back I realize I should have pretended to be at the wrong house, to be the wrong traveler, but for some reason, I made haste. In the living room a girl in a hemp dress and an Indian boy were talking about the sadness of a certain class of arachnids, the ones that carry poisons they don’t have the ability to use. The boy was short and narrow, seemed barely fifteen. He wore a long, tan tunic trimmed with yellow embroidery. He was nodding his head and smiling and speaking lowly, intently, as if he was an incarnation of some god or saint. There were others there — Sia, the Italian girl who spoke in a voice so tiny it seemed whispered from her belly button, and Gian, who never said a word, and Marco, who said too many, and the British woman, who always kept her backpack locked shut in the corner, even while she showered or made dinner or spoke to someone about how safe she felt in New Zealand, not like the other places she had been and all the awful things that had happened.

* * *

That night I looked at the only picture I had of my husband. In it he is a baby in his mother’s arms, a crumpled, fatty lump of who he eventually became, his little mouth hanging open, his mother looking distraught, caught between a hard place and another hard place — the rest of the family stands behind them, repetitive noses, eyes, skins, hairs, like wallpaper. And as I looked at the baby version of my husband, I decided not to call the present version of my husband anymore. I had called earlier that day from a pay phone near Dillon’s house, but when he picked up it was only to thank me for calling and to ask me to not call again.

I said it was tomorrow where I was and he said, yes, he knew it was tomorrow there.

I have to go , he said, but maybe you should call again. We should talk again. We should be trying to fix this, whatever this is. I feel strange that I haven’t heard from you, but I feel strange talking to you, too. Actually, don’t call anymore. I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Okay, I said.

It will be better this way, if we just don’t speak until you can tell me you’re coming home.

The calmness in his voice wasn’t at all convincing, and after I hung up the phone I imagined my husband told me he’d convinced the people in charge of the study to give him the information they’d gotten from me — the pictures of my brain, my answers, my data — and I imagined my husband saying this as if he was announcing a job promotion or that he had unexpectedly won a portion of a class-action lawsuit and as I walked back to Dillon’s house I wondered if maybe I hadn’t imagined my husband telling me this but maybe he’d really said it, really done it, and even though I understood why my husband might go to such anxious lengths to find out what, specifically, was wrong with me, this wasn’t a nice thing to hear or imagine hearing, and the little throbbing anger under everything my husband had said reminded me of how unfair feelings could be, of how our feelings had hunched up and backed away from us, left us looking at each other like strangers.

Hours later, falling asleep on a floor, I couldn’t quite parse a difference between what I’d imagined him saying and what he had actually said and I looked at the photograph of my husband again, the baby him, the he that he was long before we met, before I had even been born, and I remembered that morning when he told me I had lost my mind.

Okay , I said. You’re probably right. Do you want tea?

The things I disagreed with the most adamantly were often the most true, so I wanted to see what would happen if I just agreed. Maybe if I agreed he would have to be wrong and maybe this was the trick of being married to my husband: agreement.

I thought, for one nice moment, that I had discovered something, and then my husband asked if I was aware that I’d lost my mind or if it was something I was managing to overlook. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. He was never much of a kidder.

You know, I think I’ll make some coffee instead of tea , I said. Would you like some?

It’s a problem I’ve always had — doing the domestic things I didn’t actually want to do, but it always seemed to me that if I didn’t do them then they would never get done.