Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

I decided to try to look happy because I thought someone might be more inclined to pick up someone who was happy.

I am happy , I told myself, I am a happy person.

I opened my eyes more than was necessary and hoped this would convey my happiness to the cars, but they kept passing.

One honked, as if to say, No .

My arm stayed out for a long time and my elbow ached at the spot where they’d always taken the blood, and I became so accustomed to the passing cars that I forgot that the point of all this was for me to get into a car and go somewhere, but nothing was following anything else — one car would pass, then another, but all the cars came and went alone. And I was here. And nothing had followed me — I was a human non sequitur — senseless and misplaced, a bad joke, a joke with no place to land. The sky was a good sky color and the air was healthy feeling, and maybe this was the kind of day that reminded all those drivers that days are a finite resource and it’s best to protect the ones you have. This kind of day doesn’t want you to dare it, doesn’t want you to flip a coin, doesn’t want you to pick up a stranger off the side of the road.

But eventually that first woman was proven right — it was the women who stopped, who insisted they never picked up hitchhikers, only women with thumbs out, damsels in transportation distress — which was what the second woman said, and I thought, Sure, fine, whatever — I wasn’t going to mince words with anyone. There was no reason for that. She was on her way home from a hospital where she was a nurse, so I asked her what I had been thinking about ever since that last day at the lab:

What do they do with the blood? After they’re done with it, I mean.

What blood? she asked.

When they test it. After they test it for disease or hormone levels or whatever. All those tubes of it — what happens?

Well, they dispose of it. It is hazardous waste.

But where does it go?

Into a secure place. First a tube, then a hazardous-waste container, then the containers are taken away by a company. They put it somewhere safe and secure and no one ever touches it ever again.

And that put an end to our talking. We didn’t say another thing until she let me out where she had to let me out.

Good luck , she said, take care. And stay away from those blokes.

It became clear after some hours of waiting on the narrow, tree-lined road where the nurse had let me out that some places are not good places to be a person and not a car and that was where I was; occasional cars sped around the road bend and I ended up frightening drivers the way that wild animals do when they stand stunned dumb in a road. The cars would slow or swerve or honk and I wished I could honk back— I know, I know — why am I here? It was also unclear to me. After a while a little red car made a three-point turn and pulled up beside me and he leaned over to pop open the passenger door and I got in and thought, this is exactly who they said I should stay away from and exactly what I am not staying away from, and the bloke said, Where you headed? , and I said, The ferry , and he said, Which one?

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.