Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

In my almost-human moment, I felt the tears building up behind my eyes, bubbling there, humming like a teakettle before it boils, but I didn’t cry. Blood rushed around in my body like it was being chased, but then it stopped — maybe it realized there is nowhere for blood to go but around and around and as I thought this I knew I wasn’t always a rational person, or even a nice one. I stood up straight, put myself back in order, and tried to figure out where to go next.

He said the night terrors had never happened before me and I could never decide if that was comforting or not comforting, if it meant I brought the worst out in him or if it just meant that the majority of my husband was a mostly nice thing — and maybe the realest part of my husband was unaffiliated with the screaming, violent version that shook us both awake some nights. Still, I couldn’t forget that there was a distinct possibility that it was me and the way I handled or not quite handled my wifehood that had unhinged this part of him. I had disrupted him. I was the catalyst that began the bad in his life, and I would continue to be a long series of disruptions to him and I was always going to bring out his ugliest side, and my sleeping beside him would always stop him from being able to really sleep .

In the early months the night terrors just made sleeping a kind of roulette and there was something perversely satisfying about waking up to his frayed screaming (when life seemed more like a soap opera and less like a life) but that was before the choking began, before the nights his hands would creep across my collarbone and tighten around my neck, and though it usually only took a few small hits to his chest or face to make him stop, a few nights I had to hit him harder than what seemed safe and though he never shut my trachea long enough for me to pass out he sometimes came close, pressing down for a moment, a wink in my throat. When he slipped out of a terror, eyes still shut and jaw slack, he’d fall limp back to his side of the bed and sometimes he’d go immediately back to sleep, and on those nights I’d get out of bed, shaking with adrenaline, and go to the living room couch with my neck bent against the armrest, chin on chest, mind on husband, eyes on window, waiting for some kind of sign, some kind of evidence, some kind of kindness or understanding to tell me, Self, it is all fine and okay. Close your eyes. Tomorrow it will all be fine. But I never have been the kind to keep a back-stock of that kind of kindness, the way that other people do, taking care of themselves and others, being ready to forgive.

Other nights, my husband would stay awake and we’d play out the same script:

Did it happen?

Yes.

Elly, my God, Elly, I’m so sorry. Elyria.

And he’d wrap over me and my throat would feel rug burned where he’d twisted the skin.

Elly, talk to me .

But what was there to talk about? What could I say? I had seen how a corner of my husband wanted to stop all the air in me.

Go back to sleep , I’d say.

What was it like this time?

The same.

Did I hurt you?

No. Let’s go back to sleep.

This looks like it hurt, Elly.

He’d drag a limp finger over the red lines his hands had left.

I’m fine. We’re fine.

And he’d keep staring, waiting for me to say what I knew he needed to hear, something I said so much I wondered why he didn’t just say it for me after a while.

I’d say, I know you didn’t mean to.

I knew that he didn’t mean to, or I think I knew he didn’t mean to, or it was better to believe that he didn’t mean to, but I wondered how I knew, for certain, that he didn’t mean to, or if a more accurate thing to say would be that I trusted that he didn’t mean to, but if I actually did trust that he didn’t mean to, I should have just said that I knew he didn’t mean to, which I obviously didn’t know for certain since I would stay awake for the rest of the night wondering how I could know, for certain, that he didn’t mean to, and what did my lack of certainty mean about how much I trusted or did not trust my husband, about how well or not well our marriage was going, the possibility that we each wanted to cause severe damage to the other, and there was the fact that the only way I could defend my husband’s night terrors was to believe that they were an entirely separate phenomenon from him, but I also knew that was incredibly unlikely or actually impossible because my husband was mostly his mind and I believed his mind was what made the night terrors happen. And it’s still unclear to me why a person has abilities that they do not want to have, why a person feels things that person doesn’t want to feel and why that person doesn’t feel things that person does want to feel, and why a person falls out of love when being in love was such a good thing to be in, and why a person makes loud and clumsy attempts at midnight to kill the life one could reasonably expect that person to want to preserve.

So after I said, as I always said, that I knew my husband didn’t mean to scream and choke me in his sleep (except without saying the words scream or choke because hearing those words was almost worse than him actually doing those things) we’d lie awake awhile, each pretending to be asleep or almost asleep but we’d always stay up, slipping in and out of sleep for all those hours, each of us moving as little as possible, trying to breathe like we were deeply content, like it would be easy to go back to sleep as soon as we were truly ready, as soon as we were prepared to will ourselves back into the shut-lid place where those terrors lived. But we always avoided talking about these things — difficult things — and I wondered if that meant we’d be a little uncomfortable with or disappointed by each other for the rest of our lives.

Then there was that night when we were arguing about something that didn’t matter, something that can be summarized as I Believe You Are a Little More Despicable Than Me, and my husband wasn’t listening to me and I wasn’t listening to my husband but we were making our arguments at the same time in low voices, and I picked up the glass of neat bourbon that he’d bought for me like this was a date instead of what it was: a married couple’s attempt to pretend to be in a marriage that was the kind of marriage where we went out on things like dates, but instead became a married couple’s chance to argue, as discreetly as possible, in public, and I picked up that glass of bourbon that he’d bought for me and I started to lift it to my mouth before I thought of splashing it into my husband’s face, but I didn’t want to do that — I didn’t want to give or do anything to my husband because I didn’t want to acknowledge that my husband was even a person in my life, so I poured the glass of bourbon onto the table and when I poured it onto the table I didn’t mean to say that it wasn’t nice of him to have bought it for me and I didn’t mean to say that it didn’t taste good or that I was already drunk enough; what I meant was I am a liquid and he is a solid and the universe is expanding and here we go flying away from each other like matter always does, spinning and spilling off the edge of our table and onto our laps.

This put an end to whatever we were fighting about.

We stared into the puddle of nice bourbon, a round, amber shimmer, and we looked up and around the bar to see if anyone had seen me do this and we tried to laugh a little about it and I told my husband that I would write this into one of the episodes of the soap opera someday and he kept laughing for a beat but then he stopped laughing—