Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

No, she’s not! She’s probably fifteen because my sister is sixteen and she’s bigger than her.

What are you really? pigtails asked.

I forget , I said.

Where are you going? the redhead asked.

I don’t know. To a farm somewhere.

Are you a farmer?

Sure , I said.

Where’s your farm?

I pointed south, or I think I pointed south, but I could have pointed west, or even north, and what would it matter? If you made enough turns it would take you to the same place. The girls in the back were chanting something and slapping their hands together with increasing speed and volume.

Quiet back there , the driver yelled, and so they were.

The redhead leaned around the edge of my seat and put her face near my elbow. She had skin the texture of cheap toilet paper and luminous green eyes, little luxury items planted in her skull. The bones in her face were more pronounced than you’d expect on a girl her age — either underfed or a natural look of vulnerability.

Can I tell you a secret? she whispered. We’re runaways. We all ran away from our homes. He’s taking us to the police.

I peeked over my shoulder at the other girls. A few leaned their swan necks into the aisle looking toward me. I could hear some high voices dipping low to whisper.

What’s your name?

Elyria. What’s yours?

Alison. Where are you from?

New York. Where are you from?

A different planet. I ran away from outer space. Nebulas don’t interest me. She smiled with all her tiny teeth. You want to know another secret?

Sure.

I have two hearts. A regular one and a little baby one underneath it. And you know what else? I have a third eyeball stuck in my brain but it can’t see anything because it’s too dark in there. That’s what the doctor told me. He showed me a picture of it they took in a big white room with a robot. Have you ever seen a robot? Because I have.

Her face had pinched into something serious, and I didn’t know what to say and I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth about the robot, the doctor, the extra eye, the extra heart — what a terrible thing to have too many of — but the bus stopped and the bus driver put his arm up and waved me forward.

Bye , I said.

See you later , Alison said.

When I got to the front of the bus the driver was just staring forward, and I looked at his gnarled hands ten-and-two-ing and I saw how the flesh hung on his face like it was clay pressed on in a rush, all uneven and loose, and something in his jaw clench and nostril flare made me worry he was doing something with his life that was bloody, something that involved heads pressed against concrete or mouths filled with something that shouldn’t be there and I wondered if this was true and if it was true I knew he would continue to plow over life, continue to chop lives like a tractor, and he would keep doing that forever unless I killed him right here with my bare hands in front of all the girls, then threw his corpse out the door and drove these girls straight to the hospital for post-traumatic stress treatment, and though I knew I had the potential to do this locked in me like a poisonous pet snake, I knew I didn’t have the part of a person you must have to turn that potential kinetic, to be the kind of person who can let their awful plow.

Thanks , I said to the bus driver, to cover up what I was thinking, and one of the girls in the back shouted, Takes one to know one , and it made me gasp even though I knew she wasn’t talking to me and I worried that what I had seen in the driver was something I’d seen in myself, that it took me to know me.

The bus driver said, You’re welcome , and I wondered if he knew what else I was.

I walked roadside for a few hours, wondering if it was possible that Alison really did have an extra eye, an extra heart, if a person could ever live with that kind of surplus, and something about the way Alison spoke reminded me of how Ruby spoke, or how Ruby said something once about having two hearts. Or maybe I was misremembering some more complicated thing Ruby said, something that made it clear we didn’t speak the same language, that we couldn’t fully translate ourselves to each other. There was a night I realized this, how we could no longer or perhaps had never quite been able to hear each other—

Who lets a sixteen-year-old move to New York alone?

We were smoking cigarettes in the backyard after a late Thanksgiving dinner (Mom’s cigarettes, of course, the who to her question) and I didn’t know whether I should ask her about college life as a child prodigy — Was she lonely? Had she made friends? Were her classes, finally, challenging enough? I knew I wouldn’t understand her answers to those questions, that she’d allude to philosophical concepts I’d never heard of, that she’d make references I couldn’t place and I’d just stare, baffled and unable to keep up. I was barely passing the high school classes she’d been exempt from.

As we smoked I pushed Ruby on the swing set, and we could see Mom passed out and drooling on a love seat in the sunroom. She’d been at a fever pitch all day, swigging Beaujolais, burning all the takeout in a reheating attempt, calling Ruby the renegade genius and accidentally ashing onto her plate.

There’s our little genius, our little renegade teenage genius! How does she do it? I just don’t know how she does it!

But finally everything was quiet, just the swing creak and our faint exhalations and even though this was one of the thousands of chances I had to have a meaningful talk with Ruby, something sisterly and emotional, I didn’t take that chance: I stilled the swing and held out an imaginary microphone to her: Tell us, Ruby, how do you do it?

And Ruby ran with it because she also wanted to live in a fiction, to keep playing pretend.

Well, I’ll tell ya, Bob. The secret of my success is to make a plan and act fast. I don’t second-guess myself. I’m never of two minds about anything.

Well, folks, there you have it , I said, but there were no folks.

* * *

A van slowed and stilled beside me and this memory sank away. The driver leaned out his window, his right arm was covered in tattoos, matte-black vines blurring into dark skin.

Simon , he said.

Elyria , I said.

Elyria! That’s a helluva name. Hippie parents?

Not really.

I didn’t tell him, like I didn’t tell anyone, that Elyria was a town in Ohio that my mother had never visited. That was all my name meant: a place she’d never been.

The basic idea of a mustache was hanging over Simon’s mouth, and there were these odd wrinkles around his eyes that didn’t agree with the rest of his machine-smooth face.

I stared at the pointless hills rippling around us — the trees all captive to the ground, a grey mountain in the distance, stoic and bored — and Simon started a monologue on himself, his autobiography—

Been traveling for seven months on the North Island, did some wine work for a while to save money, but I’ve been on my own for a long time. I separated from my parents when I was sixteen. My father clobbered the shit out of my little brother one night, put him in the hospital, and I said … you know … check, please? All done with this, thanks. Ever seen a ten-year-old with a black eye from his own pops? It’s not something you want to ever see.

I almost liked how much he talked, how he answered his own questions, how simple it all was, like television. I hadn’t said more than ten words and maybe those were the last words I was ever going to say for the rest of my life, I thought, as Simon went on about how his parents were put in jail, something to do with fraud, with some kind of real estate scheme, houses in Miami, London, L.A., all confiscated, and maybe this was it — this was all I needed — someone who just naturally filled in all the silence that life has in it.