Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

Even though the air was cooling daily and the sun was setting earlier than it once had, the linen-tunic people still went without shoes and still slept in a thin-walled yurt, and I imagined they slept in a pile the way that puppies or kittens sleep, but I slept in the metal caravan the way a sardine would if sardines came canned individually. It was apparent that a unity had happened between the linen tunics and Amos and Luna, and I was not a part of that unity, that community of people all enjoying, respecting, supporting each other. They would linger over dinner at night, eat lunch together outside instead of swallowing aspirin washed down with goat’s milk like I did. I’d been given, or volunteered for, or just always did the jobs that I could do alone — searching out the eggs in the kiwi orchard, making dinner for everyone while they built that barn together, holding the ladder steady while another climbed, while they chanted one-two-three-and-go before raising the barn’s frame or things like that. And though I had noticed that I was separate from this pseudofamily I did not see a problem with it and I thought no one else saw a problem with it and I thought that probably meant that there was no problem with it, but that all changed one afternoon when Amos asked if he could speak to me for a minute and he didn’t wait for me to answer him and he didn’t speak for just a minute, he spoke for several of them and he spoke like fathers in television shows speak when they have something simple that they want to explain in a complicated way in order to seem enigmatic, maybe, in order to seem to be the keeper of some sort of wisdom only bestowed upon a man of a certain age and he told me something about biodynamics or permaculture or something, how the system relies on a total cooperation or integration or some other gration.

You know, we’re trying to create a full community here — this is important to us. And we can respect your privacy, you know, I get that, but we really do need you to participate in our ecosystem, Elyria. Can you do that?

And I didn’t say anything for a moment and Amos was doing this look my husband used to do sometimes, this look that was a cross between pity and doing long division in his head, so I mirrored that long-division-pity back at him and Amos finally said, Do you think you could be a part of our ecosystem? And the voice of a teenage girl came up in me, silently, and asked, How am I supposed to know? and it was the voice of that girl in the episode of the soap opera when she gets arrested and the cop asks her, What’s a girl like you doing getting arrested? and she says, How am I supposed to know? in the same annoyed, indignant way I’d just heard it in my head and I realized that those must have been what my feelings were — annoyed, indignant — and I couldn’t feel them, but I could hear them, so maybe I was something like that boy I’d gone to high school with who had been born without fully functioning nerves, who had fingers and hands covered in cuts and burns because he loved to cook but didn’t really understand a knife or a flame, that boy who all the other boys teased because he couldn’t have a real penis if he didn’t have the feelings that came with it, so he wasn’t a man because he didn’t know the difference between pain and pleasure, and that boy never seemed to smile and he wore long sleeves year-round, and I was not so different from him — we were both unable to get near the real life in life.

I believe I could do that , I said to Amos and he smiled, so I smiled a little and I was glad I had pretended to be better than I was because it would make it easier to leave because I knew I couldn’t live up to this pretend person I had made up and presented to Amos and it was nearly autumn now so maybe something needed to die, something needed to change, and at the same time I knew I didn’t know what would happen next, what would die or change, and I understood that I had little to no control over what would die or change next but I had a kind of calmness that was actually just exhaustion and I also had the house to myself for a least an hour since Amos had to go teach that permaculture workshop and Luna had taken the arthritic dog to the vet and what I wanted, impossibly, was for the professor to be there with me in this house, and I wanted him to be there because that early version of the man who became my husband wouldn’t say anything to me about how long it had been since we had died to each other and he wouldn’t say anything about how unfairly I had disappeared and he wouldn’t tell me that I always have two options— You can choose how you feel or you can let your feelings choose you —because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn’t have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn’t have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can’t really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after — I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.

I stepped lightly into Amos’s office where he had an off-limits computer and I went to the university’s website and I went to the mathematics department page and I tried to load one of my husband’s lectures. I had never watched them because there had never been a reason to watch them back when my husband was sitting so calmly in my real life, when we inhabited each other’s space like we were long-owned pieces of clothing, forgotten and familiar on our bodies. I found a lecture from last April and I opened it, but only the first image would load, a fuzzy still, a poor rendering of my memory’s memory, but the blur made him look younger, I realized, and maybe this was what my husband was like in the decade before we met. His oldest friends always said he looked the same as he had at college graduation but I knew his face closely enough to know that wasn’t true — I knew I had missed so many delicate years of his life and the man I had married was the hard remainder; I had missed years of innocent longing and late nights and odd jobs and girlfriends who were now mothers of someone else’s children. I had missed wrinkleless eyes and his hair before the grey ones crept in and his mouth before it had said I love you to other people, shadowy other women I never knew, would never know. All those selves my husband practiced in the decade before me felt unfair because my past didn’t have any of those secret selves because everyone’s childhood and adolescence are more or less the same, dear struggle, and my husband had seen me change from an old child to a young adult and I didn’t have a past like he did — I didn’t have a smoother version of me tucked away in other people’s memories.

And after I had deleted my history on Amos’s computer I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn’t matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing — nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will. It doesn’t seem like much now, but realizations rarely do, I suppose, those bright moments when you can finally see something that had been there all along. This wasn’t a commodifiable realization, the kind of thing in college essays or inspirational books or the hardbound journals of gentle ladies. There was no ah , no ha, no relaxation or humor folded into this realization. There was just something real in my head — a rescue boat in a sea where there was no one left to save.