Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

I was staring out my little hospital window, trying to have a significant moment, trying to realize something, to feel real. I waited, patient, but no realizations came. Nothing felt real. A deep sense of unreality came over me until, finally, a half realization came and it was this: unreality was the only reality that I had and all I could do was believe that it was enough, that unreality was close enough to reality, that reality was unreality’s last name, and making do with unreality was maybe the best I could do.

I’d had a similar nonrealization of unreality before, I remembered, in the dressing room at the church where I got married, and my mother had walked in with a droop in her eyes and a curl in her voice, already sloshy before the ceremony began.

You two make a lovey brood and grime , she’d said, too proud or oblivious to correct herself. What’s the rules about the bride mother seeing the groom man? Huh? Well, I don’t know what it is, but I did. I mean, your groom man. Saw him. Handsome one he is. A lovey grime, I mean — a lovey broom.

Mostly she could keep her drunkenness a low rumble instead of a crash and for that subtlety I was thankful, the mauve of the problem, the lovey grime. I looked at my mother and felt the jitter and pulse of her life and remembered that I had slipped into this world through her body and how that meant something, how that told me something about the kinds of accidents I was going to make because she was the only start I’d ever get.

Anyway , she said, ’ stime for you to get married. Marriage! All right.

My husband and I had decided against bridesmaids and groomsmen or, rather, had just realized we didn’t know anyone who would be those people for us. The audience was just a few pews. His family and mine, terse smiles. The grandmothers were politely crying, but no one else seemed to have a feeling. His mother’s absence was the largest presence, and his stepmother kept touching her hair and looking around, as if she was afraid someone might steal it off her head. My parents sat with enough space between them to put two or three children.

We said vows. An organ organed. We turned and walked out.

And as I stood in my hospital room, I tried to bring up some nice memories of my husband, to wash myself in that kind of nostalgia, in the airbrushed tenderness of memories that have been refined and pared down and shaved into almost nothing, just the image of a nice man doing something nice, detaching it from the irrevocable mess between us. Nurses came in and out of the room over the next day or so with smiles or no smiles or news or no news or gelatinous, compartmentalized foodstuffs, and one nurse reminded me that I had been lucky, so lucky that I hadn’t bled to death, but another told me my wound had never been so serious, that it would heal just fine, and someone read something aloud about being exported or imported or deported — my removal, my soon-to-be elsewhere, and I wondered why I seemed to be having a hard time filing my life away in an organized system, why I was putting decades-old stories in the same folders as last week, last year, the files containing my husband shuffled in with Ruby, my father, and whomever else, whatever else — and where did anything belong anymore and could I ever sort myself out and if I could, then when and how, and if I did — then what?

Someone came in with breakfast — peeled egg, leaking tomato, potato tangle, butter-stamped toast — and this must have meant that night had turned to morning again, and maybe I had slept through it or if I hadn’t slept I had at least sunk into a kind of trance, most likely, because I didn’t have a memory of opening my eyes, but it was morning and I ate the egg in a single mouthful, yolk chalky in my throat, cheeks crowded with soft, white shards.

Two female cops with dense hair and dense faces, broadly drawn women, escorted me out of the hospital room and I enjoyed the walk down the hallway and its bluish light and the way that all the nurses and doctors tried to look at the spectacle of us without looking at the spectacle of us, tried to see the small woman being escorted by cops, and I loved how ugly the light was and I loved the little flicker of eyes that I would sometimes catch and I loved that I was out of that moss-green room. And I wanted this moment to stay because I wanted to just walk and walk, flanked by two cops with a specific destination, and I wanted to just be on the way somewhere, I wanted to be on the way forever without ever getting there because that was what I really wanted, maybe, to go and go and keep leaving and leave and leave and go and leave and be going and never arrive.

I don’t remember a single sound or sight of the flight, all I remember is the descent, the thud and skid of us on the runway and how, when I woke up, all the large drama of my trip now seemed small and shiny, like a collectible figurine, a pathetic chipped-horn goat made of crystal.

Ask Ray to take you to our storage unit in the basement. In a clearly marked area you’ll find what is yours, including but not limited to your clothing (all laundered), your books, all the art that belonged to you, your lamps, the two chairs and one side table that belonged to Ruby, that rug you bought in Spain, your toiletries, a box of stale muesli, every bobby pin and hair elastic I could find, that licorice tea that you loved and I hated, the keys to the apartment that are now useless because I changed all the locks, and a paper bag containing all the strands of your hair combed from the carpet and fished out of the couch and swept out of corners and pulled from the bathtub drain. There is no more of you in my apartment. There is no reason for you to even take the elevator to my floor, so please do not attempt to do this. You need to take all of the boxes, all at once. I do not wish to see you. I do not wish to ever hear from or see you again. Regards.

I looked up from the letter to the doorman (not Ray, a new one) but he was watching a shoe-box-sized television and maybe he didn’t know that I was an unwelcome substance in this building, that I had made my husband into a person he did not want to be, but it seemed this doorman didn’t know any of this so I went to the elevator and I got off on the tenth floor like I used to do every day without thinking.

I stood at my door, now just my husband’s door, and I thought about knocking and what would happen if I did and he was home and he opened his door and saw me here. He might just nod and his eyes might tremble and possibly I’d reflexively put my arms around my husband, though I wouldn’t be sure if he was my husband anymore and I would press my bones against his and feel the slight slope of his waist and feel the knotted muscles on his upper back and I would notice how lightly he was holding me, as if I was covered in fine thorns.

Maybe I would let go of him and he would step away and look in my general direction but not my direct direction, not right at my absurd self, his missing wife limped home to repent. Maybe he’d have cut his hair in a new shape or maybe his eyes wouldn’t be the same grassy green anymore, maybe they’d turned a hunter shade, a color used in camouflage. He’d probably stand all rigid, like he was balancing a teacup full of fire on his head, and past him I would see our living room and the window we used to smoke out of when we were younger and still in love and everything still seemed possible so we could destroy our lungs a little, we could hold fire in our fingers, dare our bodies, and past the window the light and the sky would say it might soon rain but it hadn’t yet. I would want to say I was sorry but I would know that word was too small for what I’d done and I wasn’t sorry , not exactly, or maybe I would generate some kind of confidence and walk into the apartment and my husband would close the front door and turn and lean back against it. I imagined that familiar thud after unlatching my backpack and I imagined what I might say right then, in that silent moment just after the thud, and maybe I’d stand up straighter and make my tired eyes more open and try to really see my husband and try to really say something to him, give him something of myself, an explanation, some balm for the burn of now, but I knew I wouldn’t do any of this because there was a paralysis between us and a weariness in the way he looked at me and an unfamiliarity about his eyes — what were they anymore and why had they become this other thing?