Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

In the present I was still standing at my husband’s door, and for a moment I wondered if I was standing at the wrong door, if I was thinking of the wrong man, not a husband but some stranger, some neighbor I’d never met and I wondered how much of a difference there was between a husband and a stranger. Stranger plus time equals husband. Husband divided by time equals stranger. Husband and wife — which does not belong? Wife plus door equals what? But there was no equation or series of questions that could turn this moment into an answer.

To the husband mirage I said, What if we both stayed here and said absolutely nothing to each other for a year and see how we feel after that?

Maybe that wasn’t the worst idea anyone had ever had, and maybe if we could say nothing at all for a year or some other considerable length of time, maybe that would be a way to excavate the marriage, air it out, dump it out of itself and show us if anything at all was even left in it. I imagined what that would be like, us both drinking tea or eating dinner or getting dressed or undressed or dressed again or standing, both of us, by the door putting our shoes on, but we wouldn’t tick out our thoughts at the other, wouldn’t need to ask the other anything, wouldn’t need to keep this dialogue still running down the page of us, and most importantly we wouldn’t need to feel any guilt for the silence that had grown like mold on a bathroom wall we’d sometimes halfheartedly scrub at but never commit to eradicating, because, if we had agreed to this year of silence, the mold would no longer be something we needed to clean but rather evidence of our evolution, our superiority to the basic cleanings other people had to do, almost a performance piece, that mold, that silence, a living thing we were just letting live, not something we wanted to contain or talk over or bleach dead — that mold would just be something that needed nothing, and I looked at my husband in that memory and I thought of the metaphorical mold and I knew right then there was little to nothing left between us and what had been keeping us together for so long was the rich and wild memory of how there had been so much, those past moments so nice we’d asked them to stay and now they’d all left, because moments never stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglars, those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.

I kept standing there at the door thinking through all the possible ways I could make us make do with what we’d made or what I’d made, the mess, I mean, but I didn’t knock on my husband’s door and I wondered if it would be possible for my husband to shoot me with a microscopic bullet that would make me make sense again, a bullet that could send the proper wants through my body: the want to be in this nice apartment with this reliable, honest man who had paid bills and who came home and did the things he’d said he’d do and sometimes more, and the want to have a family because it was time for me to continue the march of people that I belonged to and this was what we had been building our life toward, my husband had once said, and I didn’t know how to agree or disagree. Maybe this little bullet could also make me want to live this life that was by so many standards quite nice because we had a home and jobs and money in our bank accounts and a loaf of bread in the kitchen and good knives with sturdy handles and nice appliances and rings on our hands and we lived in a city where someone would always be willing to make you an egg sandwich despite the hour or the holiday, and we had a comfortable green couch and a record player and a decent collection of records and plenty of books and we had crown molding in our home and we had a view of treetops, and we had decently functioning bodies with lungs that could wind us and hearts pumping us and mouths that had all the regular, slimy teeth and none of the false ones, and we had genetic code that had grown us both into a respectable height and shape and I had a lot of blue dresses and black boots and he looked so nice in off-white linen shirts, as if he had been a cloud in a past life.

I should want this, I thought, but all I wanted was to wish that I even wanted to want this and if I was being honest with myself, which I sometimes was, I didn’t even want to want to wish.

Look — here I am. I’m still here. I’m right where you left me , the mirage of my husband said to me in my mind.

I know , I thought.

What ? the husband mirage said.

I said I know , I didn’t really say, I know you’re still here.

The letter , my husband mirage said, and I remembered the letter and how I’d been looking forward to having instructions giving me a single choice, an unmovable logic.

The mirage of my husband closed his mirage door and I stood for a moment at his real door and I knew that I knew what I should be doing and I knew how to do it and I knew it had to happen now, so I took the stairs down but stopped on the fourth-floor landing to look through the smoggy window facing the courtyard, and some amount of humanness squeezed through me and wetted my face and coursed through my body and made me shake so slightly I wondered what my husband was doing right then and I wondered what he’d ever do now that we’d both have to do things in this new kind of without , the kind of without that was final, the kind that meant there would be no apologies, no forgiveness, and now we’d each have to go about the slug of waking, bathing, eating, without the other as a witness, this person we’d split so much of our lives with, a person who housed entire armies of information about the other and who , I wondered, who would we thumb over our pasts with and who would notice how golden my husband’s pale skin became in the lamplight in his office so late at night when his mind would move chalk sticks across, across, across, creating problems and solutions and problems and solutions and if there was no one to notice these things about my husband would my husband even exist anymore? And where would all the me that he had housed in himself go if I wasn’t there to be with him and see what he kept of me in him, and did the versions of each of us that we had crafted so exactly and precisely for the other person, did those versions just evaporate, just die, just disappear, just fall out of a building somewhere in each of our brains and if they did then why didn’t we get to have funerals for them? I loved the he that he was to me. I loved him and he is dead and I want a black moment for that man. Give me a black moment for that.

The doorman who’d let me slip by was gone and Ray was there as I opened the stairwell door—

Mrs. Riley, no one was ’sposed to let you up there.

Ray still had that immovable mass of black hair and the one blond eyebrow and the one set of blond eyelashes, a thing that turned this broad, dense man into a kind of puppy.

Did the new guy give the letter to you? He was ’sposed to.

Yeah, I got it , I said.

Ray got a set of keys from the desk. The little TV was still on, a weathergirl in front of a map, her arm moving in a slow karate chop.

I should take you to the basement, then. Right? Get your stuff?

Sure , I said, and I tried to smile and seem grateful.

We got into the elevator and when it opened in the basement Ray held an arm in front of the door and looked toward me to signal he was letting me off first, but he looked above my head instead of at my face and I realized Ray probably wouldn’t look at me because he must have thought I was a bad thing, even though he had said Good morning! to me so many times and so sincerely and asked How ya doin’, Elly? and even bothered to listen to and maybe care about how I was doing and often he had carried my groceries when I came stumbling into the lobby and once he even took the elevator with me all the way up to my apartment because I had been sick and didn’t look well and Ray had noticed and done something about it and despite all that history, Ray could now not even look at me, wouldn’t even just gently once look. To Ray I was just a chore now, just a thing that he had to endure; to him I had smacked the humanness from myself.