Catherine Lacey: Nobody Is Ever Missing

I didn’t say anything. Mother was lighting one cigarette with another. A section of her hair was pushed over her head the wrong way. She turned around and waved at me with one limp, little hand, a royal dismissal. Lipstick rimmed her mouth like ice cream on a toddler.

I’m sorry for that , he said, for saying that. I know it’s what people always do, try to tell you they’ve already dealt with what you’re dealing with, trying to tell you how they grieved — I know it doesn’t help. I’m sorry. It was just on my mind.

You don’t need to be sorry , I said.

We didn’t say anything for a little while.

He put his hand on my shoulder as if he was taking someone’s advice to do so and he let it stay there for a moment and after that moment water did come out of my eyes and I felt more appropriate and more human to myself. The professor put his arms around me and I collapsed a little, making a wet spot on his navy jacket.

Exactly , Simon said, and he smiled and I knew that smile, and I remembered when I smiled like that at boys who smiled like that, but I hadn’t seen that smile in at least seven years, and I’d never known my husband when he was young enough to let a gesture reveal himself so plainly. We had stopped for a sandwich and Simon was still filling up all the silence, and I did not smile back at him. I was no longer listening — most of my attention was on a man strumming a ukulele at the other end of the bar. A woman was looking at a menu and trying to get the man’s attention, but he had his eyes closed. The woman waved her hands in front of the ukulele man’s face but he just kept whistling, swaying. I looked back at Simon and copied his expression — serious, but with raised eyebrows — to make him think I was listening. Maybe he was too young to catch that trick. Maybe in the world of a twenty-one-year-old boy, no one had to fake an interest in you. The woman took away the man’s ukulele. He looked, dejected, at the menu.

Here’s something that may or may not be right in front of your face , Simon said, you know, in front of your face in the sense that you already know it.

Simon held my shoulders with both his hands, which felt larger and denser than I would have expected.

This is important — you and I, right now. This is important.

How’s that? I said.

What’s between people is more important than anything in the physical world. This is God, Elyria. Anytime two people can look at each other and talk honestly, that is God.

I wondered for a moment if he was trying to get me to join a cult, but I realized it was just his youth talking, not a dogma. I hadn’t spoken much to Simon and what I’d said wasn’t any kind of honesty, but Simon had perfected the art of seeing what he wanted to see, because it’s easier to go through life like that, to see the world as a series of familiar things, a place where everyone feels how you feel and sees what you see. I was still impersonating Simon to his face to get away with ignoring him, and that seemed almost sustainable, a way to spend a few weeks, but when he went to the bathroom I went out to his unlocked van and strapped on my backpack and started walking somewhere even though Simon had told me he’d pitch a tent outside tonight and let me lock myself inside his van— To prove a point , he said, I’m not a bad guy and I trust you —but I didn’t want to bear Simon anymore and I didn’t want to be the thing under those projections anymore because I did have somewhere to go, in a way — Werner’s farm, a place to sink into and forget about movement, about vibrations, about projections, about relying on whoever happened to pity me at that particular moment, increasingly disheveled, smelling more and more like the earth or an animal, caring less and less about how little I cared.

I walked through a forest near a highway until I found a clump of moss to sleep on and I remembered that Simon said possums were not indigenous to New Zealand, that they had been brought here by somebody a long time ago, some European, and since there were no animals here that liked to kill possums, all those unkilled possums had fucked up the whole fucking ecosystem by eating plants, too many plants, by wanting so much, and now there were what? — ten or fifteen possums per person in New Zealand? Something fucked-up like that ; and I imagined my dozen fucked-up possums gathered around me, a personal audience, and I wondered which things inside a person might be indigenous or nonindigenous, but it isn’t as easy to trace those kinds of things in a person as it is in a country. I wished that I could point to some colonizer and blame him for everything that was nonindigenous in me, whoever or whatever had fucked my ecosystem, had made me misunderstand myself — but I couldn’t blame anyone for what was in me, because I am, like everyone, populated entirely by myself, which made me think, again, of Ruby on that Thanksgiving night on the swings, or maybe it was another night like that night when she was talking, I thought, about how predictable she felt— I’m Asian so I’m supposed to be good at math and skip grades and I did and I’m adopted so I’m supposed to be messed up and I am —and I tried to tell her she wasn’t predictable, she wasn’t a cliché, she wasn’t a statistic— You’re a person, Ruby, like everyone else—

Oh, thanks , she said, like I really want to be like everyone else, Elyria, you’re totally missing the point. I’m talking about free will —and she went on for a long while making multitiered arguments about free will and the possibility that none of us had it. I was sixteen or seventeen and didn’t have the kind of brain that Ruby had and this was becoming increasingly obvious, that my brain couldn’t absorb as much as her brain could, that I couldn’t expound with her about free will, that I was making a C in French and failing algebra and she had mastered both those classes during weekends one summer, and now here we were, she a teenage adult and me a teenage child and she wanted to talk about free will and I didn’t have anything to say.

This was probably the moment she turned from my sister to an orphan again, and maybe I understood this then or maybe I understood this some weeks or years later, but Ruby and I were no longer two children together in an alternate universe, equally mystified by our parents and the whole world — we were now in separate alternate universes and from then on we only had rare moments where it seemed, for a second, there was some sense between us. Like that afternoon I admitted to her I’d come to Barnard so I could see her more often, and that other night when I talked her off — and I don’t want to say ledge, but it was a ledge, of sorts, a metaphorical ledge — that night I talked her off a metaphorical ledge before her college graduation because she hated how it had taken her all four years to complete a triple major — but those sweet and connected moments between us became increasingly rare, or else I have forgotten some or many of those moments, which is probably true because memories are so often made by one hand and deleted by the other, and living is a long churn of making and deleting and we all forget so much of what we could be remembering, and part of the deal with remembering those connected moments with Ruby was that they usually came with a more difficult memory, like the one from that Christmas — it must have been the one just after that Thanksgiving when we smoked on the swings. There was an evening that the three of us were somehow all sitting in the breakfast room drinking hot cocoa as if imitating some more wholesome family and even Mother had been doing a pretty good job at playing the part of the mother (she’d made the cocoa, had wrapped a present or two, and sincerely told Ruby she had missed her) but then she somehow dropped or threw her cup of cocoa and the spill seemed to inspire something in her, so she wordlessly pushed a box of ornaments from the table and left the room. Ruby and I swept up the shattered shards and sopped up the warm, dark mess and smiled at each other over this warm, dark mess but much later that night, when we found Mother shouting, Open me! Open me! , from inside a large cardboard box she’d taped up from the inside, we were all done with being amused, so we didn’t smile at all. I’m the child of a child, I thought, and I may have said that to Ruby and she may have laughed, or maybe I didn’t speak that thought at all. Eventually Mother got quiet and began snoring and we didn’t bother to open that box because we knew how much she hated to be woken up.