Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

And I knew that it was possible he wasn’t entirely right for me, but I also knew, in some way, that probably no one was right for me and potentially no one was right for anyone, but I also felt, with uncharacteristic sincerity, that we were as right for each other as any two people could manage, and I had chosen life in the face of death, this was how the professor said it, that since his mother had died he had been choosing to live every day, and I took this to mean he was just trying to do the best he could do with his life, to pretend to be the better version of himself even if he couldn’t always be that better version of himself, the version that can appropriately adjust to the disappointments of life, and let go of irrevocable losses, and stay awake through entire days without falling asleep in the middle of work or the middle of a subway car or the middle of a sentence.

Everything is okay , I told my mother back then, as someone was taking the plates away ( All done?) and she said, again, Oh, honey , and I still wasn’t her honey and I clenched my jaw and she said, It’s depression, honey, you’re just depressed. You just need to have someone give you something. You don’t need to get married, that’s not going to fix anything, believe me, it won’t.

I’m not trying to fix anything.

Oh, honey.

Stop calling me honey.

He doesn’t have anything to do with Ruby anymore and he’s not going to bring her back.

I didn’t ask to bring her back , I said, and this may or may not have been the moment I got up and put on my jacket and Mother said, Oh, I just don’t understand you and your moods, why you can’t just control yourself , or maybe she didn’t say anything right then, maybe she just got out a compact to look at and powder her nose and I knew that’s what she probably did after she wrote that one-line email, that everything okay? She probably looked into a mirror to make sure her nose was still sitting on her face as usual, and I’m not one of those people who think of the right thing to say at the right moment, so that day at the restaurant I didn’t try to explain myself or my moods or my lack of an ability to control myself and that other day I didn’t write her any reply to her one-line email, didn’t tell her anything was okay or not okay.

I paid the woman for the minutes of Internet and she said, Thank you so much , and she seemed to mean it more than the average person.

There was a diner across the road and I went into it and took a whole booth for my little self. I stared at the menu and did not think of my husband. I stared at the tile floor and did not think of where I was or why I was here. A waitress came by and I told her what I wanted to eat, which seemed suddenly a very personal thing to tell a stranger, what things you were going to turn into your body. She asked me if I was traveling by myself and I said I was and she said, Aw, good-onya, brave little one you are, don’t get too lonely, do you? , and I smiled so gently and did not throw the salt shaker across the restaurant.

After a while the old man at the booth beside mine leaned over—

Where are you from?

So I told him where I was from and he asked me where I was going and I said, The South Island ferry, and he said, Today? And I said, Whenever .

Well , he said, I’m on my way back to Taupo if you’d like a ride. I make this drive fairly often and even though I’m old I’m still a good driver, so you shouldn’t worry about that.

Oh. Okay.

The reason I make this drive so much is that I put my wife in a home up here so she could be with her sister. She doesn’t like it there, but she didn’t like living with me either. She likes when I come visit, is what she says, but she isn’t really sure who I am and she doesn’t understand that I’m her husband. Isn’t that too bad?

The man looked at me then went back to looking out the window. No one likes to be unrecognizable. No one wants to be a stranger to someone who is not a stranger to them.

There’s not much for me anywhere , he said, but he didn’t sound sad. My orchard has dried up, my wife’s brain is gone, my children moved to Australia. Even my only grandson died. Leukemia. That never made any sense to me and never will.

He shook his head and smiled.

But this is a nice place. Good pies. Nice waitresses. It’s a perfect place to stop on the way to Taupo. It’s a very nice place. There are still a lot of nice places like this, you know, even though lots of other things have gone wrong. You’re not in a hurry to get to the South Island, are you?

It seemed to take a reason to be in a hurry and I didn’t have any reasons, I knew, and maybe that was it, maybe I had come to New Zealand to find a reason in this quiet country where everyone was happily waiting on almost nothing, to wait with them until a reason found me or I found a reason.

You should never be in a hurry if you can help it. It’s bad for everything. Bad for the stomach, the spleen, the skin. Especially bad for the joints. The knees and ankles. Rushing isn’t healthy at all.

Eventually the old man drove me to his house outside Taupo and he told me that I could go waterskiing and hang gliding and kayaking because there was a lake nearby and people in that lake did things like that, but I didn’t tell the old man that I didn’t want to ski or glide or yak because that was not the kind of person that I was and I was not on an adventure and I was not a tourist and I was just a person. I smiled and said, Oh, that sounds nice, and he said, It is, it’s nice, it’s a nice place. I’ve lived here for about thirty years and it’s very nice.

I woke at four the next morning in the old man’s guest bedroom, which was actually not a guest bedroom but the abandoned room of his daughter: pink quilts, pink walls, gymnast trophies, and a dusty dollhouse. I had slept in my clothes so I just got up and put my shoes on and left and walked far.

How funny (or not funny) that the old man (all alone in his four-bedroom farmhouse on the edge of a dried-up orchard with a garage full of small engine parts for the plane he’d never built) had a life that had gotten up and run away from him (his daughters in other countries and last names, his wife forgetting everything, his grandson in some other dimension, his apple trees diseased and fruitless, and his incomplete engines rust-thick) while I, instead, had been the thing running from my whole life.

The sky was brightening slowly as I walked into Taupo, past a parking lot full of boats, down a highway just east of the lake, and though I can sometimes think back and romanticize this moment, the sheer morning glow, the cloudless sunrise, I know that all I was really thinking about in that objectively beautiful moment was whether I’d even had a choice when it came to leaving my husband, and whether we are, like Ruby had once said we were, just making decisions based on inner systems we have little to no control in creating — and I thought of that professor who became my husband and I thought of the sensation that came after he put a hand on my shoulder, a sensation that had turned me more human, put me in contact with what I think I was supposed to be feeling, and how it allowed me to be destroyed by the leaving of Ruby because being occasionally destroyed is, I think, a necessary part of the human experience. Before he put his hand on my shoulder I suspected that somewhere in me or near me was the appropriate human reaction for that moment and after he put his hand on my shoulder the appropriate human reaction made itself evident, and when he touched my shoulder, he also seemed to have come into contact with the emotional reality that he needed to experience. We both cried and the fluorescent light tinted our skin blue and I could see right through his skin to a vein in his face, a tiny blue vein on his forehead made bluer in the blue light and we held hands — it somehow made sense to hold hands with this stranger in ways it had never made sense to hold the hand of any other stranger — and Mother came back in and sat beside me and put a hand on my shoulder and nothing happened, nothing changed, nothing felt better, because she didn’t have the same effect on me that this professor had on me and I didn’t know why that was then, but I am coming nearer to understanding it now. Some people make us feel more human and some people make us feel less human and this is a fact as much as gravity is a fact and maybe there are ways to prove it, but the proof of it matters less than the existence of it — how a stranger can show up and look at you and make you make more sense to yourself and the world, even if that sense is extremely fragile and only comes around occasionally and is prone to wander or fade — what matters is that sometimes sense is made between two people and I don’t know if it’s random or there is any kind of order to it, what combinations of people work the best and why and how do we find these people and how do we keep these people around, and I don’t know if it’s chaos or not chaos but it feels like chaos to me so I suppose it is.