Nobody Is Ever Missing

by Catherine Lacey

  Ruth sighed and smiled. Stay for brekkie, then? Get cleaned up?

  The house was antique and silent, and she showed me to a little, white bathroom and said I could use the green soap, the one shaped like a seashell. I unlatched my backpack and let it thud behind me and shed all my clothes and turned on the claw-foot tub, and I stared into a mirror, my tanned skin exaggerating the white in my eyes, hair wisps curling with sweat, dirt smeared around my face.

  When the tub filled I slid in and soaked and forgot where I was and I thought about the question of whether the police had taken away the papers that Ruby had dropped off at the professor’s office that day, because once I had asked him if he still had those papers and he said he wasn’t sure where they had gone; and I said, You don’t remember? Why don’t you remember? Husband: It was a long time ago, Elly, and it was a very difficult year— And I: But why wouldn’t you remember what happened to them? And he’d said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.

  * * *

  In the living room an elderly woman was slumped like a sandbag in an ornate wingback chair.

  Nina, I’d like you to meet Elyria, Ruth said. Elyria, this is Nina.

  Nice to meet you, I said, trying to seem calm and normal and nice—not a woman with a wildebeest renting a room in her, not a woman who sleeps in garden sheds and phone booths and anywhere—but my voice sounded like I had borrowed it and it didn’t fit my mouth, not my real thoughts made into real words, but some awkward hand-me-down.

  It’s lovely to meet you, dear, Nina said, not looking up. Her belly paunch looked like risen dough.

  Mother, Ruth said, you could make an effort at the very least.

  A what?

  An effort, Ruth said louder, you could—would you just sit up? We have a guest, Mother, really.

  Fine, fine, Nina said, but she didn’t move any part of herself. She was wearing five or six pearl necklaces tangled together. A bowl of wet blueberries was balanced on her gut and a tear of blueberry skin was wedged between her front teeth.

  I’m just going to the garden for some herbs, Ruth said. I’ll be right back. There’s coffee and tea if you’d like it.

  Nina looked around the room as if someone might try to sneak up on her, then looked at me.

  So, how is it? Sleeping in the garden shed?

  Oh, it’s just okay, I said.

  I think it sounds like fun. I’d like to have some fun again. Once I slept sitting up on a train. Imagine that. A young woman all dressed to travel—just sleeping—sitting up sleeping with her gloves and hat still on!

  * * *

  After I went at a plate of scrambled eggs and toast like a stray dog, then a second plate, then a bowl of fruit and more butter-heaped toast, Ruth started asking questions (the expected ones: where-was-I-from, where-was-I-going, why-had-I-slept-in-her-shed) and I tried to sip tea as if I was the kind of person who sipped tea as I told her the truth: that I wasn’t lost because I no longer had a destination, that the place I’d wanted to stay in New Zealand had fallen through and the backup plan had fallen through. I really do enjoy being alone, I told her, and I tried to smile, but I realized that I wasn’t quite smiling and what was happening was there was water on my face and it was coming from my eyes and this was surprising to me, but it didn’t seem to surprise Ruth, who tilted her head and asked about my family as if she was a therapist, someone accustomed to sudden, naked pain, and I found myself unable to lie like I had so many other times.

  I told her about my husband and Ruby and my mother and I told her everything and I was so tired by the end of it and my chest was shaking and I exhaled and I felt a little relaxed and Ruth, with her concerned and respectably wrinkled face and her silk blouse and pale lilac trousers and the scent of rosemary haloing this emphatically wholesome situation called her life, Ruth looked at me and said, Would you like to call someone, dear? And all I could do was agree with her because it would have been nearly impossible or possibly illegal or at the least difficult to disagree with her wholesomeness— I said, Okay, and she brought a rotary phone out and the only number that came to mind was the number my mother would write in Magic Marker along my forearm when she sent Ruby and me out to play—Just in case, you can never be too careful—and sometimes you couldn’t tell her fours and nines apart—Thatsanine, notta four—and Ruby and I would mimic her later, Thatsanine, thatsanine, we’d say this invented word to other kids who had no idea and we’d smirk at each other and run through sprinklers to wash off the Magic Markered number, and we’d say, We’re never going back now, she’ll never find us now, but we always went back and we always remembered the number and I don’t know why I dialed that number that afternoon at Ruth’s house, but I dialed it as if I had finally found the case she’d meant by just in case, and just like that there was a skeptical Hello on the line and I said, It’s Elyria.

  Oh…, my mother said. Elyria? Huh.

  I’m okay, I said.

  I thought you might be, she said, you always seem to manage. Where is it you went?

  New Zealand.

  Well, that’s pretty far.

  We were quiet for a moment and she said, Are you still there?

  Yes.

  You know, there was a moment there we all thought you were dead. Is that what you wanted us to think?

  I realized it was early evening there, so she’d maybe only had a few afternoon vodkas. I told her that I didn’t want anyone to think I was dead, that I just wanted to leave.

  You know, Elly, I really thought you’d be over all this by now. It’s been six years.

  I stared at Ruth’s whitewashed china cabinet.

  Hello? Are you there?

  I’m here, I said.

  Well, don’t you have anything to say about that, Elyria? Anything?

  About what?

  You leave on the anniversary of—you know … It’s always been about Ruby for you, even the marriage—you know that—everyone knows that. I’m just the only one that will say it.

  She laughed a little and audibly sipped something.

  That’s not what it’s about. I didn’t—I didn’t even know it was … But I must have known it was, I realized, somehow, I must have known. I let the silence settle.

  Are you there?… Elyria?

  I’m here, I said, but I knew, increasingly, I wasn’t here, and I felt that able-to-weep-and-be-seen version of myself that I’d been with Ruth hardening again, like warm caramel left to cool.

  For the record, I told him not to cancel your cards, that was his idea, Elyria, because he didn’t care if you were safe, he just cared if you were his. Do you see how twisted he is now? Marrying his dead student’s sister? A decade between the two of you? That never struck you as strange?

  But my mother didn’t know what it was like to be in the diner with the sudden sense that was made between that professor and me, when we were not yet a husband and a wife, but a young woman and a young professor, people who suddenly had something that the other needed, a possibility, a particular balm, and I still don’t know how to adequately describe it or understand it, but it made everything make sense, made getting married make sense, made the guaranteed and steady supply of loss in every life make sense, and then it all changed, somehow, or killed itself, or wandered out and never came back, and that was why I had left, not Ruby, not the lack of Ruby—

  I think I need to go, I said, because I was done being reminded of the difference between us, and I hung up the phone and Ruth came back into the room and asked me if I felt better and I said I did feel better because I had turned back into the woman who could fold herself up like an acrobat and store herself away, packed like a body bent inside a cannon, and my face went back to its cool, normal state, not its warm, wet, and helpless animal state and she said, You look better, dear, maybe that’s all you needed, just to talk to your mother for a moment, and I said, Yes, than
k you. That was all I needed.

  29

  When the black truck slowed and stopped I realized this truck had slowed and stopped for me before—there was that empty-nested woman, that little bird for herself.

  I got in and she said, And where are we headed today, mademoiselle? And she smiled. I felt guilty that she was smiling because I knew I was going to tell her that I had lied, there was no farmer husband and I was going nowhere, over and over, always going nowhere.

  I don’t mind going … anywhere, I guess.

  Well, she said, and I braced for it, the question that was going to lead to an answer that would lead to a confession that wasn’t nice and wasn’t comfortable—

  What does your husband think of you going just anywhere by yourself?

  I lied, I said, I didn’t come here with my husband. He doesn’t even know where I am, and once I said all that I felt myself lighten but the atmosphere in the truck darkened because it’s disappointing enough to know that the people we love will sometimes lie but it is almost worse when we remember that strangers do this, too, and this is why it is best not to admit our lies to strangers, because it is not pleasant to learn that someone will lie even when there is little to nothing at stake, and it’s not pleasant to remember that we have all believed other strangers’ lies, and even though almost every living person knows this, in a way, it’s still not the best thing to bring up in polite conversation. If the widow had asked, I would have told her the rest of the story, the grey meat of it, but she didn’t ask. She put the truck in drive and drove and she didn’t ask me why I’d gone through all this trouble. Probably a more powerful part of herself was telling some less powerful part to just leave it—leave it—the way I’ve heard people tell their dogs to stop being interested in stinking gristle on a hot sidewalk.

  She let me out at a visitors’ center in a town that seemed close to nothing, just cliff faces and bridges over narrow rivers. Someone can help you in there, tell you where you should go, and I was thankful that she was right—inside there was a wall tacked with flyers, one said Bakers Needed, and another said Farmhands Needed, and there were other needs, needs I either couldn’t meet or didn’t want to meet, but one just said Live on Waiheke Island, Live in Paradise! and I liked that it didn’t ask anything of me, just told me what to do, emphatically. Lodging and meals for labour, many skills needed, so I took the flyer off the board and called the number and a woman answered—Do you mind weeding, housekeeping, laundry, light repairs?—and even though I did mind those things I had realized by sleeping in sheds and parks and yards that Werner wasn’t totally wrong and wasn’t totally right: I’m not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don’t need me. So I told the woman I didn’t mind any of those things and she said I could come whenever, and that’s how easy it was to find a makeshift life, a life blind to the past and future.

  After being picked up again, then let out in a sulfur-smelling parking lot by a row of train tracks and picked up again and let out at a petrol station and picked up for one last time by a bucktoothed woman driving a pale grey van, I ended up in Auckland, and as I got out of the van the bucktoothed woman said, God bless you, which I followed, as if by reflex, with a sneeze, so she said it again—God bless you—and I sneezed again, and I thought this was the kind of thing that people make easy, laughing eye contact over, that life is funny sometimes, or maybe not funny but maybe somewhat unexpected, but the bucktoothed woman kept her face as plain as a curtain, her two front teeth bucking right out of her lips like they were the other two in the holy trinity of she.

  30

  Luna said she was vegetarian for purely physical reasons as she slid a wet pile of diced onion off the side of a knife and into a hot skillet and she did this with unnerving precision, and the onions hissed, and I imagined Luna pushing a javelin through a white rabbit for fun because she said she knew she could easily kill an animal—killing wasn’t the problem—but she didn’t want to ingest dead flesh, to absorb a death, and the skewered-rabbit-on-javelin image, combined with her knife skills and the way she was looking at me, made me wonder what her body could do to a thing if it wanted to do anything to another thing, and this memory has always come to me link-armed with another memory of a morning when Luna was just eating a piece of fruit—maybe an apple but an apple has obvious implications, allegorical and otherwise, and maybe a peach, but a peach has other implications, sexual and otherwise, and I know I don’t entirely remember what kind of fruit it was, and I am not even certain that this moment ever happened in real life, but I do have a feeling that I once saw the lush flare of her lips as she bit into something and a certain purse as she chewed.

  This was during the first week of the many months I lived in a caravan behind Luna and Amos’s cabin, back when I still thought I had solved the problem of who I was, of why I couldn’t seem to go about life the way other people did—I was beginning to realize that what I wanted was the noise of people living near me, but not near enough to cause any inaudible noises to show up because I knew that those sorts of noises often shift into inaudible minor chords and I am unable to deal with that shift—when love or kindness or inaudible noises turn into boredom or disappointment or minor chords—and this is the difference between me and the rest of the world: most people can let their feelings shift without a wildebeest smashing them up from the inside, but I, for some reason, cannot—and, still, I am more human than wildebeest so I’ll never be exempt from the human need for other people to be near, but because I am part wildebeest they can’t be too near, and I would like to apologize for that but I can’t apologize for that, I can’t apologize to everyone who deserves an apology for it, unless no one deserves anything, in which case, what a relief, because I can give everyone that nothing—I can give them nothing all day.

  But this theory hadn’t completely set during those early days with Luna and Amos and their extremely organic and well-ordered life, their highly organized toolshed and their biodynamic kiwi orchard where the hens roamed around laying eggs without regret or reserve, and I noticed that Luna and Amos smiled shamelessly and openly at each other and aside from the fact that Luna knew she was an animal capable of killing other animals, neither of them seemed to have a dark corner of themselves and why is it that some people turn out like that—Luna and her constant smiling and her glowing skin and her hair shining and thick, and she was young, maybe even younger than me, and I knew she was one of these women whose youth would stick around longer than average and even though Amos was in the part of his life where his wrinkles were not just visible, but obvious, he still usually had this calm expression on his face, as if to say, yes, his life had mostly already happened, but he had won and would continue to win and here he was with his well-worked hands and heavily sunned skin and hand-hewn cabin and his pretty little wife, and all their unashamed smiles. Some people just turn out like that and other people live in caravans behind those people’s cabins, trading chores for a place to sleep.

  If Luna could tell that I was a person who wasn’t entirely all right, she must have overlooked that, or maybe was just profoundly bored and lonely in her well-ordered, organic, seaside, photo-ready life because in those first weeks she was always trying to create some kind of understanding between us, which reminded me that it is hard for me to understand people who want to understand me and be understood; Luna (she must have been flatly unaware) was always inviting me to make dinner with her and she was trying to ask me about what my life consisted of, was there a love in my life, what had I done before New Zealand, what did I hope to do next, and I tried to be good, I tried to be a good woman with good answers to these questions and I tried to appreciate how Luna wanted to share a bottle of wine with me and explain to me why it was special and I wanted to appreciate the stories she told me about how she had met Amos and how it was a whirlwind romance but I found, increasingly, that I did not particularly care and I tried to fake a little kindness, a little sweetness, tried to mirror
Luna back at herself, but that exhausted me after a week and I concluded that I was not meant for this sort of thing, friends, friendliness, no, I wasn’t meant for it. I was meant to earn my keep and just keep my keep, that’s all.

  A week or so later, a group of people showed up and they all wore similar linen tunics and much of their hair was growing in wads. They put their hands together and bowed a good deal. None of them seemed to own or wear shoes. I almost wanted to know more about them, how they all met, why they seemed to have a uniform, what they had against shoes, but the desire to know more was overridden by the knowledge that to get that information I would have to actually speak with them a substantial amount and that they might have questions about me and that it might be difficult to extract myself from such a situation.

  I was making dinner for the group one night (I had been demoted to the most domestic jobs, which I always did alone) when Amos came in to wash his hands.

  Your family must be—

  No family. I don’t have a family.

  Amos nodded. I knew there must have been a point in his life when he would have said the same thing, that he had no family, even though I knew Amos had probably made this new family with Luna to overshadow the one he had come from and knowing how to lie in the same way gave us a common truth. There was a pause here of about three seconds, then Amos turned on the faucet to wash his hands. There was another pause of about four seconds, then I went back to chopping carrots.

  You’re chopping too quickly, he said, no reason to rush the knife.

  The knife is fine.

  Aye, the knife is fine, it’s your hands that need the minding.

  The what?

  The minding.

  There was a pause of maybe one second. Amos started to reexplain, but I cut him off.