Nobody Is Ever Missing (20 page)

Please take as long as you need, Elyria. There’s no rush.

The assessment was just a few basic math problems like
nine divided by three
and
four times five
and other lines like this, problems that weren’t really problems at all, problems that were so simple they made my life problems seem unbearably complex. There were a few picture ones, too:
A fish, a dog, a hammer—which does not belong? An apple, a tree, a helicopter—which does not belong?
Still, I answered them all slowly, deliberately, making sure to match the seriousness with which this test had been given to me. All moments forever had led me to this moment with these equations and this drawing of a happy, slobbering dog, knowing the answers instantly, looking at the problems again, knowing the same answers, reading them again and trying to imagine if there was any possible way that I might be wrong, but each time I always came back to my first thought and after I had written my nine answers to the nine problems I felt a little exuberance because I knew at least nine things in this world to be just so plainly true, limbless facts. I wished, for a moment, that I had become a mathematician or an accountant or a factory worker so I could just have part of my day be full of NO or YES, ONE MILLION or TWO MILLION, or SAME, SAME, SAME, SAME. But instead I had this life that was populated with so many MAYBEs or ALMOSTs or PERHAPSes or I DON’T KNOWs that I felt that I was swimming or drowning or boiling in them, but here, in this quiet moment when I had finished the intellectual assessment but had not yet handed it back I tried to flatten my life out into a similar format:

Husband times silence equals another country.

Ruby times brick courtyard equals negative Ruby.

Seashore, sister, seagull—which does not belong?

But my life, anyone’s life, any life like a real life, any life that is humanlike—it can’t be turned into questions like that. I handed the clipboard back to Thomas and he looked down at it and moved a finger down the right side of the paper, pausing for a second on each number and letter and he nodded and looked at me.

All right, that wasn’t so bad, now was it?

No
, I said. (Was I supposed to answer that question? It was not clear.)

Thomas smiled a mouthful of tiny teeth and took off his glasses.

And how are you feeling today, Elyria?

I took a quick inventory of myself and found that everything was here and in more or less working order. My brain was functioning. My body was not crushed into a pudding. And, yes, I was somewhat trapped in this hospital room with my arm under all this gauze and all these painkillers in my veins, but that was, in its own way, somewhat enjoyable even though I had so many complicated and not-completely-all-right feelings under that enjoyment—because I knew I was enjoying something that I also knew, on some level, was just not meant to be enjoyed—

Fine
, I said.
I’m okay.

Just okay?

Yep. Fine.

Good, good. That’s good. So you’re not in too much pain.

I nodded.

The nurses here are quite nice, aren’t they?

Sure.

So, Elyria, let me just confirm a few things with you. I’ve been given a bit of information and I just want to confirm that it’s all correct. Tell me if anything sounds incorrect, all right?

Okay.

You earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard. You’ve been employed as a staff writer for CBS for five years. You married Charles Riley, six years ago. You’ve had no major health problems. You’re not in any debt. You’ve always filed your taxes on time. You were not taking any prescribed medications before you left the States. You lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a building owned by Columbia University where your husband earned tenure a year ago as an associate professor in the mathematics department. Is this all correct?

Yes. It sounds right.

Now, you see, Elyria, what I just described sounds like a pretty decent life you had going on there, so you can see how other people might be confused about why you decided to just pick up and leave like you did without even telling your husband where you went. That’s rather odd, isn’t it?

I looked at him as if he was some object in a museum that I was not particularly interested in.

It’s confusing to people
, Thomas said,
why you might just get up and leave everything.

Yes
, I said, nodding and smiling just a little.
I know.

Elyria, are you trying to avoid talking about why you left?

No.

No?

I don’t have anything to say about it.

You’re putting up quite a resistance to talking about it, though. Why is that?

I don’t know.

You don’t need to have your guard up, Elyria.

I don’t have a guard up.

You seem a little guarded.

No, I don’t.

How do you deal with stress?

I don’t know. I read, I guess. Something alone.

Can you tell me a little more about that?

I don’t really have anything to add to it. Stress is stress. You just deal with it.

I box, sometimes, to relieve stress. It feels good to hit things sometimes, you know? We all have a little anger to let out.

Okay.

So, do you do anything like that? Is there anything that’s like boxing to you?

No. I’d just rather be alone.

Thomas made a few notes and I wondered if he was waiting for me to confess something strange, to say,
Yes, Thomas, in fact I like to kill whole forests of small animals to relieve stress; that’s a lot like boxing I suppose, Thomas, you see—you and I are not so dissimilar from each other, now are we?
I made my face smile a little, like I was calm, like I was fine.

Do you miss your husband?

I don’t think about it all that much.

So it’s the same as stress relief for you: isolation. You isolate to avoid missing him.

No.

What is it then?

I just don’t miss him.

Did it occur to you that you should have told your husband where you were going?

I don’t remember.

What would it be like if you returned to your husband?

The same, I guess.

What do you mean by that?

We would just go to our jobs and live in our apartment and all the same stuff we used to do.

Did your husband ever do you any harm when you lived with him?

No. Nothing like that
, I said. But wasn’t it? I asked my silent head. Wasn’t it something like that? Wasn’t there something so brutal about our silences, something so acidic, something mutually abusive about the way we just had our lives so silently folded together?
No, it was nothing like that. Nothing like that
. But wasn’t it something like brutality, like congealed blood, like a bruised face, a broken limb that won’t heal—wasn’t it
something
like that because it was in his sleep that the silent violence between us was finally cut loose, the want we had to destroy ourselves or each other came out then, a pot of soup left to boil too long, bubbling over, scorching the pot, filling the house with smoke.

Did he abuse you emotionally?

I thought for a second and said,
I don’t know.

I thought of the little redhead girl from the bus months earlier and I wondered what had happened to her and what she had meant by saying she was from a nebula and I wondered if she was all right and I wondered if I had misremembered this and she had never said such a thing and maybe that was why I was here, because I had seen so many mirages and believed them to be true and people had noticed, maybe, people had seen me standing shoeless in sheep meadows talking to no one, maybe, looking into no one’s eyes, listening to nothing and answering it and isn’t that the thing about these kinds of things: you never know for sure if what you see and hear is what other people see and hear, and Thomas stepped into my thought—

Did he abuse you physically?

And I wondered why I couldn’t just say,
No, he did not abuse me, my husband did not abuse me
, and move on to the next question. Maybe it was because we both knew that nearly a majority of women had been, most likely, abused or assaulted or molested or whatever, and any woman who had not yet been abused or assaulted or molested or whatever should just wait, just give it a day or a year or a week or so because most likely it was going to happen to her, yes, one day she would wake up and think it was a day like any other day and by the time she fell asleep it wouldn’t be that kind of day anymore, and if this never happened, if she somehow was still a member of the unabused, unassaulted, unmolested few, then she should always remember that hands that could and would assault a woman were prevalent and nearly unavoidable. There was a sense of
not if but when
, and I felt that sense while Thomas looked at me, expecting, it seemed, for me to say,
He did—I was—this is why I left, I am one of those women who can do nothing but run
, but I knew so surely, or at least almost surely, that my husband didn’t or almost didn’t or didn’t quite, didn’t really, didn’t consciously, but I almost wished that he had abused me
—
abused me in a waking, daylight, intentional way
—
so that my leaving would make a little more sense to myself and the rest of the world.

Did he abuse you physically?

My mouth wouldn’t let my brain move it.

Elyria, I cannot take your lack of explanation as an explanation, you know. I must only report what you confirm to be the truth or tell me is the truth. If you cannot say or confirm that your husband abused you or did not abuse you, I cannot just take what I believe you may be implying by your silence and put that down. I can only write down that you refused to answer the question, do you understand?

Yes.

Perhaps we should just come back to that one later—

I sat up and again looked at the picture of the man who owned the ocean and wished I could please become him now, pinch my nose, close my eyes, and jump into some other life.

I thought of my husband sitting in his chair, his legs crossed, his arms crossed, his voice saying,
Typical, Elyria. It’s incredible how much you can forget.
Over the years there had often been things that I would forget and he would remember, memories and information that my husband had archived—things I had done, he had done, words I had said, he had said, verbatim sentences he could remember spoken by himself or others or me, things we’d seen or done or places we’d been, verbatim places, verbatim people, exactly precisely factually factual things he could remember that I could not or could not quite, completely, remember. So my husband was this constant fact-checker of my life and the idea of him making things up, intentionally or not, had occurred to me, that maybe many of the things he had told me had happened, had, perhaps, never happened—

Elyria, when did it occur to you that you wanted to leave your husband?

I don’t remember
, I said, and my voice did not sound true even to myself because I did remember the day I decided to leave, a Tuesday afternoon walking down Broadway—I watched an old woman in a crosswalk and I knew.

Thomas inhaled and flipped through a few pages on his clipboard.

Do you ever have thoughts about harming your husband?

No.

Harming others?

No.

Do you ever think about harming yourself?

No.

Do you ever think of suicide?

Memories sometimes move into a word or a phrase and you’ll never think of that word or phrase or that feeling or color without thinking of the other side, the things you store in it, and under the word
suicide
was a cave called Ruby, and it had become impossible for me to tell anyone what I thought of when I thought of the word
suicide
because so many thoughts lit up in my brain, lifetimes of thought
,
and anytime I heard that word I always remembered the end of Ruby, the little knot tied at the end of us. But this, I knew, was not what Thomas meant, when he asked me if I ever thought of suicide.

So I said,
No
, without pausing.

Elyria, I’d like to now begin another assessment. Please answer the questions as fully as you can, all right? Okay. Are you experiencing problems with falling or staying asleep?

No.

Do you ever feel frightened or uneasy for no discernible reason?

Sometimes.

How often?

I don’t know how often. Doesn’t everyone feel like that sometimes?

Are you having trouble concentrating?

On what?

On anything.

Sure.

Thomas waited for me to continue, to explain myself, but I didn’t want to look back at him or explain myself because I knew that everyone who was alive had trouble concentrating on life and I knew that he, somewhere in him, knew that, too, that really being alive, being pushed around the world by whatever was in your brain, and having feet, walking on your feet, having a freedom that is always limited to how free your body is, all that was too much to concentrate on and so no one concentrated on it too often or too easily and we all have trouble concentrating on it, on everything.