Nobody Is Ever Missing (7 page)

Oh, this chapter’s not as good out loud
, I said in my half dream.
I’ll read a different one.

I flipped to the scene where Mrs. Bridge is trying to learn Spanish from a record, but I mangled the pronunciation and he had to correct me.

It’s
Cómo está usted
.

Cómo está usted?

No.
Cómo está usted.

I am a stupid American, I thought inside the fantasy inside my thought as I read
Mrs. Bridge
, as the imagined bartender wiped a white towel down the bar, inching away. I decided in my fantasy I would make an effort to speak in a way that was more pleasing to listen to and I would choose a passage better suited for the bartender: the part where Mrs. Bridge, sleepless, has a growing sense of unreality and despair.

She had a feeling that all was not well and she waited in deep expectancy for some further intimation, listening intently, but all she heard before falling asleep was the familiar chiming of the clock.

(The imagined bartender began wiping down the bar again, moving toward me.)

The next morning Lois Montgomery telephoned to say that Grace Barron had committed suicide.

(And he was visibly satisfied with the sudden darkness, and I knew that I’d found a way to capture his attention, though I wasn’t sure what use I had for his attention.)

In the days that followed Mrs. Bridge attempted to suppress this fact. Her reasoning was that nothing could be gained by discussing it; consequently she wrote to Ruth that there was some doubt as to what had been the cause of Mrs. Barron’s death but it was presumed she had accidentally eaten some tuna-fish salad which had been left out of the refrigerator overnight and had become contaminated, and this was what she told Douglas and Carolyn.

(The imagined bartender kept listening and I thought, as I read, inside my thought, that maybe in another dimension this bartender
was
my child and this was our alternate-universe bedtime story, in the middle of the day, in the middle of a bar, in the middle of my head.)

Her first thought had been of an afternoon on the Plaza when she and Grace Barron had been looking for some way to occupy themselves, and Grace had said, a little sadly, “Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale—the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?”

The idea of my alternate-universe bedtime story dissolved and I left money on the bar and I got up, denied myself a glance at the woman who owned those legs, and wandered away, first to the library where an email from my husband let me know he’d canceled all my credit cards and closed my bank account and that explained it, so I went back to the hostel and counted the money I had: two hundred American dollars in traveler’s checks, twenty-seven New Zealand dollars, thirty-eight New Zealand cents, and one American nickel. I thought about this, remembering that when he took over all our finances after the wedding I somehow hadn’t considered any of the ways that it might become a problem, then lay on the bunk and saw that on the underside of the mattress above mine someone had written
THIS PLACE SUCKS.

13

In the morning I checked out of the hostel and walked slowly down the street. Three Japanese girls were posing in front of a mailbox; one pretended to kiss it while a fourth took a picture with her phone. I walked into a bookstore, half-intending to buy a book so I didn’t have to read
Mrs. Bridge
again, but I noticed a flyer by the door:

What Do You Need? A Home? A Job? Advice?

In smaller letters it asked:

Do You Need To Know Something? Do You Need To Know Someone? Are You Wandering? What If You Had A Place To Stay? Are You Out Here Reading A Flyer And Saying Yes, That Is Me? Some People Are In Need Of Giving; Do You Know Any People Like That? Would You Like To?

There was a name, Dillon, and a number. I wondered for a while why he had capitalized every word on his flyer, then I memorized the number, left the bookstore, found a phone booth, and called.

This is Dillon; may I help?
he said after one ring.

I saw your flyer.

And what would you like to tell me?

I’m traveling and need to make some money.

Did you know that no one ever calls from that flyer?

No, I didn’t know that.

Has it ever occurred to you that no one wants to ask for help?

Well
, I said, wondering if that was what I was doing—asking for help. That was supposedly the first step in something, in making progress, in becoming a better person with fewer problems. Or wait—was it admitting you have a problem? But doesn’t everyone have problems? Isn’t waking up or drinking water or eating lunch admitting you have a problem? There was a long silence going on. I realized I had stopped talking in the center of a sentence.

Do you have a pen? Can you take down this address?

I was happy he let me stay in my other world where sentences didn’t have endings.

The neighborhood I walked through on the way to Dillon’s seemed like nice families lived inside all the houses, like there was always a woman cooking something inside them all and these nice houses reminded me of a story I’d heard about a woman who’d had enough of her children: One morning after her husband had driven off she dressed the children, a small boy and two very small twin girls, and she put them in the minivan and she drove the minivan to a police station and she took the children out of the minivan and she told them to hold each other’s hands and not to speak, that whatever happened, they should just say nothing, and she led the children into the police station and she told an old man at the front desk,
These children—I found these children. I do not know who they belong to or where they should go
, and she turned and walked out and got into her minivan and drove home and took a nap and that evening when her husband came home and said,
Dear, where are the children?
, she said,
What children?
The husband said he could see in her eyes that she had gotten up and left herself and isn’t that the worst kind of leaving? No one is okay when someone leaves like that and I knew I never wanted to leave that way. I can’t quite remember the end of the story but I thought it somehow involved the husband going to the police station to retrieve his children and finding that they hadn’t said a word all day.

Dillon’s house was slumping into itself on the edge of a hill.

Welcome!
someone shouted as I stood in the street and stared.

I couldn’t see who had shouted. I looked to see if maybe they were behind me.

Over here!
the same voice said.

I looked at what I thought was over there, then I looked at another there, but I didn’t see anyone.

Hello?

Come on up
, someone said, and I couldn’t quite tell if it was the same voice or a different one. A tree rustled and a man jumped out of it, in a kind-of-like-falling way, and he landed on a wooden balcony on the second floor of the house. He opened the door to the balcony and went in, then came out the other side, the door at the top of the stairs I was climbing.

Are you my flyer reader?
he asked.

Yes
, I said, regretting it with every part of myself. He had three or four dreadlocks tailing the back of his head but the rest of his hair was cut short, shoe-polish black. A silver ring hung on one nostril and his body was put together in a way that suggested it would be easy for him to move a large piece of furniture by himself.

Are you our traveler in need?

I guess?

You guess! Ha! You’re great. You’re a great one. All right, up you come—make haste, young rabbit! Make haste!

Looking back I realize I should have pretended to be at the wrong house, to be the wrong traveler, but for some reason, I made haste. In the living room a girl in a hemp dress and an Indian boy were talking about the sadness of a certain class of arachnids, the ones that carry poisons they don’t have the ability to use. The boy was short and narrow, seemed barely fifteen. He wore a long, tan tunic trimmed with yellow embroidery. He was nodding his head and smiling and speaking lowly, intently, as if he was an incarnation of some god or saint. There were others there—Sia, the Italian girl who spoke in a voice so tiny it seemed whispered from her belly button, and Gian, who never said a word, and Marco, who said too many, and the British woman, who always kept her backpack locked shut in the corner, even while she showered or made dinner or spoke to someone about how safe she felt in New Zealand, not like the other places she had been and all the awful things that had happened.

*   *   *

That night I looked at the only picture I had of my husband. In it he is a baby in his mother’s arms, a crumpled, fatty lump of who he eventually became, his little mouth hanging open, his mother looking distraught, caught between a hard place and another hard place—the rest of the family stands behind them, repetitive noses, eyes, skins, hairs, like wallpaper. And as I looked at the baby version of my husband, I decided not to call the present version of my husband anymore. I had called earlier that day from a pay phone near Dillon’s house, but when he picked up it was only to thank me for calling and to ask me to not call again.

I said it was tomorrow where I was and he said, yes, he knew it was tomorrow there.

I have to go
, he said,
but maybe you should call again. We should talk again. We should be trying to fix this, whatever this is. I feel strange that I haven’t heard from you, but I feel strange talking to you, too. Actually, don’t call anymore. I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Okay,
I said.

It will be better this way, if we just don’t speak until you can tell me you’re coming home.

The calmness in his voice wasn’t at all convincing, and after I hung up the phone I imagined my husband told me he’d convinced the people in charge of the study to give him the information they’d gotten from me—the pictures of my brain, my answers, my data—and I imagined my husband saying this as if he was announcing a job promotion or that he had unexpectedly won a portion of a class-action lawsuit and as I walked back to Dillon’s house I wondered if maybe I hadn’t imagined my husband telling me this but maybe he’d really
said
it, really done it, and even though I understood why my husband might go to such anxious lengths to find out what, specifically, was wrong with me, this wasn’t a nice thing to hear or imagine hearing, and the little throbbing anger under everything my husband had said reminded me of how unfair feelings could be, of how our feelings had hunched up and backed away from us, left us looking at each other like strangers.

Hours later, falling asleep on a floor, I couldn’t quite parse a difference between what I’d imagined him saying and what he had actually said and I looked at the photograph of my husband again, the baby him, the he that he was long before we met, before I had even been born, and I remembered that morning when he told me I had lost my mind.

Okay
, I said.
You’re probably right. Do you want tea?

The things I disagreed with the most adamantly were often the most true, so I wanted to see what would happen if I just agreed. Maybe if I agreed he would have to be wrong and maybe this was the trick of being married to my husband: agreement.

I thought, for one nice moment, that I had discovered something, and then my husband asked if I was aware that I’d lost my mind or if it was something I was managing to overlook. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not. He was never much of a kidder.

You know, I think I’ll make some coffee instead of tea
, I said.
Would you like some?

It’s a problem I’ve always had—doing the domestic things I didn’t actually want to do, but it always seemed to me that if I didn’t do them then they would never get done.

I’m asking you a question
, he said.
And it’s an important question. And it’s important to me that you think about it, that you think about what I’m asking you.

Okay
, I said.
You’re right.

Agreement.

I knew how he took his coffee, black and lukewarm, so I poured him a cup and I dropped an ice cube in.

*   *   *

On Dillon’s floor I tried to fall asleep by thinking of ice cubes melting in hot coffee and I thought of wild animals chewing smaller wild animals and I remembered what that nurse had said about the tubes of blood, that they always went to a safe place, and I wondered if my husband could have actually, in real life, talked to the neuroscientists from the study and I knew I didn’t want my husband to know all the facts about my blood and brain because that would give him another unfair advantage. I told myself that the neuroscientists had not, of course, told him anything, that they were trustworthy, that they kept their sides of agreements, and I remembered the tall, black-haired lab technician with the large, soft hands who had spread the cold jelly over my scalp and slid all the electrodes in between my hair, gently, like I was his child, and I believed he would never do anything wrong to me, the cold jelly on his fingers, a warm hand on my shoulder. As I fell asleep that night on a floor it didn’t matter what I feared or imagined my husband knowing or saying he knew because there was so much in me that he could never know and he would never know enough about me, and I wasn’t really certain of that, but
See if I care
, I whispered, to nobody, to my husband, to my own self, see if my self cares, self, see if it cares.

14

Jaye was as temporary as me—a favor to Bill, the owner of the catering company who pinched her ass and called her the hottest transsexual flight attendant in Wellington, which raised the question of how many transsexual flight attendants were presently in Wellington. After a few weeks of these catering gigs that Dillon had helped me get, Jaye was the only person I had talked to for longer than the cursory where-are-you-from-where-are-you-going conversation. Outsiders recognize outsiders, I guess, though most of what she talked to me about was how being trans doesn’t make you an outsider in Wellington because everyone here is so welcoming and tolerant and fabulous, how
no
one talks shit to
any
one and even if someone
did
try to start shit, someone else would fuck that person up for even trying to start shit or talk shit in the first place. This is just what Jaye told me. I didn’t hear anyone talk shit about anyone or see anyone else fuck someone up for talking or starting shit in the first place.