Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

 
    11
    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.
    My mother looked at me, her only surviving and previously not-prone-to-weeping daughter now all wet-faced with this man in a poorly cut suit, and she put her hand out to him and said, Ruby’s mother; I’m Ruby’s mother , and he shook it, then Mother got up as if that was the last thing she had to do and she left and didn’t tell me where she was going and I didn’t care where she was going because I was in a more human state—I was making sense to myself—I was making sense to this man and we were making sense to each other. We went to a diner and tried to eat but couldn’t, so we mostly sat in silence and a