Catherine Lacey - Nobody Is Ever Missing

There might be people in this world who can read minds against their will and if that kind of person exists I am pretty sure my husband is one of them. I think this because of what happened the week I knew Id be leaving soon, but he didnt know; I knew I needed to tell him this but I couldnt imagine any possible way to get my mouth to make those words, and since my husband can unintentionally read minds, he drank a good deal more than usual that week, jars of gin mostly, but tall beers from the deli, too. Hed walk in sipping a can hidden in a paper bag, smile like it was a joke.

I would laugh.

He would laugh.

Inside our laughing we werent really laughing.

The morning I left he got out of bed, got dressed, and left the room. I stayed cold awake under shut lids until I heard our front door close. I left the apartment at noon wearing my backpack and I felt so sick and absurd that I walked into a bar instead of the subway. I ordered a double bourbon even though I dont usually drink like that and the bartender asked me where I was from and I said Germany for no good reason, or maybe just so he wouldnt try to talk to me, or maybe because I needed to live in some other story for a half hour: I was a lone German woman, here to see the Statue of Liberty and the Square of Time and the Park of Central (not a woman taking a one-way flight to a country where she only knew one person, who had only once extended an offer of his guest room, which, when she thought of it again, seemed to be the kind of invitation a person extends when they know it wont be taken but it was too late now because I was taking it and oh well oh well oh well).

A man took the stool beside me despite a long row of empties, ordered a cranberry and nothing.

Whats your trouble? he asked me. Tell me your trouble, baby.

I looked back at him like I didnt have any trouble to tell because thats my trouble, I thought, not knowing how to tell it, and this is why my favorite thing about airport security is how you can cry the whole way through and theyll only try to figure out whether youll blow up. Theyll still search you if they want to search you. Theyll still try to detect metal on you. Theyll still yell about laptops and liquids and gels and shoes, and no one will ask whats wrong because everything is already wrong, and they wont look twice at you because theyre only paid to look once. And for this, sometimes, some people are thankful.

They looked and made quick calculations: a 7 percent chance of con artistry, 4 percent chance of prostitution, 50 percent chance of mental instability, 20 percent chance of obnoxiousness, a 4 percent chance of violent behavior. I was probably none of these things, at least not at first, but to all the passing drivers and everyone else in this country I could be anything, so they just slowed, had a look, made a guess, kept driving.

Women theyd squint quick, make a worried face, continue on. Men (I later learned) stared from the farthest distance their eyes trained to stay on me in case I was something they needed to shoot or capture but they hardly ever stopped. Up close, I was not so promising: just a woman wearing a backpack, a cardigan, green sneakers. And young-seeming, of course, because you must seem young to get away with this kind of vulnerability, standing on a roads shoulder, showing the pale underside of your arm. You must seem both totally harmless and able, if necessary, to push a knife through any tender gut.

But I didnt know any of this at first I just stood and waited, not knowing that wearing sunglasses would always leave me stranded, not knowing that wearing my hair down meant something I did not mean, not knowing that my posture had to be so carefully calibrated, that I should always stand like a dancer ready to leap.

All I knew was what Id read on that map at the airport: south until I hit Wellington, across on the ferry, then Picton, Nelson, Takaka, and Golden Bay, Werners farm, the address scrawled on that bit of paper that had started all this.

When the plane landed that morning, I hadnt slept for thirty-seven hours or so. After theyd dimmed the lights Id kept my eyes wide, my brain cruising into an endless horizon. I didnt read anything or watch anything on the screen inches from my face. I listened to sleeping bodies breathe; I tried to pick words out of feathery voices, rows away. The flight attendants swayed down the aisles and winked and pursed their lips and handed me very certain amounts of food substance: bread roll smooth as a lightbulb; tongue-sized piece of chicken; thirty-two peanuts in a metallic pocket. I bit into a flap of cheese, not noticing the plastic, then gave up on food.

Outside baggage claim I watched a man smoking a cigarette and kicking something along the curb, sunlight splintering around him like a painting of a saint. This was all it was, this country Id catapulted into.

* * *

Oh, how could I not stop for you? that first driver asked. How could I not?

I dont know, I said. How could you?

The woman laughed but I was not in a place to see humor. I suppose it had been funny, but when I stared back at her with nothing on my face she stopped laughing. A long, curved nose gave her the regal but unflattering look of a falcon or toucan. She spoke to me like I was a child, which was fine because I wanted to be one. Lately, I couldnt remember those years, as if childhood was a movie Id only seen the previews to.

Youre a brave lass, arent you? Dont see many like you out on the road.

Theres a certain kind of woman who will notice someones terror and call it bravery.

I thought lots of people hitchhiked here.

Oh, not too many, she said. Not anymore. Everywhere is dangerous these days. Would you have a pear? Help yourself to a Nashi. I have loads of em, a special at the grocery.

She told me about her eleven-year-old son, an accident shed made in her twenties, and I ate a pear with the juice going everywhere, but she was only going to Papakura, so she let me out by a petrol station not far down the highway.

Dont you let any blokes pick you up, you hear? If one stops, you just let him keep going. Were always keeping an eye out, other women, you know. Another will stop for you soon enough.

I said I would, but I knew I wouldnt take her advice, because I can never manage to reject anyones offer of anything; this was one of the only things about myself of which I was certain.

For a while there were no cars to show my thumb to, but I kept standing there, not even having an appropriate curiosity about this new country (a boring little mountain, a plain blue lake, a gas station, the same as ours only slightly not). The skin on my lips was drying and I thought about how all the cells on every body are on their way to a total lack of moisture and everyone alive has that thought all the time but almost no one says it and no one says it because they dont really