Nobody Is Ever Missing Read Free Page A

that she’d make references I couldn’t place and I’d just stare, baffled and unable to keep up. I was barely passing the high school classes she’d been exempt from.
    As we smoked I pushed Ruby on the swing set, and we could see Mom passed out and drooling on a love seat in the sunroom. She’d been at a fever pitch all day, swigging Beaujolais, burning all the takeout in a reheating attempt, calling Ruby the renegade genius and accidentally ashing onto her plate.
    There’s our little genius, our little renegade teenage genius! How does she do it? I just don’t know how she does it!
    But finally everything was quiet, just the swing creak and our faint exhalations and even though this was one of the thousands of chances I had to have a meaningful talk with Ruby, something sisterly and emotional, I didn’t take that chance: I stilled the swing and held out an imaginary microphone to her: Tell us, Ruby, how do you do it?
    And Ruby ran with it because she also wanted to live in a fiction, to keep playing pretend.
    Well, I’ll tell ya, Bob. The secret of my success is to make a plan and act fast. I don’t second-guess myself. I’m never of two minds about anything.
    Well, folks, there you have it , I said, but there were no folks.
    *   *   *
    A van slowed and stilled beside me and this memory sank away. The driver leaned out his window, his right arm was covered in tattoos, matte-black vines blurring into dark skin.
    Simon , he said.
    Elyria , I said.
    Elyria! That’s a helluva name. Hippie parents?
    Not really.
    I didn’t tell him, like I didn’t tell anyone, that Elyria was a town in Ohio that my mother had never visited. That was all my name meant: a place she’d never been.
    The basic idea of a mustache was hanging over Simon’s mouth, and there were these odd wrinkles around his eyes that didn’t agree with the rest of his machine-smooth face.
    I stared at the pointless hills rippling around us—the trees all captive to the ground, a grey mountain in the distance, stoic and bored—and Simon started a monologue on himself, his autobiography—
    Been traveling for seven months on the North Island, did some wine work for a while to save money, but I’ve been on my own for a long time. I separated from my parents when I was sixteen. My father clobbered the shit out of my little brother one night, put him in the hospital, and I said … you know … check, please? All done with this, thanks. Ever seen a ten-year-old with a black eye from his own pops? It’s not something you want to ever see.
    I almost liked how much he talked, how he answered his own questions, how simple it all was, like television. I hadn’t said more than ten words and maybe those were the last words I was ever going to say for the rest of my life, I thought, as Simon went on about how his parents were put in jail, something to do with fraud, with some kind of real estate scheme, houses in Miami, London, L.A., all confiscated, and maybe this was it—this was all I needed—someone who just naturally filled in all the silence that life has in it.
    Pops tried to blame it on me and even the judge knew he was pulling a porky. My pop had a stink-eye. Anyone with half a thought in his head could see it. It was in the news then, tabloid shit mostly. You know, Tattooed Teen Divorces Parents—Violence Alleged—that kind of shit.
    He let himself laugh weakly.
    That’s terrible , I said, stepping out of my silence.
    Is what it is.
    People say that when they mean something is terrible.
    You’re right. It is terrible.

 
    5
    Another terrible thing was how I met my husband.
    He was wearing a suit that day and his deep red tie made his eyes seem even greener and brought out the pale pink in his face. He was thirty-two, but still looked boyish. I was barely twenty-two but everyone guessed older. We were sitting in a small and brutally lit waiting area in the university police office. We sat next to each other for maybe twenty minutes