Read Online Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey - Free Book Online

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