Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

because you were supposed to say whatever came to mind first, no matter what it was, but if it was just one word they would ask the same question again—
    What is your earliest memory?
    The day my mother brought Ruby home. She was two. I was also two. I don’t know if I actually remember this or if I just remember a photograph of this, and my mother was tan and happy looking, like she’d been on vacation, which she had just before picking up Ruby at the orphanage, and she was holding Ruby on her hip and she was smiling but the pictures of my mother bringing me home from the hospital two years before looked like someone had just beaten her up and handed her a baby.
    Thank you. Tell me a nightmare you had as a child.
    That I’d grow so big overnight that I wouldn’t be able to leave my room.
    Thank you. Please explain the feeling of love.
    Someone holding you by the wrist.
    Thank you. What is your happiest memory as an adult?
    The summer after Ruby died, being at the park with my husband. The light. We smiled.
    Thank you. What do you believe happens when we die?
    And I understood that you were supposed to say the first thing that came to mind but nothing actually came to mind in that moment and in fact everything seemed to slip out of mind, and all I could think of was a desert, a canyon, and that didn’t seem to have much to do with anything—
    What do you believe happens when we die?
    More silence.
    What do you believe happens when we die?
    A desert, a canyon.
    Thank you. What is your fondest childhood memory?
    Ruby’s tenth birthday party. She wore a red dress and we skated and she told me we were halfway to twenty and someday we would go to France. It was also my birthday party. We didn’t know her exact birthday, but we guessed it could be maybe the same day as mine.
    Thank you. What do you know for sure?
    I don’t know anything for sure.
    Thank you. What is your greatest fear?
    I wanted to ask, what exactly did he mean by greatest—largest, most ferocious, grandest, most grandiose, most impossible—but I knew that the content of the questions wasn’t supposed to matter and the content of my answers also didn’t matter, because they were just studying the way a brain moves, how but not exactly where it goes.
    What is your greatest fear?
    I did everything wrong.
    Thank you. What is the point of love?
    To distract us.
    Thank you. Is there an afterlife?
    The questions kept coming like normal on this last day (for me) of the study and I went to the lab for more blood work and I smiled at the nurse when she smiled at me and I drank the blue liquid, then went to the dark room and I loved the dark room, but when the man asked, What is the value of travel? and What is the most memorable place you have ever visited? , I wondered for a moment if they knew something about my plans to leave the next week and I began to wonder, again, if my husband was in on all this—and I worried he knew I had the ticket for the next week and I wondered if he’d try to stop me—whether he’d somehow lock me in the apartment or show up at the gate or buy a ticket for the seat next to mine—this is how it would have gone in the soaps, I knew, overturned chairs, screamed names and vengeance and maybe a curse and often a window punched through and often blood and often a hospital, and in the hospital there’d be one kind moment between two lovely, loving people before the IVs were ripped out and beeping monitors went flat, a doctor, a Clear! , a jolt, but that was for television, for fiction, an exaggeration of what the rest of life was and I remembered my mother watching the soaps, this yellow-tinted memory of my mother behind a cloud of smoke, Ruby sitting at her feet, a forgotten bowl of cereal now lukewarm mush there in their real life, which they weren’t a part of in that moment, but now I couldn’t remember if this was a memory or a photograph or a total invention because I’d asked my mother once what soap she’d followed