But I couldn’t talk about any of that, so I rolled back to him and said, Tell me again.
And he said, Oh, is that what this is all about?
And I said, I don’t know.
It was true I had this need every autumn, reliable as dried leaves.
She was wearing a light blue shirt, he said. She was holding a paper coffee cup. She put the cup down on my desk, put her bag on the chair beside my desk, opened the bag, and took out the papers. She handed them to me. She asked me to check over them.
Do you remember her shoes?
The red ones. The same red sneakers she always wore.
And her hair? Did she have it up?
It was down and uncombed. It was in her face a little. She looked tired. She looked out the window behind my desk while she spoke. We didn’t make eye contact. She told me she would come get the papers tomorrow.
But she must have known that she wouldn’t come get the papers tomorrow, unless she hadn’t yet decided about tomorrow, and if she had really said she was coming to get the papers tomorrow maybe that meant the whole thing had been an accident, or did it mean she had acted on some fleeting thought that wasn’t what she really believed, or did it mean nothing? I have never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it — that she’d be better off not living — and how was I supposed to live after that?
After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn’t complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.
Do you want to talk about her now?
And he knew I meant his mother, that it was his turn to try to get near the loss that he couldn’t get away from, those thoughts that came back each autumn just to die for him again, to remind him of what had happened, of how it felt.
Once she didn’t pick me up at school and I walked home and when I got there it was dark and she hadn’t made dinner but she said, You’re late for dinner, which I thought was funny because I was nine and didn’t realize how sick she was. I told her I had walked home from school and she asked why my dad hadn’t picked me up, and I said, I don’t have a dad, remember? And she said, Oh, that’s right, and I asked her why she was on the floor, and she told me she was tired, that she was too tired to get up.
I knew what he’d say next, but I always listened intensely, as if I was trying to memorize his pain so I could re-create it once he was gone or dead or dead and gone, because I thought, at the time, that my husband’s loss was what I had really fallen in love with, and maybe that loss was locked up in my husband like a prison and this was our once-a-year meeting and so I had to press myself against the Plexiglas to feel the blood and body heat of his loss, stare hard at the loss so I could remember how its face was shaped, the exact color of its eyes, something to get me through the next year of living with my husband and not his loss, but the lack of his loss, a bleached-out version of it, a numb heart that hosted something with a real pulse and wildness because my husband had only the most basic pulse and absolutely no wildness, but his loss was wild, was wild and filled with fast blood, and I could understand that angry bright red thing. I knew it was possible that I was not in love with a person but a person-shaped hole.
Kids can understand sometimes, he said. She was missing something. I don’t know what she was missing.
Did you know that she would go the way she did?
When I was a kid I knew she was leaving, sort of slowly, but I didn’t know what that meant. Just that there was less of her all the time. Every year more of her was gone.
I asked him questions like this even though it made my husband suffer, like a child pinching leaves off a fern frond.
Did you know it was going to happen to Ruby?
No, I said, not really. Did you know?
We barely knew each other, Elly. We hardly ever spoke.
And this is what he always said and what I always had a hard time believing, that he barely knew her, and I thought of Ruby and my husband in his office and how he’d look at her equations, not at her face, and I thought of them in his classroom when she was his TA and how she could have heard his chalk click on the board there, and now that same noise woke me up some nights and Ruby knew this noise before I did and what did that mean? What did it mean that she knew something that I would eventually know, that her dying made my life take this turn? I sometimes thought that my husband’s pain had radiated out of him and into Ruby’s blood and turned her against herself, that it was his fault somehow that Ruby pushed out the screen in the women’s room and put herself into the air, but I also knew (though I maybe didn’t know that I knew) that she had come to this conclusion on her own, though I still sometimes imagined my husband had sent a signal out the way bats or plants sometimes do. My husband knew what a woman looked like before she threw herself out of this world and he knew Ruby before she threw herself out of this world and I will never be able to divide those two things.
I wanted him to be responsible for how Ruby went missing, and I know that no one gets back what they lose this way and he wouldn’t and I wouldn’t, but at the same time I wanted it back and couldn’t stop wanting it back and if I couldn’t get it back I wanted, at least, for someone or something to be at fault — I wanted him to be responsible for how Ruby went missing.
I am or we were (or still are) the kind of people who can never quite get away from our losses, the kind of people who don’t know that magic trick that other people seem to know — how to dissolve a sense of loss, how to unbraid it from a brain.
* * *
The morning after our box pasta dinner and loss thumbing, I went to the clinic to give them the blood and information I said I’d give them. It was for a study, and I didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, only that I had agreed to do it as a favor to some colleagues of my husband’s.
Reliable participants were hard to find, they said.
Reliable participants would do the following:
Arrive at seven in the morning each Tuesday on an empty stomach, bleed a tube of blood for a nurse, allow the lab technician with the large, soft hands to apply the electrodes, answer the questions he asked (What do you believe in? What is your greatest fear? What is the point of love?), bleed more blood, drink a blue liquid, sit in a dark room for fifteen minutes, answer questions in the dark (Do you believe inner peace is possible? Is there an afterlife? What is something you know is true?), give more blood, eat a complimentary pack of graham crackers and a carton of juice so you don’t pass out on the subway or sidewalk, go home, and receive a check for ninety dollars each Friday.
As they took the blood, I watched the thin, clear tube turn red and I felt it get warm against my forearm and I thought about how my hands and my husband’s hands still loved each other and how the rest of our bodies just dangled off these hands and I envied how simply those hands could be what they were — ambivalent chunks of bone and muscle that just touch, hold, and are held, repeat. And maybe, I thought, if I was lucky, this study could end up making my blood and brains feel better, less driven by dread, less stuck on what is missing. But part of the point of this study was that I not know the study’s point, which made it seem a lot like everything.