You don’t cry much when you think about her. It’s not that you’re afraid to cry or consider it a sign of weakness; you’ve been trying, squinching your face up and pushing behind the eyes, making animal sobbing sounds, but your eyes are dry as ever. It’s as if the ducts have closed up. You can feel the swelling of tears in your sinuses, your whole head soggy with grief. It would be an incredible relief to puncture yourself and let it all leak out. Before bedtime, you litter the floor in your motel room with debris, hoping to stub your toe while stumbling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, thus sparking a spontaneous crying session, but all that happens is you bash your toe and you become enraged, begin throwing things, punching walls. The next day, you check out early and are twenty miles down the highway before management will have seen the damage you’ve done to the room.
YOU BEGIN TO MISS even the annoying things about her. Especially the annoying things. A proper road trip should be fraught with underlying tension and frayed nerves, sustained frictive stretches punctuated by occasional cathartic stops at memorable landmarks and delirious nights along the roadside. Without the tension, the frivolity of vacation seems less justified. So you find yourself wishing she were sitting in bed next to you, clipping her toenails and scattering the shards in the sheets, leaving them where they will prick your legs. You find yourself wishing she were here to wake you up in the middle of the night in order to say something like, “Did you know you were snoring?”
You miss her awful taste in music—she liked the She Loves You Beatles but hated the Rubber Soul Beatles, considered reality TV singers real artists on par with Dylan and Ray Charles. You miss her tendency to mispronounce common words like nuclear and library. You miss the fact that she was pathologically incapable of finishing packaged foods, she always left the last chip or the last cracker or last whatever in case you wanted it, which meant your cupboard overflowed with cereal boxes containing one cornflake, year-old packages of stale graham crackers (you even miss the ant infestations, and the subsequent complaining to the exterminator about your wife in that socially acceptable way married men do). You miss the fact that she was so uncomfortable blowing her nose in public—it was the honking noise she hated—that she would rather walk sniffling from one end of the mall to the other with mucus pooling up in her philtrum. You miss making dinner reservations for Friday night and then having them scrapped when she fell asleep on the couch at eight p.m., her head pressed against your chest, trapping you into watching TV quietly for several hours until she woke up and slogged upstairs. You miss the nagging (and you hate calling it nagging because it makes you feel too much like a stereotypical put-upon sitcom husband, but that’s what it was, it was nagging) about your career prospects and your inadequate levels of motivation. You miss the arguments, from the monumental (i.e., here’s why we need to stop spending time with your awful brothers) to the minuscule (i.e., how hard is it to close a drawer when you’re done with it?). It’s the arguments that breathed life into the relationship. It’s in the arguments that you ultimately felt the love. It’s the passion inculcated by such dramas that makes you wish you could just one more time hear her say, “Of course it’s pronounced liberry,” a smirk lurking beneath her defensive façade, letting you know that soon you can smile and she can smile and you can kiss her and she can kiss you and everything will be fine.
WHAT YOU MISS MOST is her eyes. Seeing them across the dinner table when you look up from your plate, the eyes of your wife like polished jade, watching over you.
WHAT YOU MISS MOST, actually, is the way she walked, the comically proper posture, as if she were always carrying a stack of books on her head. The rigidity of the spine, the shoulders thrown backward, chest thrust forward. Knowing you were the only one who could fold her into your arms, make her relax.
OR MAYBE THE THING you miss most is the thing everyone misses most about her, which is her generosity. Volunteering at blood drives and at walks to benefit children with heart disease, while you stayed home playing video games. Cold-calling people to raise funds for women’s shelters in the city. Maintaining a meticulous record of birthdays and anniversaries for every one of your acquaintances, sending cards and gifts, however nominal. Giving money to beggars even when it was obvious they just wanted booze, saying, “Who am I to keep him from getting drunk?” or, “What if he’s had a really bad day?” finding someone’s digital camera and then spending the next two days sleuthing through the pictures for clues to find her and return it. Sneaking out of bed on Sundays to make you breakfast. Stopping by work during your lunch break to bring you a bottle of lemonade you’d left at home.
IT COULD BE HER legs you miss most. The way they gleamed. Calves taut like guitar strings, muscled like she was always wearing high heels. The way they felt when they were wrapped around your waist pulling you into her.
YOU MISS THE MOLE on the back of her neck, a tiny dot almost indiscernible from a distance. The odd pale patch of skin between her shoulder blades, a splotch like bleach spilled on a T-shirt. The scar from her appendectomy, stretched like an uneasy pink smile above her hip. The way her knees bent at perfect forty-five-degree angles when she was painting the wood trim in your new home. The way she laid the next day’s clothes out on the dresser every night before bed. The single incisor that flashed between her lips when she grinned, a detail you never mentioned to her because you knew it would only make her more self-conscious about being photographed. The inward curve of her toes, as if they’d been bound together when she was a child. The way she always missed the same spot on the top of her left knee when she shaved.
WHAT YOU MISS MOST, really, is being able to say anything you wanted to her and getting a response. Being able to tell her how afraid you are and having her validate your fears, having her tell you she’s scared too, mutually reassuring each other whether you believed yourselves or not. Having someone to affirm your rightness even when you’re obviously not right, someone who knows the correct time and manner to tell you you’re wrong. Having someone off of whom you can bounce your most ludicrous dreams, someone who knows to pretend they’re attainable.
You talk to her still. You talk and talk, more than you ever did, but she never says anything, which makes it all as empty and useless as prayer.