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When Leah was gone, when I became convinced that she had died and no one had thought to tell me, I grew briefly obsessed with a website for people whose loved ones had disappeared. It was better and worse than the message board for the wives of imaginary spacemen, inasmuch as the conversation was typically less ridiculous but the stories universally worse. The people who posted were mourning the losses of lovers and siblings, parents in the throes of dementia who had wandered away from secure facilities, sisters who had run off in stolen hatchbacks, friends who had simply vanished, the way that people often do. I say mourning, though of course the ab stract of grief is different without a body, without a point from which to hang the solid object of one’s pain. Does anyone else find the possibility of the comeback kind of worse than the idea of death, someone posted. Not that you don’t want them to return but rather that that’s the tormenting thing: the thought that they might do.
Something I learned very quickly was that grieving was complicated by lack of certainty, that the hope inherent in a missing loved one was also a species of curse. People posted about children who had gone missing upward of fifteen years ago and whose faces were now impossible to conjure, about friends who had messaged to confirm a meeting place and then simply never showed up. In almost every case, the sense of loss was convoluted by an ache of possibility, by the almost-but-not-quite-negligible hope of reprieve. Deus ex machina—the missing loved one thrown back down to earth. Grief is selfish: we cry for ourselves without the person we have lost far more than we cry for the person—but more than that, we cry because it helps. The grief process is also the coping process and if the grief is frozen by ambiguity, by the constant possibility of reversal, then so is the ability to cope.
It’s not grief, one woman posted, it’s more like a haunting. Her sister had disappeared two decades previously, run away or otherwise removed via the back door of their childhood home when she was fifteen years old. There was no proof that anything bad had happened, the woman typed, no proof of anything at all. They told us hope wasn’t lost so often that it became impossible to live with it. It’s too hard, trying to exist between these poles of hope and death. You just find yourself imagining all these possibilities, all these possible sisters wandering around half-unseen like people with sheets over their head, except that somewhere among them, you know that one of them’s real—one of them’s dead, one of them’s the ghost.
I found I liked this woman, read her updates with particular interest and scrolled the website in the early morning, as this appeared to be her favorite time to post. More than once, I found myself building up to writing her a message, typing sentences that I then deleted, refashioned, deleted again.
I used to hope, I typed once, that I’d die before my partner, even though I knew that was selfish. I used to think that I hoped I’d die before she died and before the planet died and really just generally before things got any worse.
I didn’t send this message, specifically because it seemed to imply that my views had changed, when they hadn’t.
LEAH
I had slept, and when I had, I had dreamed about Miri. I saw the warm dark, the changing light of the aquarium at which I had worked in my teens. In the dream, Miri held my hand by the Open Ocean tank, pulled me down onto a viewing bench, and kissed me just beneath my collar. I love it here, she said, I love the way it moves. I opened my mouth to tell her about all the different species she could find in the tank and she shook her head, clapped her hand to my lips. Don’t do that, she said, though my mouth was already leaking water. I had woken shortly after that. I didn’t want to sleep again until I had to.
Time passed. I don’t know how much or how quickly. We changed the batteries in the torches and ate because there was food in the lockers and we knew we ought to eat it. At some point, Jelka lay down on the floor of the main deck and went to sleep. Matteo sat by the comms deck, idly pressing and repressing the transmission button, and at one point began to whistle Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies again. I sat on the floor beside Jelka, stretched my legs out, and thought about showering. They had made a big fuss of the wash stall the first time they showed us around the craft, a woman from the Centre throwing open the door to present us with the sink, the toilet, and the showerhead like someone on a home makeover show revealing a lavish en suite bath. The distillation system is state-of-the-art, the woman said, rubbing a cuff across the shower dial like you might do with a new car. Brings the water in from the outside and purifies it. Maximum efficiency, as much fresh water as you need. No Navy showers here—theoretically you could keep the shower on for hours without encountering problems. Turn the tap on in the sink, too, if you like. Have a party! I had nodded at her, watched her continue to buff at the shower dial for several seconds before moving back into the rear chamber.