3. Have You Seen My Cousin Michael?
The Year of Paying Attention
Sarah’s much younger than me, twenty-five years younger. I’ve talked with therapists, close friends, male and female (I know, why so binary, but I didn’t know from gender fluidity until recently), and with my younger sister about whether this automatically makes me a pervert, and Sarah my victim. They assure me it does not. I am officially in agreement with them, but I still harbor doubts. She has been involved with older men, as a rule, if that makes you feel any better. It makes me feel a little better. Last month I drove Sarah to LaGuardia Airport to fly to a two-week writing residency. She’s gone away before. Then she comes back. We’re grownups. We’ve been together for years. C’mon. We talked each day. She was enjoying it. I was fine. “Talk to you tomorrow.” “Miss you!” Then one evening, as my solitary bedtime approached, I received a text: “Goodnight sweetheart! I love you!” Goodnight? It was 7:43pm in her time zone — wait, we’re not going to talk?
There could be only one explanation. She’d grown tired of me, and was busy falling in love with a strapping age-appropriate writer in the residency’s picturesque, isolated cattle ranch setting. And this fellow, tall, reticent, a writer who’s soon to burst onto the literary scene, is naturally helpless in his feelings for her, too. The inevitability of this is borne out by my own experience — it wasn’t love at first sight, but after a few conversations, I was smitten. She’s good looking. She’s smart. Our friend Kathy doesn’t care for most people, but she reminds me how she was drawn to Sarah from the first meeting, and Kathy’s boyfriend lights up like a hamburger drive-thru sign at the sight of my beloved, or former beloved, now in the arms of Sam Shepherd’s lean dopplegänger. Kathy and her boyfriend won’t be surprised when I explain Sarah’s left me.
I pause and wonder whether I’m thinking clearly. I must be, because I feel ill. The Dalai Lama, who’s smart but has zero experience with women, says if there’s a problem, you can either do something about it, and so cease fretting, or there’s nothing you can do, in which case, cease fretting. When I feel jealous, my next move is to become irritating. Nosy. Clingy. I become somebody you want to get away from. Sarah was already far away, so she didn’t know how good she had it. Some more deep breathing, some emotional eating, and some rational reflection. Do I love Sarah? I do. What do I want for her? I want her to be happy, safe and fulfilled.
Do I know Sarah? I do. She’s honest, compassionate, steady. If she falls in love with that handsome, deeply literate, Italian-speaking, violin-playing writer who owns a prestigious small press and insists on publishing her book, what am I to do? Will I attend the book party? Be happy to read her thank-you to me at the back of the book? Fuck no. We talked the next day. It was all in my mind. But you knew that.
***
The email subject, Upsetting News, sent a wave of dread over me. I opened my sister’s message, and clicked on a link to a local New Hampshire TV news report. My cousin Michael has gone missing. Michael was my all-summer-long best friend when we were little, his family’s little beach house next door to ours, both across the way from our other cousins, at the end of a dead-end street of six or eight ramshackle summer cottages my Irish immigrant grandfather owned and rented out.
The last time I saw Michael was 30 years ago. In his late teens something happened. My mother mentioned schizophrenia. One college weekend I drove the 25 miles from Boston University to do my laundry and empty the refrigerator, and Michael was there visiting his aunt, my mother, with my Uncle Mike. I sat in the den with this silent, smiling, absent-while-present young man who’d been a virtual brother to me years earlier, and made polite conversation. I didn’t see him again after that.
Now a link to a local TV news report shows his three sisters posting MISSING flyers everywhere they can in Southern New Hampshire, and telling a local TV reporter their brother was last seen walking out into the freezing cold, wearing a t-shirt and leather jacket. I’ve replayed the news report to study their faces, Linda, Lisa, and Laurie, women I still think of as little girls, but now they’re like me, bordering on old. Or already old.
The news report shows each cousin, their married names written out under their concerned faces. Michael doesn’t have any money, they explain, and he’s not dressed for the terribly cold weather. He won’t talk to anyone or ask for help. He needs to be approached, they explain. He was last seen in this spot, they point, and might have been seen by a bus driver, walking along the road.
Michael is my age. When I look at his picture I see my Uncle Mike, not the nine-year-old kid I sat laughing with on the Tilt-A-Whirl. I recall telling my daughters how each summer, for mysterious reasons, I would lose my voice in the first couple of weeks, and be put on “voice rest.” Which meant I spent that week trailing around after my cousin, whisper-shouting, “Michael!”
Each time I replay the local news report, I have to watch an ad for a different local car dealership. I click my way to the Facebook page for Bring Michael Home, and realize there is nothing to do beyond leaving a message that I’m thinking about Michael and his sisters. I received an anonymous “thank you” in reply.
Sharing this in writing feels vulgar. My cousins, unknown to me now, are suffering, surely frantic with worry. Shouldn’t I drive to New Hampshire and help look for Michael? Reports like this appear on local news regularly, but this is the first time I know the missing person. There seem to be two possible outcomes, and the bad one is completely terrible.
My last trip to New England was for my college roommate Jack’s funeral, a sad day, a sad story. But that event was emotionally rich, almost shockingly so. I’d introduced Jack to his wife, had been best man at Jack’s wedding, and was in the hospital with them minutes after their daughter was born. I stayed friends with them both after they divorced. I encouraged Jack to stop smoking and drinking, without success. Jack’s daughter and my daughter Lizzie attended the same private school, and became close friends.
Last night a text request from Lizzie sent me looking for a Halloween snapshot of Jack’s daughter dressed in a cow costume, next to my daughter got up as an Indian maiden. (Cultural appropriation, but I didn’t know.) I found it, along with a picture of Jack, his wife and hours-old newborn. I forwarded them all. I hoped it wouldn’t make his daughter sad, her parents so young and good-looking and happy.
In a box somewhere there’s a little black and white photo of me and Michael, with cousin after cousin, ten of us sitting cheek-by-jowl on the little brick steps to Michael’s family beach cottage. There are precious few pictures from that time, unlike the hundreds and hundreds of pictures of my kids at the same age.
Michael has wandered off before, always turning up to everyone’s relief. The Missing flyer shows him in a New England Patriots t-shirt, with a serious look of his face. It’s 11 degrees in Derry, New Hampshire right now, and the computer tells me it feels like zero.
Next week: The Story of Christmas: You’re A Loser!
