MISSING I.
II.
In moments absent of thought I say his name with my mind’s mouth. I concentrate on the syllables, all two of them, and how the hard “c” will taste just before I’ll have to half bite my full bottom lip to make the sound of a “v.” If it’s early morning and I’m alone in my full sized bed, I’ll twist and writhe to get the most of the lavish feeling of my legs against crisp white sheets while I think of him. The sunlight pressing in looks teardrop-blue against the inside of my eyelids just before I part them, sometimes whispering his name aloud so the world, my world, doesn’t get too used to its absence.
How do I answer when people ask me who the name on my bracelet belongs to? To say I didn’t know him is too distant. I tell them I wear it because I care about the Vietnam War — it means something to me. I don’t always say that it’s something more than just historical fascination — something closer to memory but far from experience. I don’t say that he was six years older and forty-three years before me but he sits heavy in my heart.
“Calvin.” His brother’s name is Scott. I see them, the two kids that they were in their early twenties and late teens, laughing together on a Sunday afternoon in March. Their eyes are squinted to protect themselves from the unbearable brightness of the early spring’s Sun. You could almost confuse one for the other in their matching bombers if it weren’t for the yellow and black badge on Calvin’s left sleeve that’s the size of a fifty scent piece. I think about the two of them together from time to time, but mostly I think of Calvin alone. Sometimes I wonder how his death might have sounded. I know, I mean, I feel like I know that there was nothing Hollywood about it. There was no guttural cry or desperate plea, no “screams and moans” through the transmission like they said. No, not Calvin. I imagine the moment of his life ending as a note from a single piano key resounding in the silence of a still forest and then, without fading, gone. I think of that day he may have died, and the footsteps he might have made in the mud by the river. I close my eyes to these pictures, the indeterminable nature of them makes me feel a love or a dust in my heart that twists my mouth and makes me ache. “Calvin.”
58
It’s hard for me to say that I don’t know him and that I only know about him. What I know or feel about him is the same as what I felt before I got his name and the day he went missing on a stainless steel bracelet that came in the mail — before he ever became an individual to me. It didn’t make me feel stronger, no, just closer. He could have been Robert or Edward or someone who only goes by his last name, maybe Vasquez. He could have been any one of them.
III. I dialed the number of a house in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The phone rang against my ear and I hurried to think of what to say, careful not to let them think, not even for a fraction of a heartbeat, that I found him. I breathed heavy into the phone and the number was out of service. I sighed at the operator’s machine voice. Was that selfish? Am I ignorant? I told my sister I tried calling and she thought so. She said it was an invasion of a subject that his brother and the rest of his family may have come to peace with. I wasn’t so sure if peace would ever come to them. I just wanted to know more than his age, the day he was born and the day he was gone, the names of his parents and brother. I just wanted to speak with someone who heard him breathe or sat next to him in a movie theater. Maybe they knew what his face looked like when he slept. I wanted to know what his handwriting was like. What was his favorite snack and when was his first kiss? Did he drive stick?