When I woke up the next morning, his side of the bed was empty.
At first, I thought he went for breakfast.
The curtains were ajar and the pale morning light spread across the carpet. His shoes were still by the chair. His bag was near the sink. Her wedding dress hung from the closet door like a ghost.
At first I smiled. I really smiled.
I imagined it below, asking for coffee and pancakes, maybe trying to surprise me. Nina loved the little surprises. Once, when we were still dating, he drove 40 minutes just to leave me a paper bag with hot muffins on the porch before going to work.
I looked at the cell phone.
There was no message.
I called her.
It sounded from somewhere inside the room.
His cell phone was in his bag.
That’s when my smile was erased.
“Nina?” I called her, even though I knew she wasn’t there.
I looked in the bathroom. In the hallway. In the area of the vending machines, near the elevator. Then in the lobby.
The reception woman looked up from the computer. “Can I help you?”
“My wife,” I said, not yet realizing how strange those words were going to sound. “Have you seen my wife pass by? Dark hair, white cardigan, maybe still wearing a dress?”
The woman frowned. “I started my shift at 6 in the morning. I don’t remember anyone like that.”
“He must have gone down to breakfast.”
“We don’t serve breakfast, sir.”
I stood there, barefoot, with yesterday’s dress pants, wrinkled shirt and heart starting to beat me tightly.
By noon, his parents were already calling the hospitals. In the evening, some cops were in our honeymoon suite, asking me questions that seemed insulting to me just because I was terrified.
“Did they argue last night?”
“No.”
“Any history of depression?”
“No.”
“Could it be that she wanted to leave?”
“No,” I snapped. “He married me yesterday.”
Nina’s mother, Aileen, was sobbing with a handkerchief until her husband, Frank, had to accompany her to a chair. Her friends didn’t know anything about her. Her parents had no idea where she was. Her bag was still in the room. His phone was there, too. Her wedding ring, no.
The police searched for her for months.
They checked traffic cameras, hospitals, bus stations, airports and deserted roads. The volunteers roamed the fields with flashlights. Signs with Nina’s smiling face appeared in grocery stores, laundries, churches and petrol stations.
I gave interviews that I barely remembered. I stood next to Aileen and Frank as journalists asked if Nina had enemies, secrets or motives to flee.
He always answered the same thing.
“No. He was happy.”
In the end, everyone told me to keep going, but I could never really do it.
How do you bury someone when there’s no corpse? How do you mourn the loss of a woman who may still be somewhere under the same sky?
There are people who lose their partner to death. I lost mine for a question.
The years passed. My hair got dark and then I started to get grayed on my temples. My friends stopped inviting me to weddings because they didn’t know what to say. My parents got old. Nina’s parents moved in after Aileen told me that the village had become “a big wound.”
He worked. He ate. He paid the bills.
He smiled when he expected of me.
But every morning, a small part of me kept waking up and blindly searching an empty bed.
Seventeen years later, I was on a business trip nearly 1,300 miles from home. He had driven too much time, slept too little and survived on gas station coffee that he knew of burnt regret. The trip was supposed to be simple: meet a client, sign some papers, go back by car and resume my quiet life.
It was late afternoon when I stopped at a small gas station for coffee before I got back on the road.
The venue was next to a two-lane road, with the asphalt cracked and a discolored red sign flashing over the pumps.
Inside, the air smelled like hot dogs, floor cleaner and rancid coffee. A radio sounded at low volume behind the counter. I picked up a glass of paper, filled it in the machine and tried not to think about how tired I was.
As I headed to the box, I was paralyzed.
The young cashier was not supposed to be over 20 years old. But he looked a lot like me when he was a teenager. The same eyes. The same jaw. Even the same crooked smile.
For a moment, my body was left without knowing how to move.
He looked up from the scanner. “Everything well, sir?”
His voice was not mine, but it looked like it was enough to put goose bumps on me.
I walked up, almost unable to breathe. There were small differences, of course. His hair was a little darker. I was thinner than I had been. But the face that stared at me was that of my old graduation photos. That one that Nina used to make fun of me.
I looked for my wallet with trembling fingers.
“What’s your name?” I asked. “And why do you look so much like my twin brother… or what I was like when I was 18?”
His expression changed.
It was not confusion. I’m not angry either.
Fear.
“My name?” he repeated.
I took an old picture of my wallet and gave it to him.
I was wrinkled with so much carrying it for years. In it, I was 18, standing next to my old van, smiling at the camera with my hair falling over my eyes. Nina had once told me that in that photo it seemed like a problem.
The cashier took her slowly.
As soon as he looked at her, he was completely pale.
His hand was shaking with the picture. His eyes quickly passed from the photo to me and then to the glass door.
“Hey,” I said carefully, “nothing happens. I’m not trying to scare you.
He didn’t answer.
“What’s your name?” I asked again.
Without saying a word, he jumped over the counter and ran out of the gas station.
For half a second, I stood there, with the coffee cooling in my hand and my old photo lying on the floor between us.
Then something inside me broke loose.
I ran after him, having no idea that the next few hours were going to change everything I thought I knew about my life.
I pushed the glass door so hard that the bell above it squealed.
The young cashier was already halfway through the car park, zigzagging between two parked trucks as someone who had spent his whole life knowing where the exits were. I chased him past the pumps, with my dress shoes slipping near the curb.
“Wait!” I shouted. “Please wait a minute!”
He turned and, during a strange second, I saw myself again at the age of 18. Not in a mirror. Not in a photo.
I live, breathing and terrified.
He snuck behind the gas station into a narrow dirt road lined with weeds. I was no longer young, and my lungs burned before I reached the trees. Still, I kept running. I had already lost Nina once because she didn’t know she was leaving. I couldn’t let this kid disappear, too.
He reduced the passage next to a metal fence, grabbed on it and bowed, exclaiming. I stopped several feet away with my hands up.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said in gasps.
He let out a short, bitter laugh. “That’s what people say before they do it.”
His words affected me more than the race.
“Tell me your name.”
He looked away.
“Please,” I added. “I’ve been with questions in my head for 17 years. You seem like the answer to each and every one of them.”
His shoulders got up and down. He finally whispered, “Evan.”
“Evan,” I repeated, and that name sounded painfully unknown to me. “How old are you?”
He rubbed his face with both hands. “Seventeen.”
I got a knot in my chest.
