Missing
by Judith Yarrow
Alice Jason’s children are worried about their mother. She was supposed to be traveling for a month through parts of Asia, a trip she’d started planning on the eve of her divorce. Finally after fifteen years of hard-scrabble single parenting, her children out of the house and beginning families of their own, she’d announced her departure date and was seen off at the airport.
By now she’s been gone eight months, and her children have no idea when she’ll return, or even exactly where she is. Her postcards and letters continued to arrive at irregular intervals. They gave no explanations, just informed the children of her next probable destination. Sometimes they simply made cryptic comments: “Don’t worry, everything will be all right,” or “The path is sure to reveal itself at the next intersection.”
Because her children are responsible adults, they can’t leave their obligations to go in search of their elusive mother, so they asked me to locate her and persuade her to return home. I might be able to locate her, but could I persuade her? Once I thought I knew her; now I didn’t know. “I would try,” I wrote. It gave a certain poignancy to my travel, and a focus.
Her last postcard from Japan, where she’d stayed so much longer than originally planned, had said she’d be in Bangkok for a week. Her daughter had sent a letter to her at the Opera Hotel where the mother had said she’d be staying, but she hadn’t remained in Bangkok long enough to receive it, and eventually it was returned.
The daughter, being the efficient mother of two very busy small children, simply added a note to the letter and sent it on to Malacca, sufficiently far enough along on the itinerary her mother had sketched out to ensure she’d get it. The letter was waiting for Mrs. Jason at the Majestic Hotel. I’ve read it. It has a certain sweet innocence about it, as if it were following a camp form-letter, “Dear Mom, we are all fine. I hope you are too. When will you be coming home? Lisa’s getting a new tooth, Rob says hello. . .”
I had their mother’s initial travel plans, but whether she had given them up completely I couldn’t decide. It’s difficult to know where along the journey Mrs. Jason had left the course, or even if she’d left it. Perhaps instead I should say where she’d stepped out into the unknown land of the permanent traveler. It might have started in Japan, the place that looked so similar on the surface to her familiar world and turned out to be so utterly different in basic premises. When one thing is called into question, all things follow: who she was, for instance, and then, who she wanted to become.
Or maybe she began to slip off course in Bangkok. In leaving Bangkok she might have left behind more than she realized. But personally, I think that once she’d cut herself loose from the anchor of her home after the children had vanished, as children do, deep into their own lives; once that anchor had been cast off, she’d gone adrift, compass and sextant lost. Now she wandered among foreign islands trying for a landing that would yield up the golden answer to a question she hasn’t yet been able to frame.
I dropped the children a note to let them know I was still searching for their mother and would be bound for Singapore in a few days time, after a stop in Malacca. But Malacca’s weathered red Dutch merchants’ buildings and cluttered Chinese shops slowed my search. These were scenes Mrs. Jason might have paused to photograph, record for tedious recounting to her grandchildren when they were older: “When I was in Malacca...” I can’t bear that sort of thing anymore. My photographs are mysteries pointing the way from a past I leave behind with every step, signs and significations I will read again someday as if I were reading a Polynesian star chart: these shells, these twigs shape a wave that will carry you to another shore, one where existence is sufficient and wholeness is without question.
Of course, when I got to Singapore, that self-named “tropical city of excellence,” as clean as tyranny can make it, I couldn’t find her, though two letters from her son waited for answers to her absence, letters asking where and when, questions I knew she couldn’t answer, demands for reassurance that the mother still existed and was coming home. By now I knew that was unlikely. She was erasing herself, the mother they knew, in a steady deconstruction that had to end in bleached ribs on some uncharted atoll or a new person sprung overnight and ready for the thickening swell of life, ripe with herself at last.
Traces of their mother were vanishing, I wrote, but I’d try for her in Bali—Bali, where they dance in the temples to the sounds of golden gongs and brass drums, where choruses of cocks crow in the morning and in the night dogs fight; where the gods are fed every day on fruit and rice. I was finding true signs of the woman now, glimpses of recognition, shadows of her unnamed shape cast forward through time, all categories eliminated until only the fundamental self remained, not mother, not wife, not broken spirit. Now, seeker in the midday heat and the rainstorm chill. Now, voyager along the uncharted strands of a life that point me onward. Now, permanently missing.
In Ubud at the poste restante, more letters waited, frantic demands from both son and daughter to tell them what had happened to their mother, why my letters were so vague. I wanted to reassure them, but what could I say beyond the obvious? I sent them a postcard: “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right in the end. The path itself is the answer, though every intersection is a new question.”
Judith Yarrow has been published in Cicada, Backbone, Aji, Raven’s Perch, and others. She was the featured poet in Edge: An International Journal, and her poems have been included in the Washington State Poet Laureates’ 2014 and 2017 collections. She finally settled down in Seattle, except for four years in Japan, in the 1980s. These days she spends a lot of her time revising a science fiction trilogy. Find more of her work at jyarrow.com.