Hazel didn’t have this pain for comparison, but she felt an affinity through her own pain and how bad she seemed to be at life. Except that the cause of her own pain was less specific, and she had no idea if she would ever be able to push it out and feel better.
In some ways it was silly how physical the pain seemed, like a big duffle she toted around with her all the time. She often pictured her sadness as an IV cart she had to wheel everywhere she went, its bag dripping a heavy fluid that was keeping her sick instead of making her better. Hazel moved slowly, which sometimes made Ms. Cheese yell, but Ms. Cheese wasn’t born yesterday. “In addition to my son, whom I talk about daily, I have five daughters I seldom mention,” she told Hazel. “But I’ll speak of them now to say that I have six kids, and they were all young at the same time. And sometimes in the grocery store when they’d want something, they’d all lie down on the floor and grab onto my ankle, three on each side, to try to get me to buy it. But instead I’d just walk to the checkout counter and drag them all behind me. It would take about twenty minutes to get ten feet but I’d do it. And well-meaning people in line, men especially, would be like, ‘Ma’am? Do you want some assistance with these kids? I can administer punitive slaps to them, or threaten them using the masculine tenor of my voice?’ and I’d say, ‘No thank you, they’ll all let go when we get to the parking lot because the cement will scrape their stomachs.’ Because it did. But it took forever to get there, and that’s the way you walk all the time, Hazel, and you are a tiny thing, so you must be pulling serious demons. Take a break and slug into the deep freeze if you want; see if you can ice the monkey on your back into submission. Because I need you to refill all the mayo jars before the dinner rush, and if some hustle isn’t involved you aren’t gonna make it.”
Other nights she would hand Hazel a barely drunk milk shake left behind by a customer, one who looked very healthy, Ms. Cheese always stressed, and tell Hazel to drink it in front of her so she could confirm that calories were entering Hazel’s body. “I have seen about everything,” Ms. Cheese said. “Witnessed the very worst sort of tragedies. But your story I do not ever want you to tell me. I don’t want to know what happened. I think it would mess with my head. You are loveless and haunted and I wonder daily if it’s bad luck to have you around.”
“It’s probably not good luck,” Hazel agreed. Ms. Cheese filled the empty portion of Hazel’s milk shake glass up with aerosol whipped cream.
“I had to fire a kid once because he kept sucking the nitrous oxide out of the whipped cream cans. He admitted he was doing it to get high, that was the main reason he said, but he also told me that one weekend he’d done a powerful hallucinogen and had a vision that the gas inside whipped cream cans was actually the trapped souls of dead people who’d been violently wronged. They were trapped in there kind of like a genie in a bottle. If he inhaled them then breathed them out, they could be saved and ascend to the spirit world; if he didn’t, they were doomed to power aerofoam dessert toppings then be extinguished forever. I said, in that case, do they grant him a wish when he saves them? Because he needed to go wish for a new job. And he said, ‘No, it’s more an act of service I’m performing for the dead community.’ A real hero, that kid.”
This thought depressed Hazel even more all day. Imagine dying only to fall into a spirit trap and get imprisoned inside a can of whipped cream.
ON THE TV IN HER EFFICIENCY MOTEL ROOM (THE OWNER GAVE HER a decent monthly rate), Hazel watched the interviewer lean in and place her hand upon Byron’s. The motel where Hazel lived wasn’t very clean, but it was next door to a Laundromat, so the air often smelled like dryer sheets. This made everything seem a little fresher than it actually was.
Hazel learned that Byron had reported her “missing and troubled,” wracked with grief due to the terminal illness of her father, who also seemed to have disappeared. He was offering an enormous reward for any information. He said he feared she’d been kidnapped due to his financial stature and fame, and that something terrible had happened before the demand could be made. “The search for answers regarding what happened to Hazel is my highest priority,” he said, “alongside my responsibilities to Gogol shareholders.”
The woman interviewing him was notorious for getting emotional reactions out of celebrities. She’d infamously made the pop star Dolphin Savior break down in tears.
“How are you managing to go on amidst your wife’s disappearance?” she asked, scanning Byron’s face.
“I describe my work as the technologies business,” Byron said. “But what I really sell is access to information.” He paused a moment. His pupils reflected the LED stock stream from the face of his watch; it moved across the surface of his eyes like a visible memory. “As Hazel’s husband, I am supposed to have more information about her than anyone else does. So the loss is also compounded by all sorts of lesser feelings—humiliation, fraudulence, inadequacy. At the end of the day I have to assume the unthinkable and begin gestures toward moving forward.”
“You recently filed for an abandonment divorce. I can’t imagine the difficulty of that decision. You brought one of your project managers here with you, Fiffany Leiber.” The camera panned offstage to show Fiffany, professional and glamorous, look up from her device and smile. “You’ve spoken of how grateful you are to be surrounded by such a supportive team. What helps you cope with the day to day? If Hazel isn’t found, do you think you could ever find love again?”
“I think Hazel will be found,” he said. “I’ve given up hope that she’ll be found alive, but I think she’ll be discovered and we’ll have answers. I run a company that is all about breakthroughs. What we’re technologically capable of one month is often something that would’ve felt impossible just a few weeks before.”
Hazel swallowed and stared at the door bolt. It didn’t seem like Byron had moved into a “let bygones be bygones” mind-set.