“Thanks, Graham.”
“Anything at all to help.”
A few hours later, as the sun was rising over the Estuary, casting orange hues on black ripples, Jack found himself sitting in Sandy’s car, leafing through Donal’s file and through all the pages of Garda reports that only Sandy had been able to retrieve through her contacts. Her diary revealed a plan to go to Limerick city the following day to visit one of Donal’s friends, Alan O’Connor, who had been out with Donal the night of his disappearance. Hope returned at the possibility of meeting her there. The cramped car smelled sickeningly sweet of the vanilla-fragrance air freshener that hung from the dashboard mirror, mixed with the tinge of stale coffee from the Styrofoam cup balanced below it. There was nothing about the car that gave him any more clues as to the type of person Sandy was. There were no wrappers left behind, no CDs or cassettes revealing her taste in music. Just an old, cold car with work and cold coffee left behind.
It had no heart; she had taken that part with her.
21
I awoke, I wasn’t sure how many hours later, to see a little girl with wild, black frizzy hair perched next to me on the arm of the couch, watching me with the same intense black eyes as her grandfather’s.
I jumped.
She smiled. Dimples dented her yellow skin and her eyes softened to a dark brown.
“Hi,” she chirped.
I looked around the room that was now almost pitch-black save for the orange light creeping under the kitchen door, lighting the floor just enough for me to be able to make out my surroundings and the little girl half-lit before me. The sky outside the window over the sink was black. Stars, the same stars I never paid the slightest bit of notice to at home, hung above like Christmas lights decorating a toy village.
“Well, aren’t you going to say hi?” the little voice again chirped happily.
I sighed; I had never had time for children and had even despised being one myself.
“Hi,” I said with disinterest.
“See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Excruciating.” I yawned and stretched.
She hopped off the arm of the sofa and bounced onto the end, joining me but crushing my feet in the process.
“Ouch,” I moaned, tucking my legs closer to my body.
“That can’t have hurt.” She lowered her head and viewed me doubtingly.
“How old are you, one hundred and ninety?” I asked, pulling my blanket around me tighter as though it would protect me from her.
“If I was a hundred and ninety, I’d be dead.” She rolled her eyes.
“And what a shame that would be.”
“You don’t like me, do you?”
I thought about that. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because you sat on my feet.”
“You didn’t like me before I sat on your feet.”
“True.”
“Most people think I’m cute.” She sighed.
“Really?” I asked in mock surprise. “I don’t get that impression.”
“Why not?” She didn’t seem to be insulted, just more interested.
“Because you’re three feet tall and you have no front teeth.” I closed my eyes, wishing she’d go away, and rested my head against the back of the couch. The throbbing in my head had dissipated but the chirping at the end of the couch would no doubt bring it back in full force.
“I won’t be like this forever, you know,” she said, trying to please me.
“I hope so for your case.”
“Me too,” she said with a sigh and rested her head on the back of the couch, imitating me.
I stared at her in silence, hoping she’d take the hint and go away. She smiled at me.
“Most people’s impression of me is that I don’t want to talk to them,” I hinted.
“Really? I don’t get that impression,” she imitated me, saying the words with difficulty in her toothless mouth.
I laughed. “What age are you?”
She held up her hand displaying four fingers and a thumb.
“Four fingers and a thumb?” I asked.
She frowned and looked at her hand again, her lips moving as she counted.
“Is there a special school kids go to, to learn to do that?” I asked. “Can’t you just say five?”
“I can say five.”
“So what, you think holding up a hand is cuter?”
She shrugged.
“Where is everyone?”
“Asleep. Did you used to have a television? We have televisions here but they don’t work.”
“Bummer for you.”
“Yeah, bummer.” She sighed dramatically but I don’t think she cared. “My grandma says I ask a lot of questions but I think you ask more.”
“You like to ask questions?” I was suddenly interested. “What kind of questions?”
She shrugged. “Normal questions.”
“About what?”
“Everything.”
“You keep on asking them, Wanda, maybe you’ll get out of here.”
“OK.”
Silence.
“Why would I want to get out of here?”
Not such normal questions after all, it appeared. “Do you like it here?”
She looked around the room. “I prefer my own room.”
“No, this village place.” I pointed out the window. “Where you live.”
She nodded.
“What do you do all day?”
“Play.”
“How tiring for you.”
She nodded. “Sometimes it is. I start school soon though.”
“There’s a school here?”
“Not in here.”
She still couldn’t get past this room. “What do your parents do all day?”
“Mama works with Granddad.”
“She’s a carpenter too?”
She shook her head. “We don’t have a car.”
“What does your dad do?”
She shrugged again. “Mama and Daddy stopped liking each other. Have you got a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Ever had one?”
“I’ve had more than one.”
“At the same time?”
I didn’t answer.
“Why aren’t you with any of them now?”
“Because I stopped liking them.”
“All of them?”
“Almost all of them.”
“Oh. That’s not very nice.”
“No.” My mind wandered. “I suppose it’s not.”
“Does it make you sad? It makes Mama sad.”
“No, it doesn’t make me sad.” I laughed awkwardly not feeling comfortable with her gaze or loose tongue.
“You look sad.”
“How can I look sad when I’m laughing?”
She shrugged again. That’s why I hated children; there were so many empty spaces in their minds and not enough answers, the exact reason why I’d hated being one myself. There was always a lack of knowledge about what was going on and seldom did I come across an adult who could enlighten me.
“Wanda, for someone who asks a lot of questions, you don’t know a lot of answers.”
“I ask different questions than you do.” She frowned. “I know lots of answers.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” She thought hard. “The reason Mr Ngambao from next door doesn’t work in the fields is because he has a sore back.”
“Where are the fields?”
She pointed out the window. “That way. That’s where our food grows and then everyone goes to the eatery three times every day to eat it.”
“The entire village eats together?”
She nodded. “Petra’s mama works there but I don’t want to work there when I’m older, or in the fields, I want to work with Bobby,” she said dreamily. “My friend Lacey’s dad works in the library.”
I searched for the importance of her sentence and found none. “Does anybody
ever think of spending their time more wisely, like trying to get the hell out of here?” I asked smartly, more to myself.
“People try to leave,” she said, “but they can’t. There’s no way out, but I like it here, so I don’t mind.” She yawned. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed. ’Night.” She climbed down off the couch and made her way to the door dragging a torn blanket behind her. “Is this yours?” She stopped, bending over to pick up something from the floor. She held it up and I saw it shine as the light seeping in from under the door hit it.
“Yes,” I said, taking my watch from her hands.
The door opened, orange light filled the room, forcing me to close my eyes, and then I heard it shut again and I was alone in the darkness with the words of a five-year-old ringing in my ears.
“People try to leave but they can’t. There’s no way out…”
That was the other thing I hated about kids; they always said the exact things that deep down you already knew, would never admit to, and most certainly never wanted to hear.
22
“So Joseph is a carpenter. What is it that you do, Mary?” I asked Helena as we strolled along the dusty path of the village.
Helena smiled.
We had walked through the village and now wandered beyond, passing fields of glorious golds and greens, dotted with people of all nationalities who stooped and rose as they worked the farm, growing anything and everything I had ever and never heard of. Dozens of greenhouses speckled the landscape, the villagers taking every opportunity to grow what they could. Like the diverse people, the weather had arrived in this place in all its fiery yet vital forms. Already in just a few days I’d experienced the sweltering heat, a thunderstorm, a spring breeze, and a winter chill, inconsistent weather I presumed to be the explanation for the unusual array of plants, trees, flowers, and crops that all managed to live together successfully in the same environment. The explanation for the humans, I hadn’t yet learned of. But it seemed there were no rules regarding nature in this place. Four seasons in one day was accepted, welcomed, and adapted to. It was warm again now as we strolled side by side, me feeling revitalized after sleeping more hours in one night than I had since I was a child. Since Jenny-May.
“Since Jenny-May what?” Gregory would always ask me. “Since she went missing?”
“No, just since Jenny-May—period,” I would reply.
That morning I encountered someone I had been searching for for twelve years. Helena had urged me onward, snapping shut my gaping mouth and clicking fingers before my goggling eyes. I was overwhelmed by her presence, and I was never overwhelmed. I was dumbfounded, and I was never dumbfounded. I suddenly felt lonely, and I was never lonely. But lately I was a lot of things I never used to be. After so many years of looking, it was near impossible to remain as serene as Helena when the faces I saw in my dreams passed me in my waking hours.
“Stay calm,” Helena had murmured more than once into my ear.
Robin Geraghty was the first of my ghosts to float by. We had been seated at the eatery, a stunning timber building on two levels, with a balcony around four sides from which the views of forestry, mountains, and fields were displayed to perfection. It wasn’t a crammed work cafeteria, as I had imagined; it was a beautiful building that housed the local villagers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; a scheme created to help ration the food they collected and grew. Money, I recalled, had no value here, not even when wallets filled with it arrived on their doorsteps. “Why spend money on something that arrives in abundance daily?” Helena had asked by way of explanation.
On the front of the building, ornate handcrafted timber decorated the entrance as it did the registry. Owing to the many languages of the village, Helena explained, these carvings were the most productive and attractive methods of exhibiting the use of the building. Oversized grapevines, wine bottles, and bread loaves decorated the front, looking so delectable even in their lumber form that I had to run my hand along the smooth curve of the berry.
I was returning from my trip to the buffet-style counter when I saw Robin, causing me almost to drop my tray of doughnuts and iced coffee. (It appeared that a box of food had gone missing from a Krispy Kreme delivery van and had arrived on the outskirts of the village that morning, much to my delight. I had visions of a delivery man, clipboard in hand, ignoring the insults of a stressed-out store manager, as he scratched his head in wonder and recounted the contents of his van, parked up on a busy loading bay outside a downtown New York store while I, and a line of hungry people behind me, dove into the basket in a long-lost place.) The appearance of Robin almost caused me to douse myself; it was as though my iced coffee got a fright too, wavering slightly in its stance.
Robin Geraghty had disappeared at the age of six. She had gone out to play in her front garden in the suburbs of North Dublin at eleven A.M. but was gone when her mother checked on her at eleven-oh-five. Everyone, and I mean everyone, the family, the country, the Gardaí, which at that time included me, all thought she had been abducted by the next-door neighbor. Fifty-five-year-old Dennis Fairman, an odd man, a loner, spoke to nobody but Robin each time he passed her, much to her parents’ concern.
He said he didn’t do it. He swore to me he didn’t do it; he kept on repeating that she was his friend and that he couldn’t and wouldn’t hurt her. Nobody believed him; I didn’t believe him; yet we didn’t have the proof of his guilt. We didn’t even have a body. The man became so tormented by his neighbors, by the media, by the constant Garda questioning that he ended his own life, a sure sign to the parents and everybody else of his guilt. But as a nineteen-year-old Robin walked by me and made her way to the counter, I felt ill.
Although Robin had disappeared at the age of six, I knew it was she the moment I lifted my ogling eyes from the Krispy Kreme to see the young woman walk by. A computer-generated image of her had been made public and updated every few years. I had memorized it, had used it every day as part of my mind checks when I came across familiar faces. And that face was all of a sudden coming toward me. The computer image hadn’t been far off, though her face was fuller; her hair was darker; there was a swing in her hips and a knowledge in her eyes as all she had seen and done had altered all but their color. All the things a picture couldn’t convey. But it was she.
I’d been unable to eat my breakfast; instead I sat in a daze at the table with Helena’s family, while Wanda studied me and impersonated my every move. I ignored her and her constant babbling about somebody called Bobby, instead unable to stop myself from watching Robin while trying to figure out how I felt about seeing this young woman living life as she had done for the past twelve years. My feelings were mixed, my happiness bittersweet, because although all the people I yearned to find surrounded me, it was also the moment I realized that I had spent a colossal portion of my life looking in all the wrong places. It’s that moment when you meet your idol, when all your wishes come true; there’s a feeling of secret disappointment.
Helena and I stopped walking at an uncultivated multicolored field filled with bright yellow Bermuda buttercups, blue-and-mauve milkwort, daisies, dandelions, and long grasses, the sweet smell reminding me of the last few breaths I had taken in Glin.
“What’s up ahead?” I spotted more buildings peeking out behind a gathering of silver birch, the oak visible against the peeling, papery black-and-white bark of the trunk.
“That’s another village,” Helena explained. “There are so many new arrivals every day, we couldn’t possibly fit into this tiny town. Also there are so many cultures that wouldn’t and couldn’t settle for living in environments like this. Their homes are out there.” She nodded toward the faraway trees and mountains.
I hadn’t even contemplated that. “So there are more people I’ve searched for, over there?”
“Possibly,” she said in agreement. “They would have registry offices just as we have here so all the names will be logged, although I’m not sure they’ll release the information, as it’s usually deemed
private unless in the case of emergencies. Hopefully, we won’t have to go looking for them, they’ll find you.”
I smiled at the irony. “What exactly is this plan you’re hatching?”
“Well,” she said, smiling as her eyes sparkled mischievously, “thanks to the list you provided me with, Joan is now taking bookings for private auditions for a new Irish play in about”—she lifted my hand and looked at my watch—“two hours’ time.”
I felt anxious about meeting people like Robin, but Helena’s plan made me laugh. “Surely there could have been an easier way to do this.”
“Of course,” Helena said, throwing her lemon pashmina over her right shoulder, “but this is so much more fun.”
“What makes you think that any of the people on my list will come to these auditions?”
“Are you joking?” She looked surprised, “Didn’t you see Bernard and Joan? Most people here really love to get involved in activities, especially ones held by people from home.”
“Won’t the non-Irish communities be jealous?” I half-joked. “I wouldn’t want them to think I’m omitting them from my grand production.”
“No.” Helena laughed. “Everyone will have a laugh at our expense come show time.”
“Show time? You mean we’re actually staging a play?” My eyes widened.
“Of course!” Helena laughed again. “We’re not dragging twenty people to the auditions just to tell them there’s no play, but what exactly that play will be we’ve yet to decide.”
My headache returned. “As soon as I start talking to them today they’re going to realize the likelihood of my running an acting agency is no greater than Bernard’s chances of landing a lead role.”
Helena laughed. “Don’t worry, they won’t suspect a thing, and even if they do they won’t mind. People tend to reinvent themselves here; they use this experience as a second chance in life. If what you were at home was not an acting agent, it doesn’t mean that you’re not one here. The longer you’re here the more you’ll notice that there really is a good atmosphere among everyone.”