A Place Called Here

by Cecelia Ahern

  “Bobby,” said Wanda in a childish whisper that ran down my back.

  I looked up at Bobby, noticed the deathly pale of his face, his mouth hung open as though the words that had run from his vocal cords had chickened out last minute, refused to jump, and instead stood on his lips in fear. Tears formed in his eyes and his bottom lip trembled and I realized the laughter hadn’t come from his mouth at all. It had floated from there to Here, carried on the wind, over the treetops and into this place, landing somewhere among us. While I attempted to process all this, the door to the living room was pushed open and Helena appeared sleepy-eyed in her robe, her hair tousled and her face a picture of worry. She froze at the door while she studied Bobby, making sure she had heard correctly. His look said it all, and she charged at him, holding her arms out. Plonking herself on the couch, she held his head to her chest and rocked him as though he were a baby while he cried and mumbled through his tears how he’d been forgotten.

  I sat on the other end of the couch and kept on pulling the thread. It kept on coming, unraveling more and more with every minute spent in this place, unable to stop this fine thread from detaching itself from the seams.

  40

  I have found that the many imbalances within our individual lives result in an overall more worldly balance. What I mean is that no matter how unfair I think something is, I need only look at the bigger picture to see how, in a way, it fits. My dad was right when he said that there was no such thing as a free meal: Everything comes at a cost to others, most of the time at a cost to ourselves. Whenever something is gained, it has been taken from another place. When something is lost, it arrives elsewhere. There are the usual philosophical questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Within every bad thing I see good, and, likewise, within every good thing I see bad, however impossible it is to understand it or see it at the time. As humans we are the epitome of life; in life there is always balance. Life and death, male and female, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, win and lose, love and hate. Lost and found.

  Apart from the Christmas turkey my dad won in the Leitrim Arms pub quiz when I was five years old, my dad had never won anything in his life. The day Jenny-May Butler went missing was the day that my dad won £500 on the lotto scratch cards. Maybe he had a good thing owed to him.

  It was a summer day. There was only one week left before we were to go back to school and I was dreading even the thought of it, but apart from the anxiety for the week ahead, without having to get up every morning for school over the past few months I had lost all sense of time. Weekdays were the same as weekends. For a few months a year, the dreaded Sunday nights were the same as Friday and Saturday nights. This night was a Sunday night but, unusually for this time of year, it was a dreaded one. It was six forty P.M., still bright, the cul-de-sac was busy with kids playing, just like me, forgetting what day it was but knowing that whatever day it was, it sure was a great one because tomorrow would be exactly the same. My mother was in the front garden with my grandma and granddad getting the last few warm evening sunrays. I was sitting at the kitchen table anxiously waiting for the doorbell to ring. I was drinking a glass of milk and watching the clothes in the washing machine go around and around, trying to identify each garment that flashed by, just to occupy my mind.

  My dad had eyed me warily as he came back and forth from the TV room to the kitchen, grabbing food he wasn’t supposed to be eating while on his new diet. I didn’t know whether he was trying to scope me out or whether he was eyeing me to see if I had noticed him stealing food. Either way he’d asked me three times already what was wrong, and I’d just shrugged and told him nothing. It was one of those occasions when telling someone wouldn’t make it any better. He checked on me from time to time, noticing how I’d jumped when the doorbell rang (only my mum, who had forgotten to put the door on the latch). He made a few faces at me to try to make me laugh, cramming a few biscuits into his mouth all at once to pretend he was entertaining me and not his stomach. I smiled for his sake; he seemed happy enough with that and then moved into the TV room again, this time with a lemon square up his sleeve.

  You see, I was waiting for Jenny-May to call around.

  She had challenged me to a game of King/Queen. It was a game we used to play on the road with a tennis ball. Each person stood in the boxes that were drawn on the road with chalk and then the idea was to bounce the ball first in your own box before passing it into someone else’s. They had to do the same and if they missed it, if they failed to bounce it in their own box first or if the ball went outside the lines, they were out. The idea was to try to make it to the box at the top, which was the King’s box, which was where Jenny-May was for the duration of the game. Everybody used to always say how wonderful she was at playing the game, how amazing and brilliant and talented and fast and precise and how gag, gag, make me puke, she was. My friend Emer and I used to watch the games from our wall. We were never allowed to play because Jenny-May wouldn’t let us. I merely commented to Emer one day that one of the reasons Jenny-May always won was because she always started in the top box. This meant that she didn’t have to work her way up like everybody else did.

  Well, somebody somewhere overheard, and word got back to Jenny-May what I’d said and the next day, when Emer and I were sitting on the wall kicking our heels against the bricks and flicking ladybirds from the pillars to see how far they’d go, Jenny-May marched up to us with her hands on her hips, surrounded by her posse, and demanded I explain myself, which I did. Red-faced and flustered at being answered back at, she challenged me to a game of King/Queen. As I said, I’d never played this game before and I knew all too well that Jenny-May was good; all I’d meant was that she wasn’t as good as people were saying. There was something about Jenny-May that made people see more in her than there actually was. I’ve come across a few people like that in my life and they always make me think of her.

  She was clever, though. She made sure that everyone knew that if I didn’t show up, then she would automatically become the champion, and I suddenly wished my dreaded visit to Aunty Lila was a day early.

  Word spread among everyone in the road that Jenny-May had challenged me to a game. They were all going to turn out and sit on the curb to watch, including Colin Fitzpatrick, who was way too cool to hang out on our road. He used to go skateboarding with the people around the corner whom no one else had the privilege of hanging out with. Word was that even the skateboard gang were all coming to watch.

  I barely slept a wink the night before. I got out of bed, put my runners on with my nightdress, and went outside to practice King/Queen up against the garden wall. It wasn’t much use because the ball kept hitting against the stippled back wall and sent it flying in all the wrong directions. Plus it was so dark I could hardly see it. Eventually Ms. Smith from next door opened her bedroom window and stuck out her head, which was covered in hair curlers which I thought was odd because the next morning her hair was straight, and she sleepily asked me to stop. I went back to bed but didn’t sleep much, and when I did, I dreamed of Jenny-May Butler being lifted onto everyone’s shoulders wearing a crown while Stephen Spencer, who was on a skateboard, pointed a nail-varnished finger at me and laughed. Oh, and I was naked.

  It was my challenge with Jenny-May that alerted her parents to the fact she was missing. During the summer months we all had complete freedom. We stayed outside together all day playing, rarely going inside and sometimes having lunch in one another’s house. So I don’t blame her parents for not noticing she hadn’t been around all day. Nobody blamed them because I knew they all understood. They all knew deep down that it could have happened to them too, that it could have been their child no one had noticed not being around for a few hours that day.

  Jenny-May’s house and mine were directly opposite each other. Mum and my grandparents had come back inside now that the sun had finally disappeared behind the Butlers’ house. I knew everybody was gathering on the curb waiting for me and Jenny-May to leave our houses
and meet in the middle. I saw my dad look out the front window and then back at me. I think he finally understood what was wrong and gave me a small smile. Then he put biscuits on the table and sat with me, munching away.

  Eventually, as it struck seven P.M., everybody outside began chanting. Some voices called for me but they were drowned out by chants for Jenny-May. Maybe it was equal but I seemed to hear only her name. All my life, I’ve heard her name louder than my own. Suddenly there was a big cheer and I assumed Jenny-May had left her house. Then the cheering stopped, there was chattering, then it got quieter and then it was completely silent. Dad looked at me and shrugged. The doorbell rang. I didn’t jump this time because something didn’t feel quite right. Dad patted my hand. I heard Mum answer the door, her voice as friendly and chirpy as ever. Then I heard Mrs. Butler’s voice, not so friendly, no singsong tone. Dad recognized it too, and left the table to join them in the hall. Voices turned to concerned tones.

  I don’t know why, but I couldn’t leave the table. I just sat there thinking of ways to get out of the challenge but at the same time having the strange feeling that I wouldn’t need an excuse. The atmosphere had changed—for the worse, I sensed—but I had that relieved feeling like arriving at school to find out the teacher’s sick and not for one second worrying about the teacher. A few minutes later the kitchen door opened and Dad, Mum, and Mrs. Butler came in.

  “Honey,” Mum said softly, “do you, by any chance, know where Jenny-May is?”

  I frowned, confused by the question even though it was perfectly straightforward. I looked back and forth to all their faces. Dad was looking at me with concern, Mum was nodding at me encouragingly, and Mrs. Butler looked like she was going to cry. She looked like her entire life depended on my answer. I suppose it did, in a way.

  When I didn’t answer immediately, Mrs. Butler spoke quickly. “The kids outside haven’t seen her all day. I thought maybe she would be with you.”

  I knew it was wrong but I felt the sudden urge to laugh at the idea that Jenny-May would have spent the day with me. I just shook my head. Mrs. Butler called around to all the neighbors to see if they’d seen her daughter. The more doors she knocked on, the more I could see how her face changed from embarrassment to steely determination and then to fear.

  I’ve seen mothers’ faces in shopping centers when they turn around and notice their child isn’t with them. I studied their faces so intently, completely fascinated by it, because I don’t recall ever seeing that look on my mum’s face. Not because she didn’t love me, of course, but because I was always so tall and out of place there was no way she could lose me. I used to try to get lost sometimes, just to see her face. I would close my eyes, spin around, and choose a direction to head in. Other times I deliberately waited for her to turn the corner into the next aisle in the supermarket. I would shiver by the frozen food and count to twenty until I felt she was far enough away, but most of the time I would turn the corner and there she would be, studying the calorie content on the back of food packages, not having even noticed my absence. If she ever did notice the lack of my shuffling lanky body trailing behind her, no more than five minutes would pass before she found me. She needed only to look up and she’d see my head above the clothes racks or look down to spy my awkward oversized feet poking out from behind a shelf.

  From viewing other mothers, I see how the first casual glance over their shoulder changes to panic, how their movements become quicker, head, eyes, limbs darting around, then their abandoning shopping carts in search of the only thing that truly feeds their soul. The fear, the panic, the dread, the drive. They say a mother has the strength to lift a car if it means saving her child. I think that week Mrs. Butler could have lifted a bus just to find Jenny-May. As it got into the second month she looked as though she could barely lift her own eyes above ground level. Jenny-May had taken a big chunk of her with her, too.

  It turned out that I was one of the last to see her. When Grandma and Granddad arrived at noon that day, I opened the door to welcome them in and Jenny-May cycled past. She turned to look at me and gave me a look. One of her looks that I hated so much. A look that could wither you instantly. A look that said “I’m better than you and you are going to lose today at King/Queen and then Stephen Spencer will know what an incompetent lanky idiot you are.” I looked over my grandmother’s shoulder as I hugged her and watched Jenny-May cycling down the road with her head held high, her chin back and nose in the air, and her blond hair falling to the small of her back. I did what anyone in my situation would have done. I wished she would disappear.

  That day my dad won £500 in the lotto scratch cards. He was so delighted, I could tell. He sat down in the kitchen with me and tried not to smile, but I could see the corners of his lips curling. We could hear Mrs. Butler crying in the next room with my mother. He placed his hand over mine and I knew he was thinking right then that he was so lucky, what a lucky father to win money in the lotto and still have his daughter when people like Mr. and Mrs. Butler were suffering so much. I, in turn, was glad that I hadn’t gone missing and due to Jenny-May’s no-show I was now the undisputed champion of King/Queen. I’d also made some new friends now that Jenny-May wasn’t around to tell them not to. Things were going great for my family and life couldn’t possibly be any worse for Mr. and Mrs. Butler. My parents stayed up late those nights talking and thanking God how they had been blessed.

  But something inside me felt different. Jenny-May’s last stolen glance had taken a part of me with it. That day, Mr. and Mrs. Butler weren’t the only parents to lose a child.

  Like I said, there’s always balance.

  41

  Despite Dr. Burton’s threats and protestations, Jack had decided to continue with his mission and make the journey to Leitrim after all. Another night spent in young Bobby’s room had awoken the drive within him to find Donal, not that it had needed much of an awakening. It was the part of him that was constantly wide-eyed and alert, searching around for answers, clues, and meaning with every beat of his heart. He was still clinging to the idea that finding Sandy was his way out. She was the medicine his overworked mind needed in order to rest. Why exactly, he didn’t know, but he had rarely felt such instincts for something in his life. It was as though the part of him that had been lost along with Donal had been replaced by a strengthened sense. He was like a blind man being led by his heightened sense of smell; by touch he could orient himself; by sound he could listen to his heart. When Jack had lost Donal, he had lost his vision but he’d gained a new sense of direction in his life.

  He didn’t know what he was going to say to Sandy’s parents when he saw them, if indeed they were home or if they would even give him the time of day. He just kept on following the invisible internal compass that had replaced Donal. At noon he found himself sitting in his car around the corner from the housing estate where they lived, taking deep breaths. It was a Saturday but the small cul-de-sac was quiet. He got out of the car and strolled down the small street, trying to look inconspicuous but feeling and knowing he was completely out of place on the tranquil road, the only moving piece on a chessboard.

  He stopped outside number four, where there was a small two-door silver car in the drive that glistened to within an inch of its life. The front garden was immaculate and was a hive of activity for bees and birds. All the summer flowers were out in their glory, colors of every shade, sweet honey scents, jasmines and lavenders. The grass was an even inch in height all around, the border where it met the soil a razor-sharp line that looked like it could cut any petal that dared to fall. A hanging basket overflowing with petunias and geraniums hung from outside the porch door. An umbrella stand sat inside, Wellington boots and fishing gear beside that. By the entrance a gnome hid under a willow tree holding a sign saying WELCOME. Jack relaxed slightly. Here were the boarded-up windows, barking dogs, and burned-out car from his worst-case scenario fears.

  He opened the lemon-colored gate, which matched the front door and window frames,
like a perfectly edible candy house. There was no creak; just as he suspected. He walked up the even flagstones, not a weed peeking up between the stones. He cleared his throat and pressed the doorbell, its tinkling sound also nonthreatening. He heard footsteps, saw a shadow through the obscured glass get closer to the door. Despite the friendly appearance of the woman he assumed to be Sandy’s mother, the arrival of a strange man on her doorway demanded the porch’s sliding door remain closed.

  “Mrs. Shortt?” He smiled and gave her the least threatening face he could.

  She seemed to relax a bit more and stepped into the porch area, the sliding door still a barrier. “Yes?”

  “My name is Jack Ruttle. I’m very sorry to disturb you at home but I was wondering if Sandy was here?”

  Her eyes moved fleetingly over him, quickly surveying the man who looked for her daughter and then she slid the porch door open. “You’re a friend of Sandy’s?”

  He doubted saying no would get him any further, but would probably result in the closing of the door once again. “Yes,” he said, smiling. “Is she here?”

  She smiled back. “I’m sorry Mr…. what did you say your name was?”

  “It’s Jack Ruttle, but just call me Jack.”

  “Jack,” she said pleasantly, “she’s not here. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “I don’t suppose you could tell me where she is?” He kept smiling, knowing it had the potential to be far more of an awkward moment, a perfect stranger interrogating a mother on the whereabouts of her child.

  “Where is she?” she repeated thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Jack. Would she want me to tell you where she is?”

  They both laughed and Jack shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I’m not sure how I could possibly convince you of that.” He held his hands out, admitting defeat. “Look, I don’t know what I was expecting when I got here but I just thought I’d take a chance. I’m very sorry for bothering you. Could I leave a message for her? Could you tell her that I’m looking for her and that…” He paused and tried to think of something that could convince Sandy to crawl out of her hiding place if she was in that house listening to him right now. “Could you tell her that I can’t do this without her. She’ll know what I’m talking about.”