Thanks for the Memories

by Cecelia Ahern

  “Oh. Okay.” I jump over his legs to get to the dressing table and reapply my makeup.

  “I was worried about you,” he says quietly.

  “You needn’t have been.” I realize I have one shoe on, and start searching everywhere for the other.

  “So I called downstairs to reception to see if they knew where you were.”

  “Yeah?” I give up looking for my shoe and concentrate on inserting my earrings. My fingers, trembling with the adrenaline of the Justin situation, have become too big for the task at hand. The back of one earring falls to the floor. I get down on my hands and knees to find it.

  “So then I walked up and down the street, checking all of the shops that I know you like, asking all the people in them if they’d seen you.”

  “You did?” I say, distracted, feeling carpet burns through my jeans as I shuffle around the floor on my knees.

  “Yes,” he says quietly again.

  “Aha! Got it!” I find the backing beside the bin below the dresser. “Now where the hell is my shoe?”

  “And along the way,” Dad continues, “I met a policeman, and I told him I was very worried, and he walked me back to the hotel and told me to wait here for you but to call this number if you didn’t come back after twenty-four hours.”

  “Oh, that was nice of him.” I open the wardrobe in the hunt for my shoe, and find it still full of Dad’s clothes. “Dad!” I exclaim. “You forgot to pack your other suit. And your good sweater!”

  I look at him—for the first time since I’ve entered the room, I realize—and only now notice how pale he looks. How old he seems in this soulless hotel room. Perched at the edge of his single bed, he’s dressed in his three-piece suit, cap beside him on the bed, his case packed or half packed and sitting upright beside him. In one hand is the photograph of Mum, in the other is the card the policeman gave him. The fingers that hold them tremble; his eyes are red and sore-looking.

  “Dad,” I say as panic builds inside me, “are you okay?”

  “I was worried,” he repeats again in the tiny voice I’d been as good as ignoring. He swallows hard. “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “I was visiting a friend,” I say softly, joining him on the bed.

  “Oh. Well, this friend here was worried.” He gives a small smile. It’s a weak smile, and I’m jolted by how fragile he appears, how much like an old man. His usual attitude, his jovial nature, is gone. His smile disappears quickly, and his trembling hands, usually steady as a rock, force the photo of Mum and the card from the policeman back into his coat pocket.

  I look at his bag. “Did you pack that yourself?”

  “Tried to. Thought I got everything.” He looks away from the open wardrobe, embarrassed.

  “Okay, well, let’s take a look in it and see what we have.” I hear my voice, and it startles me to hear myself speaking to him as though addressing a child.

  “Aren’t we running out of time?” he asks. His voice is so quiet, I feel I should lower mine so as not to break him.

  “No”—my eyes fill with tears, and I speak more forcefully than I intend—“we have all the time in the world, Dad.”

  I look away and distract those tears from falling by lifting his case onto the bed and trying to compose myself. Day-to-day things, the mundane, are what keeps the motor running. How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.

  When I open the case, I feel my composure slip again, but I keep talking, sounding like a delusional 1950s suburban TV mother, repeating the hypnotic mantra that everything’s just dandy and swell. I “oh, gosh” and “shucks” my way through his suitcase, which is a mess, though I shouldn’t be surprised, as Dad has never had to pack a suitcase in his life. What upsets me is the possibility that at seventy-five years old, after ten years without his wife, he simply doesn’t know how to. A simple thing like that, my big-as-an-oak-tree, steady-as-a-rock father cannot do. Instead he sits on the edge of the bed, twisting his cap around in his gnarled fingers.

  Things have attempted to be folded, but instead are crumpled in small balls with no order at all, as though they have been packed by a child. I find my shoe inside some bathroom towels. I take it out and put it on my foot without saying anything, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world. The towels go back where they belong. I start folding and packing all over again. His dirty underwear, socks, pajamas, vests, toiletry bag. Then I walk over to get the clothes from the wardrobe, and I take a deep breath.

  “We have all the time in the world, Dad,” I repeat. Though this time, it’s for my own benefit.

  On the tube on the way to the airport, Dad keeps checking his watch and fidgeting in his seat. Every time the train stops at a station, he pushes the seat in front of him impatiently as if to move it along himself.

  “Do you have to be somewhere?” I smile.

  “The Monday Club.” He looks at me with worried eyes. He’s never missed a week, not even when I was in the hospital.

  “But today is Monday. We have time.”

  He fidgets. “I just don’t want to miss this flight. We might get stuck over here.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll make it.” I do my best to hide my smile. “And there’s more than one flight a day, you know.”

  “Good.” He looks relieved. “I might even make evening mass. Oh, they won’t believe everything I tell them tonight,” he says with excitement. “Donal will drop dead when everybody listens to me and not to him for a change.” He settles back into his seat and watches out the window as the underground speeds by. He stares into the black, no longer seeing his own reflection but seeing somewhere else and someone else a long way off, a long time ago. While he’s in another world, I take out my cell phone and start planning my next move.

  “Frankie, it’s me. Justin Hitchcock is getting the first plane to Dublin tomorrow morning, and I need to know what he’s doing, stat.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that, Dr. Conway?”

  “I thought you had ways.”

  “You’re right, I do. But I thought you were the psychic one.”

  “I’m certainly not psychic, but even still, I’m not getting anything about where he could be going.”

  “Are your powers fading?”

  “I don’t have powers.”

  “Whatever. Give me an hour, I’ll get back to you.”

  Two hours later, while Dad and I wait at the gate, Frankie calls back.

  “He’s going to be in the National Gallery tomorrow morning at ten thirty. He’s giving a talk on a painting called Woman Writing a Letter. Sounds fascinating.”

  “Oh, it is, it’s one of Terborch’s finest. In my opinion.”

  Silence.

  “You were being sarcastic, weren’t you?” I realize. “Okay, well, does your uncle Thomas still run that company?” I smile mischievously, and Dad looks at me curiously.

  “What are you planning?” Dad asks suspiciously once I’ve ended the call.

  “I’m having a little bit of fun.”

  “Shouldn’t you get back to work? It’s been weeks now. Conor called your hand phone while you were gone this morning, it slipped my mind to tell you. He’s in Japan, but I could hear him very clearly,” he says, impressed with either Conor or the phone company, I’m not sure which. “He wanted to know why the house doesn’t have a For Sale sign yet. He said you were supposed to do that.” He looks worried.

  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten.” I’m agitated by the news of Conor’s call, but I try not to let it show. “I’m selling it myself. I have my first viewing tomorrow.”

  Dad looks unsure, and he’s right to, because I’m lying through my teeth.

  “Your company knows this?” His eyes narrow.

  “Yes.” I smile tightly. “They can take the photos and put the sign up in a matter of hours. I know a few people in the real estate world.”

  He rolls his eyes.

  We both look away in a huff, and just so I don’
t feel that I’m fully lying, while we shuffle along the line to board the plane, I text a few clients to see if they’re interested in a viewing. Then I ask my trusty photographer to take the shots of the house. By the time we’re fastening our seat belts, I have already arranged for the For Sale sign for later today and a viewing appointment tomorrow, for a couple I’ve been working with. Both teachers at the local school, they will come by the house during their lunch break. At the bottom of their text is the mandatory “Was so sorry to hear about what happened. Have been thinking of you. See you tomorrow, Linda xx.”

  I delete it right away.

  Dad looks at my thumb working over the buttons on my phone with speed. “You writing a book?”

  I ignore him.

  “You’ll get arthritis in your thumb, and it’s not much fun, I can tell you that.”

  I press send and switch the phone off.

  “You really selling the house yourself?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say, confidently now.

  “Well, I didn’t know that, did I? I didn’t know what to tell him.”

  Score one to me.

  “That’s okay, Dad, you don’t have to feel you’re in the middle of all this.”

  “Well, I am.”

  Score one to him.

  “Well, you wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t answered my phone.”

  Two–one.

  “You were missing all morning—what was I supposed to do, ignore it?”

  Two–all.

  “He was concerned about you, you know. He thought you should see someone. A professional person.”

  Off the charts.

  “Did he, now?” I fold my arms, wanting to call him and rant about all the things I hate about him and that have always annoyed me. The cutting of his toenails in bed, the nose-blowing that rattled the house every morning, his inability to let people finish their sentences, his stupid party coin trick that I fake-laughed at from the first time he did it, his inability to sit down and have an adult conversation about our problems, his constant walking away during our fights…Dad interrupts my silent torture of Conor.

  “He said you called him in the middle of the night, spurting Latin.”

  “Really?” I feel anger surge. “And what did you say?”

  He looks out the window as we pick up speed down the runway. “I told him you made a fine fluent Italian-speaking Viking too.” I see his cheeks lift, and I throw my head back and laugh.

  All even.

  He suddenly grabs my hand. “Thanks for all this, love. I had a great time.” He gives my hand a squeeze and goes back to looking out the window as the green of the fields surrounding the runway goes racing by.

  He doesn’t let go of my hand, so I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes.

  Chapter 33

  JUSTIN WALKS THROUGH ARRIVALS AT Dublin Airport on Tuesday morning with his cell phone glued to his ear, listening once again to the sound of Bea’s outgoing message. He sighs when he hears the beep, beyond bored now with her childish behavior.

  “Hi, honey, it’s me. Dad. Again. Listen, I know you’re angry with me, and at your age everything is oh-so-very-dramatic, but if you’d just listen to what I have to say, the odds are you’ll agree with me and thank me for it when you’re old and gray. I only want the best for you, and I will not hang up this phone until I have convinced you—” He immediately hangs up.

  Behind the barricade at arrivals is a man in a dark suit holding a large white placard with Justin’s surname written in large capital letters. Underneath are those two magical words: THANK YOU.

  Those words have been capturing his attention on billboards, in the newspaper, on the radio, and on television all day and every day, ever since the first note arrived. Whenever the words drift from the lips of a passerby, he does a double take, following them as though hypnotized, as though they contain a special encrypted code just for him. Those words float in the air like the scent of freshly cut grass on a summer’s day; more than a smell, they carry with them a feeling, a place, a time, a happiness. They transport him just like a special song from youth, when nostalgia, like the ocean’s tide, sweeps in and catches you on the sand, pulling you in and under when you least expect it, and often when you least want it.

  Those words are now constantly in his head. Thank you, thank you, thank you. The more he hears them and rereads the short notes, the more alien they become, as though he is seeing the sequence of those particular letters for the first time in his life—like how music notes, so familiar, so simple, arranged in a different way become pure masterpieces.

  This transformation of everyday common things into something magical, this growing understanding that what he once perceived to be was not at all, reminds him of the times he spent as a child staring at his face in the mirror. As he stood on a footstool so that he could reach, the more intensely he stared, the more his face began to morph into one he was wholly unfamiliar with. In those moments he wondered if he was seeing the real him: eyes farther apart than he’d thought, one eyelid lower than the other, one nostril also ever so slightly lower, the corner of one side of his mouth turning downward, as though there was a line going through one side of his face and dragging everything south, like a knife through sticky chocolate cake. The surface, once smooth, drooped and hung down. A quick glimpse, and it was unnoticeable. Careful analysis, though, before brushing his teeth at night, revealed he wore the face of a stranger.

  Now he takes a step back from those two words, circles them a few times, and views them from all angles. Just as with paintings in a gallery, the words themselves dictate the height at which they should be displayed, the position from which they should be best approached and contemplated. He has found the correct angle now. He can now see the weight they hold; they have a sense of purpose, the strength of beauty and ammunition. Rather than a polite utterance heard a thousand times a day, “Thank you” now has meaning.

  Without another thought about Bea, he flips his phone closed and approaches the man holding the sign. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Hitchcock?” The six-foot man’s eyebrows are so dark and thick Justin can barely see his eyes.

  “Yes,” he says suspiciously. “Is this car for a Justin Hitchcock?”

  The man consults a piece of paper in his pocket. “Yes, it is, sir. Is that still you, or does that change things?”

  “Ye-es,” he says slowly. “That’s me.”

  “You don’t seem so sure,” the driver says, lowering the sign. “Where are you going this morning?”

  “Shouldn’t you know that?”

  “I do. But the last time I let somebody in my car as unsure as you, I delivered an animal rights activist directly into an IMFHA meeting.”

  Unfamiliar with the initials, Justin asks, “Is that bad?”

  “The president of the Irish Masters of Fox Hounds Association thought so. He was stuck at the airport with no car while the lunatic I collected was splashing red paint around the conference room. Let’s just say, in terms of a tip for me, it was what the hounds would call a ‘blank day.’”

  “Well, I don’t think the hounds would call it anything, necessarily,” Justin jokes, “other than ‘Ooo-ooo.’” He lifts his chin and howls into the air, playfully.

  The driver stares back blankly, and Justin’s face flushes. “Well, I’m going to the National Gallery.” Pause. “I’m pro-Gallery, by the way. I’m going to talk about painting, not turn people into canvases as a method of venting my frustration. Though if my ex-wife was in the audience, I’d run at her with a paintbrush.” He laughs, and the driver responds with another stony expression.

  “I wasn’t expecting anybody to greet me,” Justin yaps at the driver’s heels as they walk out of the airport into the gray October day. “Nobody at the gallery informed me you’d be here,” he tests him as they hurry across the pedestrian walkway through parachuting raindrops that plummet toward Justin’s head and shoulders.

  “I didn’t know about the job until late last
night, when I got the call. I was supposed to be going to my wife’s aunt’s funeral today.” They reach the lot, and he roots around his pockets for the car parking ticket and slides it into the machine to validate it.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Justin stops wiping away the parachuting raindrop casualties that have landed with a shplat on the shoulders of his brown corduroy jacket and looks at the driver grimly, out of respect.

  “So was I. I hate funerals.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be alone in thinking that.”

  The driver stops walking and turns to face Justin with a look of intensity on his face. “They always give me the giggles,” he says. “Does that ever happen to you?”

  Justin is unsure whether to take him seriously, but the driver doesn’t crack even the slightest smile. Justin thinks back to his father’s funeral, when he was nine years old. The two families huddled together at the graveyard, all dressed head to toe in black like dung beetles around the dirty open hole in the ground where the casket was placed. His dad’s family had flown over from Ireland, bringing with them the rain, which was unconventional for Chicago’s hot summer. They stood beneath umbrellas, he close to his aunt Emelda, who held their umbrella in one hand and the other tightly on his shoulder, Al and his mother beside him under another umbrella. Al had brought along his fire engine, which he played with while the priest talked about their father’s life. This annoyed Justin. In fact, everybody and everything annoyed Justin that day.

  He hated Aunt Emelda’s hand being there, heavy and tight on his shoulder, though he knew she was trying to be helpful.

  He’d greeted her that morning dressed in his best suit, as his mother had requested in her new quiet voice, which Justin had to lean in closely to hear. Aunt Emelda had pretended to be psychic, just as she always did when they saw each other after long stints apart.

  “I know just what you want, little soldier,” she’d said in her strong Cork accent, which Justin could barely understand and sometimes mistook for her breaking out into song. She’d rummaged in her oversize handbag and dug out a toy soldier with a plastic smile and a plastic salute, quickly peeling off the price tag and, with it, the sticker with the soldier’s name, before handing it to him. Justin stared down at Colonel Blank, who saluted him with one hand and held a plastic gun in the other, and immediately mistrusted him. The plastic gun got lost in the heavy pile of black coats by the front door as soon as he’d pulled the package open. As usual, Aunt Emelda’s psychic powers had been tuned into the desires of the wrong nine-year-old boy, for Justin had not wanted this plastic soldier on this day of all days, and he couldn’t help but imagine a young boy across town waiting for a plastic soldier and instead being handed Justin’s father by the tuft of his jet-black hair. But he accepted her gift with a smile as big and sincere as Colonel Blank’s. Later that day, as he stood with her beside the hole in the ground, he thought maybe for once she could read his mind as her hand gripped him tighter, her nails digging into his bony shoulders as though holding him back. For Justin had thought about jumping into that damp, dark hole.