by Joy Fielding
Vic laughed and corrected her gently. “Widgets. Small, mechanical devices whose names you usually can’t remember. Gadgets,” he said, explaining further.
Marcy sipped her tea and said nothing. I’m an idiot, she thought.
“I sold the business and retired last year,” he continued. Then, when no further questions were forthcoming, “I’m from Chicago.”
Marcy managed a tepid smile. She’d always liked Chicago. She should have gone there, she was thinking as her cell phone began ringing in her purse. Chicago had wonderful architecture and interesting neighborhoods. It didn’t rain almost every day.
“Is that your phone?” Vic asked.
“Hmm? Oh. Oh,” she said, locating it at the bottom of her purse and lifting it to her ear. “Hello?”
“Where the hell are you?” her sister demanded angrily.
“Judith?”
“Where have you been? I haven’t heard from you in over a week. What’s going on?”
“Is everything all right? Has something happened to Darren?”
“Your son’s fine, Marcy,” her sister said, not bothering to mask her impatience. “It’s you I’m worried about. Why haven’t you returned any of my calls?”
“I haven’t checked my messages.”
“Why the hell not?”
Because I didn’t want to speak to you, Marcy thought, but decided not to say. Judith was obviously upset enough already. Marcy pictured her sister, older by two years, pacing the marbled floor of her new luxury condominium. She was undoubtedly dressed in her standard uniform of black yoga pants and matching tank top, because she’d either just finished working out or was just about to start. Judith spent at least half the day exercising—a thirty-minute swim first thing in the morning, followed by an hour or two of spin classes, then an hour and a half of “hot yoga” in the afternoon. Occasionally, if time allowed and she was in the mood, she’d throw in an additional Pilates class, “for my core,” she insisted, although her stomach was already as hard and flat as steel. Possibly she was munching on a piece of raw carrot, Marcy thought; her sister’s diet consisted solely of sushi, raw vegetables, and the occasional spoonful of peanut butter. Judith was on husband number five. She’d had her tubes tied when she was eighteen, having decided when she and Marcy were still children never to have any of her own. “You really want to take that chance?” she’d asked.
“Something’s not right,” she said now. “I’m coming over.”
“You can’t.” Marcy allowed her gaze to drift toward the pub’s large front window.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not there.”
“Where are you?”
A long pause. “Ireland.”
“What?”
“I’m in Ireland,” Marcy repeated, knowing full well Judith had heard her the first time and holding the phone away from her ear in preparation for Judith’s shriek.
“Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Is someone with you?”
“I’m fine, Judith.” Marcy saw a shadow fall across the front window. The shadow stopped and waved at the bartender. The bartender acknowledged the shadow’s wave with a sly smile.
“You aren’t fine. You’re off your rocker. I demand you come home instantly.”
“I can’t do that.” The shadow stepped into a cone of light, then turned and disappeared. “Oh, my God.” Marcy gasped, jumping to her feet.
“What is it?” Vic and Judith asked simultaneously.
“What’s going on?” her sister added.
“My God, it’s Devon!” Marcy said, slamming her hip into a nearby table as she raced for the door.
“What?”
“I just saw her. She’s here.”
“Marcy, calm down. You’re talking crazy.”
“I’m not crazy.” Marcy pushed open the pub’s heavy front door, tears stinging her eyes as her head swiveled up and down the tourist-clogged street. A light drizzle had started to fall. “Devon!” she called out, running east along the river Lee. “Where are you? Come back. Please come back.”
“Marcy, please,” Judith urged in Marcy’s ear. “It’s not Devon. You know it’s not her.”
“I know what I saw.” Marcy stopped at St. Patrick’s Bridge, debating whether or not to cross it. “I’m telling you. She’s here. I saw her.”
“No, you didn’t,” Judith said gently. “Devon is dead, Marcy.”
“You’re wrong. She’s here.”
“Your daughter is dead,” Judith repeated, tears clinging to each word.
“Go to hell,” Marcy cried. Then she tossed the phone into the river and crossed over the bridge.
TWO
WITHIN MINUTES, SHE WAS lost in the labyrinth of lane-ways that twisted around the river Lee. Normally Marcy would have found the narrow streets with their collection of small specialty shops engaging, the Old World asserting its presence in the middle of the bustling new city, but their charm quickly gave way to frustration.
“Devon!” Marcy cried, her eyes pushing through the ubiquitous crowds, straining to see over the tops of black umbrellas that were sprouting up everywhere around her. Two teenage boys walked aimlessly in front of her, laughing and punching at each others’ arms, in the way of teenage boys everywhere, seemingly oblivious to the raindrops grazing the tops of their shoulders.
One of the boys turned around at the sound of her voice, his gaze flitting absently in her direction for several seconds before he returned his attention to his friends. Marcy was neither surprised nor offended by his lack of interest. She understood she was no longer on the radar of teenage boys, having seen that same vague look on the faces of her son’s friends more times than she cared to remember. For them she existed, if she existed at all, as a necessary pair of hands to make them a sandwich at lunchtime or a human answering machine to relay urgent messages to her son. Sometimes she served as an excuse—“I can’t come out tonight; my mom’s not feeling well.” More often, a complaint—“I can’t come out tonight; my mom’s on the warpath.”
“Mom, mom, mom,” Marcy repeated in a whisper, straining to remember the sound of the word on Devon’s lips and picturing her own mother when she was young and full of life. She marveled that such a simple three-letter word could mean so much, wield such power, be so fraught.
“Devon!” she called again, although not as loudly as the first time, and then again, “Devon,” this time the name barely escaping her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears as she circled back to the main road, wet curls clinging to her forehead. Seconds later she found herself at the busy intersection of St. Patrick’s Street and Merchant’s Quay.
In front of her stood the hulking Merchant’s Quay Shopping Centre, an enclosed shopping complex that served as the city’s main mall. Marcy stood staring at it, thinking she should probably go inside, if only to escape the rain, but she was unable to move. Had Devon taken refuge there? Was she wandering through the various stores—or shops, as they were always called here—waiting for the sudden downpour to stop? Was she searching for racy underwear at Marks and Spencer or hunting for an old-fashioned, paisley-print blouse in Laura Ashley? What do I do now? Marcy wondered, deciding against going inside. Large shopping malls tended to make her anxious, even in the best of times.
And this was definitely not the best of times.
Instead, she found herself running down St. Patrick’s Street, her eyes darting back and forth, trying to see between the raindrops, to fit her daughter’s delicate features on the face of each young woman who hurried by. As she approached Paul’s Lane, she heard a tour guide explaining to a bunch of wet, fidgety tourists that until recently the lane had been a wonderful antiques quarter, but that virtually all the shops that had made the street unique were now closed due to high rents and the young population’s lack of interest in anything older than itself. In today’s world, he said, tut-tutting beneath his bright green umbrella, it was all about the new.
St. Patrick�
��s Street curved gently, like a shy grin, into Grand Parade, a spacious thoroughfare where shops and offices mingled with charming eighteenth-century houses and the remains of the old city walls. Marcy continued south, her eyes scanning the now-empty benches inside Bishop Lucey Park. She proceeded to the South Mall, a wide tree-lined street that was Cork’s financial center, its Georgian-style architecture housing what seemed like an endless succession of banks, law offices, and insurance companies. No chance Devon would be here, Marcy decided. Her daughter had never been very good with formal institutions of any kind. She’d been even less good with money.
Marcy shuddered, remembering the time she’d berated Devon for taking forty dollars from her purse. Such a paltry sum and she’d made such a fuss. You’d have thought Devon had stolen the crown jewels, for God’s sake, the way she’d carried on.
“I was just borrowing it,” Devon had insisted stubbornly. “I was going to pay it back.”
Marcy had protested in turn. “It’s not that. It’s a matter of trust.”
“You’re saying you don’t trust me?”
“I’m saying I don’t like it when you take things without asking.”
“I just borrowed it.”
“Without asking.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was such a big deal.”
“Well, it is a big deal.”
“I apologized, didn’t I? God, what’s your problem?”
What was her problem? Marcy wondered now, her eyelashes so heavy with rain—or was that tears?—that she could barely see the sidewalk in front of her. Why had she made such a nothing incident into such a huge issue? Didn’t all teenage girls occasionally steal money from their mothers’ purses? So what if Devon had been almost twenty-one at the time? She was still a child, still living at home, still under her mother’s protection.
Her mother’s protection. Marcy scoffed silently. Had Devon ever felt protected in her mother’s house?
Had Marcy in hers?
Everything that happened is my fault, Marcy told herself silently, slipping on a patch of slippery pavement and collapsing to the sidewalk like a discarded piece of crumpled paper. Immediately the wetness from the concrete seeped into her trench coat and right through her navy slacks, but she made no move to get up. Serves me right, she was thinking, recalling that awful afternoon when the police had shown up at her door to tell her Devon was dead.
Except she wasn’t dead.
She was here.
Right here, Marcy realized with a start, her head shooting toward a young woman exiting a two-story gray brick building directly across the street. Not only was Devon still alive, she was here in Cork. She was standing right in front of her.
Marcy pushed herself to her feet, ignoring the concerned whispers of several passersby who’d stopped to help her up. Unmindful of the traffic that was coming at her in both directions, she darted across the street, forgetting that cars drove on the opposite side of the road from those in North America and almost colliding with a speeding motor scooter. The driver swore at her, a good Anglo-Saxon four-letter word that exploded up and down the street, drawing the attention of everyone in the vicinity, including Devon, whose head snapped toward the angry expletive.
Except it wasn’t Devon.
Marcy could see immediately that this wasn’t the same young woman she’d been chasing after. This girl was at least three inches taller than Devon, who’d always complained that, at five feet, four and a half inches, she was too short for the current vogue. “Why’d I have to get your legs and not Judith’s?” she’d asked Marcy accusingly, as if such things were in Marcy’s control.
Marcy had sympathized. “I always wished I had her legs, too,” she said, seeking common ground.
“Marcy!” she heard a voice calling faintly in the distance, her name sounding strange, even meaningless, to her ears. “Marcy Taggart,” she heard again, the name expanding like a sponge, gaining weight, becoming more solid, if not more familiar. Someone was suddenly beside her, touching her arm. “Marcy, are you all right?”
A man’s face snapped into focus. He was deeply tanned and his dark hair was graying at the temples. A nice face, Marcy thought, saved from blandness by a pair of unsettlingly blue eyes. Why hadn’t she noticed them before?
“It’s Vic Sorvino,” the man said, his hand lingering on her arm, as if afraid she might bolt again at any second.
“I know who you are,” Marcy said impatiently. “I’m not crazy.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply—”
“I didn’t just lose my memory all of a sudden.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I was just worried about you.”
“Why?”
“Well, the way you took off …” He paused, glanced up and down the street, as if looking for someone. “I take it you didn’t find her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The girl you went chasing after. Devon, I think you called her.”
“Did you see her?” Marcy demanded. “Did she come back?” Why hadn’t she thought to go back to the pub instead of stumbling down a bunch of blind alleys, chasing uselessly after her own tail?
“No. I didn’t see anyone,” Vic said. “All I know is that one minute you were sitting beside me, sipping your tea and talking on the phone, and the next you were running down the street, shouting, ‘Devon.’ ”
“So you followed me?”
“I tried, but I lost you in the crowd after you crossed the bridge.”
“Why?”
“Why did I lose you?”
“Why did you follow me?” Marcy asked.
“To be honest, I really don’t know. I guess I was worried. You looked as if you’d seen a ghost.”
Marcy stared at him. Was that what had happened? Had the girl she’d seen been nothing but an apparition, a figment of her desperate imagination? That’s what Judith obviously thought. Was she right?
It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d chased after ghosts.
How many times in the last twenty months had she stopped strangers on the street, certain each girl with a passing resemblance to Devon was the daughter she’d lost? And each time, she’d been so sure, so certain that the young woman waiting in line at the grocery checkout counter, the girl hugging her boyfriend on a street corner, the woman laughing with her friends on the outside patio of a local restaurant, was her child.
And each time she’d been wrong.
Was she wrong this time as well? Did it make any sense—any sense at all—that her daughter could be here?
It wasn’t that far-fetched a possibility, Marcy quickly assured herself. How often had Devon heard her father extolling the imagined glories of Ireland? The most beautiful country in the world, he’d proclaimed repeatedly, promising to take her there as soon as his busy schedule permitted. Devon had worshipped her father, so it wasn’t that surprising she would choose Ireland as her place of refuge.
Was that why Marcy had really come here? Had she somehow known she’d find Devon?
“I guess I did see a ghost,” she said when she realized Vic was waiting for some kind of response.
“It happens.”
Marcy nodded, wondering what he knew of ghosts. “We should get back to our bus.”
He took her elbow, gently led her along South Mall toward Parnell Place. By the time they saw the pinched face of their guide as he paced impatiently outside their waiting bus, the rain had slowed to a weak drizzle. “I’m so sorry we’re late,” Marcy said as the guide hurried them inside the coach.
“Please take your seats,” he urged, instructing the driver to start the bus’s engine.
Marcy felt the unabashed animosity of her fellow tourists pushing her toward her seat as the coach pulled out of the station. She lost her balance and lurched forward.
“Careful,” Vic said, grabbing the back of her coat to steady her.
What was he still doing here? Marcy wondered, shaking free of his sturdy grip. She
was too old for a babysitter, and she no longer believed in knights in shining armor. Shiny armor had a way of rusting pretty quickly, especially in the rain.
“Would you please get settled as quickly as possible?” the guide said as Marcy crawled into her seat at the back and Vic sat down beside her. “In a few minutes we’ll be passing through Blarney, which boasts one of the most impressive castles in all of Ireland,” he announced in the next breath, “although all that remains of it today is a massive square tower, its parapet rising to a height of twenty-five meters, or eighty-two feet. The Blarney Stone is wedged underneath the battlements. Those who kiss it are said to be granted the gift of gab. Clearly, I’ve kissed it many times.” He paused for the chuckles that dutifully followed. “Blarney Castle also boasts a beautiful garden and a lovely dell beside Blarney Lake. Someday I hope you’ll take a tour of the dungeons that were built right into the rock at the base of the castle, and also Badger Cave, for those of you who aren’t too claustrophobic. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to do any of those things today.” A loud groan swept through the bus. The guide continued. “I’m sorry, but I did warn you about being late. You can register your complaints with the tour company when we arrive back in Dublin. Perhaps they’ll reimburse you a portion of the fare, or maybe you’ll be able to make arrangements to return some other time. Despite the crowds, Blarney Castle is well worth the trip.” He glared at Marcy, as if blaming her in advance for whatever tips he wouldn’t collect. Several angry heads swiveled in her direction.
“I’m very sorry,” she whispered to no one in particular, then turned to stare out the window, seeing only her own reflection staring back. I used to be considered beautiful, she thought, wondering when she’d become so tired looking and old. People were always telling her she looked at least a decade younger than she was, and maybe she had at one time. Before, Marcy thought. Before her life had changed forever. Before that awful October afternoon when she’d watched a police car pull to a stop outside her sprawling bungalow in Hogg’s Hollow, her eyes following the two officers slowly up her front walk, her breath catching painfully in her lungs at the sight of their crisp blue uniforms.