A Place Called Here

by Cecelia Ahern

  He leaned forward in his chair. Oh, his eyes were so blue.

  “Your mum and dad told me you want to find Jenny-May, is this true?”

  Wow. Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick. I rolled my eyes, OK, enough of this crap. “Mr. Burton, I don’t want to seem rude or insensitive here because I know Jenny-May is missing and everyone is sad but…”

  “Go on,” he encouraged me, and I wanted to jump on him and kiss him.

  “Well, me and Jenny-May were never friends. She hated me. I miss her in a way that I notice she’s gone but not in a way that I want her back. And I don’t want her back or to find her. Just knowing where she is would be enough.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Now, I know you probably thought that because Jenny-May was my friend and she went missing, that every time I lose something, like a sock, and try to find it, it’s like my way of finding Jenny-May and bringing her back.”

  His mouth dropped open a little.

  “Well, it’s a reasonable assumption, I suppose, Mr. Burton, but it’s just not me. I’m really not that complicated. It’s just annoying that when things go missing, I don’t know where they go. Take, for instance, the Scotch tape. Last night Mum was trying to wrap a present for Aunt Deirdre’s birthday but she couldn’t find the Scotch tape. Now, we always leave it in the second drawer under the cutlery drawer. It’s always there, we never put it anywhere else, and my mum and dad know how I am about things like that and so they really do put everything in their places. Our house is really tidy, honestly, so it’s not like things just get lost all the time in a mess. Anyway I used the Scotch tape on Saturday when I was doing my art homework, for which I got a crappy C today, by the way, even though Tracey Tinsleton got an A for drawing what looks like a squashed fly on a windscreen and that’s considered ‘real art,’ but I promise I put it back in the drawer. Dad didn’t use it, Mum didn’t use it, and I’m almost certain no one broke into the house just to steal some Scotch tape. So I searched all evening for it but I couldn’t find it. Where is it?”

  Mr. Burton was silent and slowly moved back and settled into his chair.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You don’t miss Jenny-May Butler.”

  We both started laughing and for the first time ever, I didn’t feel bad about it.

  “Why do you think you’re here?” Mr. Burton got serious again after our bout of laughter.

  “Because I need answers.”

  “Answers like…?”

  I thought about it. “Where is the Scotch tape that we couldn’t find last night? Where is Jenny-May Butler? Why does one of my socks always go missing in the washing machine?”

  “You think I can tell you where all these things are?”

  “Not specifics, Mr. Burton, but a general indication would be fine.”

  He smiled at me. “Why don’t you let me ask you the questions for a moment, and maybe through your answers, we’ll find the answers you want.”

  “OK, if you think that’ll work.” Weirdo.

  “Why do you feel the need to know where things are?”

  “I have to know.”

  “Why do you feel you have to know?”

  “Why do you feel you have to ask me questions?”

  Mr. Burton blinked and was silent for a second longer than he wanted, I could tell. “It’s my job and I get paid to do it.”

  “Paid to do it.” I rolled my eyes. “Mr. Burton, you could have my Saturday job stacking toilet rolls and get paid but you chose to study for what, ten million years? To get all of those scrolls you’ve hung on the walls.” I looked around at his framed qualifications. “I’d say you went through all of that studying, all of those exams, and ask all these questions for more reasons than just getting paid.”

  He smiled lightly and watched me. I don’t think he knew what else to say. And so there was a two-minute silence while he thought. Finally he put down his pen and paper and leaned toward me, resting his elbows on his knees.

  “I like to have conversations with people, I always have. I find that through talking about themselves people learn things that they didn’t know before. It’s a kind of self-healing. I ask questions because I like to help people.”

  “And so do I.”

  “You feel by asking questions about Jenny-May, you’re helping her or maybe her parents?” He tried to hide the confusion from his eyes.

  “No, I’m helping myself.”

  “How does it help you? Isn’t not getting the answers frustrating you even more?”

  “Sometimes I find things, Mr. Burton. I find the things that have just been misplaced.”

  “Isn’t everything that’s lost, misplaced?”

  “To misplace something is to lose it temporarily by forgetting where you put it. I always remember where I put things. It’s the things that I don’t misplace that I try to find—the things that grow legs and walk away all by themselves—that annoy me.”

  “Do you think it’s possible that somebody else, other than you, moves all these things?”

  “Like who?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Well, in the case of the Scotch tape the answer is clearly no. In the case of the socks, unless somebody reaches into the washing machine and takes out my socks, then the answer is no. Mr. Burton, my parents want to help me. I don’t think that they would move things and then forget about it every single time. If anything, they are more aware of exactly where they put things.”

  “So what is your assumption? Where do you think these things are?”

  “Mr. Burton, if I had an assumption, then I wouldn’t be here.”

  “You have no idea, then? Even in your wildest dreams, during your most frustrating times when you’re vigorously searching into the early hours of the morning and you still can’t find it, have you any opinion at all as to where you think the missing things are?”

  Well, he’d clearly learned more about me from my parents than I thought, but having to answer this question truthfully, I feared, would mean he’d never fall in love with me. But I took a deep breath and told the truth anyway. “At times like that I’m convinced they are in a place where missing things go.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Do you think Jenny-May is there? Does it make you feel better to think that she’s there?”

  “Oh, God.” I rolled my eyes. “If someone killed her, Mr. Burton, they killed her. I’m not trying to create imaginary worlds to make myself feel better.”

  He tried very hard not to move a muscle in his face.

  “But whether she’s alive now or not, why haven’t the Gardaí been able to find her?”

  “Would it make you feel better to just accept that sometimes there are mysteries?”

  “You don’t accept that, why should I?”

  “What makes you think I don’t?”

  “You’re a counselor. You believe that every action has a reaction and all that kind of stuff, I read up on it before I came here. Everything that I do now is because of something that happened, something somebody said or did. You believe there are answers to everything and ways of solving everything.”

  “That’s not necessarily true. I can’t fix everything, Sandy.”

  “Can you fix me?”

  “You’re not broken.”

  “Is that your medical opinion?”

  “I’m not a doctor.”

  “Aren’t you a ‘doctor of the mind’?” I held up my fingers in quotation marks and rolled my eyes.

  Silence.

  “How do you feel when you are searching and searching but you still can’t find whatever it is that you’re looking for?”

  I could tell this was the weirdest conversation he had ever had.

  “Have you a girlfriend, Mr. Burton?”

  His forehead creased. “Sandy, I’m not sure that this is relevant.” When I didn’t answer, he sighed. “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you want one?”

  He was contemplative. “Are
you saying that the feeling of searching for a missing sock is like searching for love?” He tried to ask the question without making me sound stupid but he failed miserably.

  I rolled my eyes again. He was making me do that a lot. “No, it’s a feeling of knowing something is missing in your life but not being able to find it, no matter how hard you look.”

  He cleared his throat awkwardly, picked up his pen and paper and pretended to write something.

  Doodle time. “Boring you, am I?”

  He laughed and it broke the tension.

  I tried to explain again. “Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favorite song that you knew by heart. It’s like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a television show you watched for years. It’s something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there’s an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can’t rest until I know the answers.”

  “I understand,” he said softly.

  “Well, then, multiply that feeling by one hundred.”

  He was contemplative. “You’re mature for your age, Sandy.”

  “Funny, because I was hoping you’d know an awful lot more for yours.”

  He laughed until our time was up.

  That night at dinner Dad asked me how it went.

  “He couldn’t answer my questions,” I replied, slurping on my soup.

  Dad looked like his heart was going to break. “So I suppose you don’t want to go back.”

  “No!” I said quickly and my mum tried to hide her smile by taking a sip of water.

  Dad looked back and forth from her face to mine questioningly.

  “He has nice eyes,” I offered by way of explanation, slurping again.

  His eyebrows rose and he looked to my mum, who had a grin from ear to ear and flushed cheeks. “That’s true, Harold. He has very nice eyes.”

  “Ah, well then!” He threw his arms up. “If the man has nice eyes for Christ’s sake, who am I to argue?”

  Later that night I lay on my bed and thought about my conversation with Mr. Burton. He may not have had answers for me but he sure cured me of searching for one thing.

  11

  I went to see Mr. Burton every week while I was at St. Mary’s Secondary School. We even met up during the summer months when the school remained open to the rest of the town for summer activities. The last time I went to see him was when I had just turned eighteen. I’d finished my leaving certificate the previous year and I’d found out that morning I’d been accepted into the Gardaí Síochana. I was due to move to Cork in a few months to train at Templemore.

  “Hello, Mr. Burton,” I said as he entered the small office that hadn’t changed one bit since the first day we met. He was still young and handsome and I loved every inch of him.

  “Sandy, for the hundredth time, stop calling me Mr. Burton. You make me sound like an old man.”

  “You are an old man,” I teased.

  “Which makes you an old woman,” he said lightly, and a silence fell between us. “So”—he became businesslike—“what’s on your mind this week?”

  “I got accepted into the Gardaí today.”

  His eyes widened. Happiness? Sadness? “Wow, Sandy, congratulations. You did it!” He came over and gave me a hug. We held on a second longer than we should have.

  “How do your mum and dad feel?”

  “They don’t know yet.”

  “They’ll be sad to see you go.”

  “It’s for the best.” I looked away.

  “You won’t leave all your problems behind in Leitrim, you know,” he said gently.

  “No, but I’ll leave behind the people who know about them.”

  “Do you plan on coming back to visit?”

  I stared him directly in the eyes. Were we still talking about my parents? “As much as I can.”

  “How much will that be?”

  I shrugged.

  “They have always supported you, Sandy.”

  “I can’t be who they want me to be, Mr. Burton. I make them uncomfortable.”

  He rolled his eyes at me calling him that, at my deliberate attempts to build a wall between us. “They just want you to be you, you know that. Don’t be ashamed of the way you are. They love you for who you are.”

  The way he looked at me made me wonder again if we were talking about my parents at all. I looked around the room. He knew everything about me, absolutely everything, and I sensed everything about him. He was still single and living alone, despite every girl in Leitrim town chasing him. He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with life, but if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something, or someone, it was him.

  He cleared his throat. “I heard you went out with Andy McCarthy this weekend.”

  “And?”

  He rubbed his face wearily and allowed a silence to fall between us. We were both good at that. Four years of therapy, of me baring my soul, yet every new word was a word farther from discussing the very thing that consumed my thoughts most moments of most days.

  “So come on, talk to me,” he said softly.

  Our last session and I couldn’t think of anything. He still had no answers for me.

  “Are you going to the costume party on Friday?” He picked up the mood of the atmosphere.

  “Yes,” I smiled. “I can’t think of a better way to say good-bye to this place than to walk out being dressed as something else.”

  “What are you dressing up as?”

  “A sock.”

  He laughed so hard. I knew he, of all people, would get the joke. “Andy isn’t going with you?”

  “Do my socks ever come as a pair?”

  He raised his eyebrows, indicating he wanted to know more.

  “He didn’t ‘get’ why I turned his flat upside down when I couldn’t find the invite.”

  “Where do you think it is?”

  “With everything else. With my mind.” I rubbed my eyes wearily.

  “You haven’t lost your mind, Sandy. So you’re going to be a garda.” His smile was shaky.

  “Worried about the future of our country?”

  “No.” He smiled. “At least I know we’ll be in safe hands. You’ll be questioning criminals to death.”

  “I learned from the best.” I forced myself to smile.

  Mr. Burton turned up at the costume party that Friday night—dressed as a sock. I’d laughed so hard. He drove me home that night and we sat in silence. After so many years of talking, neither of us knew what to say. Outside my house he leaned over and kissed my lips hungrily; long and hard. It was like our hello and a good-bye all at once.

  “Pity we’re not the same pattern, Gregory. We would have made a good pair,” I said sadly.

  I wanted him to tell me that we’d make the most perfect odd pair around but I think he agreed because I watched him drive away.

  The more partners I had, the more I realized Gregory and I were the best pair I’d ever come across. But in my pursuit of answers to all the difficult questions in my life, I missed out on the obvious ones right in front of my very eyes.

  12

  Helena was watching me curiously through the amber blaze of the campfire, the shadow of the flames dancing upward to lick her face. The other members of the group had continued with their reminiscing of Derek’s rock-and-roll days, happy to move the subject away from my question about where we were. Excited chatter had resumed but I remained on the outside, though I was not alone. Finally, I lifted my eyes from the ash floor and allowed them to meet Helena’s.

  She waited for a silence to fall among the group before asking, “What do you do for a living, Sandy?”

  “Oooh, yes,” Joan said excitedly, warming her hands around her teacup. “Do tell us.”

  I had everyone’s attention a
nd so I considered my options. Why lie?

  “I run an agency,” I began and then stopped.

  “What kind of an agency?” Bernard asked.

  “A modeling agency is it?” Joan asked in hushed tones. “With long legs like yours, I’ll bet it is.” Her teacup rested in her hands not far below her lips, her pinky erect and standing tall like a dog on the hunt.

  “Joan, she said she runs the agency, not is a member of one.” Bernard shook his head and his chin wobbled.

  “Actually, it’s a missing-persons agency.”

  There was a silence as they searched my face. I shrugged as if to say “Yes, I’m aware of the irony,” and when they all looked at each other, they erupted in laughter. All except Helena.

  “Oh, Sandy, that was a good one.” Bernard wiped the corners of his eyes with his handkerchief. “What kind of agency is it really?”

  “Acting.” Helena jumped in before I had a chance to answer.

  “How do you know?” Bernard asked her, rather in a huff that she knew something before him. “You’re the one who asked the question in the first place.”

  “She told me while you were all laughing.” She waved her hand dismissively.

  “An acting agency.” Joan looked at me with wide eyes. “How wonderful. We had some excellent plays in Finbar’s Hall,” Joan explained. “Do you remember that?” She looked around at her friends. “Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, to name but two of Shakespeare’s finest works. Bernard was—”

  Bernard coughed loudly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Joan blushed, “Bernard is a fantastic actor. He played quite a convincing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. No doubt you would love him to be in your agency.”

  And they fell into their usual chatter of swapping old stories. Helena made her way round the fire and sat next to me.

  “I must say, you excel in your occupation,” Helena chuckled.

  “Why did you do that?” I referred to her interjection.

  “Oh, you don’t want to tell them that, especially Joan, with her voice so hushed she feels the need to tell everybody everything just to make sure she’s heard,” she teased, but watched her friend fondly. “If anyone finds out you run a missing-persons agency you’ll be swamped with questions. Everyone will think you’ll have come to bring us all home.” I wasn’t sure whether she was joking or asking me a question. Either way, she didn’t laugh and I didn’t answer.