“Easier said than done, I’m afraid.”
“Tell me one thing. Have you forgiven yourself for all of this?”
I frowned. “So, you agree with me that it’s all my fault, then?”
“No, I don’t. I’m not assessing who’s to blame in the situation you’ve just told me about. What I’m saying is that it’s clear to me that you blame yourself for all of this. Am I right?”
I nodded.
“So when are you going to absolve yourself from the guilt you feel?”
“I don’t know if I can, Leon . . .”
“Do you think Elaine would want you to be miserable?”
“Well, probably, considering that the last time she saw me, she thought I was getting it on with her boyfriend.”
“Friends fall out all the time, then they make up. If she’d lived, would you guys have made up, do you think?”
I had to think about it. “I think we’d probably have had a lot of stuff to work through first – stuff that had been going on for a long time. But eventually, yes, I think we would have made up. For all our arguing, we did really care about each other.”
“Well, then, there’s your answer. Elaine would want you to move on. Just think about it, Andie. Nobody else can move you on past this point only yourself.”
I sat on the bed for countless hours mulling over what I hadn’t done. I hadn’t taken Leon’s advice. I hadn’t moved on one centimetre from where I’d been when I sat with him in the bar all those weeks ago. Instead, I’d moved myself physically, chasing him, when what I was looking for could only be found within me. And another thing I hadn’t done was that I hadn’t been fair to Colm. Every bit of his anger was justified – I had been using his issues to try to make myself feel better. If I’d really wanted to help him, wouldn’t telling him my story have let him know better than any other reassuring words that I truly understood where he was coming from? But instead, I’d tried to make myself feel like a bigger person by seeing this as a problem that Colm had, completely blocking out the fact that I was as culpable as he was – I was worse, actually, because at least he was ready to do something about his issues. All of this carry-on from me just rendered my so-called help attempts false and meaningless.
God, this was all a bit much for one night – when I got bursts of clarity, I didn’t do them by halves. Good job they happened so rarely. That wasn’t much consolation though as I stared at the empty space beside me that grew colder by the minute.
Chapter Thirty-two
I never know what to do with myself in the calm after a storm. It’s a horrible period of time that reminds me of waiting in an airport with a hangover for a flight that keeps on getting delayed. I really wanted to do something to make the terrible feeling that was engulfing me just go away, but I couldn’t make the plane come any faster, and even if I could, I wouldn’t have had the energy to.
Colm had disappeared. We’re talking vanished-off-the-face-of-the-planet type of disappeared. And the really frustrating thing was how easy it was for him to do. There was nobody that he felt he needed to keep in touch with on a day-to-day basis, nobody he needed to check in with to assure them he was alive and alright.
After my Think Tank, I called down to Colm’s room with a pillow to explain to him that I’d finally woken up to myself, and to apologise (and possibly grovel). If he was in, I knew there wasn’t a hope of him answering the door even if I knocked all night, so I was going to sleep up against his bedroom door – he’d be forced to talk to me when he finally left his room. If he was out, he wouldn’t be able to get back into his room without waking me (I hoped), at which point he’d be forced to listen to me. I could hear his TV blaring inside the room, but that didn’t mean he was in – he’d always leave the TV on when we went out. No amount of pointing out what a waste of electricity that was would change his ways – he did it at home to deter burglars, apparently, but now he was in the habit of doing it wherever he went – and he’d told me he sometimes left it on all night too and could sleep through the noise perfectly fine. I chanced a few loud knocks, but as expected they went unanswered. I settled myself outside his door and prepared myself to wait.
I’d woken up at eight in the morning with a severe crick in my neck, and a temper the size of Mount Everest. He obviously hadn’t been out the previous night, so he was in there and just ignoring me. I’d been able to put up with that the night before, but the combination of not being a morning person, sleeping with a block of wood for the night and being woken up several times by loud scenes on Colm’s TV had dropped my tolerance several feet below sea level.
I banged and banged on Colm’s door until my knuckles bled – which coincided with a man coming out of one of the hotel rooms on the other side of Colm’s, with his girlfriend or wife hovering in the background, and eating the head off me for making such a racket. It was alright for him, waltzing out into the corridor with nothing but his boxers on – from the looks of things, his love life was going just fine. The noise from Colm’s TV the previous night probably hadn’t helped the man’s mood though.
I ran down to my own room, collected a book and camped outside Colm’s room again. He’d have to leave sooner or later. Besides, I hadn’t had much chance to read since I came to Vegas, and now was as good a time as any to catch up. Except I discovered after about two minutes that I couldn’t read. No, I hadn’t somehow lost the ability to do so, but the combination of passing people and staff staring at me, asking me if I was locked out and just plain laughing at me, proved something of a distraction, not to mention the fact that I was far too engrossed in listening for any signs of movement on the other side of the door to concentrate on more than one line at a time.
After a while – okay, after a couple of hours – it dawned on me that Colm wasn’t coming out. Why? Because he wasn’t in there. There was no way he’d still be in his room close to ten o’clock. He wasn’t happy unless he was up and about doing things before he’d even gone to bed the night before. A cold sensation crept over my entire body as I entertained the notion that he’d stayed out for the night. Where could he have spent the night – or, worse still, with whom? He knew nobody in Vegas, except . . . Lindy. No. Surely he’d never go there, no matter how mad he was with me? But, suddenly, anything seemed possible. He knew how much she got on my goat – what better way to get back at me?
Wild visions of Colm and Lindy together flooded my mind. I almost vomited, and would have, except I hadn’t eaten anything since those Taytos the night before. I got up and shuffled my way back to my room. I was almost paralysed with fear at the thought of Colm with someone else. Even if he wasn’t with Lindy, who was to say that he hadn’t just gone out to a bar, met someone and gone home with her? I hadn’t thought it was his style, but maybe I was wrong. It seemed I was wrong about a lot of things recently.
I sat on the bed and hugged my knees to my chest, paralysed by how upset I was. I felt powerless. My initial anger at myself for not being honest with Colm about Elaine turned to disappointment at the way Colm had handled the situation. Yes, I’d messed up big time, but Colm’s reaction to it had been a bit excessive too . . . and while I didn’t blame him for feeling let down by me, I felt he should have given me a chance to explain my side of the story. If he couldn’t do that, what hope would we have ever had? Would he have walked away from us the first time we ran into a roadblock, regardless of what it was?
Once I started questioning everything, I just couldn’t stop. Was he really in love with me? Did he just think that he was because we’d been thrown together over here? If he really loved me, wouldn’t he have listened to what I had to say before ending things? Wouldn’t he have done everything he could to keep us together, instead of breaking it off? Had he just been looking for an excuse to get out of our relationship?
The thing that bothered me the most though was that, for all his talk about facing up to his past and moving on, he’d just brought himself right back to square one by running away again like this. He wa
s really just going around in circles. I hadn’t been fully honest by concealing my past issues, but he certainly hadn’t either. His weren’t the actions of someone who had any intention of moving on. He was just falling back into old, comfortable patterns. Was he always going to do that as soon as life threw something at us?
It was scary to realise that I actually had no idea how Colm was going to handle the situation we found ourselves in. It was even scarier to admit to myself that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this person whom I barely knew, and who barely knew me. There was very little I knew for a fact any more, but that much was enough. If I knew he felt that too, all of the rest of it could be worked out. But it didn’t look like he did feel that way, did it? The first sniff of trouble, and he was out the door and hitching a ride to the moon.
I sat on the bed for so many hours that my bum turned to jelly – it pretty much was jelly anyway with all the eating out I’d been doing since I came to Vegas – but the pins and needles were a sure sign that my body wanted me to get up and actually do something. But what could I actually do that would be in any way constructive? I sighed, and made a mental note to rejiggle the top three on my pet-hate list. Firmly occupying the Number 1 position from now on would be ‘Trying to find people’.
I grabbed the phone again and rang Colm’s extension, knowing that there’d be no answer. I half-hoped that someone would pick up, because that would at least mean that I’d know that he’d checked out. Okay, so it would present a whole new set of problems relating to where the hell he actually was, but right now I knew absolutely nothing. That thought made me wonder if Reception would tell me if Colm had checked out or not. Philippe would have been able to find that out for me, no bother, but he wasn’t working today.
I picked up the phone and dialled Reception. “Hello, could you put me through to Colm Cannon, please? He’s a guest at this hotel, but I don’t know his extension.” The sly approach was probably the best way to go in this instance. If he’d checked out, the receptionist would have to tell me that there was no such guest.
“Andie, is that you?”
Damn it. It was Nicole. She and I had always shared a quick chat whenever I walked past her in Reception since the day I’d received the letter from my unknown number-one fan. As Colm was usually with me whenever I walked past Reception, she now knew him too.
“Ah – yes, it’s me.”
“Okay – has Colm changed his room or . . .?”
I sighed heavily. “I’m too stressed to even think of a plausible excuse for what I’ve just asked, so I’m going to tell you the truth. We’ve been seeing each other, but we had a blazing row last night and now he’s vanished.”
There was a long silence. “How long have you two been together? And what about Leon?”
“Not long and, as for Leon, he’s clearly not interested.”
“I see.” The disapproval in her tone was obvious, but she reverted into professional mode. “What can I do to help you here?”
“I was wondering if you’d be so good as to see if Colm has checked out. He’s been saying all week that he wanted to change his flight and go home today because we had nothing planned to do. I know I shouldn’t be asking you to do this, but . . .”
“Just say nothing to anyone about it, okay?”
I heard her tap-tap on her keyboard for about fifteen seconds, then she said, “He hasn’t checked out . . . but there’s something you should know.”
“Oh?”
“I was working overtime last night when Colm walked past. Things were quiet here and he looked really upset, so I called him over and asked if he was okay. He said he wasn’t but didn’t want to bore me with the details, but he’d be fine soon because he’d be going home to Ireland first thing in the morning and getting away from all the – horseshit, I think he called it – here.”
I nodded slowly. It made sense. And while it was far preferable to him spending last night making Lindy squeal with pleasure, it also meant he hadn’t cared enough to stay around and sort things out.
“Nicole, thank you so much for being so kind to me.”
“My pleasure,” she said, but her voice was slightly colder than it had been in the past. She wasn’t impressed that I’d been with Colm while the Leon search was going on, that much was clear – but at least she’d had the goodness to tell me what Colm had said, regardless of her disapproval.
I put down the phone and thought about what I’d just heard. Okay, so he hadn’t checked out, but those kinds of formalities were never important in Colm’s world. It would be just like him to pick up his bag and go, then phone the hotel later when he’d cooled down and instruct them to take his room payment from the credit-card details he’d given at check-in.
So, where did that leave me? My flight wasn’t until Tuesday as we hadn’t been able to find anything to suit the Éire TV pocket until then. I couldn’t spend the time between this and then sitting here thinking about everything.
I willed my legs to flip off the bed and for my feet to meet the carpet. There. That wasn’t too hard. I put one foot in front of the other and walked to the window. If I hadn’t been on my own all day staring off into space, I would have sworn that someone had injected my legs with lead (the guy in the 70s hotel immediately came to mind as a suspect). I walked to the desk and turned on my laptop, opened a website and pulled out my credit card. Within a few minutes, I’d bought what I was looking for. I ran to the shower, got dressed, then got out my cases and packed like a lunatic. I was just about to leave the room when the phone beside my bed rang. I pounced on it.
“Colm?”
“Andee, it’s Philippe. We must talk!”
My heart sank. Much as I loved Philippe, he and his inflections were all I needed now. I’d be on the phone until the end of his shift. “We must talk!” usually meant he fancied a catch-up call to ask me where things were with Leon or to complain about one of his colleagues who would invariably be sitting right beside him as he spoke.
“I’m sorry, Philippe – can I ring you back later?” And I would – from the airport, to say my farewells to him. Philippe had been nothing but welcoming to me from the day we’d met, and while I would have loved to have said goodbye face to face, I just wasn’t able for it while my mind was in such turmoil. I’d end up a crying mess, he’d try to convince me to stay until he lost his voice, and neither of us would be any better off at the end of it. Of course there was always the hazard that I might run into him on my way out.
“No, Andee!”
“I can’t talk now, Philippe – I’m really sorry.” My voice caught. “Please try to understand,” I said tearfully before I put down the phone. I felt awful for hanging up on him, but I had to get away before my sanity packed in.
I threw my room-key on the table with a note to say I was checking out and to charge everything to the credit-card details I gave upon arrival, loaded myself up with my belongings and left.
Chapter Thirty-three
Ten minutes later, I was standing in a queue outside the hotel for a taxi to the airport. I’d had to travel through the hotel and go out a side entrance to avoid being seen by Philippe, which had cost me time – but I would have lost a lot more if he’d seen me leave. My thoughts wandered relentlessly as the queue shuffled forward. The facts that I’d been forced to face over the past while kept slamming from one side of my brain to the other. Some were harder to accept than others.
Fact 1: Leon didn’t want to be found.
There, I’d said it. No maybes, no logical reasons or justifications for why he hadn’t come forward – he just didn’t want to. He didn’t want me. End of story.
Fact 2: This wasn’t just about finding Leon.
Okay, Fact 2 was ever so slightly harder to admit to myself. Leon was the dream, the utopian way of escaping from all my problems. No conversations about my penchant for flashing my knickers on nights out, no seeing Johnny Meagher’s face peeking through my food when I got my Friday fish and chips (fish and ch
ips that are thrown onto paper are on my “Things I love” list – I’m old school about things like that), and most importantly, no proximity to the place where I was responsible for someone else’s death.
Fact 3: If I had found Leon, I wouldn’t have known what the hell to do with him.
And if I thought 2 was a hard one to swallow, 3 was just plain embarrassing. I couldn’t pick up a magazine without reading about how I was dying of heartbreak over my lost love, but if he’d been found, there wouldn’t have been a happy ever after. What I’d said to Colm when we’d spoken about Leon summed it up – if Leon had showed up, I would have told him I was in love with someone else. What would have happened then? I suppose we would have had an awkward moment where I would have had to get rid of him as politely as possible, or he would have found some excuse to leave abruptly. Nice.
Fact 4: Fact 3 is because of Colm.
Fact 5: If I lost Colm forever, I didn’t think I would be able to bear it.
Which was why I had to get home as soon as possible. Wherever he was, I would find him – I wouldn’t rest until I did.
“An-deeee!”
The voice from the end of the queue carried on the warm desert air to where I stood, now first in the queue for the next available taxi. Oh God. I whipped my head frantically in the other direction to see if there was any sign of a taxi approaching. Naturally, the lane remained ominously empty.
Philippe ran up to me, his face a picture of indignation. “You are lee-ving Vaygas? But why?”
“I’m not leaving, Philippe. I’m just – taking a trip to – LA, for an interview.”
He shook his head so vehemently that it looked like he’d just received an electric shock. “No, you are not going to LA.”
“Of course I am!”
“You lie.” He said this with the absolute certainty of someone who was convinced they were in the right. “You know why I know you lie? Because I called to see you after I rang you. You didn’t answer the door. I was concerned. So I got the key to your room from reception and let myself in –”
[2014] Looking for Leon Page 29