The turbulence worsens. A mobile phone tumbles into Millie’s foot and someone’s paperback drops into the aisle. The fleet of television screens throughout the massive cabin simultaneously glitch and freeze, so many frozen images: Tom Hanks is on one, a blur of garden flowers on another. A few unflappable passengers continue their reading, but most, like the Gogartys, appear to have stopped breathing. The pilot’s deep voice crackles on and he sounds oddly intimate, as if he’s everyone’s lover, a husky mumble that reassures his close friends, the passengers.
Millie squeezes her granddaughter’s fingers and places her free hand on top of their little hand pile. They’re like athletes rallying before the first whistle, and neither lets go. Minutes pass and then the plane is sailing smoothly once more. The clouds vanish, the televisions resume.
48
Stepping onto American soil for the first time, Aideen quells visions of being interrogated in the bowels of Orlando International—Gran’s little airborne smoke break, or Dad having discovered their whereabouts, or those smuggled sausages, any could be their downfall. But they move, unmolested, through a disorienting maze of heavily air-conditioned mega-rooms. Everything is supersized. The moving sidewalks, the labyrinthine corridors, the signs, the citizens. America, or the first few minutes of it, stupefies Aideen. Silently, sheeplike, they trail the masses, who seem to know where to go.
The pair is eventually funneled into a daunting queue of dazed non-Americans. Customs personnel in tidy uniforms with dark guns at their hips loudly direct them into a cordoned-off maze. When it’s their turn, a seated officer compares photos to faces and runs both passports through a machine, setting off a series of blips. For a moment, Aideen knows they’re fucked; an alarm has been activated in a security room, Gran will get done for kidnapping, Aideen’ll be in the shitter.
“You’re here for business or pleasure?”
Gran smiles and rests an elbow onto the counter, chin flirtatiously nestled on fist.
“A tricky question.”
The officer stops and peers more closely at her. “What?”
“Pleasure, with a soupçon of business.”
“Pardon me?”
“No business,” says Aideen quickly. “My gran’s just being…” She searches for the word Gran’s being. Annoying. Thick. Deliberately provocative. “Just, like, joking. What she means is, like, gambling and stuff.”
“At Disney?” asks the man. “There’s no casinos at Disney.”
“Clearwater,” says Aideen.
“You all are driving to Clearwater from here?”
“Aren’t we nearby?” says Aideen.
“Well, sure. You woulda been better off flying into Tampa, though. Tampa’s right next door to Clearwater. Take you an hour and a half.” He studies Gran and says, “Maybe two and a half. You have a driver’s license?”
“We flew into the wrong city?” Aideen side-glares at Gran.
“Ah well,” says Millie. “We’ll get it sorted.”
The officer nods. “You staying at a hotel in Clearwater? Or a rental?”
“Sorry?” says Aideen.
“You didn’t fill out the address on the landing form.” He taps a blank space at the bottom of a card, which Aideen had completed on the plane. “We gotta have an address.”
“Sorry, we don’t have an address,” says Aideen, panic leaking into her voice.
“I’m gonna need an address. If you want to step aside…”
“Don’t be silly, petal, of course we do.” Gran’s already digging into her bag of grotesques. As if she were by her fire in Margate, she begins to fish out items and place them on the counter to make room—a foul serviette streaked with blood or ketchup, who can say which, a golf ball, a bottle with the word “diarrhea” screaming from it.
“My God,” says Aideen, this last item being too much to bear.
“You can’t do that here, ma’am.”
“Bingo,” says Gran. She brandishes Sylvia’s luggage tag in triumph and hands it to Aideen to copy down: 2895 Victory Towers, Unit 208, Clearwater, FL.
“This is where we’re headed,” says Gran, with a sly smile at Aideen. “To see our old friend Sylvia Phenning.”
* * *
Legally admitted into the country and set free, temporarily, from all the aggro back home, which Aideen does her best, with mixed results, to not examine, the pair find themselves in motion once more. Ahead, massive opaque sliding doors yawn open to reveal a hopping arrivals hall. On the front line stand throngs of men bearing hand-scrawled and printed signs in languages Aideen’s never seen.
Aideen and Gran appear to be the only people not wearing shorts. Just ahead, a large, loud family in bedazzled matching T-shirts that read WELCOME HOME TANYA! WE HEART YOU!!! are raucously beckoning to a delightedly embarrassed Tanya, a slight blond girl (also in shorts) who’s pointing and laughing at the youngest among them. It’s a baby held in a woman’s arms, wearing a vest that bears a tiny version of the same rhinestoned message. The group moves collectively to huddle round Tanya until she’s swallowed up and only her purple Havaianas are visible.
Through a wall of windows and transparent revolving doors that lead to the street, the Orlando sun is ablaze. Aideen thinks of home, and for the first time in days she grins—the sheer otherworldliness, the madness of what they’re doing. She is actually in another country without Mum and Dad’s permission. Without Mum and Dad.
Gran stops walking. “If you were a car hire, where would you be?”
“I don’t think we should hire a car. It’s too far a drive.”
“Does that say rentals?” Gran asks, squinting at a sign that reads TAXIS.
“We’ll get lost. We’ll end up in, like, Utah. We haven’t a clue.” Considering their hellacious drive to the airport, the notion of riding shotgun with Gran on the wrong side of a ten-lane Floridian highway strikes real fear in Aideen’s heart. “And you’ve never driven over here, Gran.”
“But sure, isn’t that the point?” Gran proceeds to rabbit on and on, laying out her case—she’s been driving for six decades, she’s an absolute whiz behind the wheel, her Peter always said what a wonderful parallel parker she was. Until Aideen says, “Alright fine, fine.”
Aideen makes Gran fork over her credit card at a vending machine that sells SIM cards—they’ll definitely need a working phone—but when they reach the car rental desk, they quickly learn that even the cheapest vehicle will cost them most of their remaining cash.
“We need to be smart,” Aideen insists, and they head outside in search of a bus.
49
If this weren’t his daughter’s first vanishing act, Kevin would likely be giving into stirrings of real fear. But he’s been, as the Yanks say, to this particular rodeo. There was the time Aideen had felt hard done by during some domestic squabble so she’d jammed tangerines and a notebook and runners into a drawstring bag and hid out in the church confessional for the better part of an afternoon. On the panic scale, this drama scored high, being the premiere. Once, during an otherwise uneventful dinner, she’d been set off by some perceived injustice. One minute, Aideen was at the table eating gnocchi; the next, the Gogartys watched through the window as she slipped down the drive and out to the main road. She’d gone to sit along the rocks at Bullock Harbour, she’d told them upon her return—she’d just wanted to be alone, have a think.
And fair enough.
Ringing the police just yet strikes him as histrionic. She must be here, in Dalkey, somewhere. He drives to Bullock Harbour and then all around the village, passing his local, Finnegan’s Pub, and the handful of little shops and cafés. Panic building, he guns it to the supermarket and darts from produce to dairy to frozen goods, dodging a particularly chatty neighbor. He cares nothing now about any past dustups—he would drive to any corner of the country, he would do whatever was necessary, to see his daughter’s beautiful mug right now, to get hold of her. He zooms along the cul-de-sacs and back lanes of Dalkey, coasts up and down the main ro
ad, and stops at Aideen’s former school on a whim—unless she’s cleverer than he thinks, it’s the last place on earth she would go to seek refuge, though he does spot Nuala in the auditorium, quite literally standing center stage.
Finally the call he’s been dreading, the one to his wife, is officially unavoidable. He feels that he will be blamed for this, that this one—that all of them really, the awful, relentless burden of responsibility, of adulthood—is on him. He parks on a back road; as much as an accident due to mobile phone distraction synchronizes poetically with this crappiest of days, he’d like to avoid it.
Grace picks up on the first ring and despite his plan to deliver his news in neutral tones, he blurts out, “Aideen’s gone! I can’t find her!”
“OK. OK. Let’s see.”
Under pressure, Grace is invariably collected. If anything, stress calms her. Really, how could he not have chosen her, whose very foundation is a stubborn refusal to admit things will go terribly wrong, a woman with a stingy capacity for worry. Kevin’s comfort zone—nay, his baseline, these days anyway—is pure stress.
“Where have you looked?” she says.
“Everywhere.”
“She’s not in her dorm room?”
“She left the school. I’m in Dalkey.”
“What?”
“She ran off after locking herself in that bloody closet. Right after we hung up. I went back and the door was open.”
Following a taut and troubling silence, Kevin’s wife says, with deliberate, vexing enunciation, “You let her leave that room.”
His pits grow hot. “I’m confused, Grace. Are you asking whether I physically barricaded myself against a door that had been shut for a good hour? Or perhaps you’re saying I should not have updated you during a major crisis? Fuck’s sake, I’m not Aideen. I can’t control if she slips out of a room.”
“Clearly.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing, Kevin, it means absolutely nothing.”
“This is my fault then.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“You’re always saying that.”
“I’m saying that I’m at work and you’re the parent—you’re supposed to be the parent—in charge. Extract from that what you will.”
“Really, Grace? Is that right? I’m the one in charge? Because in case you forgot, you banished me from the house, remember? You specifically instructed me not to deal with the kids.”
“And why was that?”
“Fuck!” He manages to swallow the “you.” “That is not the point.” His face boils. “You are conflating two vastly different things. We’re not discussing my non-infidelity.”
“Oh right, we’re discussing the fact that you lost our daughter.”
“You are so sanctimonious, you know that. Which is easy, isn’t it? How can you be accountable if you’re never fucking home.” He experiences a great sense of release stretching these last three words slowly into the phone.
“I’m not home,” she says darkly, “because I’m supporting my family. I’m putting bread on the table, remember? You were laid off. Remember? I’m the one keeping our heads above water, remember?”
“I’m afraid you’ve reached your cliché quota for the day.”
“I’m not the one off doing the dirt with some twenty-year-old tart who works at my daughter’s school. Did you see your little friend at Millburn today? Is that why you let Aideen get away, you were too busy—”
“Nothing happened!”
“Not for want of trying.”
“Oh look, just forget it, just…” Will he? Yes, he will, he will. “Just go and fuck off.”
He disconnects the call and throws his mobile onto the seat beside him. His arms and face, even his hands, feel taut. He is panting. He’s never spoken to his wife with such rage; though he wants to call it up and examine it, he can’t remember the sequence of their battle, only the fury, and beneath that, the panic, at its core. His phone begins to ring and he feels an almost giddy relief when he sees that it’s Grace.
“Ring the police,” she says.
“What?”
“Ring the police.”
“You ring the police.” He is shocked at how brutal his tone is. “I’m going to find my daughter.”
Kevin hangs up on his wife for the second time today and turns on the engine and roars toward home. He barely slows at each turn, tires shrieking. He pounds a fist on the steering wheel when he’s stalled at a traffic light. Finally, finally, he pulls into his drive, seething still and shaking, only to see two figures, a man and woman, standing in the rain—it’s bucketing down—on his front steps. For a moment, Kevin has a keen, primal urge to turn right round and drive off to some other life, maybe head to Connemara and grow root vegetables and read Yeats.
At the sound of his car, both turn in his direction. They don’t wave or smile. They appear grim and somber, the woman with a sort of urgent, impatient posture, the man in an overcoat, stooped almost comically over. What news is Kevin about to receive? What has happened to this life of his?
He parks in what can only be described as an unhinged manner—herky-jerky and lurching, like a learner on day one trying to shift from gear to gear. He starts to get out of the car before it’s even turned off, then doubles back and removes the key.
“Hello?” He jogs toward the pair—he can’t possibly rustle up his trusty old disarming grin. He stops short upon realizing that this is not anyone he recognizes from Millburn School.
“Mr. Gogarty,” says the woman. He is familiar with this face, the sensible, short, clipped hair, the sparse eyebrows. It’s a person he associates dimly with authority.
And then he remembers.
“We’re in a very serious situation. May we come in?”
Kevin’s mind is short-circuiting; he’s in a delayed cycle, stuck on Aideen.
“We’ve been trying to get you all day.”
“Sorry?”
“Your mum wasn’t in her room this morning,” says the director of Rossdale Home. “We believe she may have wandered off. Are you alright, Mr. Gogarty?”
50
Millie learns that they’ll soon be in Clearwater from Geraldine Adams, her verbose seatmate, a great-grandmother with a face like a sultana and a fascinating drawl. Geraldine is coming to the end, Millie can only hope, of an incomprehensible tale about her neighbor’s tomcat, who does his business in her garden, which somehow endangers her great-grandson’s heart condition. Christ, she thinks, is this what I’m going to be like? Twenty minutes on feline fecal matter?
There were no side-by-side seats available on the Florida Express Bus Service (which, incidentally, dispensed to her a most welcome senior citizen discount), and for the first time since the Gogartys commenced this mad scheme, they’d had to separate. Millie had tried haranguing two undergrads in hooded FSU sweatshirts to swap seats, claiming her granddaughter was too young to sit alone. Aideen had glared at her with that deadly brew of teenaged self-consciousness and indignation, snapped that she’d be fine, and disappeared into the back of the coach before Millie, or the students, could get another word in.
Millie watches the foreign nighttime landscape roll by—warehouses, billboards, strip malls, vacant lots, petrol stations, palm trees, roads for forever. Her thoughts pleasantly float, fleeting shards of narratives, until she realizes the woman, Geraldine, has started up again.
“… brings me beefsteak tomatoes, which are sublime. Damn shame about her husband though.” Geraldine shakes her head gravely. “He’s probably on the davenport with a six-pack screaming at the TV right about now.”
“Davenport?”
“It’s like this: Leonard is either asleep or drunk. Those are his two states of being. There is no fluctuation. I cannot fathom how she tolerates him. I have racked my brain. I have prayed on it.”
“He sounds like a—”
“He’s stumbling in the door every night stuffing his face with Big Macs and large fr
ies and don’t think he’s bringing any of that home to share with Brenda and me, because he isn’t. Man does not share. Does not consider his fellow man. Or woman. You know he actually makes me pay rent?”
“He doesn’t! He makes—”
“But let me tell you: I’m having the last laugh on that fool. He got it into his head that I’m sitting on a big pile of money and he’s gonna get it when I pass. Makes little mumblings about it when he’s under the influence. Like I would leave money to Leonard Lowler! How stupid does he think I am?”
“So you don’t have a big pile of money?”
Geraldine giggles at what is clearly preposterous.
“Put it this way,” she says. “I get my dry goods, all my dry goods, at the dollar store.”
Millie is uncertain as to what this specifically means, but she absorbs the gist. She herself is a big fan of euro shops.
“All I can think is a long time back I had some stock from Johnson & Johnson. That’s where I worked. Wasn’t that much but anyway I sold it way back when. Went on some beautiful cruises with that money. But Leonard doesn’t know that. And there’s no law says I have to correct him.”
“There certainly isn’t,” says Millie. A tiny germ of a thought almost catches hold, something to do with a person’s worth after they’ve died, but it’s interrupted by Aideen slinking up the aisle, her hair a thatch of muddy yarn. Millie proudly introduces her granddaughter to her new friend just as the coach driver coughs one word into the speaker system: “Clearwater.”
51
Aideen spends her first hour at the Castaways Motel flattening singles into the poolside vending machine, discovering, devouring, its glorious collection of junk food, each item more exotically named than the next. Whatchamacallit. $100,000 Bar. Ding Dong. America is variety, infinite choice. America is brilliant. She taps in F-2 and watches something called Nutter Butter jerk toward her and drop.
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