If You Could See Me Now (22 page)

“Well, that’s one side of you I’ve never met.” She smiled. “So you’re not actively involved with this project?”

“My work is with people, Elizabeth, not buildings.”

“Well then, what on earth was Benjamin talking about?” Elizabeth was confused. She sighed. “He’s an odd one, that Benjamin West.” But she wasn’t letting me get away with not answering her question. “What business were you talking to Vincent about? What have children got to do with the hotel?”

“You’re very nosy.” I laughed. “Vincent Taylor and I weren’t talking about any business.” I smiled. “Anyway, that’s a good question, what do you think children
should
have to do with the hotel?”

“Absolutely nothing.” Elizabeth laughed, and then stopped abruptly, afraid she had offended me. “You think the hotel should be child-friendly.”

“Don’t you think everything and every
one
should be child-friendly?”

“I can think of a few exceptions,” Elizabeth said smartly, looking out to Luke.

I knew she was thinking of Saoirse and her father, possibly even herself.

“I’ll talk to Vincent tomorrow about a playroom/play area kind of thing. . . .” She trailed off. “I’ve never designed a children’s room before. What the hell do children want?”

“It will come easily to you, Elizabeth. You were a child once, what did you want?”

Her brown eyes darkened and she looked away. “It’s different now. Children don’t want what I wanted then. Times have changed.”

“Not that much, they haven’t. Children always want the same things, because they all need the same basic things.”

“Like what?”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what you wanted and I’ll let you know if they’re the same things?”

Elizabeth laughed lightly. “Do you always play games, Ivan?”

“Always.” I smiled. “Tell me.”

She studied my eyes, battling with herself about whether to speak or not, and after a few moments, she spoke. “When I was a child, my mother and I would sit down at the kitchen table every Saturday night with our crayons and fancy paper and we’d write out a full plan of what we were going to do the next day.” Her eyes shone with the fondness of remembering. “Every Saturday night I got so excited about how we were going to spend the next day, I’d pin the schedule up on the wall of my bedroom and force myself to go to sleep so that morning would come.” Her smile faded and she snapped out of her trance. “But you can’t incorporate those things into a playroom; children want PlayStations and X-Boxes and that kind of thing.”

“Why don’t you tell me what kinds of things were on the schedule?”

She looked away into the distance. “They were a collection of hopelessly impossible dreams. My mother promised me we would lie on our backs in the
field at night, catch as many falling stars as we could, and then make all the wishes our hearts desired. We talked about lying in great big baths
filled up to our chins with cherry blossoms, tasting the sun showers, twirling around in the village sprinklers that watered the grass in the summer, having a moonlit dinner on the beach, and then doing the soft-shoe shuffle
in the sand.” Elizabeth laughed at the memory. “It’s all so silly, really, when I say it aloud, but that’s the way she was. She was playful and adventurous, wild and carefree, if not a bit eccentric. She always wanted to think of new things to see, taste, and discover.”

“All those things must have been so much fun,” I said, in awe of her mother. Tasting sun showers beat a toilet-roll telescope any day.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Elizabeth looked away and swallowed hard. “We never actually did any of them.”

“But I bet you did them all a million times in your head,” I said.

“Well, there was one thing we did together. Just after she had Saoirse, she brought me out to the
field, lay down a blanket, and set down a picnic basket. We ate freshly baked brown bread, still piping hot from the oven, with homemade strawberry jam.” Elizabeth closed her eyes and breathed in. “I can still remember the smell and the taste.” She shook her head in wonder. “She chose to have the picnic in our cow
field, so there we were in the middle of the
field, having a picnic surrounded by curious cows.”

We both laughed.

“But that’s when she told me she was going away. She was too big a person for this small town. It’s not what she said, but I know it must have been how she felt.” Elizabeth’s voice trembled and she stopped talking. She watched Luke and Sam chasing each other around the garden, but didn’t see them; listened to their childish squeals of joy, but didn’t hear them. She shut it all out.

“Anyway”—her voice became serious again and she cleared her throat— “that’s irrelevant. It’s got nothing to do with the hotel; I don’t even know why I brought it up.”

She was embarrassed. I bet Elizabeth had never said all that aloud, ever in her life, and so I let the long silence sit between us as she worked it all out in her head.

“Do you and Fiona have a good relationship?” she asked, still not looking me in the eye after what she had told me.

“Fiona?”

“Yes, the woman you’re not married to.” She smiled for the
first
time and seemed to settle.

“Fiona doesn’t talk to me,” I replied, confused as to why she still thought I was Sam’s dad. I would have to have a chat with Luke about that one. I wasn’t comfortable with this case of mistaken identity.

“Did things end badly between you both?”

“They never began to be able to end,” I answered honestly.

“I know that feeling.” She rolled her eyes and laughed. “At least one good thing came out of it though.” She looked away and watched Sam and Luke playing. She had been referring to Sam, but I got the feeling she was looking at Luke and I was pleased at that.

Before we left Sam’s house, Elizabeth turned to me. “Ivan, I’ve never spoken to anyone about what I said before.” She swallowed. “Ever. I don’t know what made me blurt it out.”

I smiled. “Thank you for giving me a very big piece of your mind. I think that deserves another daisy chain.” I held out another bracelet I’d made.

Mistake number two: When sliding it onto her wrist, I felt myself give her a little piece of my heart.

Chapter Nineteen

After the day I gave
Elizabeth the daisy chains . . . and my heart, I learned far more about her than just what she and her mother did on Saturday evenings. I realized she’s like one of those cockles that you see clinging to the rocks down on Fermoy beach. You know by looking at it that it’s loose, but as soon as you touch it or get close to it, it seizes up and clings on to the rock’s surface for life. That’s what Elizabeth was like; open until someone came near and then she’d tense up and cling on for dear life. Sure, she opened up to me on that day in the back garden, but then the next day when I dropped by, it was as though she were mad at me because she’d talked about it. But that was Elizabeth all ’round, mad at everyone, including herself, and she was probably embarrassed. It wasn’t often Elizabeth told anybody anything about herself, unless she was talking to customers about her company.

It was difficult to spend time with Luke now that Elizabeth could see me and frankly she would have been worried if I knocked on her fuchsia door to ask her if Luke was coming out to play. She has a thing about friends being a certain age. The important thing, though, was that Luke didn’t seem to mind. He was always so busy playing with Sam. Whenever Luke decided to include me, it would make Sam frustrated because he couldn’t see me of course. I think I was getting in the way, and Luke and I both knew that it wasn’t really him that I was there for. Kids always know what’s going on, even before you know yourself sometimes.

I didn’t like that Elizabeth thought that I was Sam’s dad. I never lie to my friends, ever, so I tried so many times to tell her that I wasn’t Sam’s dad. One of the times, the conversation went like this.

One evening in the house after Elizabeth had been at work, she asked me, “So where are you from, Ivan?”

She had just
finished a meeting with Vincent Taylor about the hotel and apparently, according to her, she just walked right up to him and told him she had been speaking with Ivan and we both felt the hotel needed a children’s area to give the parents an even more relaxing romantic time together. Well, Vincent laughed so much that he just gave in and agreed. She’s still confused as to why he thought it was so funny. I told her it was because Vincent hadn’t a clue who I was and she just rolled her eyes at me and accused me of being secretive. Anyway, because of that, she was in a good mood so she was ready to talk, for a change. I was wondering when she’d start asking me questions (other than the ones about my job, how many staff we had, what was the turnover every year—she bored me to tears with all that kind of stuff).

But she’d
finally asked me where I was from, so happily I answered, “Ekam Eveileb.”

She frowned. “That name is familiar, I’ve heard of it somewhere before. Where is it?”

“A million miles from here.”

“Baile na gCroíthe is a million miles from everywhere. Ekam Eveileb.” She allowed the words to roll off her tongue. “What does that mean? That’s not Irish
or
English, is it?” She looked confused.

“It’s draw kcab-ish.”

“Draw Cab?” she repeated, raising an eyebrow. “Honestly, Ivan, sometimes you’re as bad as Luke. I think he gets most of his sayings from you.”

I chuckled.

“In fact”—Elizabeth leaned forward—“I didn’t want to say this to you before, but I think he really looks up to you.”

“Really?” I was
flattered.

“Well yes, because ...well—” she searched for the correct words.

“Please don’t think my nephew is insane or anything but last week he invented this friend.” She laughed nervously. “We had him over to the house for dinner for a few days, they chased each other around outside, played everything from football to the computer to
cards,
can you believe it? But the funny thing is that his name was
Ivan
.”

My blank reaction started her backtracking and she blushed wildly. “Well, actually it’s not funny at all, it’s completely preposterous
ofcourse,
but I thought that maybe it meant that he looked up to you and saw you as some sort of male role model. . . .” She trailed off. “Anyway, Ivan’s gone now. He left us. All alone. It was devastating, as you can imagine. I was told that they could stay around for as long as
three months
.” She made a face. “Thank god he left, I had the date marked off on the calendar and everything,” she said, her face still red. “Actually, funnily enough, he left when you arrived. I think you scared Ivan off . . . Ivan.” She laughed, but my blank face caused her to stop and sigh. “Ivan, why am I the only one talking?”

“Because I’m listening.”

“Well, I’m
finished now so you can say something,” she snapped.

I laughed. She always got mad when she felt stupid. “Well, I have a theory.”

“Good, share it with me for once. Unless it’s to put me and my nephew in a gray concrete building run by nuns with bars on the windows.”

I looked at her in horror.

“Go on.” She laughed.

“Well, who’s to say that Ivan disappeared?”

Elizabeth looked horrified. “No one says he disappeared, because he never appeared in the
first
place.”

“He did to Luke.”

“Luke made him up.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“Well, I didn’t see him.”

“You see me.”

“What have you got to do with Luke’s
invisible
friend?”

“Maybe I
am
Luke’s friend, only I don’t like being called invisible. It’s not very PC.”

“Well, I can see you.”

“Exactly, so I don’t know why people insist on saying invisible. If
someone
can see me, then surely that’s visible. Think about it, have Ivan, Luke’s friend, and I ever been in the same room at the same time?”