There's No Place Like Here (20 page)

I looked at my wrist for the millionth time since I’d lost my watch, and sighed with frustration.

“I have to find my watch.”

“Don’t worry.” Helena smiled. “It’s not like being at home, Sandy; things don’t just go missing.”

“I know, I know, you keep telling me that, but if that’s so, well, then where is it?”

“Wherever you dropped it.” She laughed, and shook her head at me like I was a child.

Joseph, I noticed, didn’t smile but changed the subject altogether. “What kind of play will you do?” he asked in his deep soothing tones.

I laughed. “We have no idea. Helena managed to steer the conversation away from talk of what the actual play would be every time someone asked. I don’t mean to rain on your parade but I think a week is an entirely implausible amount of time to rehearse and perfect a play.”

“It will be a short one,” Helena said defensively.

“What about scripts and costumes and whatever else is needed?” I asked, suddenly realizing the extent of what we would have to do.

“Don’t worry about all of that, Sandy.” She turned to Joseph. “There’s the belief at home that old theaters are haunted because costumes and makeup are always reported or rumored to go missing. Well, it’s true, they do go missing but it’s not due to ghosts, not of the pilfering kind, anyway, because the finest costumes show up here daily. Bobby will have everything we need,” she said calmly.

“She has thought this all through.” Joseph smiled affectionately at his wife.

“Oh, the thinking is all finished, dear. It has already been decided. We are going to stage
The Wizard of Oz
,” Helena said grandly and proudly, swirling her red wine and taking a sip.

I started laughing.

“Why is it funny?” Joseph asked, amused.

“It’s
The Wizard of Oz
,” I stressed. “It’s not a play, it’s a musical! It’s what children do in school shows. I thought you’d come up with something a bit more cultured, like a Beckett play or O’Casey,” I argued. “But
The Wizard of Oz
…?” I wrinkled my nose.

“My, my, I think we have a snob on our hands.” Helena tried not to smile.

“I’m not aware of this
Wizard of Oz
.” Joseph looked confused.

I gasped. “Neglected child.”

“It’s not something that was shown all the time in Watamu,” Helena reminded me. “And if you hadn’t left rehearsals so early today, Sandy, you would have learned that we are not doing a musical version. It is an adaptation written many years ago by Dennis O’Shea, a fine Irish playwright who has been here for two years. He heard about what we were doing and brought it to me this morning. I thought it was perfect, and so it has already been cast and the first few scenes blocked. Mind you I had to tell them that it was you that had made the decision.”

“You cast them in
The Wizard of Oz
?” I said, totally unimpressed.

“What is it about?” Joseph asked, intrigued.

“Sandy, you do the honors,” Helena said.

“OK, well, it’s a
children’s
movie,” I stressed to Helena, “made in the thirties about a little girl called Dorothy Gale who is swept away in a cyclone to a magical land. Once there, she embarks on a quest to see the wizard, who can help her return home. It’s ridiculous to ask a group of adults to do it.” I laughed, but realized no one was laughing with me.

“And this wizard, does he help her?”

“Yes,” I said slowly, feeling it odd the story was being taken so seriously. “The wizard helps her and she learns that she could have returned home the whole time. All she had to do was tap her ruby heels together and say ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.’”

He still didn’t laugh. “So she returns home in the end?”

There was a silence and I finally understood why. I nodded slowly.

“And what does she do while she’s in this magical land?”

“She helps her friends,” I said quietly.

“It doesn’t seem such a silly story to me,” Joseph said seriously. “One the people here will very much like to see.”

I thought about that. In fact, I thought about it all night, until I was dreaming of ruby slippers and cyclones and of talking lions and houses that fell on witches, until the phrase “There’s no place like home” was echoing so loudly and continuously in my head that I woke up saying it aloud and I was afraid to go back to sleep.

28

I
stared up at the ceiling, at the point right above my head where the white paint had bubbled and cracked over the wood. The moon was sitting perfectly framed in the window of the family room I was sleeping in. Blue light was cast through the glass, causing an exact reflection of its window squares to appear on the chunky wooden table. There was no moon in the window on the table, I noticed, just a ghostly reflection of pale blue.

I was wide awake now. I felt for my wrist to check the time and remembered again my watch was gone. My heart started to pound as it always did when something of mine was missing; I would immediately become restless and ache to start looking. My hunts were like an addiction, the pre-search feeling like a craving. A part of me was possessed and became obsessed with not resting until my belongings were found. There was very little anybody could do when I was in that mode; there was very little that could be said or done to cause me to screech in my tracks. The people with me always used to tell me it was lonely for them when I left them like that all of a sudden. Everybody I was with was always the victim; didn’t they know that it was lonely for me, too?

“But the
pen
is not your missing object,” Gregory would always say to me.

“Yes, it is,” I would grumble, while rooting in my bag, nose practically touching the bottom.

“No, it’s not. When you search you are trying to fulfil a
feeling
. Whether you have the pen or not is completely irrelevant, Sandy.”

“It is not irrelevant,” I would shout back. “If I have no pen, well, then, how can I write down what you are about to tell me?”

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and handed me a pen. “Here.”

“But that isn’t
my
pen.”

He would sigh and smile as he always did. “This idea of searching for lost things is a
distraction
—”

“Distraction, distraction, distraction, distraction. Never mind me;
you
are obsessed with saying that word. You saying the word distraction is
your
distraction from saying anything else,” I spluttered angrily.

“Let me finish,” he said sternly.

I stopped rooting immediately and listened to him, feigning interest.

“This idea of searching for lost things is a distract…”—he stopped himself—“is a way of avoiding dealing with something else that’s lost in your life
within you.
Now shall we start searching for what that is?”

“A-ha!” I smiled, happily extracting my pen from the bottom of my bag. “Found it!”

Unfortunately for Gregory, the craving never reared its ugly head anytime we would try to search within me.

If there had been a ten-foot wall surrounding the house, I would have scaled it. There was no barrier to my search scenes; all they did was become invisible hurdles. Gregory did have one good thing to say about my searching, and that was that he had never seen stamina and determination quite like it. And then he ruined the compliment by saying what a pity it was that I didn’t pump that energy into other areas of my life. Still, somewhere in his comment I sensed praise.

The clock on the family-room wall read 3:45. I threw back the covers in the deathly silent house and began rummaging through Barbara Langley’s suitcase of eighties nightmare clothes. I settled on a black-and-white sailor-style top, black drainpipe jeans, and flat black pumps. All I needed was an armful of bracelets, hoop earrings, and backcombed hair and I’d be dancing to “The Time Warp.” But then, I already was.

Joseph and Helena seemed so sure that my watch wasn’t lost; they seemed so confident that nothing could leave this place. I had to find out. I slipped out of the house silently so as not to wake the family. Outside, the weather was mild. I felt like I was walking around a toy village in the snowy mountains of Switzerland; little wooden chalets with window boxes and candles in the windows to help light the way and welcome new wanderers. All was quiet outside. The crackling and the snapping of branches could be heard from the forest as people made their way to the village for the first time. People who’d probably found themselves there during an innocent walk to the shop or a stroll home from the pub. I felt safe in the village, protected by people intent on picking up where they left off and moving on.

I walked out of the village, following the dusty road that ran alongside the fields. The sun was rising over the trees in the distance, casting orange hues over the blue light, like a giant orange squeezing its colorful juice over the villages, the trees, the mountains and fields, and allowing the liquid light to flow like a stream down the pathways.

In the distance I saw a figure rising and stooping in the center of the road. He stood up and his height and physique revealed him to be Joseph. His figure was jet black against the rising sun that was the giant orange sitting on the top of the road, looking like it was about to roll down to us, squashing all in its path. I was just about to approach him when he got down on his hands and knees and began brushing the dusty floor. I jumped into the woods and hid behind a tree, watching him. He’d beaten me to it; I realized he was searching for my watch.

The beam from a flashlight shot through the trees and made its way toward me. I quickly ducked, wondering where on earth it was coming from. Joseph stopped what he was doing to look up at the light. It disappeared, he continued searching, and I continued to watch him, wanting to see what he would do when he came upon the watch. But he didn’t find it. After an hour of very determined searching, I think Gregory would agree, Joseph finally rose to his feet, placed his hands on his hips, shook his head, and sighed.

A chill ran through me. It wasn’t there, I
knew
it. Before Jack went home on Wednesday night, he returned to the estuary to see if Sandy’s car had upped and gone over the past twenty-four hours.

Gloria had been delighted to learn that he was planning on seeing a psychiatrist, although she was a little confused, to say the least, as to why he had to travel to Dublin for a session. Still, he hadn’t seen her so happy in a long time and it showed him how bad he must have been lately. He could almost hear her thinking and planning a wedding, babies, christenings, and who knows what else, as he told her. However, she was misguided in thinking the counseling was directly for him. He had no intention of wanting to be cured of wanting to find his brother. To him it was no sickness.

It was dark outside, pitch-black among the trees down by the Shannon Estuary where owls hooted and creatures moved around in the undergrowth. He took his emergency flashlight out of his car and as he switched it on, he saw various startled glowing eyes freeze and then dash back into the bushes. Sandy’s Ford Fiesta was in its place, untouched since he’d last been there. He shone the light around the trees, at the pathway that led farther along the estuary. A pleasant walk for bird watchers and nature lovers or a jogging path for Sandy? He walked toward it, deeper into the forest where he had looked so many times over the last few days. His inexperience had previously led him to look out for footprints, as if they would be any help to him. He walked farther, enjoying seeing creatures leap out of the line of the light into the distance, and he shone the light up into the trees and watched as it found its way up to the sky.

A trail appeared on his left. He stopped walking and immediately stopped trying to work out what was niggling at him. He’d never noticed that trail before. He shone the light up the trail: more trees and blackness were at the end. He shuddered and moved the light away again with the intention of returning in the light of day to wander up the track. As he shone the torch in another direction, shining metal caught his eye and disappeared again. He quickly searched around with the light, afraid whatever it was would vanish. His eye fell upon a silver watch, lying among the long grass beside the trail to his left. He bent to pick it up with his heart thumping in his chest, an image suddenly appearing in his mind.

It was the memory of Sandy bending to pick up her watch at the garage a few mornings ago.

29

H
ello, I hope I’ve called the correct number for Mary Stanley.” Jack spoke into the answering machine. “My name is Jack Ruttle. You don’t know me but I’ve been trying to get in touch with Sandy Shortt, whom I know you were recently in contact with. I know this seems like a strange phone call, but if you hear from her or have any idea where she has gone, could you please contact me on the following number…”

Jack sighed and tried another number. All around him on this sunny day in Dublin, people were lying out on the grass of St. Stephen’s Green. Ducks were waddling around his bench, searching for bits of bread people had dropped while feeding them. They quacked, pecked, and hopped back into the glistening water, distracting him momentarily. After spending more than an hour trying to find his way around Dublin’s system of one-way streets, and then being stuck in traffic jams, he’d finally managed to find a parking space around St. Stephen’s Green. He had an hour to spare before his session with Dr. Burton, something he was growing increasingly nervous about. Jack wasn’t good at discussing his feelings with anyone at the best of times, never mind an entire hour of searching his brain for pretend worries with a psychiatrist, all just to find information about Sandy Shortt. Columbo he was not, and he was growing tired of trying to find indirect ways of getting answers.

He had been calling through the list on Sandy’s phonebook all morning, leaving messages with all those who had contacted her over the past few days and those she had made appointments with in previous weeks. He wasn’t getting anywhere; so far he’d left six voice messages, he’d spoken to two people who were extremely guarded about giving out any information, and he’d listened for far too long to her fuming landlord, who seemed more upset about not being paid yet that month than where Sandy was.