Now You See Her (10 page)

“So, did you find Audrey?” Kelly asked, suddenly appearing at her side.

“No, but I found Shannon.”

“Was she able to help you?”

“I didn’t speak to her.”

“Why not?”

“It’s complicated,” Marcy said after a pause.

“What’s complicated?” Liam asked, lowering a steaming pot of tea to the table along with two mugs, then plopping into the chair across from her. “You don’t mind if I join you, do you? I’m on my break, and you look in need of some company. Do you know you’re soaking wet?”

Marcy quickly pulled off her coat, began patting at her hair. “I couldn’t find a taxi.…”

“Leave your hair alone,” he said. “It’s quite sexy like that, you know.”

Marcy laughed, flattered in spite of herself.

“That’s better. So, what’s complicated?”

“What isn’t?”

Liam’s turn to laugh. “Hunger isn’t complicated,” he said. “I bet you could use something to eat.”

“Anything you recommend?”

“I’d try the special. Kelly, can you get the lady a special? My treat,” he added.

“No, don’t be silly. I can’t let you do that.”

“Consider it done. My way of apologizing for my rudeness earlier.”

“You weren’t rude.”

“I was a bit abrupt. You know, about Audrey.”

“Are you saying you
did
recognize her picture?”

He poured them each a mug full of tea. “Well, I might have been a little hasty in my assessment.”

“Would you like to see the picture again?” Marcy was already digging inside her purse.

“Drink your tea,” he instructed, taking Devon’s photograph from Marcy’s hand.

Marcy did as she was told, lifting the mug to her lips and taking a long sip, her eyes never leaving his. “Well?”

“I suppose it could be Audrey.”

Marcy tried to swallow her growing excitement with another sip of tea. “Do you know her last name?”

Liam shook his head.

“What
do
you know about her?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid. I’ve only talked to her a couple of times. She moved here about a year ago. From some small town west of London, I think she said.”

“She has an English accent?” Devon had always had a good ear for accents, Marcy recalled, remembering her performances in various high school plays.

“I suppose. Definitely not Irish, but I wasn’t paying that
strict attention. She’s not really my type. I like ’em a little older myself.” A playful smile teased his lips.

Is he flirting with me? Marcy wondered, dismissing the thought as she sank back in her chair. “Can you do me a favor? Can you call me the next time you see her? I mean, immediately. And can you not say anything to her about my trying to find her?”

“Can you tell me why I should do either of those things?”

“It’s complicated,” Marcy said again. Could she trust him not to give her away?

“Can you at least tell me your name?”

“Marcy,” she said after a pause of several seconds, deciding she had to trust someone. “Marcy Taggart. I believe the girl you know as Audrey is really my daughter, Devon.”

Liam’s eyes revealed a long list of questions, none of which he voiced. Instead he removed a pen from the pocket of his white shirt and slid it across the table. “Write your cell phone number on that napkin.”

Marcy started to print her number along the surface of the small paper napkin, then stopped. “Oh, God, I can’t. I threw it away.”

“You threw away your phone?”

“I threw it in the river.”

“Why on earth would you do that?”

“It’s …”

“Complicated,” Liam said, finishing for her. “Figured as much. So, just how do you propose I get in touch with you?”

“I’m staying at the Doyle Cork Inn over on Western Road,” Marcy told him.

Liam nodded, retrieving his pen and scribbling his own number across the top of the napkin. “Suppose you check in with me periodically. That might be easier.”

Marcy almost burst into tears. “That’s really very kind of you.”

“Sometimes we have to rely on the kindness of strangers,” he said with a twinkle in his deep green eyes.

Marcy recognized the familiar quote from Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
. She lifted her mug into the air, clicked it against his. “To the kindness of strangers.”

Liam’s smile was unexpectedly shy. “To finding your daughter,” he said.

I
T ALWAYS STARTED THE
same way.

With soft words and a seemingly simple request.

“Darling, come lie beside me for a minute,” her mother might say, welcoming Marcy into her bed, although it was almost noon. “I know you’re just a little girl, but you’re so wise and thoughtful. You understand so many things. Do you think you could help me out with a little problem I’m having?” Or “Sweetheart, you know how much I value your opinion. Come sit on the bed and tell me which dress you think I should wear for the party tonight—the red one or the blue?” Or “Marcy, my sweet angel. I know you’re much too young to be thinking about boys, but I need your advice about what to do with your father.”

Marcy turned over in her too-soft double bed in her room at the Doyle Cork Inn, wrapping the lumpy foam pillow around her
ears to keep from hearing the exchange of dialogue that inevitably followed. But it was too late. Her mother was already beside her, whispering in her ear, asking for help she didn’t want, opinions she quickly discounted, and advice she never took.

“I think you should wear the red one,” Marcy might have answered, sitting on the end of her mother’s bed and watching her mother rifle impatiently through her closet, dragging clothes off their hangers and tossing them unceremoniously to the pearl-gray broadloom at her feet.

“You really think the red is better, darling? Why is that? Do you think I look better in bright colors? Does the blue dress wash me out? Does it make me look fat?”

“You could never look fat.”

The sudden threat of tears. “Do you think I’ve put on weight? Is that it?”

“No, I—”

“My clothes have been feeling a little tight lately, although you know, I think it’s all the manufacturers’ fault with their ridiculously inconsistent labeling. I mean, you buy the same size you always buy, and suddenly it doesn’t fit, and I’m wondering if it’s some sort of conspiracy, a conspiracy to confuse women, make them feel vulnerable and helpless, because you can never rely on sizes anymore. You have to try absolutely everything on. Which is very time-consuming and unnecessary. You shouldn’t have to try everything on. It shouldn’t be that way. You should be able to go into a store and pick out a pair of pants, for example, say you want a pair of pants, and you’ve always worn a size six or maybe an eight, there’s nothing wrong about being a size eight or a ten or even a twelve or a fourteen or a sixteen. There’s nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong is that the manufacturers are deliberately confusing women, they’re playing games with our heads, mind
games, and they’re making us feel insecure about our bodies, making us feel fat when we’re the same size we’ve always been. We’re not fat at all. Do you think I look fat?”

“I think you look beaut—”

“I worry about Judith. She looks as if she’s put on a few pounds. She has great legs but she has a tendency to put on weight.”

“No, she—”

“I’m sure she’s put on a few pounds. Around the hips and thighs. And you can’t dismiss it as being baby fat anymore. Not when you’re almost fourteen. You’re not doing her any favors by telling her she’ll outgrow it. You have to tell her the truth. I told her that unfortunately she has the same body type as her grandmother, your father’s mother, not
my
mother, my mother was always very slim and elegant, but the women in Daddy’s family have all tended to pack on the pounds, especially around the hips, and Judith takes after them, poor thing, so she has to be especially vigilant, she can’t afford to get lazy, because society is very cruel to women who don’t take care of themselves. You always have to look your best. Designers don’t make clothes for fat people, I told her. And it’s not easy because the manufacturers are conspiring to confuse women, and it’s not fair. It’s just not fair.” The threat of tears became a reality. Her mother began pacing back and forth in front of Marcy.

“Mom, what is it? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

“I’m crying because it’s so sad. The world is such a cruel place. And sometimes I feel such despair. For you. For Judith. For all of us.” She slammed the closet door shut, then immediately opened it again, then closed it, then opened it.

“I’m going to get Daddy.”

“No. Don’t do that.”

“But I’m scared. You’re scaring me.”

“Oh, sweetheart. There’s nothing to be scared about. Everything’s going to be just fine. I heard the most wonderful thing on TV last night. This doctor was on the news and he predicted they’re
this
close to discovering a cure for cancer. And you’ll see. It’ll happen in your lifetime. Probably not in mine. But for sure in yours. People will live much longer than they do today. You could actually live to be two hundred years old, maybe even forever. It’s not impossible. And you’re such a sweet girl, Marcy. So lovely and sweet. You deserve to live forever. If only we could do something about your hair. So much hair for such a tiny face.”

Marcy pushed the hair away from her forehead, sitting up in her bed at the Doyle Cork Inn, staring at the clock radio on the tiny nightstand beside her, trying not to see her mother’s pained expression. Almost four a.m. Still another few hours before it got light. She flopped back down, flipped from one side to the other, then back again, hearing echoes of her mother’s closet door as it opened and closed, opened and closed.

“I’ve made such a mess of things,” her mother was saying, sobbing uncontrollably now. “I’ve let everybody down.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have. Look at me. What have I accomplished? Nothing. I have nothing.”

“You have Daddy. You have me and Judith.”

Her mother stared at her as if she could see right through her, as if she didn’t exist. “I had to have a Caesarian section with Judith,” she said. “Did I ever tell you about that?” She continued, not waiting for a reply. “It was horrible. They gave me this horrible, big needle—they insert it right into your spine—and it’s supposed to freeze you from the waist down, except they gave me too much and it froze me right up to my chest, and it felt as if I couldn’t breathe, and I was crying, telling them I couldn’t breathe, but the doctors insisted I was breathing just
fine, even though it felt like I was dying. Can you understand? I thought I was dying. And I was so scared. I was so scared,” she repeated, her shoulders shaking with the ferocity of her sobs.

And then she suddenly dropped to the floor, curled into a tight fetal ball, and fell fast asleep.

She slept for the rest of the day, and the next morning she was gone.

“Where’s Mom?” Marcy remembered asking when she came downstairs for breakfast.

Judith shrugged, cutting the omelet their father had made her into tiny pieces, then lifting a forkful of the eggs to her mouth and returning it to her plate untouched. “Away.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Where she usually goes,” Judith replied.

Which meant nobody knew. Periodically, their mother simply disappeared. Usually for a period of several weeks. Sometimes less, occasionally more. Nobody ever knew where she went. Their father had stopped trying to find her after the first few times, stopped reporting her disappearances to the police, stopped hiring detectives to find her, stopped searching through homeless shelters and checking the dirty and raggedly dressed bodies asleep on downtown sewer grates. Once, when Marcy was in her teens and out with a group of friends from school, she thought she saw her mother rifling through a garbage bin outside a store window, but she turned away before she could be sure and quickly ushered her friends to another location.

Her father had tried to explain, using the accepted parlance of the day. “Your mother is manic-depressive. There’s nothing to worry about. She’s not going to die. She’s not dangerous. She just gets very excited and then she gets very depressed. But as long as she takes her medication, she’ll be able to function just fine.”

Except she hated her medication. It made her feel as if she were, in her words, “trying to do the butterfly stroke in a vat of molasses.” And so she’d stop taking it. And then the cycle would begin again: the wild mood swings, the talking too fast and interrupting too much, the unrelenting intensity that accompanied even the most mundane of acts, the hysterical fits of laughter, the terrifying crying jags, the sudden falling asleep, the eventual disappearing act.

It didn’t take Marcy long to learn the signs. She got very good at predicting when her mother was about to take off. “It’s happening again,” she’d say to Judith. Invariably she was right.

Except once.

“Okay, enough of that,” Marcy said, pushing herself out of her too-soft bed and flipping on the overhead light. She should have brought a book with her, she thought. Who goes on holiday and doesn’t take a book? Something—anything—to keep her mind occupied, to keep the ghosts of the past at bay. She’d buy one as soon as the stores opened. Along with a new cell phone, she decided, walking to the window and staring through the dusty lace curtains at the closed blinds of the room across the way. She was still standing there, still staring, when the night sky began to brighten and the bells of St. Anne’s Shandon Church announced the start of a new day.

AS SOON AS
the stores opened, Marcy purchased a new cell phone and called Liam.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, hearing the sleep still clinging to his voice. What was the matter with her? Why had she called him so early? Why had she called him at all, for God’s sake? He’d said to check in periodically, not first thing the next morning. So what was she doing? Just because he’d sat with
her for the better part of twenty minutes yesterday afternoon didn’t mean he was truly interested in her problems. A natural flirt, he’d only been humoring her with his attention. He didn’t really care about her or her daughter. He just felt sorry for her. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said.