Authors: Joy Fielding
“I don’t know. I was reaching for a bag of potato chips and I stopped to admire the flowers. You know how they say you have to stop and smell the roses? Even though these are tulips and they don’t smell. Only I knocked over the vase and I couldn’t
find the potato chips. Do you remember Vicki? Vicki Enquist? She’s really tall, almost six feet, her nose is a little crooked? She was like my best friend in the seventh grade, do you remember her?” she said, all in the same breath.
Marcy was about to answer that no, she had no memory of anyone named Vicki Enquist and could Devon please slow down, that she wasn’t making any sense, but her daughter had already moved on.
“Her mother was like this famous gardener or something. She had, like, her own TV show or something in Vancouver. Anyway, she was there tonight. Vicki, I mean, not her mother. At the party over at Ashleigh’s. And she looked so pretty,” Devon said, suddenly bursting into tears. “Her nose didn’t look too crooked at all. And I felt really bad about all the times we teased her. I was really mean to her, Mom.”
“Sweetheart, please. You’re scaring me. Why don’t we sit down?”
“I don’t want to sit down. I want to go dancing.” Devon pushed herself onto her toes and did a clumsy pirouette. “But everybody else just wants to sit around and get high,” she said, losing her balance and tumbling into her mother’s arms.
“Is that it?” Marcy asked, holding her daughter at arm’s length, forcing Devon’s eyes to hers. “Are you high, Devon? Have you been doing drugs?”
“I’m so thirsty,” Devon said, ignoring the question and extricating herself from Marcy’s grip.
“I’ll get you a glass of water.”
“There’s water on the floor,” Devon said, as if noticing it for the first time.
“I’ll clean it up in a minute.”
Devon suddenly sank to her knees, began moving the water and salt around the large sand-colored squares of the ceramic
tile floor with the palms of her hands, as if she were a child who’d just discovered the joys of finger-painting.
“Devon, please, sweetheart, be careful of the glass. No, don’t put that in your mouth. Please let me help you up.”
“I don’t want to get up.”
“You need to let me help you.” Marcy succeeded in dragging her daughter to her feet and sitting her down in one of the four kitchen chairs clustered around the large oval-shaped pine table. “I’ll get you some water. Please, baby. Tell me what you’ve taken.”
“I’m just so thirsty,” Devon said again. “Why am I so thirsty? Did I tell you that Bobby Saunders was at the party tonight? He’s like this big-shot hockey player or something. I think he plays with the Maple Leafs. All the girls are crazy about him, although personally I don’t think he’s all that hot. I think he looks kind of stupid. He has this big, goofy grin, and he’s missing a couple of teeth. Anyway, he was coming on to all the girls, saying things like, Are we going to have sex tonight?’ even though he supposedly has this gorgeous fiancée who’s some kind of supermodel. It was disgusting. Do you even know who I’m talking about? You don’t know anything about hockey. I bet Dad would know. Dad’s very into sports.” She started crying again.
Marcy’s hands were shaking as she went to the sink and poured a glass of water for Devon, letting the sound of the water gushing from the tap temporarily drown out Devon’s insane chatter.
“Devon,” she said, turning off the tap and swiveling toward her. Except that Devon was no longer sitting on the chair. She was curled up on the floor in a semi-fetal position, her knees pressed tight against her blue T-shirt, her face half-submerged in a mound of soggy salt, a large shard of glass pressed against her cheek, mere inches from her eye. “Devon?” Marcy said again, her voice lost between a cry and a whisper.
She collapsed to her knees beside her daughter. Immediately a piece of crystal pierced her skin and she cried out. It was then that she heard a faint sigh escape Devon’s parted lips and realized that her daughter had fallen asleep. Sound asleep, Marcy realized when she tried to rouse her.
She thought of waking Peter but decided against it. There was no reason for both of them to be up. It took her almost fifteen minutes to get Devon out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into her bedroom, another twenty to get her undressed and cleaned up, five more to maneuver her into bed, and then another fifteen to go back and clean up the mess in the kitchen. By the time Marcy returned to her room, she was bathed in sweat, and blood was dripping in a series of straggly lines from her knee to her ankle. She took a shower, applied a Band-Aid to her knee, and climbed back into bed.
“Can’t you stay still?” Peter muttered, flipping over onto his side.
“What are you doing sitting there?” Vic asked now, his eyes finding hers in the dark hotel room. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you crying?”
Marcy immediately swiped at the tears in the corners of her eyes. “No. Of course not. Well … maybe a little.”
Vic pushed himself onto his elbows, reached for her hand. “Are you sorry that we …?”
“What? Oh, no. No. Honestly. I promise that’s not it.”
“You were thinking about Devon,” he said, the name sounding comfortable, even familiar, on his tongue, almost as if he knew her.
“Yes.”
“Have you decided what you’re going to do?”
“No.”
“Would you like me to go with you?” he asked with a smile. The smile said,
Don’t even try to lie to me
. “I’m serious. I’d be happy to go back with you to Cork.”
It was certainly tempting, Marcy thought. It would be nice to have company. “No,” she said after a moment’s pause. It would only complicate things. “I think this is something I need to do alone.”
He nodded, as if he weren’t surprised. “Promise you’ll keep me posted.”
“I have your card,” she said.
“You’ll call the minute you find Devon?” Again the easy use of her daughter’s name. Had Marcy ever felt such ease where her daughter was concerned?
“You think I’ll find her?” Marcy was suddenly very much in need of his assurance.
“I know you will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know you.”
“But you
don’t
know me. Not really.”
“I know how determined you are, that you won’t give up until you find her.”
“I
will
find her,” Marcy said forcefully.
“Absolutely, you will. No question about it. And if at any point you change your mind about wanting me to join you, if you need some help, or if you just want someone to hold your hand or scratch your back …”
She smiled as his fingers moved up her arm to the base of her neck, disappearing into her mop of wayward curls. “Oh, God. I must look awful. My hair—”
“Is fabulous.”
She shook her head, the curls bouncing lazily across her forehead.
“Is it really possible you don’t know how beautiful you are?” Vic asked.
“My mother always used to say I had way too much hair,” Marcy told him.
“My mother used to say I’d be six feet tall if only I’d stand up straight.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your posture.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your hair.”
Marcy laughed. “Mothers,” she said.
“You said yours died when she was forty-six? That must have been very hard for you.”
“Actually,” Marcy admitted, “in some ways it was a relief.”
“Had she been sick for long?”
“As long as I can remember.”
Vic tilted his head to one side, his eyes asking her to continue.
“She threw herself off the roof of a ten-story building when I was fifteen years old,” Marcy said.
“My God, I’m so sorry.”
“Can you do me a favor?” Marcy asked, crawling back into bed and drawing the covers up to her chin.
“Anything.”
“Can you just hold me?”
She felt his arms immediately surround her, his breath warm on the back of her neck as she pressed her backside into the concave curve of his stomach. They lay that way until eventually she felt his grip on her loosen and his breathing drift into the slower rhythms of sleep. She lay there in the dark, absorbing the reassurance of his gentle snores, then she gently extricated herself from his arms, slipped quietly out of bed, got dressed, and tiptoed from the room.
F
IRST THING THE NEXT
morning, Marcy checked out of her hotel.
“I notice you have a number of messages you haven’t retrieved,” the clerk behind the reception desk told her as she was settling up her account.
“You can just erase them.”
“As you wish. If there’s anything else I can help you with …”
“You can get me a taxi, please.” Some time after she’d returned to her own room, Marcy had decided against renting a car—Lynette was right: She was unfamiliar with the roads; she wasn’t used to driving on the left side of the street; she really wouldn’t need a car once she arrived. Hadn’t her former tour guide expressly stated that Cork was a city best experienced on foot?
“You’ll be able to find one right outside the main entrance. Do you need help with your suitcase?”
“No. I can manage. Thank you.”
A line of taxis waited just outside the front door. Marcy approached several before she found one willing to make the drive all the way to Cork, and even then the driver insisted on being compensated for gas and a round-trip fare. “Fine,” Marcy said, climbing into the backseat. “Just get me there as fast as you can.” And in one piece, she added silently as the man threw the cab into gear and the small car all but bounced away from the curb.
Luckily the driver was possibly the only man in Ireland who showed absolutely no interest in carrying on a conversation. Nor did he feel any need to show off his knowledge of Irish history and folklore. Guess he never kissed the Blarney Stone, Marcy found herself thinking as she tried to get comfortable in the cramped backseat.
It took a long time to get out of the city. For a while the taxi was stuck behind two huge dump trucks—“the new national symbol of Dublin,” her guide had grunted yesterday when the bus found itself similarly trapped—each toting tons of sand and gravel. Construction was everywhere: New roads were being built, old ones widened; new apartment complexes, many of them tall, gray concrete boxes devoid of charm or character, were springing up all over the place; monstrous new homes were replacing charming old cottages. Marcy rolled down her window, then quickly rolled it back up again, the constant banging of jackhammers giving her an instant headache.
Things improved once they reached the main motorway, although only barely. Heavy traffic competed with a rapidly descending fog and patches of occasionally heavy rain to make driving conditions less than ideal. Marcy recalled having read
somewhere that Ireland was ranked the second-most dangerous country in Europe in which to drive. She couldn’t remember the first. “Are we almost there?” she asked after almost two hours had elapsed.
Are we there yet?
she heard Devon’s voice say, echoing her own.
“About another hour,” the driver replied from the front seat. “People always forget how to drive in the rain.”
“But it rains almost every day.”
“There you go,” he said, as if that answered everything. And maybe it did, Marcy thought, leaning her head back against the top of the seat and closing her eyes. “Where do you want me to drop you?” he asked in what seemed like the next breath.
“What?” Marcy snapped to attention, checking her watch to discover an hour had passed and she must have fallen asleep. She looked out the raindrop-splattered window to find the city of Cork.
“What hotel are you stayin’ in?” the cab driver asked, navigating his way slowly through the severe congestion into the flat of the city.
It suddenly occurred to Marcy that she had forgotten to make hotel reservations. She pictured Lynette shaking her head, silently berating her again for failing to think
in advance
. “I actually don’t have a room. Do you happen to know somewhere nice you could recommend?”
“Well, it’s not going to be easy to find a place. It’s the height of the tourist season after all, and Cork doesn’t have that many grand hotels.”
“It doesn’t have to be grand. In fact, I’d prefer somewhere simpler.” Simpler meant less chance of anyone finding her. She didn’t want Judith or Peter being able to track her down as easily as they had in Dublin. Nor did she want Vic Sorvino riding
in on his white horse to rescue her, appealing as that thought might be. Experience had taught her that she couldn’t depend on a man to save her. Nor should she. It wasn’t fair to either of them.
Marcy opened her side window, careful not to let the rain inside the car. The bells of St. Anne’s Shandon Church were sending the first eight notes of “Danny Boy” rippling down the hill and throughout the city. She smiled, a feeling of excitement filling her lungs. It didn’t matter where she stayed, she thought. As long as Devon was nearby, she’d sleep on the sidewalk if she had to.
“There’s Tynan’s over on Western,” the driver was saying. “It’s a bed and breakfast, and I hear it’s okay, although it might be pretty basic.”
“Basic is good.”
It was also fully booked. As were the next half-dozen B&Bs that sat cheek by jowl along Western Road. Good thing the rain finally stopped, Marcy thought as she dragged her suitcase up the front steps of the Doyle Cork Inn, one of the few B&Bs on the street she’d yet to try.
“Can I give you a hand with that?” a young man asked, appearing at her side to grab her suitcase. He was in his late teens, and his fair skin was scarred with the leftover remnants of a case of childhood chicken pox. There was one particularly large pockmark that sat right between his wide-set hazel eyes, like a bullet hole. A stray lock of reddish-blond hair curled into the center of his large forehead, and his mouth was filled to bursting with Chiclet-sized teeth.
A proper pair of braces would have fixed that
, she heard Peter say.
“Thank you, yes.” Marcy followed the young man inside to the check-in counter of the tiny lobby. “Do you have a room?”
“I believe we do, yes.”
“Thank God. I was beginning to give up hope.”