Now You See Her

FIFTEEN


WHAT HAPPENED?” HE ASKED, his eyes darting from her black eye and bruised cheek to the tops of her scuffed shoes and then back again. “Are you all right?”

“Vic! What are you doing here?”

A sheepish grin crept onto his sweet mouth. “You left without saying good-bye.”

“What?” Was he serious? What was he saying?

“I was worried about you. The way you just took off …” He paused, took a long, deep breath. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“Then they told me you’d been in a fight—”

“Who told you? I don’t understand. What are you doing here?” Marcy asked again.

“I stopped by Grogan’s House. The waitress told me what happ—” He looked around. Officers Sweeny and Donnelly were listening to their exchange from the open doorway. “Look, why don’t we go somewhere more private?”

Marcy wasn’t sure this was such a great idea in light of what had happened the last time they’d gone somewhere more private. Still she allowed him to lead her by the elbow out of the station and onto the busy South Mall.

“Take care,” Colleen Donnelly called after her.

“Did they hurt you?” Vic was asking. “Because if they laid a hand on you, we can contact the American embassy—”

“I’m Canadian,” Marcy said, reminding him. “And no, the police were really very kind. I don’t understand. What are you doing here?” she asked a third time, stopping in the middle of the busy street. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Italy?”

“I decided Italy could wait a few more days.”

“But why?”

A flush of embarrassment stained Vic’s cheeks, visible even in the growing darkness of the early evening. “I would have thought that was pretty obvious.”

What was he saying? “I’ve never been very good with the obvious,” Marcy admitted as pedestrians surged by them on both sides. “I’m afraid you’ll have to spell it out.”

Vic took a quick glance over both shoulders. “Look. Why don’t we go grab a beer or get something to eat? It’s almost six o’clock.”

As if on cue, the bells of St. Anne’s Shandon Church began ringing out the hours.

“I’m really awfully tired,” Marcy said. “It’s been one hell of a day.”

“Where are you staying?”

Should I tell him? Marcy wondered. Vic Sorvino was a thoughtful, decent guy who’d been nothing but nice to her. So why was she hesitating? She tried not to recall the tenderness of his touch, the way his hands had gently caressed her body. Yes, they’d been good together. Maybe even great. Still, a one-night stand was a one-night stand. What was he doing still hanging around? “At a little bed and breakfast over on Western Road,” she told him.

“Lead the way.”


SHE WAS FIFTEEN years old the day she walked into her parents’ bedroom and found the now-familiar scene of her mother standing naked in the middle of the room, the contents of her closets strewn across her bed, the drawers of her dresser open and empty, dozens of delicate lace bras and panties thrown on the carpet like so much debris. Every necklace she owned appeared to be hanging from the wrists of her outstretched hands. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying.

“What are you doing?” Marcy asked, although she knew the answer well enough to mouth the response along with her mother.

“I have nothing to wear.”

Marcy shrugged and turned away. So it was starting again, she thought, her stomach twisting into a series of tight little knots. Why had she come up here? She could have simply eaten her breakfast and left for school with nothing more than a casual shout of good-bye up the stairs, as Judith had done, as her sister did every morning. No way Judith was ever going to find herself in this position—standing in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, her mother naked in front of her, at least a dozen beaded necklaces dangling from her arms like tinsel on a dried-out Christmas tree.

It had been almost a year since the last occurrence, a year in which her mother had dutifully followed her doctor’s orders and stayed on her medication, a year without major incident, a year of relative calm. A year in which Marcy had allowed herself to be lulled into a false sense of security. A year in which she’d permitted herself the fantasy that they were a normal family, that they could actually be happy, that she might be able to relax her guard.

Which was all it took for everything to go to rat shit, she realized when she saw her mother standing naked in the middle of the room—one moment when you weren’t looking.

“Maybe you could help me, darling,” her mother was saying, several long beaded necklaces falling from her wrist to the floor as she beckoned Marcy forward. The necklaces slithered across the carpet and came to rest at Marcy’s feet, where they coiled in on themselves like brightly colored snakes.

Venomous snakes, Marcy thought, taking a step back. “I’ll be late for school.”

“This will only take a minute.”

“You should get dressed.” Marcy stared just past her mother at the orange-and-black Calder lithograph on the far wall. It embarrassed her to see her mother in the nude, her once slender body now flaccid and lined with unflattering veins. “You’ll catch cold.”

Her mother laughed, incongruous tears streaming down her face. “You don’t catch cold from being naked, silly girl. You catch cold from a virus. Everybody knows that.”

“I have to go.”

“No. Please don’t leave me.”

“I’ll call Dad.”

“No, you can’t do that. He’s in court all day today. A very important case. We can’t disturb him.”

“Then I’ll call your doctor.”

“He’s on holiday.” A note of triumph crept into her mother’s voice, as if she’d been planning this for some time.

Marcy crossed the room toward the en suite bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet above the sink, and began rifling through the various creams and lotions for her mother’s medication. “Where are your pills, Mom?”

“Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I flushed them down the toilet.” Again, that disturbing note of triumph.

“Please tell me you’re joking,” Marcy said, lifting the cover off the toilet and staring into the empty bowl. The joke’s on me, she thought.

“I stopped taking them weeks ago. I don’t need them anymore, darling. They were just making me sick.”

“They were making you well.”

“Then I’d rather be sick,” her mother said stubbornly.

“I have to go.” Marcy walked briskly out of the bathroom, heading for the door. “I’m going to be late.”

Her mother’s hand on her arm stopped her. Another necklace rolled off her wrist and dropped to the floor, coming apart on impact, its delicate orange beads scattering in all directions. “Why don’t you wear any makeup, sweetheart? A little blush or mascara would do wonders for you, take some of the emphasis away from your hair.”

In response, Marcy grabbed a pair of shapeless gray sweatpants from the bed and thrust them against her mother’s chest. “Get dressed, Mom.”

“Please, won’t you stay with me a little longer?”

“I can’t. I’ll see you later.”

“There’s so much cruelty in the world,” her mother said, triggering the start of another crying jag. “All those poor abused children and animals, all those people dying in poverty.” She sank to the floor. “Sometimes I feel such despair.”

I don’t have the patience for your despair, Marcy thought. “I have to go. I have a French test first period.”

“Then you should run along,” her mother said, abruptly shifting gears, both hands waving Marcy out of the room. The remaining necklaces hanging from her wrists tumbled to the floor.

Marcy turned and fled the room.

“Good luck on your test,” her mother called after her.

“You just left her like that?” Judith demanded when they passed each other in the school corridor later that morning.

“What was I supposed to do? I didn’t see you sticking around.”

“Whatever. Did you call Dad?”

“He was in court. I left him a message.”

“She’ll be all right,” Judith said. “She always is.”

“Yeah,” Marcy agreed, thinking that maybe at lunch she’d go home to make sure.

Except that when it came time for lunch, she chose to go out with a bunch of friends to a nearby greasy spoon instead. If the experience of the past fifteen years had taught her anything, she reasoned, it was that nothing she could do would make any difference. Her mother would spend the next few weeks in a progressive downward spiral of crying jags and incoherent babbling, and then she’d likely disappear for a few days, maybe even weeks, living on the streets and sifting through garbage bins until somebody recognized her and brought her home.

And then the cycle would start all over again.

Except it didn’t.

At two o’clock that afternoon she and Judith were summoned into the principal’s office, where two uniformed officers were waiting to inform them that their mother had committed suicide by jumping off the roof of a ten-story office building near the busy intersection of Yonge and St. Clair.

“Don’t feel guilty,” Judith told her as they waited for their father to pick them up from school and take them home.

Marcy nodded. She didn’t feel guilty about her mother’s death. She felt relieved.

And for that, she’d felt guilty ever since.


“MARCY?” VIC CALLED softly from the bed. “What are you doing?”

Good question, Marcy thought, turning from the window where she’d been staring out at the closed curtains of the upstairs window of the bed and breakfast next door, trying to make sense of everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Hell, why stop there? she wondered. How about the last twenty-four years? The last fifty? When had her life ever made any kind of sense? “What time is it?” she asked, wrapping her pink cotton bathrobe tighter around her. What was Vic Sorvino doing in her bed? How the hell had she let this happen? Again. What was the matter with her? Yes, he was an attractive man, and yes, he made her feel wanted and desirable and even beautiful. But she was hardly a teenager, for God’s sake, easily seduced by a few well-chosen words. Had she no self-control whatsoever?

Vic reached for his watch on the tiny nightstand beside the bed. “A little after nine,” he said, laying the watch back down and sitting up, the sheet falling across his naked torso. “You hungry?”

Marcy shook her head no. “You?”

“Not really. How’s the cheek?”

“Okay.”

“Think that eye could use some more ice?”

“No. I hear the raccoon look is very big for fall.”

Vic chuckled, patted the space beside him. “Come back to bed.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.” Marcy shrugged. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.” How did this happen? she wanted to shout. How did you end up in my bed?

Except she already knew the answer. This was all her doing. They’d barely made it up the stairs before her lips were reaching hungrily for his. She was tearing at his shirt before she’d even closed the door to her room. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“There’s absolutely nothing the matter with you,” Vic said.

“I practically attacked you, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t recall any protests on my part.”

“I normally don’t act that way.” She laughed. “Except, of course, for the last time we were together.”

“And you asked me what I’m doing here?” he said, sardonically.

“What are you doing here, Vic?”

The air turned suddenly serious. “I told you. I was worried about you.”

“Don’t be.”

“Can’t help it. It seems I’ve grown quite attached.”

“That’s probably not a very good idea.”

“On the contrary, I think it’s the best idea I’ve had in years.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated, shaking his head. “I’m not sure I can answer that. I don’t know. Maybe I sense a kindred soul.”

“Or maybe you just feel sorry for me.”

“I feel many things for you,” he shot back quickly. “Sorry isn’t one of them.”

Marcy smiled in spite of her attempt not to.

“Come back to bed,” he said again.

What the hell? Marcy thought. Why not? It wasn’t as if she had anything better to do. It was after nine, it was dark, everything hurt, she had a black eye and a sore cheek, and the odds of her finding Devon if she went out again tonight were almost nil. Plus she was exhausted. She lay down on the bed, Vic’s arms immediately encircling her, his body fitting neatly around hers, as if it belonged there.

“We can go out again, if you’d like. Make the rounds of all the pubs,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Maybe we’ll see her.”

Marcy shook her head, feeling Vic’s breath warm against the back of her neck. “We won’t see her.”

“We might.”

“No. She knows I’m here. She doesn’t want me to find her.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I don’t know much, that’s for sure.”

“Tell me what kind of trouble she was in,” Vic said.

“What?”

“You told me in Dublin that Devon was in some sort of trouble.”

“Yes,” Marcy said. Had she told him that?

“With the police?”

“She’d gotten mixed up with some guy who was into cocaine, which of course was the last thing Devon needed. It just made her more depressed.”

“What happened?”

“They went to a party one night. It got kind of loud. A neighbor called the police. They found drugs. Devon was charged along with everyone else. Our lawyer scheduled a meeting with the Crown attorney. He thought that because of Devon’s condition, we might be able to persuade him to drop the charges if she’d agree to get help.”

“And?”

“The weekend before that meeting was supposed to take place, Devon went up to our cottage.” Marcy’s voice caught in her throat. “She never came back.”

“You’ll find her, Marcy. You’ll bring her home.”

There was a long silence. “What if it’s not her?” Marcy asked, the question she hadn’t permitted herself even to contemplate until now. “What if Peter and Judith and the police are right? I only saw her for half a second through a window that was covered with beer ads. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe she wasn’t the girl I saw standing on the bridge. Maybe I’m as crazy as everyone thinks I am.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“You married your realtor,” Marcy reminded him.

Vic laughed. “I guess sometimes we just want so badly to stop hurting, we do crazy things.”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’d like to be here when you find out.”

Marcy flipped over onto her back, her eyes seeking his. “You really are the nicest man,” she said as she reached for him again.


SHE AWOKE TO the sound of bells ringing.

Except they weren’t bells, she realized, sitting up and looking toward her purse on the floor next to the bed. The ringing was coming from inside her bag. It was her phone.

Careful not to disturb the man still sleeping beside her, Marcy grabbed her purse, taking it with her into the bathroom and closing the door behind her, perching on the side of the tub, feeling the enamel cold against her bare skin. “Hello?” she whispered.

“I think I might have found her,” Liam said without further preamble.

“What?” Was she dreaming? “How?”

“Well, I’ve been asking around, as you know, and it looks like it’s finally paid off. I just got a call from an acquaintance of mine. He says that a girl matching your daughter’s description recently rented a small house just down the way from his ex-wife. He saw her yesterday when he went to visit his kids.”

“There are a lot of girls matching my daughter’s description,” Marcy told him.

“This one’s named Audrey.”

Marcy gasped, quickly covering her mouth with her hand and trying to contain her budding excitement. “Where is she?”

“A tiny village very close to here, called Youghal.”

“Yawl?” Marcy repeated, pronouncing it as he had.

“I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes,” he said.