Now You See Her

EIGHT


IT 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.

“Has something happened? Have you found Audrey?”

“No. I … I … bought a cell phone,” she blurted out, quickly rattling off her number. “I’m so sorry for disturbing you. I just thought this way you could call me—”

“The instant I see her,” Liam said, finishing the sentence for her. “Promise,” he added, as if understanding Marcy’s need for reassurance. “So what are the plans for the day?”

Marcy told him about her intention to check out the university.

“Good luck,” he said, hanging up before she could apologize again.

I’ll need it, Marcy thought, dropping the phone into her purse and setting out for the university campus.


ACCORDING TO THE brochure the Visitors’ Centre provided, University College Cork was established in 1845 and was currently one of Ireland’s leading research institutes. Located on a hill overlooking the valley of the river Lee, the campus was a pleasing blend of the old and the new, an attractive quadrangle of colorful gardens and wooded grounds interspersed with old, Gothic-revival-style buildings and modern concrete-and-glass structures. More than seventeen thousand students attended the four main colleges: one college for arts, Celtic studies, and social science; one for business and law; one for medicine and health; and one for engineering, science, and food science. The university was also home to the Irish Institute of Chinese studies, which Marcy decided probably explained the high number of Asian students she’d been seeing since setting foot on campus.

Knowing it was highly unlikely that Devon would have enrolled in anything to do with medicine, business, engineering, or law, Marcy decided to concentrate on the arts. Her daughter had always been drawn to drama. From the time she was a little girl, her dream had been to become an actress. As a teenager, she’d spoken often of going to Hollywood. Marcy had tried to dissuade her. “It’s a lifetime of rejection,” she’d said.

She should have been more supportive, Marcy thought now, marching along the brick and concrete pedestrian road that ran through the campus, glancing at the clusters of students dotting the white concrete benches that lined the path. Would it have killed her to be more encouraging?

“Why do you always have to be so negative?” she could hear Devon demand.

“I’m just trying to protect you.”

“I don’t need your protection. I need your support.”

“Excuse me,” Marcy said now, stilling Devon’s angry voice with her own and showing her photograph to a group of young women who were walking by. “Do any of you recognize this girl?”

The three girls took turns looking at the picture. “No,” the first one said, her two friends nodding in quick agreement.

“Don’t know her,” they said, almost in unison.

“Thank you. Excuse me.” Marcy continued in the next breath, quickly approaching a young man balancing an armload of books. “Have you seen this girl? Her name is Devon.…”

“No, sorry.”

“You may know her as Audrey.”

“Sorry, no.”

It was the same with everyone she asked.

“Sorry. Can’t help you.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Don’t know her.”

“No, sorry.”

Marcy occasionally pressed. “Could you look at the picture again? Maybe you took an English class together?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Couldn’t say.”

“No, sorry.”

“Have you tried the registrar’s office?” someone suggested.

Moments later Marcy was in the office of the registrar. “She doesn’t look at all familiar?” she asked the woman behind the reception desk.

“No, I can’t say I recognize this one. You’re sure she’s a student here?”

Marcy admitted she was sure of no such thing.

The woman typed something into her computer. “Audrey, you said her name was?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Last name?”

Marcy hesitated. Which name would her daughter use? “I don’t know.”

The woman shook her head, her eyes seemingly focused on a spot to the left of Marcy’s nose. “I’m afraid I can’t help you without a last name.”

“Try Taggart.” Marcy spelled it. “And if there’s no Audrey Taggart, try Devon.”

“Audrey and Devon Taggart.” The woman sighed as she typed in both names. “No, nothing for either of them. Sorry. Have you inquired at the other colleges?”

By four o’clock, Marcy had tried virtually every department on campus. She’d popped her head into every office and classroom, visited every gallery, walked down every hall, investigated every nook and cranny of every building, peeked behind every tree, asked every student she was able to corral to look at the photograph. “You already asked me,” one muttered, sidestepping her as if she were a panhandler.

Marcy was just exiting the campus when she saw her.

The girl was standing on the footbridge separating Bachelor’s Quay from North Mall, staring down at the water below, seemingly lost in thought. A breeze was blowing her long hair into her face, and every few seconds her hand reached up to push the pesky strands away from her mouth.

“Devon!” Marcy cried out, her voice disappearing under the wheels of a passing car. She began running up the street toward the bridge, each step bringing her closer to the daughter she feared she’d lost forever. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Please let her be happy to see me, she prayed as she ran. Please let her not be angry. Please let me hold her in my arms again.

Which was when she heard the shouting and turned to see the bicycle coming out of nowhere, a look of horror on the cyclist’s face as he tried to avoid crashing into her. But he was traveling too fast and her reflexes were too slow, and his front wheel caught the back of her legs, spinning her around and lifting her off her feet.

In the next second, Marcy was sprawled across the pavement like a rag doll, a small crowd gathering around her. “Are you all right?” someone was asking. “Is anything broken?” “Can you stand up?”

Marcy felt hands underneath her arms, dragging her to her feet, returning her to an upright position. “I’m fine,” she said, barely recognizing her own voice. What the hell had just happened?

“You’re sure? Do you need to go to the hospital?” a young man asked, pushing his way to the front of the crowd.

“I don’t need a hospital.” What I need is to find my daughter, Marcy thought, recovering her equilibrium and deducing from the boy’s ashen complexion that he was the one who’d run her down. She looked frantically toward the footbridge, but she couldn’t see over the heads of those who’d stopped to help her. “Please. I have to go.”

“No,” the young man insisted, his strong hand on her arm preventing her from going anywhere. “You shouldn’t move for a few minutes. You could have a concussion.”

“I didn’t hit my head. I don’t have a concussion. Please, if you could all just get out of my way …”

“You heard the lady,” the young man snapped at the small crowd. “Back off. She needs some air.” The people immediately began dispersing until only Marcy and the young man remained. “I’m so sorry,” he was saying, curly brown hair framing a face that was more rugged than handsome, small dark eyes skipping nervously across her features, as if checking for signs she was about to collapse.

He looked to be in his twenties, Marcy thought, her eyes straining past his head toward the footbridge. The same age as Devon. “It’s okay,” she said, her voice flat. “It was an accident.”

“I was just goin’ along, mindin’ me own business, not payin’ enough attention, I guess, and suddenly there you were,” the boy elaborated in a strong Irish brogue. “I tried turnin’ the wheel—”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Marcy assured him, her brain absorbing what her eyes already knew: that Devon was no longer standing on the bridge, staring absently at the water below, a breeze blowing wayward wisps of hair into her sad face.

Her daughter was gone.

She’d lost her again.