“How does it help you? Isn’t not getting the answers frustrating you even more?”
“Sometimes I find things, Mr. Burton. I find the things that have just been misplaced.”
“Isn’t everything that’s lost, misplaced?”
“To misplace something is to lose it temporarily by forgetting where you put it. I always remember where I put things. It’s the things that I don’t misplace that I try to find-the things that grow legs and walk away all by themselves-that annoy me.”
“Do you think it’s possible that somebody else, other than you, moves all these things?”
“Like who?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Well, in the case of the Scotch tape the answer is clearly no. In the case of the socks, unless somebody reaches into the washing machine and takes out my socks, then the answer is no. Mr. Burton, my parents want to help me. I don’t think that they would move things and then forget about it every single time. If anything, they are more aware of exactly where they put things.”
“So what is your assumption? Where do you think these things are?”
“Mr. Burton, if I had an assumption, then I wouldn’t be here.”
“You have no idea, then? Even in your wildest dreams, during your most frustrating times when you’re vigorously searching into the early hours of the morning and you still can’t find it, have you any opinion at all as to where you think the missing things are?”
Well, he’d clearly learned more about me from my parents than I thought, but having to answer this question truthfully, I feared, would mean he’d never fall in love with me. But I took a deep breath and told the truth anyway. “At times like that I’m convinced they are in a place where missing things go.”
He didn’t miss a beat. “Do you think Jenny-May is there? Does it make you feel better to think that she’s there?”
“Oh, God.” I rolled my eyes. “If someone killed her, Mr. Burton, they killed her. I’m not trying to create imaginary worlds to make myself feel better.”
He tried very hard not to move a muscle in his face.
“But whether she’s alive now or not, why haven’t the Gardaí been able to find her?”
“Would it make you feel better to just accept that sometimes there are mysteries?”
“You don’t accept that, why should I?”
“What makes you think I don’t?”
“You’re a counselor. You believe that every action has a reaction and all that kind of stuff, I read up on it before I came here. Everything that I do now is because of something that happened, something somebody said or did. You believe there are answers to everything and ways of solving everything.”
“That’s not necessarily true. I can’t fix everything, Sandy.”
“Can you fix me?”
“You’re not broken.”
“Is that your medical opinion?”
“I’m not a doctor.”
“Aren’t you a ‘doctor of the mind’?” I held up my fingers in quotation marks and rolled my eyes.
Silence.
“How do you feel when you are searching and searching but you still can’t find whatever it is that you’re looking for?”
I could tell this was the weirdest conversation he had ever had.
“Have you a girlfriend, Mr. Burton?”
His forehead creased. “ Sandy, I’m not sure that this is relevant.” When I didn’t answer, he sighed. “No, I don’t.”
“Do you want one?”
He was contemplative. “Are you saying that the feeling of searching for a missing sock is like searching for love?” He tried to ask the question without making me sound stupid but he failed miserably.
I rolled my eyes again. He was making me do that a lot. “No, it’s a feeling of knowing something is missing in your life but not being able to find it, no matter how hard you look.”
He cleared his throat awkwardly, picked up his pen and paper and pretended to write something.
Doodle time. “Boring you, am I?”
He laughed and it broke the tension.
I tried to explain again. “Perhaps it would have been easier if I said that not being able to find something is like suddenly not remembering the words to your favorite song that you knew by heart. It’s like suddenly forgetting the name of someone you know really well and see every day, or the name of a television show you watched for years. It’s something so frustrating that it plays on your mind over and over again because you know there’s an answer but no one can tell you it. It niggles and niggles at me and I can’t rest until I know the answers.”
“I understand,” he said softly.
“Well, then, multiply that feeling by one hundred.”
He was contemplative. “You’re mature for your age, Sandy.”
“Funny, because I was hoping you’d know an awful lot more for yours.”
He laughed until our time was up.
That night at dinner Dad asked me how it went.
“He couldn’t answer my questions,” I replied, slurping on my soup.
Dad looked like his heart was going to break. “So I suppose you don’t want to go back.”
“No!” I said quickly and my mum tried to hide her smile by taking a sip of water.
Dad looked back and forth from her face to mine questioningly.
“He has nice eyes,” I offered by way of explanation, slurping again.
His eyebrows rose and he looked to my mum, who had a grin from ear to ear and flushed cheeks. “That’s true, Harold. He has very nice eyes.”
“Ah, well then!” He threw his arms up. “If the man has nice eyes for Christ’s sake, who am I to argue?”
Later that night I lay on my bed and thought about my conversation with Mr. Burton. He may not have had answers for me but he sure cured me of searching for one thing.
11
I went to see Mr. Burton every week while I was at St. Mary’s Secondary School. We even met up during the summer months when the school remained open to the rest of the town for summer activities. The last time I went to see him was when I had just turned eighteen. I’d finished my leaving certificate the previous year and I’d found out that morning I’d been accepted into the Gardaí Síochana. I was due to move to Cork in a few months to train at Templemore.
“Hello, Mr. Burton,” I said as he entered the small office that hadn’t changed one bit since the first day we met. He was still young and handsome and I loved every inch of him.
“ Sandy, for the hundredth time, stop calling me Mr. Burton. You make me sound like an old man.”
“You are an old man,” I teased.
“Which makes you an old woman,” he said lightly, and a silence fell between us. “So”-he became businesslike-“what’s on your mind this week?”
“I got accepted into the Gardaí today.”
His eyes widened. Happiness? Sadness? “Wow, Sandy, congratulations. You did it!” He came over and gave me a hug. We held on a second longer than we should have.
“How do your mum and dad feel?”
“They don’t know yet.”
“They’ll be sad to see you go.”
“It’s for the best.” I looked away.
“You won’t leave all your problems behind in Leitrim, you know,” he said gently.
“No, but I’ll leave behind the people who know about them.”
“Do you plan on coming back to visit?”
I stared him directly in the eyes. Were we still talking about my parents? “As much as I can.”
“How much will that be?”
I shrugged.
“They have always supported you, Sandy.”
“I can’t be who they want me to be, Mr. Burton. I make them uncomfortable.”
He rolled his eyes at me calling him that, at my deliberate attempts to build a wall between us. “They just want you to be you, you know that. Don’t be ashamed of the way you are. They love you for who you are.”
The way he looked at me made me wonder again if we were talking about my parents at all. I looked around the room. He knew everything about me, absolutely everything, and I sensed everything about him. He was still single and living alone, despite every girl in Leitrim town chasing him. He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with life, but if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something, or someone, it was him.