One by one, the people explained how they had arrived here. It was an emotional experience. Some had been here only a few years, others more than a decade, yet the realization of never returning home was still raw. There were tears from many but, as usual, none from me. It was as though by the time my tears worked their way from my heart to my eyes, they had evaporated and drifted into the air as sad vapors instead. I was fascinated to hear what had happened after they left the scenes that I had examined so many times and arrived here. It was all so simple. I had followed unnecessary routes, suspected all the wrong people, scrutinized every single inch of the road they were last seen on. It was pointless because all they did was wander off here.
While it was painful for the missing, knowing that they wouldn’t be returning home, it was a lot better than the alternative. I wished Jenny-May Butler was here, I wished Donal Ruttle was here, I wished the others on my list and the thousands of others that go missing every year were here. I prayed that harm hadn’t come to Jenny-May. I prayed that, if it had, it had been quick and painless. But mostly I prayed that she was here.
I was captivated as I watched all of these people. I was a stranger to them but they were best friends to me. I had so many stories of theirs I wanted to tell them, that I knew and understood and had laughed at and could identify with. There were so many people they knew whom I wanted to tell them I’d met and laughed with. There were situations that I knew they’d been in that I wanted to tell them I shared. The complete opposite to how I was in life. I wanted to join in, swap stories, and belong.
There was a silence and I realized all eyes were on me.
“Well?” Helena asked, adjusting her lemon pashmina around her shoulders.
“Well, what?” I asked, looking around in confusion.
“Aren’t you going to tell us your story of arriving here?”
I felt like telling them I’d been here long before them all. But I didn’t. Instead I politely excused myself from the hall.
Later that night, I sat in the eatery at a quiet table with Helena and Joseph. Candles flickered on every table, birds-of-paradise sat in small tin buckets in the center. We had just finished an appetizer of wild mushroom soup and piping hot brown bread, and I sat back in my chair, already full, and awaited my main course. The eatery was quiet on this Wednesday night, people choosing to go to bed before their early starts at work the next day. Each of the people taking part in the production had been granted time off from their work, their involvement in the arts seen to be enough. We were to spend all day, every day, rehearsing in order to meet the deadline of next Sunday, when Helena had already assured the cast and community the dress rehearsal would be. This was a task that seemed highly ambitious and entirely unrealistic in my eyes, yet Helena assured me that people here threw themselves into their work and were highly productive. But what did I know?
I looked at my wrist for the millionth time since I’d lost my watch, and sighed with frustration.
“I have to find my watch.”
“Don’t worry.” Helena smiled. “It’s not like being at home, Sandy; things don’t just go missing.”
“I know, I know, you keep telling me that, but if that’s so, well, then where is it?”
“Wherever you dropped it.” She laughed, and shook her head at me like I was a child.
Joseph, I noticed, didn’t smile but changed the subject altogether. “What kind of play will you do?” he asked in his deep soothing tones.
I laughed. “We have no idea. Helena managed to steer the conversation away from talk of what the actual play would be every time someone asked. I don’t mean to rain on your parade but I think a week is an entirely implausible amount of time to rehearse and perfect a play.”
“It will be a short one,” Helena said defensively.
“What about scripts and costumes and whatever else is needed?” I asked, suddenly realizing the extent of what we would have to do.
“Don’t worry about all of that, Sandy.” She turned to Joseph. “There’s the belief at home that old theaters are haunted because costumes and makeup are always reported or rumored to go missing. Well, it’s true, they do go missing but it’s not due to ghosts, not of the pilfering kind, anyway, because the finest costumes show up here daily. Bobby will have everything we need,” she said calmly.
“She has thought this all through.” Joseph smiled affectionately at his wife.
“Oh, the thinking is all finished, dear. It has already been decided. We are going to stage The Wizard of Oz,” Helena said grandly and proudly, swirling her red wine and taking a sip.
I started laughing.
“Why is it funny?” Joseph asked, amused.
“It’s The Wizard of Oz,” I stressed. “It’s not a play, it’s a musical! It’s what children do in school shows. I thought you’d come up with something a bit more cultured, like a Beckett play or O’Casey,” I argued. “But The Wizard of Oz…?” I wrinkled my nose.
“My, my, I think we have a snob on our hands.” Helena tried not to smile.
“I’m not aware of this Wizard of Oz.” Joseph looked confused.
I gasped. “Neglected child.”
“It’s not something that was shown all the time in Watamu,” Helena reminded me. “And if you hadn’t left rehearsals so early today, Sandy, you would have learned that we are not doing a musical version. It is an adaptation written many years ago by Dennis O’Shea, a fine Irish playwright who has been here for two years. He heard about what we were doing and brought it to me this morning. I thought it was perfect, and so it has already been cast and the first few scenes blocked. Mind you I had to tell them that it was you that had made the decision.”
“You cast them in The Wizard of Oz?” I said, totally unimpressed.
“What is it about?” Joseph asked, intrigued.
“Sandy, you do the honors,” Helena said.
“OK, well, it’s a children’s movie,” I stressed to Helena, “made in the thirties about a little girl called Dorothy Gale who is swept away in a cyclone to a magical land. Once there, she embarks on a quest to see the wizard, who can help her return home. It’s ridiculous to ask a group of adults to do it.” I laughed, but realized no one was laughing with me.
“And this wizard, does he help her?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, feeling it odd the story was being taken so seriously. “The wizard helps her and she learns that she could have returned home the whole time. All she had to do was tap her ruby heels together and say ‘There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.’”
He still didn’t laugh. “So she returns home in the end?”
There was a silence and I finally understood why. I nodded slowly.
“And what does she do while she’s in this magical land?”
“She helps her friends,” I said quietly.
“It doesn’t seem such a silly story to me,” Joseph said seriously. “One the people here will very much like to see.”
I thought about that. In fact, I thought about it all night, until I was dreaming of ruby slippers and cyclones and of talking lions and houses that fell on witches, until the phrase “There’s no place like home” was echoing so loudly and continuously in my head that I woke up saying it aloud and I was afraid to go back to sleep.
28
I stared up at the ceiling, at the point right above my head where the white paint had bubbled and cracked over the wood. The moon was sitting perfectly framed in the window of the family room I was sleeping in. Blue light was cast through the glass, causing an exact reflection of its window squares to appear on the chunky wooden table. There was no moon in the window on the table, I noticed, just a ghostly reflection of pale blue.
I was wide awake now. I felt for my wrist to check the time and remembered again my watch was gone. My heart started to pound as it always did when something of mine was missing; I would immediately become restless and ache to start looking. My hunts were like an addiction, the pre-search feeling like a craving. A part of me was possessed and became obsessed with not resting until my belongings were found. There was very little anybody could do when I was in that mode; there was very little that could be said or done to cause me to screech in my tracks. The people with me always used to tell me it was lonely for them when I left them like that all of a sudden. Everybody I was with was always the victim; didn’t they know that it was lonely for me, too?