He sighed. “That’s it?”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s it? Just let people vanish? No more questions asked? Come and go as you please? Flutter in and out. Disappear, reappear, and disappear again? No problem!” He laughed angrily. “Nobody worry about a thing! Don’t bother caring about all the people at home that love you and that are worrying themselves sick to death about you.”
There was silence.
“You love Sandy?”
“What?” He screwed his face up.
“You said…Never mind.” She sipped her tea.
“I’ve only ever spoken to Sandy on the phone,” Jack said slowly. “There was no…relationship between us.”
“So by finding my daughter, you find your brother?” He didn’t have time to answer the question. “Do you think your brother’s hiding place is the same as Sandy’s?” she asked boldly.
And there it was. A complete stranger, someone who had met him no more than ten minutes before, had summed up the ridiculous notion behind his frantic search, in one question. Susan allowed a few moments to pass before offering, “I don’t know the circumstances of your brother’s disappearance, Jack, but I know he’s not in the same place as Sandy. Here’s another lesson,” she said softly, “a lesson Harold and I have learned over the years. No one ever finds the other sock in the washing machine, not through actively looking, anyway.” She waved her hand dismissively. “Things just turn up. You can drive yourself crazy trying to find them. It doesn’t matter how neat and tidy you keep your life, it doesn’t matter how organized things are.” She paused and laughed sadly. “I’m a hypocrite, I somehow pretend to myself that a tidy house will make Sandy come home more often. I think, if she can just see everything, if she can see that everything is in order and has its place, then she won’t have to worry about things going missing.” She looked around the spotless kitchen. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter how much, how often, or how closely you keep an eye on things because you can’t control it. Sometimes things and people just go.” She waved her hand through the air on the last word. “Just like that.” Then she placed the comforting hand over his. “Don’t destroy yourself trying to find out where.”
They said their good-byes at the door and Susan, trying to hide her embarrassment, said, “Talking about things turning up, if you do come across Sandy before we do, tell her I found her purple diary with the butterflies. It was in her old bedroom. Unusual, because I’ve cleaned out that wardrobe dozens of times but never came across it.” She frowned. “Anyway, it would be important for her to know.”
She looked up and waved again across the road and Jack turned to see a woman similar in age to Susan. “That’s Mrs. Butler,” she said, although it was of no importance to Jack. “Her daughter Jenny-May went missing when she was ten years old, the same age as Sandy. Such a lovely little girl, an angel, everyone said.”
Jack, suddenly interested, studied the woman some more. “Did they find her?”
“No,” Susan said sadly, “they never did, but she has left that porch light on every single night for twenty-four years hoping she’ll come home. She’ll barely go away on holiday, she’s so afraid she’ll miss her.”
Jack slowly walked back to his car, feeling odd, different, as though he had switched bodies with the man who had only an hour ago entered the Shortt household. He stopped walking, looked to the sky, and contemplated all that he had learned through meeting Sandy’s mother. He smiled. And he cried as relief washed over him like a waterfall raining down. Because for the first time in a year, he felt like he could finally stop.
And start living again.
42
Bobby was in no mood to discuss hearing his laughter enter this atmosphere the previous night, but he needn’t have spoken a word because it was clear that the air had been let out of his once ballooned spirit and all that was left was its deflated shell. It broke my heart to see him that way, to see a bird that had once soared now lie defeated on the ground, a broken wing stopping his flight. The few times I had attempted to raise the issue, the more still he lay wounded. There wasn’t a whimper, there wasn’t a tear; it was his silence that screamed the words he couldn’t or wouldn’t voice. It appeared he was going to concentrate on my problems until he felt fit to deal with his own. Not an altogether alien method of dealing with life, for me.
“Why do you always leave your bag by the door?” Bobby spoke for the first time as we entered his shop.
I looked to where Bobby was staring to see my bag, or dare I say, Barbara Langley’s bag, that had been quite absentmindedly placed beside the door. Like a cowboy in a western who parked his horse up by the saloon door, it was to enable a swift departure from any situation. To help ease the feelings of claustrophobia I would feel in the rooms and company of those I wasn’t altogether comfortable with, my parents included. Gregory included. My own home included. Rarely were there places I would keep my bag on my person. I would look to the door, see my bag, and feel secure knowing there was a way out, and there, as proof, were my belongings not far from that exit to freedom.
I shrugged. “Just habit.” How all of my life’s complications and complex idiosyncrasies could be reduced to a shrug and two words. How nothing words could be.
Bobby wasn’t in the mood to question me any further and we returned to the storeroom containing my boxes of belongings.
“So,” I said, breaking the silence as I looked to Bobby, who was staring as though lost, as though he had never before encountered this room. “What are we doing back here?” I asked.
“We’re going to empty your boxes.”
“Why?”
He didn’t respond, not because he was ignoring me but because I think he didn’t hear me. There was so much more for him to hear now. He began emptying the top box, placing Mr. Pobbs very carefully on the floor. He lined up each item in a row from wall to wall, then moved to the next box and did the same. I helped him though I didn’t understand why. After twenty minutes, my belongings from Here were lined neatly in six rows across the walnut floor. I looked down at each item and couldn’t help smiling. Each one, from the impersonal-the stapler-to the personal-Mr. Pobbs-all opened the doors to previously locked-away memories.
Bobby was looking at me.
“What?”
“Do you notice anything?”
I looked back to the floor, running my eyes along the rows. Mr. Pobbs, stapler, T-shirt, twenty odd socks, engraved pen, work file I got in trouble for losing…Was I missing the point? I turned to him questioningly.
“What about the passport,” he stated lifelessly.
I looked back to the floor, smiling already. When I was fifteen years old my parents had arranged for us to go to Austria on a hiking holiday but the night before we were due to travel, my passport was nowhere to be found. I hadn’t wanted to go away at all. I had been complaining about the trip for months. A week away had meant missing two sessions with Mr. Burton, but not only that, any fear, any irrational phobia, tends to affect normal daily life. I stopped enjoying trips away due to my fear of losing things, and if something was lost in a place like Austria, a place I had never been to, a place I would more than likely never return to again, well then, how on earth was I supposed to find anything again? The night I lost my passport I had a quick change of heart. The two sessions with Mr. Burton were forgotten. All of a sudden I wanted to find the passport and I wanted to go on the trip. Anything that meant not missing another possession in my life.
The trip was canceled as it was too late to get a replacement or temporary passport, but for once my parents were genuinely as flummoxed as I was, and had searched as frantically as I had. Finding it here after all those years, tattered and worn and complete with gawky photograph of me at age eleven, had been an incredible moment. But as I looked around the floor my smile faded. It was no longer there.