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Chapter 5
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
WHILE I TRY TO GET THE BOXES back together, I think about giving Brian his stuff tonight, just to get it out of the basement. But his apartment doesn’t have much space and I’m about to ask him a big favor, so I leave them where they are and bring my notebooks and a few of the files up and tuck them into my leather messenger bag for the trip. I’ll have the six hours across the Atlantic to go through them.
The lasagna’s in the oven when Brian comes through the door. He knocks first, always trying to be respectful, which annoys me, unreasonably, and he has a bottle of white, which is my favorite. We’ve gotten relatively comfortable with each other since the divorce, but we’re not huggers or kissers. I take the bottle and say, “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
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Lilly melts away to her room and I pour him a glass of red and we head out to the backyard. It’s up a bit from the beach; my dad always said that the more expensive houses with beachfront down on Ocean Street were likely to get flooded but that we had the benefit of the view without the risk. The patio table’s in the corner and we sit down and he leans back in his chair. He looks middle-aged, his hair thinning on top and his chest and stomach newly soft. I suddenly remember the desperate crush I had on him when I was sixteen and he was seventeen. I loved how tall he was, how the veins ran down the inside of his arms. I can still see that seventeen-year-old in his face.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“Uncle Danny got a call from Dublin last night. They found Erin’s scarf. Not far from where she disappeared. He wants me to go over.”
He doesn’t say anything, but he reaches out and touches my shoulder, just for a second. “Oh, Mags,” he says finally. “I’m so sorry.” I can feel his emotion. He cares about me, about Danny. He’s a good guy. He really is.
“And there’s another girl missing. That’s how they found the scarf.”
“But ... is it connected to the other two? Did they find anything else?”
“No.” But now I’m wondering what Roly hasn’t told me. “Can you take Lilly for a week or so? Maybe more. I don’t know how long it will take.”
He hesitates and I know it’s his embarrassment about his apartment. “Yeah, of course.”
“It’s probably better for her if you just stay here, since it’s for so long. Do you mind?”
“No, no, of course not. Probably better for her.” I can hear the relief in his voice. I’m supposed to pay him spousal support, but he won’t take it. He was okay for a few years, after the divorce, but lately he’s had bad luck with jobs, layoffs and workforce reductions and so on. His family had money once, a lot of it. Brian and Frank were like royalty at our high school, their house one of the biggest and most expensive along the beach. But his dad went bankrupt in the early 2000s and he now lives in Florida with a twenty-six-year-old girlfriend. Lilly tells me that Brian gets into a bad place sometimes, thinking about that.
He was angry for a while, after we split up, but now he’s forgiven me for my together life, my career success, the nice house, inherited from my parents, which was half his before the divorce, the fact that I stopped loving him before he stopped loving me, the fact that maybe I never loved him at all. I flash back to an afternoon in the counselor’s office, Brian spitting out the words: I never had a chance. You loved someone else the whole time. I don’t even know who it is.
He wasn’t wrong. But that’s a long time ago now. “Thanks, Bri.”
“ ’Course.”
After we eat, Lilly asks if we can go down to the beach. She’s hesitant, not sure what we’ll say, but Brian nods and I say, “Great idea!” a little too enthusiastically. The three of us walk down and stand on the sand. The beach is busy tonight; everyone in the neighborhood can feel spring on the air, the new sweetness of the days.
We watch the sun coming down over Long Island Sound. The gulls are calling overhead. A clam boat’s coming in. We watch a lone fisherman against the horizon.
We’re about to head back to the house when Jessica and Chris Fallon and their twins come down the beach, their dog running circles around the boys. Jessica and Chris were in Brian and Erin’s high school class; I was a year behind them all. They wave and Lilly runs to say hi to the twins.
“Hey, guys,” Jessica says. When she leans in to hug me, I can smell her perfume, too strong, even in the fresh air. Jessica was always thin, but middle age has rounded her out and like me, she’s suddenly got a lot of wrinkles around her eyes and across her forehead. I saw her once on Main Street and thought, That’s an old lady, before I realized it was her. But now, looking at her small nose and greenish eyes and the high cheekbones she always put too much bronzer on, I can see the sixteen-year-old she was. Chris has thickened, too, his football player’s body gone to fat. I feel a sudden surge of affection for them, for Brian, for all of us. We’re the parents now. We’re the middle-aged fogies.
We watch the three kids throwing rocks into the water for the dog.
Something on my face makes Jessica turn serious, searching my eyes. “Is everything okay, you guys?” I glance at Brian. “Yeah, we just ... Uncle Danny got a call from Ireland last night. They found something they think belonged to Erin. I’m flying over tomorrow.” Brian rubs my shoulder again. I think about how we must look to someone coming down the beach. Two couples, talking, watching their kids.
“Oh.” Jessica’s eyes go wide. She was Erin’s best friend in high school, but it’s been so many years. I can see it’s completely out of the blue, that she’d stopped thinking we’d find anything. “I’m so sorry, Maggie. Do they think that ... Do they think it’s her?”
“They just don’t know. I’m heading over. Brian’s going to stay with Lilly.” I nod toward the house. Her breath catches. Her eyes fill with tears. “I just keep thinking about the last time we saw her. When we were all Eurailing over there and stopped in Dublin. She seemed different, but good. Like she was happy there.” She looks up, meets my eyes. “Settled, I guess. And you know, for Erin ... that was ... I guess even once they found those other women, I always wondered if she might not just walk in someday and have some crazy explanation. I’m sorry, Maggie. This must be awful.”
“No. I think probably I always thought that, too,” I tell her. “Hopefully we’ll get some closure. For Uncle Danny.” The dog barks and we all watch it run down the beach, back toward Jess and Chris’s house. Chris calls to the boys to head back.
“Bri, let us know if we can help with Lilly this week,” Jess says. She hugs me again, too tight. I can feel her tears on my cheek.
“Nice time of year,” Brian says once they’re gone, his voice heavy with sadness.
“Yeah. It’ll be summer before we know it.”
He nods.
A gull calls somewhere over the water. The sound tosses me back—a low, gray skyline, the air damp and touched with peat smoke, gulls wheeling over the Liffey, Mespil Road, Raglan Road, Sandymount Strand, Leeson Street, Sutton, The Four Courts, Delgany, Roundwood, Glenmalure. I walk the maps in my mind.
Brian coughs. We watch our daughter walk toward us.
“She looked so old to me tonight,” he says. “I mean, I just saw her last week. But when she came out to the car after school, she looked up and she was just ... older.”
“I know. It’s crazy. That’s been happening to me all the time lately.”
“She’s a good kid. We’re lucky. She’s got her head on straight.” I know what he means. Not like Erin.
The sun hovers for a moment and then it’s gone. We stay there, watching the empty stretch of sky as it changes color, purple, then pink, then orange.
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