22

“So Joseph is a carpenter. What is it that you do, Mary?” I asked Helena as we strolled along the dusty path of the village.

Helena smiled.

We had walked through the village and now wandered beyond, passing fields of glorious golds and greens, dotted with people of all nationalities who stooped and rose as they worked the farm, growing anything and everything I had ever and never heard of. Dozens of greenhouses speckled the landscape, the villagers taking every opportunity to grow what they could. Like the diverse people, the weather had arrived in this place in all its fiery yet vital forms. Already in just a few days I’d experienced the sweltering heat, a thunderstorm, a spring breeze, and a winter chill, inconsistent weather I presumed to be the explanation for the unusual array of plants, trees, flowers, and crops that all managed to live together successfully in the same environment. The explanation for the humans, I hadn’t yet learned of. But it seemed there were no rules regarding nature in this place. Four seasons in one day was accepted, welcomed, and adapted to. It was warm again now as we strolled side by side, me feeling revitalized after sleeping more hours in one night than I had since I was a child. Since Jenny-May.

“Since Jenny-May what?” Gregory would always ask me. “Since she went missing?”

“No, just since Jenny-May-period,” I would reply.

That morning I encountered someone I had been searching for for twelve years. Helena had urged me onward, snapping shut my gaping mouth and clicking fingers before my goggling eyes. I was overwhelmed by her presence, and I was never overwhelmed. I was dumbfounded, and I was never dumbfounded. I suddenly felt lonely, and I was never lonely. But lately I was a lot of things I never used to be. After so many years of looking, it was near impossible to remain as serene as Helena when the faces I saw in my dreams passed me in my waking hours.

“Stay calm,” Helena had murmured more than once into my ear.

Robin Geraghty was the first of my ghosts to float by. We had been seated at the eatery, a stunning timber building on two levels, with a balcony around four sides from which the views of forestry, mountains, and fields were displayed to perfection. It wasn’t a crammed work cafeteria, as I had imagined; it was a beautiful building that housed the local villagers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; a scheme created to help ration the food they collected and grew. Money, I recalled, had no value here, not even when wallets filled with it arrived on their doorsteps. “Why spend money on something that arrives in abundance daily?” Helena had asked by way of explanation.

On the front of the building, ornate handcrafted timber decorated the entrance as it did the registry. Owing to the many languages of the village, Helena explained, these carvings were the most productive and attractive methods of exhibiting the use of the building. Oversized grapevines, wine bottles, and bread loaves decorated the front, looking so delectable even in their lumber form that I had to run my hand along the smooth curve of the berry.

I was returning from my trip to the buffet-style counter when I saw Robin, causing me almost to drop my tray of doughnuts and iced coffee. (It appeared that a box of food had gone missing from a Krispy Kreme delivery van and had arrived on the outskirts of the village that morning, much to my delight. I had visions of a delivery man, clipboard in hand, ignoring the insults of a stressed-out store manager, as he scratched his head in wonder and recounted the contents of his van, parked up on a busy loading bay outside a downtown New York store while I, and a line of hungry people behind me, dove into the basket in a long-lost place.) The appearance of Robin almost caused me to douse myself; it was as though my iced coffee got a fright too, wavering slightly in its stance.

Robin Geraghty had disappeared at the age of six. She had gone out to play in her front garden in the suburbs of North Dublin at eleven A.M. but was gone when her mother checked on her at eleven-oh-five. Everyone, and I mean everyone, the family, the country, the Gardaí, which at that time included me, all thought she had been abducted by the next-door neighbor. Fifty-five-year-old Dennis Fairman, an odd man, a loner, spoke to nobody but Robin each time he passed her, much to her parents’ concern.

He said he didn’t do it. He swore to me he didn’t do it; he kept on repeating that she was his friend and that he couldn’t and wouldn’t hurt her. Nobody believed him; I didn’t believe him; yet we didn’t have the proof of his guilt. We didn’t even have a body. The man became so tormented by his neighbors, by the media, by the constant Garda questioning that he ended his own life, a sure sign to the parents and everybody else of his guilt. But as a nineteen-year-old Robin walked by me and made her way to the counter, I felt ill.

Although Robin had disappeared at the age of six, I knew it was she the moment I lifted my ogling eyes from the Krispy Kreme to see the young woman walk by. A computer-generated image of her had been made public and updated every few years. I had memorized it, had used it every day as part of my mind checks when I came across familiar faces. And that face was all of a sudden coming toward me. The computer image hadn’t been far off, though her face was fuller; her hair was darker; there was a swing in her hips and a knowledge in her eyes as all she had seen and done had altered all but their color. All the things a picture couldn’t convey. But it was she.

I’d been unable to eat my breakfast; instead I sat in a daze at the table with Helena’s family, while Wanda studied me and impersonated my every move. I ignored her and her constant babbling about somebody called Bobby, instead unable to stop myself from watching Robin while trying to figure out how I felt about seeing this young woman living life as she had done for the past twelve years. My feelings were mixed, my happiness bittersweet, because although all the people I yearned to find surrounded me, it was also the moment I realized that I had spent a colossal portion of my life looking in all the wrong places. It’s that moment when you meet your idol, when all your wishes come true; there’s a feeling of secret disappointment.

Helena and I stopped walking at an uncultivated multicolored field filled with bright yellow Bermuda buttercups, blue-and-mauve milkwort, daisies, dandelions, and long grasses, the sweet smell reminding me of the last few breaths I had taken in Glin.

“What’s up ahead?” I spotted more buildings peeking out behind a gathering of silver birch, the oak visible against the peeling, papery black-and-white bark of the trunk.

“That’s another village,” Helena explained. “There are so many new arrivals every day, we couldn’t possibly fit into this tiny town. Also there are so many cultures that wouldn’t and couldn’t settle for living in environments like this. Their homes are out there.” She nodded toward the faraway trees and mountains.

I hadn’t even contemplated that. “So there are more people I’ve searched for, over there?”

“Possibly,” she said in agreement. “They would have registry offices just as we have here so all the names will be logged, although I’m not sure they’ll release the information, as it’s usually deemed private unless in the case of emergencies. Hopefully, we won’t have to go looking for them, they’ll find you.”

I smiled at the irony. “What exactly is this plan you’re hatching?”

“Well,” she said, smiling as her eyes sparkled mischievously, “thanks to the list you provided me with, Joan is now taking bookings for private auditions for a new Irish play in about”-she lifted my hand and looked at my watch-“two hours’ time.”

I felt anxious about meeting people like Robin, but Helena’s plan made me laugh. “Surely there could have been an easier way to do this.”