I’ll eventually belong to the category of disappearance where there is no apparent danger to either the missing person or the public: for example, persons aged eighteen and over who have decided to start a new life. I’m thirty-four, and in the eyes of others, have wanted out for a long, long time now.

This all means one thing: right now nobody out there is even looking for me.

How long will that last? What happens when they find the battered, red 1991 Ford Fiesta along the estuary with a packed bag in the trunk and a missing-persons file, a cup of, by then, cold not-yet-sipped coffee, and a cell phone, probably with missed calls, on the dashboard?

What then?

5

Wait a minute.

The coffee. I’ve just remembered the coffee.

On my journey from Dublin, I stopped at a closed garage to get a coffee from the outside dispenser and he saw me; the man filling his tires with air saw me.

It was out in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of the countryside at five fifteen in the morning, when the birds were singing and the cows mooing so loudly I could barely hear myself think. The smell of manure was thick but sweetened with the scent of honeysuckle waving in the light morning breeze.

This stranger and I were both so far from everything but yet right in the middle of something. The mere fact that we were the only two people around for miles was enough for our eyes to meet and to feel connected.

He was tall but not as tall as I am; they never are. Five eleven, with a round face, red cheeks, strawberry-blond hair, and bright blue eyes I felt I’d seen before, which looked tired at that early hour. He was dressed in a pair of worn-looking blue denims, his blue-and-white-check cotton shirt crumpled from his drive, his hair disheveled, his jaw unshaven, his gut expanding as his years moved on. I guessed he was in his mid to late thirties, although he looked older, with stress lines along his brow and laugh lines-no, I could tell from the sadness emanating from him that they weren’t from laughter. A few gray hairs had crept into the side of his temples, fresh on his young head, every strand the result of a harsh lesson learned. Despite the extra weight, he looked strong, muscular. He was someone who did a lot of physical work, my assumption backed up by the heavy work boots he wore. His hands were large, weather-beaten but strong. I could see the veins on his forearms protruding as he moved, his sleeves rolled up messily to below his elbows as he lifted the air pump from its stand. But he wasn’t going to work, not dressed like that, not in that shirt. For him this was his good wear.

I studied him as I made my way back to my car.

“Excuse me, you dropped something,” he called out.

I stopped in my tracks and looked behind me. There on the tarmac sat my watch, the silver glistening under the sun. “Bloody watch,” I mumbled, checking to see that it wasn’t damaged.

“Thank you.” I smiled, sliding it back onto my wrist.

“No problem. Lovely day, isn’t it?”

A familiar voice to match the familiar eyes. I studied him for a while before answering. Some guy I’d met in a bar previously, a drunken fling, an old lover, a past colleague, client, neighbor, or school friend? I went through the regular checklist in my mind. There was no further recognition on either side. If he wasn’t a previous fling, I was thinking I’d like to make him one.

“Gorgeous.” I returned the smile.

His eyebrows rose in surprise first and then fell again, his face settling in obvious pleasure as he understood the compliment. But as much as I would have loved to stay and perhaps arrange a date for sometime in the future, I had a meeting with Jack Ruttle, the nice man I had promised to help, the man I was driving from Dublin to Limerick to see.

Oh, please, handsome man from the garage that day, please remember me, wonder about me, look for me, find me.

Yes, I know; another irony. Me, wanting a man to call? My parents would be so proud.

6

Jack Ruttle trailed slowly behind an HGV along the N69, the coast road that led from North Kerry to where he lived in Foynes, a small town in County Limerick a half-hour’s drive from Limerick city. It was five A.M. as he traveled the only route to Shannon Foynes Port, Limerick ’s only seaport. Staring at the speedometer, he telepathically urged the truck to go faster while he gripped the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles turned white. Ignoring the advice of the dentist he had seen just the previous day in Tralee, he began to grind his back teeth. The constant grinding was wearing down his teeth and weakening his gums, causing his mouth to throb and ache. His cheeks were red and swollen, and matched his tired eyes. He’d left the friend’s couch he was sleeping on in Tralee to drive home through the night. Sleep wasn’t coming easily to him these days.

“Are you under any stress?” the dentist had asked him while studying the inside of Jack’s mouth.

An open-mouthed Jack had swallowed a curse and fought the urge to clamp his teeth down on the white surgical finger in his mouth. Stressed was an understatement.

His brother Donal had disappeared on his twenty-fourth birthday after a night out with friends in Limerick city. Following a late-night snack of burger and chips in a fast-food restaurant, he had separated himself from his friends and staggered off alone. The joint was too packed for any particular person to be noticed; his four friends were too drunk and too distracted by their attempts to bring a female home for the night to care.

CCTV showed him taking €30 out of an ATM on O’Connell Street at 3:08 A.M. on a Friday night, and later he was caught on camera stumbling in the direction of Arthur’s Quay. After that, his trail was lost. It was almost as if his feet had left the earth and he’d floated up toward the sky. Jack prepared himself for the fact that, in a way, maybe he had. His death was a concept he knew he could eventually accept if only there was a shred of evidence to support it.

It was the not knowing that tortured him. It was the worry that kept him awake and the fear that drove him from his bed at night to the toilet to be physically ill. But it was the inconclusive search of the Gardaí that fueled his continuous search. He had combined his trip to the dentist in Tralee with a visit to one of Donal’s friends who had been with him the night he went missing. Like the other crowd that were there that night, he was a person Jack felt like punching and hugging all at the same time. He wanted to shout at him, yet console him for his loss of a friend. He never wanted to see him again, yet he didn’t want to leave his side in case he remembered something, something he’d previously forgotten that would suddenly be the clue they were all looking for.

He stayed awake at nights looking through maps, rereading reports, double-checking times and statements while, beside him, Gloria’s chest rose and fell with her silent breathing, her sweet breath sometimes blowing the corners of his papers as her sleeping world crept in on his.

Gloria, his girlfriend of eight years, always slept. She had slept soundly through the entire year of Jack’s horrid nightmare, and still she dreamed. Still, she had hopes for tomorrow.

She had fallen into a deep sleep after hours spent at the garda station, the first day they worried about not hearing from Donal after four days of silence. She slept after the Gardaí had spent the day searching the river for his body. She slept after the day they’d spent hours attaching photos of Donal to shop windows, supermarket notice boards, and lampposts. She slept the night they thought they had found his body down an alley in the town and slept the next night when they discovered it wasn’t him. She slept the night the Gardaí said there was nothing more they could do after months of searching. She slept the night of his mother’s funeral, after seeing the coffin of a grief-stricken mother being lowered into the dirt to join her husband at long last after twenty years in this life without him.