Cecelia Ahern - There’s No Place Like Here

The families always wondered what drove me to do this. They had a reason, a link, a love for the missing, whereas my fees were barely enough for me to get by on. So, what was my motivation? Peace of mind, I suppose. A way to help me close my eyes and sleep at night.

But all of this begs the question: how can someone like me, with my physical attributes and my mental attitude, go missing?

I’ve just realized that I haven’t even told you my name. It’s Sandy Shortt. It’s OK, you can laugh. I know you want to. I would too if it wasn’t so bloody heartbreaking. My parents called me Sandy because I was born with a head of sandy-colored hair. Pity they didn’t foresee that my hair would turn as black as coal. They didn’t know either that those cute pudgy little legs would soon stop kicking and start growing at such a fast rate, for so long. So Sandy Shortt is my name. That is who I am supposed to be, how I am identified and recorded for all time. But I am neither of those things. The contradiction often makes people laugh during introductions. Normally I respond to their amusement with a shrug and a smile. But not now. You see, there’s nothing funny about being missing. I also quickly realized there’s little difference between being missing and looking for the missing: every day I search. Same as I did when I was working. Only this time I search for a way back to be found.

I have learned one thing worth mentioning. There is one huge difference in my life from before, one vital piece of evidence. For once in my life I want to go home.

What bad timing to realize such a thing. The biggest irony of all.

I was born and reared in County Leitrim in Ireland, which with a population of about 25,000, is the smallest county in the country. Once the county town, Leitrim has the remains of a castle and some other ancient buildings, but it has lost its former importance and dwindled to a village. The landscape ranges from bushy brown hills to majestic mountains with yawning valleys and countless picturesque lakes. Leitrim is all but landlocked, having a coastal outlet to the Atlantic only two miles long. When there, I feel it brings on a sudden feeling of claustrophobia and an overwhelming desire for solid flat ground.

There’s a saying about Leitrim and that is that the best thing to come out of Leitrim is the road to Dublin. I finished school when I was seventeen, applied for the Guards, and I eventually got myself on that road to Dublin. Since then I have rarely traveled back. A few times a year I would visit my parents in the three-bedroom terraced house in a small cul-de-sac of twelve houses where I grew up. The usual intention was to stay for the weekend but most of the time I only lasted a day, using an emergency at work as the excuse to grab my unpacked bag by the door and drive, drive, drive very fast on the best thing to come out of Leitrim.

I didn’t have a bad relationship with my parents. They were always supportive, ever ready to dive in front of bullets, into fires and off mountains if it meant my happiness. The truth is, they made me uneasy. In their eyes I could see who they saw and I didn’t like it. I saw my reflection in their expressions more than in any mirror. Some people have the power to do that, to look at you and their faces let you know exactly how you’re behaving. I suppose it was because they loved me, but I couldn’t spend too much time with people who loved me because of those eyes, because of that reflection.

When I was ten-after Jenny-May went missing-my parents began to tiptoe around me, watching me warily. They had pretend conversations and false laughs that echoed around the house. They would try to distract me, create a false sense of ease and normality in the atmosphere, but I knew that they were doing it and why and it only made me aware that something was wrong.

They were so supportive, they loved me so much, and each time the house was about to be turned upside down for yet another grueling search, they never gave in without a pleasant fight. Milk and cookies at the kitchen table, the radio on in the background, and the washing machine going, all to break the uncomfortable silence that would inevitably ensue.

Mum would give me that smile, that smile that didn’t reach her eyes, that smile that made her back teeth clench and grind when she thought I wasn’t looking. With forced easiness in her voice and a forced face of happiness, she would cock her head to one side, try not to let me know she was studying me intently, and say, “Why do you want to search the house again, honey?” She always called me honey, like she knew as much as I did that I was no more Sandy Shortt than Jenny-May Butler was an angel.

No matter how much action and noise had been created in the kitchen to avoid the uncomfortable silence, it didn’t seem to work. The silence drowned it all out.

My answer: “Because I can’t find it, Mum.”

“What pair are they?”

The easy smile, the pretense that this was a casual conversation and not a desperate attempt at interrogation to find out how my mind worked.

“My blue ones with the white stripes,” I answered on one particular occasion. I insisted on bright-colored socks, bright and identifiable so that they could be easily found.

“Well, maybe you didn’t put both of them in the linen basket, honey. Maybe the one you’re looking for is somewhere in your room.” A smile, trying not to fidget, swallowing hard.

I shook my head. “I put them both in the basket, I saw you put them both in the machine and only one came back out. It’s not in the machine and it’s not in the basket.”

The plan to have the washing machine switched on as a distraction backfired and was then the focus of attention. My mum tried not to lose that placid smile as she glanced at the overturned basket on the kitchen floor, all her folded clothes scattered and rolled in messy piles. For one second she let the façade drop. I could have missed it with a blink but I didn’t. I saw the look on her face when she glanced down. It was fear. Not for the missing sock, but for me. She quickly plastered on the smile again, shrugging like it was all no big deal.

“Perhaps it blew away in the wind, I had the patio door open.”

I shook my head.

“Or it could have fallen out of the basket when I carried it over from there to there.”

I shook my head again.

She swallowed and her smile tightened. “Maybe it’s caught up in the sheets. Those sheets are so big; you’d never see a little sock hidden in there.”

“I already checked.”

She took a cookie from the center of the table and bit down hard, anything to take the smile off her aching face. She chewed for a while, pretending not to be thinking, pretending to listen to the radio and humming a song she didn’t even know. All to fool me into thinking there was nothing to be worried about.

“Honey,” she said, smiling, “sometimes things just get lost.”

“Where do they go when they’re lost?”

“They don’t go anywhere.” She smiled. “They are always in the place we dropped them or left them behind. We’re just not looking in the right area when we can’t find them.”

“But I’ve looked in all the places, Mum. I always do.”

I had; I always did. I turned everything upside down; there was no place in the small house that ever went untouched.

“A sock can’t just get up and walk away without a foot in it.” Mum false-laughed.

You see, the way Mum gave up right there, that’s the point when most people stop wondering, when most people stop caring. You can’t find something, you know it’s somewhere, and, even though you’ve looked everywhere , there’s still no sign. So you put it down to your own madness, blame yourself for losing it, and eventually you forget about it. I couldn’t do that.