Cecelia Ahern - If You Could See Me Now

All day she had felt odd. Her father always said that when you got a chill up your spine it meant that someone was walking over your grave. Elizabeth didn’t believe that but as she stared at the television, she turned her head away from the three-seater leather couch and tried to shake off the feeling that a pair of eyes were watching her.

Ivan watched her mute the television once again, quickly put her coffee cup on the table next to her, and jump out of her chair as though she had been sitting on pins. Here she goes again, he thought. Her eyes were wide and terrified as they darted around the room. Once again Ivan prepared himself and pushed his body to the edge of the couch. The denim of his jeans squeaked against the leather.

Elizabeth jumped to face the couch.

She grabbed a black iron poker from the large marble fireplace and spun around on her heels. Her knuckles turned white as they tightened around it. She slowly tiptoed around the room, eyes wild with fear. The leather squeaked again underneath him and Elizabeth charged toward the couch. Ivan leaped from his seat and dived to the corner of the room.

Ivan hid behind the curtains for protection and watched as she pulled the cushions out of the chair while grumbling to herself about mice. After ten minutes of searching through the couch, Elizabeth put all the cushions back in place.

She picked up her coffee cup self-consciously and made her way into the kitchen. Ivan followed closely on her heel; he was so close that strands of her soft hair peeking out from under the towel wrapped around her hair tickled his face. Her hair smelled of coconut and her skin of rich fruits.

He couldn’t understand his fascination with her. He had been watching her since after lunch on Friday. Luke had kept calling him to play game after game and all Ivan had wanted was to be around Elizabeth. Firstly it was just to see if she could hear him or sense him again, but then after a few hours, he found her compelling. She was obsessively neat. He noticed she couldn’t leave the room to answer the phone or front door until everything had been tidied away and wiped clean. She drank a lot of coffee, stared out to her garden, picked imaginary pieces of fluff from almost everything. And she thought a great deal. He could see it in her face. Her brow would furrow in concentration and she would make facial expressions as though she were having conversations with people in her head. They seemed to turn into debates more often than not, judging by the activity on her forehead.

He noticed she was always surrounded by silence. There was never any music or sounds in the background like most people had, like a radio blaring, the window open to allow the sounds of summer—the birdsong and the lawn mowers—in. Luke and she spoke little and when they did it was mostly her giving him orders, him asking permission, nothing fun. The phone rarely rang, nobody called by. It was almost as if the conversations in her head were loud enough to fill her silence.

He spent most of Friday and Saturday following her around, sitting on the cream leather couch in the evenings and watching her watch the only program she seemed to like on TV. They both laughed in all the same places, groaned in all the same places, and they seemed to be completely in sync, yet she didn’t know he was there. He had watched her sleeping the previous night. She was restless, she only could have slept three hours at the most, the rest of the time she spent reading a book, putting it down after five minutes, staring into space, picking the book up again, reading a few pages, reading back over the same pages, putting it down again, closing her eyes, opening them again, turning the light on, doodling sketches of furniture and rooms, playing with colors and shades and scraps of material, turning the light off again.

She had made Ivan tired just watching her from the straw chair in the corner of the room. The trips to the kitchen for coffee couldn’t have helped her either. On Sunday morning she was up early tidying, vacuuming, polishing, and cleaning an already spotless home. She spent all morning at it while Ivan chased with Luke out in the back garden. He recalled Elizabeth being particularly upset by the sight of Luke running around the garden laughing and screaming to himself. She had joined them at the kitchen table and watched Luke playing cards, shaking her head and looking worried when he lost a game of snap against himself.

When Luke went to bed at nine o’clock, Ivan read him a story of Tom Thumb, quicker than he usually would, and then hurried to continue watching Elizabeth. He could sense her getting more jittery as the days wore on.

She washed her coffee cup out, ensuring it was already spotless before putting it in the dishwasher. She dried the wet sink with a cloth and put the cloth in the wash basket in the utility room. She picked imaginary fluff from a few items in her path, picked crumbs from the floor, switched off all the lights, and began the same process in the living room. She had done the exact same thing the last two nights.

But before leaving the living room this time, she stopped abruptly, almost sending Ivan into the back of her. His heart beat wildly. Had she sensed him?

She spun around slowly.

He fixed his shirt to look presentable.

Once she was facing him, he smiled. “Hi,” he said, feeling very self-conscious.

She rubbed her eyes tiredly and opened them again. “Oh, Elizabeth, you are going mad,” she whispered. She bit her lip and charged toward Ivan.

Chapter Five

Elizabeth knew she was losing her mind right at that moment. It had happened to her sister and mother; her mother with her eccentricity and wild girl nature and Saoirse with her drinking problems and complete detachment from life. Now it seemed it was Elizabeth’s turn. For the last few days she had felt incredibly insecure, as if someone were watching her. She had locked all the doors, drawn all the curtains, set the alarm. That probably should have been enough, but now she was going to go that one step further.

She charged through the living room straight toward the fireplace, grabbed the iron poker, marched out of the living room, locked the door, and made her way upstairs. She looked at the poker lying on her bedside locker, rolled her eyes, and turned her lamp off. She was losing her mind.

Ivan emerged from behind the couch and looked around the dark living room. He had dived behind it, thinking she was charging toward him. He heard the door lock after she stormed out. He sighed loudly, feeling a disappointment he had never experienced before. She still hadn’t seen him.

I’m not magic, you know. I can’t cross my arms, nod my head, blink, and disappear, and reappear on the top of a bookshelf or anything. I don’t live in a lamp, don’t have funny little ears, big hairy feet, or wings. I don’t replace lost teeth with money, leave presents under a tree, or hide chocolate eggs. I can’t Fly, climb up the walls of buildings, or run faster than the speed of lightning.

And I can’t open doors.

That has to be done for me. The grown-ups find that part the funniest, but also the most embarrassing, when their children do it in public. So I can touch a door, but I can’t open it? There’s no explanation for it, it’s just the way it is. It’s like asking why people can’t Fly, yet they can jump and allow two feet to leave the earth.

So Elizabeth needn’t have locked the living room door when she went to bed that night because I couldn’t turn the handle anyway. Like I said, I’m not a superhero; I can’t see through walls or blow out forest fires with one breath. My special power is friendship. I listen to people and I hear what they say. I hear their tones, the words they use to express themselves, and most importantly, I hear what they don’t say. Sighs and silences and avoided conversations are just as important as the things you do talk about.