Cecelia Ahern - If You Could See Me Now

“Gone? What do you mean gone?”

“She was missing this morning from her room, nobody’s seen her.”

“Has a habit of disappearing in the night, does your mother,” Brendan said angrily, rocking Saoirse. “Well, if she’s not where you sent her, you don’t need to look far from here. Sure won’t she be in Flanagan’s.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened and she gasped. Her mother was here in Baile na gCroíthe; she hadn’t left her after all.

In between their bitter exchanges, Saoirse wailed.

“For Christ’s sake, Brendan, can you not quieten her?” Kathleen complained. “You know I can take the children, they can live with me and Alan in—”

“They’re my children and you won’t take them from me like you did Gráinne,” he bellowed. Saoirse’s wails quietened.

There was a long silence between the two.

“Be off with you.” Her father spoke weakly, as though his earlier boom had broken his voice.

The front door closed and Elizabeth watched as Kathleen banged the gate shut and got into her car. Elizabeth watched from the window as it sped off, the lights disappearing into the distance, along with Elizabeth’s hopes of going with her to see her mother.

A glimmer of hope remained. Her father had mentioned Flanagan’s. Elizabeth knew where that was, she passed it every day, going to school. She would pack her bag, find her mother, and live with her away from her screaming little sister and father and they would go on adventures every day.

The handle on the door shook and she dived into bed and pretended to be asleep. Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she decided that as soon as her father had gone to bed, she would make her own way to Flanagan’s.

She would sneak out into the night just like her mother.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Opal stood against the wall of the hospital ward, her hands trembling as they clasped and unclasped themselves against her anxiety-filled stomach.

Ivan looked at her with uncertain eyes. “It’s worth a try.”

They could see Geoffrey in his private room through the glass in the corridor. He was hooked up to a ventilator, his mouth covered by the oxygen mask, and around him contraptions beeped while wires ran from his body into machines. In the center of all this action, his body lay still and calm, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. They were surrounded by that eerie sound that only hospitals provided, the sound of everyone waiting, of being in between one timeless place and another.

As soon as the nurses who were tending to Geoffrey opened the door to leave, Opal and Ivan entered.

“Here she is,” Olivia spoke from beside Geoffrey’s bed, as Opal entered.

His eyes shot open quickly and he began to look around wildly, searching the room.

“She’s on your left-hand side, dear, she’s holding your hand,” Olivia said gently.

Geoffrey attempted to speak, his sound coming out muffled from under the mask. Opal’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes filled, and the lump in her throat was visible. It was a language that only Olivia could understand; the words of a dying man.

Olivia nodded as he made sounds; her eyes filled and, when she spoke, Ivan could no longer stay in the room.

“He said to tell you, that his heart has ached every moment you were apart, dear Opal.”

Ivan stepped out of the room through the open door and walked as quickly as he could down the hall and out of the hospital.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Outside Elizabeth’s bedroom window on Fuchsia Lane, the rain began to fall, hitting off the bedroom window like pebbles and sounding like coins being jigged about in a collection jar. The wind began warming its vocal cords for the night and Elizabeth, tucked up in bed, was transported back to that night she had journeyed out in the late winter darkness to find her mother.

She had packed her schoolbag with only a few things—underwear, two jumpers and skirts, the book her mother had given her, and her teddy. Her money box had revealed £4.42 and after wrapping her raincoat around her favorite floral dress and stepping into her red Wellington boots, she set out into the cold night. She climbed the small garden wall to avoid the sound of the gate alerting her father, who these days slept like the farmyard dog with one ear pricked. She walked alongside the bushes so as not to be spotted walking up the straight road; the wind pushed and pulled the branches, causing them to scrape her face and legs and causing wet kisses from soggy leaves to brush against her skin. The wind was vicious that night, it whipped her legs and stung her ears and cheeks, blowing against her face so hard it took her breath away. Within minutes of walking up the road, her fingers, nose, and lips were numb and her body was freezing to the bone, but the thought of seeing her mother that night kept her going. And on she journeyed.

Twenty minutes later she arrived at the bridge to Baile na gCroíthe. She had never seen the town at eleven o’clock at night; it was like a ghost town, dark, empty, and silent, as if it were about to bear witness to something and never speak a word of it.

She walked toward Flanagan’s with butterflies in her tummy, no longer feeling the lash of the cold, just pure excitement at the thrill of being reunited with her mother. She heard Flanagan’s before she saw it—it and the Camel’s Hump were the only buildings in the village with lights on. From an open window, out floated the sounds of a piano, fiddle, bodhrán, and loud singing and laughter, occasional cheers and whoops. Elizabeth giggled to herself; it sounded like everyone was having such fun.

Aunt Kathleen’s car was parked outside, and Elizabeth’s legs automatically moved faster. The front door was open and inside there was a small hallway; the door to the pub was closed, complete with stained glass. Elizabeth stood in the porchway and shook the rain from her raincoat, hung it up alongside the umbrellas on the rack on the wall. Her brown hair was soaking wet, her nose was red and running, and the rain had found its way into the top of her boots; her legs shook from the cold and her feet squelched in the ice-cold pools of water under her feet.

The piano stopped suddenly, followed by a loud roar from a crowd of men that made Elizabeth jump.

“Come on, Gráinne, sing us another one,” one man slurred, and they all cheered.

Elizabeth’s heart leaped at the sound of her mother’s name; she was inside! She was such a beautiful singer, she sang around the house all the time, composing lullabies and nursery rhymes all by herself. In the mornings, Elizabeth loved to lie in her bed and listen to her mother as she hummed around the rooms of the bungalow. But the voice that began in the silence, followed by the rowdy cheers of drunken men, was not the sweet voice of her mother that she knew so well.

...

In Fuchsia Lane, Elizabeth’s eyes darted open and she sat upright in her bed. Outside, the wind howled like a wounded animal. Her heart was hammering in her chest; her mouth was dry and her body clammy. Throwing the covers off her, she grabbed her car keys on the bedside table, ran down the stairs, threw her raincoat around her shoulders, and escaped the house to her car. The cold drops of rain hit against her face and she remembered why she hated to feel the rain against her face; it reminded her of that night. She hurried to her car, shivering as the wind tossed her hair across her eyes and face, and by the time she sat behind the wheel, she was already drenched.

The windscreen wipers lashed across the window furiously as she drove down the dark roads to the village. Driving over the bridge, she was faced with the ghost town. Everyone was locked safely inside in the warmth of their houses and hostels. Apart from the Camel’s Hump and Flanagan’s, there was no life elsewhere in the village. Elizabeth parked her car and stood across the road from Flanagan’s, standing in the cold rain, staring across at the building, remembering. Remembering that night.