Anybody Out There?
Page 61

Mitch was staring at his organizer, looking confused. “It’s not here. I could have sworn it was. I keep doing that, like, I keep losing stuff…”
So did I. So often I was certain I had things in my handbag, then discovered that I didn’t. I felt another jolt of connection with this Mitch.
“I can get the number,” he said. “It’s got to be somewhere in my apartment. How about I give it to you next week?”
“Can you take my number? Could you call when you find it?”
“Sure.” He took my card.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Why do you come here after seeing someone so good?”
He stared into the distance, considering. “After talking to Trish via Neris, I was able to let a lot of stuff go. And I dunno, I like coming here. Leisl is good, in her own way. She doesn’t hit gold every week but her averages are pretty high. And the people here understand how it is for me—everyone else in my life, they think I should be over it by now. So coming here, I can be myself.” He tucked my card in his wallet. “I’ll call you.”
“Please do,” I said.
Because I wouldn’t be coming back.
41
But later on, at home, I wondered if Leisl might have been onto something. The spirit “person,” “voice,” whatever you want to call it, had sounded a bit like Granny Maguire. Then there was the dog connection; I know it had come through a bit garbled, what with talk of my (unfortunately, nonexistent) dog putting on weight. But the thing was, Granny Maguire had kept greyhounds.
Rumor had it that she used to sleep with them. Sleep sleep with them, if you know what I mean. Although, now that I think of it, it was Helen who’d told me that and I’d never had it corroborated by a more reliable source.
Whenever we used to visit Granny Maguire, the minute I stepped out of the car, she’d urge, “Go on, Gerry; go on, Martin.” (Named after Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.) And two blurs of leanness would whip out of the house and pin me to the wall, a paw on either side of my face, barking so hard my eardrums would hurt.
Granny Maguire would be in convulsions. “Don’t let on you’re ascared,” she’d screech, laughing so much she’d have to thump the ground with her stick. “They can smell the fear. They can smell the fear.”
Everyone said that Granny Maguire was a “character,” but that was only because she hadn’t set the dogs on them. They wouldn’t have been so quick to say it then.
And what about Leisl mentioning a little blond nephew in a hat? Not everyone had one of those. With a tickle of anxiety, I started to worry about JJ. What if Leisl had been giving me a warning? What if something was wrong with JJ? Fear continued to badger me, until eventually I had no choice but to ring and see if he was okay, even though it was one in the morning in Ireland.
Garv answered the phone.
I whispered, “Did I wake you?”
He whispered back, “Yes.”
“I’m very sorry, Garv, but could you do something for me? Could you check that JJ is okay?”
“What sort of okay?”
“Alive. Breathing.”
“Okay. Hold on.”
Even if Aidan hadn’t died, Garv would have humored me. He was nice, that way.
He put the phone down and I heard Maggie whisper, “Who is it?”
“It’s Anna, she wants me to check on JJ.”
“Why?”
“Just.”
Thirty seconds later Garv was back. “He’s fine.”
“Sorry to have woken you.”
“Not at all.”
Feeling a little foolish, I disconnected. So much for Leisl.
As soon as I hung up, I was filled with a terrible need to talk to Aidan.
Typing furiously, I looked up Neris Hemming on the Internet. She had her own site, bearing literally hundreds of grateful testimonials. There were also details of her three books—I hadn’t known she’d written any, I was going to run out to the nearest Barnes & Noble right now—and information on her forthcoming twenty-seven-city tour: she was playing thousand-seater venues in places like Cleveland, Ohio, and Portland, Oregon, but, to my bitter disappointment, she wasn’t coming to New York.
The nearest city was Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ll go, I thought, with sudden determination. I’ll take a day off work and fly down. Then I discovered that it was sold out and another wave of wretchedness hit me.
I had to arrange a personal reading with her, but I clicked on every single link until it became clear that there was no way of contacting her via the site. I needed that phone number from Mitch.
42
I was trying to remember if Aidan and I had had rows. I mean, we must have had. I mustn’t fall into the trap of turning him into a saint because he had died. It was so important to remember him as he’d really been. But I couldn’t remember any major fireworks—no big shouty matches or kitchen implements being flung.
Of course, we’d had our disagreements: I used to get occasional bouts of jealousy about Janie and any mention of Shane made him tight-lipped and surly.
And there was that morning when we were getting ready for work and he was having trouble with his hair.
“It won’t go the way I want it to,” he complained, trying to push down a stubborn tuft.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You look cute with it sticking out like that.”
Briefly, he lit up, then said, “Oh, you mean Irish cute—like a puppy. Not U.S. cute.”
“Cute, like adorable.”
“I don’t want to be cute or adorable,” he griped. “I want to be good-looking. I want to be handsome, like George Clooney.”
He put his tube of hair wax back on the shelf with a little more force than was strictly necessary and I got annoyed and accused him of being vain, and he said that wanting to look like George Clooney wasn’t vain, it was normal, and I said, “Oh, is it?” And he said, “Yes!” Then we continued our ablutions in huffy silence. But it was early in the morning and we’d had a late night the night before and were tired and had to go to work and we didn’t want to, and under the circumstances the whole thing was understandable.
And there were other things—it used to drive him mad when I played with the ingrowing hairs on my shins. I’d be having a great time, squeezing and tweezing—gross, I know, but is there anything more satisfying?—and he’d say, “Anna, please. I hate it when you do that.” And I’d say, “Sorry,” and pretend to stop, but I’d carry on, hiding behind a cushion or a magazine. After a while he’d say, “I know you’re still doing it.”