There are papers everywhere, old postcards and letters and receipts, and I have to stop myself yelling up the stairs at Lilly for making such a mess. I find the box that has all my notes from Erin’s case, but Lilly’s gone through it and it’s mixed up with things from the other boxes. It takes me twenty minutes to sort through Brian’s college papers and my mother’s old purses and find my box of notebooks and files. I open up the box and put them in a separate pile.
In a plastic tub are the things from the house Erin lived in in Dublin, books and clothes and postcards and jewelry. The police in Ireland—the Guards, I remind myself, the Gardaí, with a little th sound added to the d—had gone through it. After she’d been missing for six months, her roommates had shipped her things home. At some point Uncle Danny had asked me to keep them since he couldn’t stand having them in the house. There are a few items of clothing, a white satin jewelry box that had held Erin’s claddagh necklace, a little fabric pouch of earrings, a four-leaf clover embedded in glass, some makeup, and some books and stationery.
In another box, there’s a paper envelope of photographs and I open it and fan out a random assortment of pictures of me and Erin. It was my mom’s; she had kept some pictures of us on her bedside table when she was really sick, once we’d moved a hospital bed into the den.
There’s one of Erin and me at the beach. I’m five or six; she’s a year older. We sit on little chairs on the sand, looking up at the photographer. We’re pink from the sun, our red bathing suits caked with sand. Erin’s grinning and waving. I’m clutching a little plastic sand shovel.
Another is us in our Irish dancing costumes, onstage at an all–Long Island feis. There are school pictures of me from fifth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade.
There’s one of Erin at seventeen, sitting on the beach and looking out across the water. Her long hair is wildly curly, the wind whipping corkscrews across her face; she’s in half profile. I seem to remember that her best friend Jessica took the pictures, that they were supposed to be a present for a boyfriend, though I don’t think Erin ever gave them to anyone. They’re too solitary, too dark, the expression on Erin’s face sad, stormy.
And then there’s one of me at twenty, just before my mom was diagnosed, standing in front of the student center at Notre Dame. I’m wearing jeans and Doc Martens and a tweed blazer I got at the thrift store in South Bend and I look basically the way I looked almost two years later, in 1993, when Erin disappeared and I went to Dublin to try to find her.
I look at the photograph for a few more minutes, trying to remember what it was like to be that person, before I put everything away and head back upstairs to finish dinner.
3
1993
I was twenty-two that fall, a too-thin girl with shoulder-length brown hair that I always wore scraped back in a ponytail, working at the bar to help out Uncle Danny, training for a marathon, and trying to stop my dad from drinking too much. I’d graduated from Notre Dame the spring before, after taking a semester off as my mom was dying and then finishing up the last of my coursework at the bar when things were quiet. I think I can say with complete honesty that I had no inkling, at that point, of my future career path, but I was curious about people and I knew, from bartending and from studying literature for four years, that people lie all the time, and that the interesting thing is not that they lie, but why they do. Now I know that this is a lot of it, of being a detective, and that perhaps I was setting off on some inevitable path that night we got the call from Dublin.
I was working a long shift with Uncle Danny, serving beers and vodka and rum and Cokes to the cops and the plumbers and the bankers off the train, when the phone rang at the bar.
“Is Mr. Flaherty there?” I recognized the accent as Irish, real Irish, and for just a moment I thought it was Erin, that somehow she’d picked up an accent since moving to Dublin almost a year before. I handed it to Uncle Danny and listened as he said, “Oh, no, I haven’t heard from her. She didn’t leave a note? No. Okay. Thanks. We’ll … yes, we’ll get back to ya.”
“That was Erin’s roommates over there in Dublin,” he said, hesitating for a moment and then starting to wipe the bar down. “Eeemur or somesuch, one of those real Irishy names. She hasn’t been back to her place for a while. They got worried and thought they oughta call. Whaddya think, Mags? Ya think she’s okay?” His voice caught and I rubbed little circles on his shoulder. I could already feel the anger rising through my throat.
Do you know how fucking worried Uncle Danny is about you?
Why do you always do this, Erin?
“I’m sure she’s fine,” I told him. “I bet she’ll be back.”
But Erin wasn’t back the next day.
My dad came by the bar after work to talk about what to do. Two old men. That’s what I thought when I came up from the basement and saw them. Uncle Danny was wearing one of his shiny golf shirts and the fabric was lighter where it stretched over his belly. My dad was just off the train from the city, still in a gray suit that had gotten too big for him, his blue eyes the only alive thing in his face. My mom had been gone for a year and a bit and he wasn’t over it. He was pale, shaky. He didn’t sleep much. I watched him stir the gin in front of him on the bar.
They tossed it around for a bit, Uncle Danny going over, maybe my dad.
“I wish Father Anthony was here,” Danny said. “He’d know what to do. God rest him. I guess I’d better go over.”
I stepped in after Uncle Danny started coughing and couldn’t stop.
“I’ll go,” I told them. “I can go look into it. Uncle Danny, your heart.”
They barely tried to stop me.
Two old men. I felt guilty for thinking it, but it was true. Uncle Danny. I kept finding cigarettes hidden in his desk in the office at the bar. He reeked of them. His doctor said he was a heart attack waiting to happen if he didn’t cut out the smokes and lose some weight.
“I’ll go,” I told them again. “And then once I figure out what’s going on, you can come over. Hopefully she’s just…” We let it sit there, all the possibilities contained in that hopefully.
“Okay, baby. Thanks. That’s a good idea. I can come when you figure out what’s going on.”
* * *
I arrived in Dublin on a wet, gray morning, the first of October. The airport was a ’70s movie, psychedelic carpet, cigarette smoke thick in the arrivals hall. Ireland. Cold wet air swept through me when I walked outside to find a cab. The accents were familiar from the bar, where we always had a guy or two just off the plane, but they took on a different quality when they filled all the spaces around me, looser, more confident. Changing money, I was conscious of my own accent, the nasal of it, the loud upward pitch of my words. The cabdriver was a skinny, leggy old man who said, “God bless you now, love. Take care o’ yourself,” when I got out at Erin’s house.
Gordon Street was a little side street near a canal, a twisting narrow lane of squat little stucco one- and two-story houses, almost in miniature, with brick or red-painted facades and a few doors painted bright blue, a few shabbier ones painted black or dull red. Looming over the rooftops was a huge round structure shaped like a crown, and there was a Virgin Mary statue tucked into an alcove on the sidewalk. Children played and shouted in the street, their cheeks pink from the cold. With a little thrill of recognition, I thought, The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.