Despite Saoirse’s protestation, her tone was indeed childlike. So was her stance for that matter.
With one hand she held the door to her dorm room open, while her other hand was balled into a fist that dug into her hip. Her lips were pursed together and her head cocked to one side. Amused, Ciaran half-expected her to stomp her foot.
“I never said you were, Seersh,” Ciaran clarified, walking past his sister and into her room.
Behind him he heard Saoirse sigh heavily and then the sound of the door closing. She might not be happy about it, but at least he was in. A quick look around the room, however, showed him that it might all be for naught. “She isn’t here,” Saoirse said.
Turning to face his sister, Ciaran tried to make his voice sound as innocent as possible. “Who?”
Now she did stomp her foot. “Don’t give me that!” she yelled, waving a finger at the air in front of Ciaran’s face. “You’re not here to ask about Mum. You want to try and get a glimpse of the pretty little blind girl!”
“Don’t call her that!” Ciaran demanded.
“Why not?” Saoirse asked, plopping onto her bed. She lay back, her blond hair spread out around her face, blending into the lemon-yellow bedspread. “She’s pretty, she’s little, and she’s blind.”
Disregarding Ciaran’s shocked expression, she expanded her reasoning. “She’s also ginger-haired, but that would be one too many adjectives.”
Suddenly Ciaran had a disturbing thought: Ruby could be in the bathroom right now and overhearing every word they were saying. He was sure that Ruby had gotten a taste of her impudent nature, but the girl hadn’t been blind for very long, and blindness was not something that should be treated casually or in a way that could be interpreted as disrespectful. “It’s rude,” Ciaran whispered, his eyes bulging as he looked over at the closed bathroom door.
Rolling her own eyes as she rolled off the bed, Saoirse opened the door with a dramatic, sweeping flourish and announced grandly, “The ginger-haired princess ain’t in the lavvy!”
Ciaran acknowledged the disappointment that filled his body, but since it was not an uncommon feeling, he didn’t need to dwell on it for very long. Instead, he used his energy to channel the playfulness of his sister. “Well, she probably jumped from the tower to escape the evil, blond-haired witch.” Saoirse’s laughter was silenced only when the pillow Ciaran threw hit her squarely in the face.
When she picked up the pillow, Ciaran thought for sure that she would attack him with the goose-down weapon. Instead she tossed it on her bed and ran into her brother’s arms to give him a quick hug that was filled with more awkwardness than spontaneity. “Sorry, Ciar,” she said. Pulling away from her brother she crossed to the mirror on the other side of the room. When she saw her reflection she immediately started to tame a few strands of wayward hair. “Ruby isn’t here. Fritz beat you to it and came by about ten minutes ago to walk her to the library.”
“Oh that’s great,” Ciaran said, deflated. “I’m glad she has someone to show her around.”
Saoirse knew he was lying, but she didn’t want to discuss his latest romantic disappointment, so she kept her gaze focused on her unruly hair to avoid looking at her brother’s sullen expression.
Unfortunately, he was only going to make it harder for her to avoid eye contact. “What about you?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, reaching for her tortoise shell hairbrush.
“Anyone showing you around lately?” he asked. “You were M.I.A. most of the summer.”
A few brushes and her hair was perfect. She dropped the brush back onto the vanity top and searched for another distraction. “No, you wanker, just doing girl stuff,” Saoirse mumbled as she grabbed a barrette and began to clasp it in her hair. “And, you know, trying to keep up with all our beastly summer reading.”
Ciaran couldn’t argue with that. For whatever reason Double A felt it important that every student read five new books over summer vacation, but did not require them to spend any time doing lab work. It didn’t make any sense to him. Though very little made sense to him lately, in or out of school.
“And I haven’t heard from Mum either,” she said. “So I hate to break it to you, but this was kind of a wasted visit.”
She thought her words would act as a dismissal, but looking in the mirror she saw that they had the opposite effect. Ciaran propped up the pillows and sat on her bed, his arms and ankles crossed. She was about to tell him quite sternly that she didn’t want his shoes on her comforter, but she knew that he had seen her jumping on her bed—and his bed and Ronan and Michael’s bed—countless times before with her shoes on, so it would be a request without merit. The only option she had was to continue the conversation. At least one part of it. “It isn’t as strange as you’re making it out to be.”
“What isn’t?” Ciaran asked.
“Mum’s silence,” Saoirse replied, sitting at the foot of the bed. She lifted up Ciaran’s feet and placed them in her lap. She raised her one knee and then the other and watched his shoes rise and fall, thinking it was better to focus on them than look at Ciaran, so he wouldn’t see that she was now lying.
“It’s quite normal when you think about it, and anyway isn’t her silence gobs better than her stroppy attitude and nasty insults?” It was a smart plan, but even though Ciaran had not grown up with Saoirse, he was proving to be a very insightful and observant brother.
“You don’t believe that,” he said. “Your upper lip is twitching like it always does when you’re nervous and lying.”
Saoirse was too touched by Ciaran’s comment to try and convince him he was wrong. Despite being caught, it was nice to have someone know you very well, not completely, but nearly. “Well, fine then,” she said, squeezing the tip of one of his penny loafers so tightly that it made him wince.
The sound Ciaran made was a mixture of a cry and a laugh. “Ow!”
“It is flippin’ strange,” Saoirse said, releasing her hold on him, “but that’s Mum. She’s a strange bird.”
Swinging his legs off Saoirse’s knees, Ciaran bounced once and sat on the edge of her bed next to her. “Strange, yes, and if she was just being elusive toward us, I wouldn’t think twice about it,” Ciaran confessed, pressing his shoe into the floor as if that was going to soothe his toes. “But Ronan hasn’t heard from her either, not in months.”
The twitching stopped, but Saoirse’s concern only grew. “Months?”
“Ever since your impromptu birthday party,” Ciaran replied. “Regardless of how she can act sometimes, I’m worried about her.”
And now Saoirse was worried too. She hadn’t given her mother’s absence much thought. While she boarded at Ecole des Roches, there had been long stretches of time when she hadn’t seen her mother and only had the briefest of phone calls in between visits. Edwige wasn’t a typical parent and could not be described as maternal, Saoirse knew that, but she also knew that her mother was always reachable. She always knew how to get in touch with her even if she never took the initiative. What was most disturbing was that she also knew that Edwige was never out of Ronan’s life for very long. If that was now the case, if she had suddenly cut off communication with her eldest child without any explanation, then something was definitely wrong. Unfortunately, Saoirse didn’t have the time to investigate it. “I guess we’ll just have to wait until Mum decides it’s time for her to make a return engagement,” she said.
That’s exactly what Ciaran had told Ronan initially, but after thinking about it for a while he had come to realize it was hardly the most effective course of action. If he had learned anything through his lab work, it was that you had to try and seek out a solution to a problem. If the first experiment failed, you started another and continued on until one succeeded. “So, we just do nothing?”
Saoirse didn’t know what to do about her mother, but she did know how to handle Ciaran. The most effective course of action in dealing with her brother was to be direct. “For now, dear brother, the only thing I have to do is write a paper on some daft, recently discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald short story,” she announced as she walked toward the front door. Opening it, she leaned against the frame, both hands holding the doorknob behind her back. “And since you are not the literary genius in the family, you can’t help me.”
“Sorry about that,” Ciaran replied, slowly standing up.
Relieved that Ciaran had taken the bait, Saoirse relaxed a bit. “Dumbarse Yankee should’ve kept his bad work hidden better, so I could have a free afternoon.”
Smiling at his sister, Ciaran wished that he possessed her ability to rebound so quickly, to allow bad news and worry to roll off his back as easily as a fallen leaf can be swept up by the wind. But he was more like a tree whose roots burrowed deep into the earth. “Please tell Ruby that, um ...”
“That you stopped by to offer your services as Seeing Eye bloke,” Saoirse said, finishing Ciaran’s thought in
