Mum and Dad come back from holidays on Friday. Jo has filled them in about Lily already, and I suspect, about how life has been for me at school. Their bags are stuffed with trinkets for me: earrings that look like miniature blue tiles, Portuguese custard tarts that have been slightly squished by air travel.
“I know we’re taking things easy with the … New Age stuff,” Dad says, sheepishly. “But I found myself in one of those crystal shops, and ended up stumbling out with this.”
He extracts a long, golden thread with a hard, black pendant on the edge of it, accompanied by a single red bead. “She told me it was a protection charm,” he says. “Azabache. Or, jet. But I like azabache. They give it to babies in South America when they’re born. Helps ward off the evil eye.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I say, smiling weakly. Imagining him trying to make conversation with a crystal-seller is enough to make my heart glow with a sense of hope. My parents are home. Things have to get better, don’t they?
He drapes the necklace over my head and the stone lands in the centre of my chest, settling at my breastbone. I run my finger over the smooth black stone, the shape and size of a thumbprint and immediately think of Roe.
Talk eventually turns to the O’Callaghans. Mum has already texted Lily’s mum from Portugal.
“Have you spoken to her?” I ask hopefully.
“No,” she says sagely. “You don’t phone at a time like this. Especially if you’re not family. You need to give people space, but let them know you’re there.”
“That family needs grace,” Dad says, shaking his head.
“That family,” Mum says, standing up to take out our biggest frying pan, “needs lasagnes.”
I help Mum make the lasagnes all night. I grate the cheese, chop the garlic, run to the shop to get big pasta sheets. In the morning, she drives me to school in the car and we hit the O’Callaghans’ house on the way. The shortness of the trip – just three streets, two left turns and you’re there – is a nauseating reminder of just how often I used to make this journey. I have been down this road on Barbie rollerblades, on light-up trainers, on the sunshine-yellow bicycle I begged for that was stolen two months later.
We park outside their semi-detached house, identical to every other house on the road except for the fact that I spent half of my childhood inside it. I hold the two tin-foil-covered lasagnes – one meat, one vegetarian – in my lap.
“Right,” she says. “Pen. Notepaper.”
I rip out a page from my spiral-ring notebook and hand her my best pen. She scribbles something about reheating at 180 degrees, adding that she’s “on call” for anything they need.
She signs off with love always, Nora Chambers and then takes a long look at me, sitting low in the passenger seat.
… and Maeve, she writes.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THERE ARE SEARCHES FOR LILY. PEOPLE WALKING AROUND the riverbank and marshlands with flashlights and dogs. Items of her clothing sniffed at. Mum doesn’t let me go. I hear her and Dad arguing about it in their bedroom. He thinks it will make me feel proactive; she thinks it will traumatize me. What I think seems not to matter.
Dad goes both nights and returns home only after I’ve gone to bed. I hear his steps creaking on the old staircase and then the sound of a long, exhausted sigh when he enters their bedroom.
My brother Pat comes home for the weekend, back for the wedding of two school friends, and the house is momentarily distracted by the big silliness of him. I spend a long time sitting in the beanbag in his bedroom, showing him the list of songs I cribbed from the Walkman.
“Oh wow, it’s happening,” he says, scanning the list with raised eyebrows. “At long last.”
“What?”
“You’re developing taste.”
He picks through his vinyl collection and extracts a big, square record with a red-haired woman on it.
“Maeve, I think it’s time you met Jenny Lewis.”
Suddenly, I’m plunged into a world of loud women with guitars, an endless family tree of people Pat talks about as if they were beloved ex-girlfriends. Courtney and PJ and Carrie and Jenny. Kim and Joni and, for some reason, Prince.
“Prince wasn’t a woman,” I say.
“Prince wasn’t anything. Prince was just Prince.”
Every album and song that Pat passes on to me makes me think of Roe. I want to tell Pat about him, but I can’t get the words out right.
I don’t say anything. Instead, I just lap up the music Pat gives me, eager to memorize his opinions so I can possibly repeat them to Roe later, at some faraway point on the horizon when Lily is back and we can go back to our bus conversations. Pat, of course, thinks it’s because his taste is superb.
“Come in and listen any time you want,” he says, plucking at the strings of his old bass guitar. “Just leave everything in here, yeah?”
But then Pat goes, and real life is the dreary act that follows him. The days pass with a sluggish melancholy, and the school-wide iciness towards me doesn’t even begin to thaw. People avoid conversation with me in the line for the loos. They just raise their eyebrows and then look right through me.
The rhythm of my schedule is still completely the same: I take the bus to school, I go to classes, I take the bus home. Yet everything feels coloured by an unsettling shadow, like the bluish cast on a duck’s egg. Missing posters go up, and every time I see Lily’s face on a telephone pole, I feel as though I’ve bitten into ice cream. I don’t see Roe. The girls in school stop asking me questions, and instead just stop talking when they see me approach. It would all be completely unbearable if it weren’t for Fiona.
I start eating lunch in the art room in the attic
