There's No Place Like Here Read Free

that had been literally turned upside down.
    “Lose something, honey?”
    “My blue sock with the white stripes,” came my muffled reply from under the couch.
    “Just the one again?”
    I nodded.
    “Left foot or right foot?”
    “Left.”
    “OK, I’ll look upstairs.” He hung his coat on the rack by the door, placed his umbrella in the stand, gave his flustered wife a tender kiss on the cheek and an encouraging rub on the back, and then made his way upstairs. For two hours he stayed in my parents’ room, looking, but I couldn’t hear him moving around. One peep through the keyhole revealed a man lying on his back on the bed with a washcloth over his eyes.
    On my visits in later years they would ask the same easygoing questions that were never intended to be intrusive, but to someone who was already armored up to her eyeballs they felt as such.
    “Any interesting cases at work?”
    “What’s going on in Dublin?”
    “How’s the apartment?”
    “Any boyfriends?”
    There were never any boyfriends; I didn’t want another pair of eyes haunting me day in and day out. I’d had lovers and fighters, short-term boyfriends, men-friends and one-night-only friends. I’d tried enough to know that anything long term wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t be intimate; I couldn’t care enough, give enough, or want enough. I had no desire for what these men offered, they had no understanding of what I wanted, so it was tight smiles all round while I told my parents that work was fine, Dublin was busy, the apartment was great, and no, no boyfriends.
    Every single time I left the house, even when I cut my visits short, Dad would announce proudly that I was the best thing to come out of Leitrim.
    The fault never lay with Leitrim, nor did it with my parents. They were so supportive, and I only realize it now. I’m finding that with every passing day, that realization is so much more frustrating than never finding anything.
    4
    W hen Jenny-May Butler went missing, her final insult was to take a part of me with her. The older I got, the taller I got, the more that hole within me stretched, an abyss that continued to grow as I got older. But how did I physically go missing? How did I get to where I am now? First question, and most important, where am I now?
    I’m here and that’s all I know.
    I look around and search for familiarity. I wander constantly and search for the road that leads out of here, though there isn’t one. Where is here ? I wish I knew. It’s cluttered with personal possessions: car keys, house keys, cell phones, handbags, coats, suitcases adorned with airport baggage tickets, odd shoes, business files, photographs, can openers, scissors, earrings scattered among the piles of missing items that glisten occasionally in the light. And there are socks—lots of odd socks. Everywhere I walk, I trip over the things that people are probably still tearing their hair out to find.
    There are animals, too. Lots of cats and dogs with bewildered little faces and withering whiskers, no longer identical to their photos on small-town telephone poles. No offers of rewards can bring them back.
    How can I describe this place? It’s an in-between place. It’s like a grand hallway that leads you nowhere, it’s like a banquet dinner of leftovers, a sports team made up of the people never picked, a mother without her child, it’s a body without its heart. It’s almost there but not quite. It’s filled to the brim with personal items yet it’s empty because the people who own them aren’t here to love them.
    How did I get here? I was one of those disappearing joggers. How pathetic. I used to watch those B-movie thrillers and groan every time the credits opened at the early-morning crime scene, the murdered body lying on the ground in workout clothes. I thought it foolish that women went running down quiet alleyways during the dark hours of the night, or during the quiet hours of the early morning especially when a known