Ahead of me, the beach is empty, a layer of marine fog hanging a hundred meters offshore. I sit down on the sand to wait. The wall of dawn fog over the sea is sun-shot and golden, glowing. It looks like a portal, like you could swim under it into another world. I keep thinking I see sailboats ghosting through it. My face feels hot with anticipation, nerves snapping through me. Any minute now.
Last night, I used the gift card from Eamonn to buy a small bottle of amaretto from the SuperValu on Ranelagh Road. On my way home, I tipped the amaretto down a sewer, breathing in its fumes. I’ve never liked the stuff. It seemed important to buy something I don’t actually use, that has nothing to do with my real life.
Small waves collapse on the shore. I can hear their sound receding down the beach and the dry rustle of the dune grass behind me. Near the water, a rusted lobster trap has washed onshore, tangled with sea wrack. The last time I came here was in winter, three years ago, and the sea was frigid then, heaving and gray, the sand frozen underfoot.
Eamonn will be here soon. We always met at seven. I wonder if he will look different, if these three years will have changed him. I stare down the beach until my eyes start to ache.
I force myself not to check my watch, and by the time I do, it’s half past ten, and the fog has burned off, leaving acres of flat, featureless water stretching to the horizon. My eyes are dry, razed from the sun, and Eamonn isn’t coming.
You stupid woman, I think, you stupid, stupid woman. Coming here with your plan all wrapped up and ready to go, as if you’ve ever been in control in any of this. I didn’t sleep last night, not for one minute. I was too worried about missing my alarm. I lay awake, and for what? So I could sit here alone on a beach, making a mockery of myself. The truth, probably, is that Eamonn saw my signal, but what happened with me meant so little to him that he can’t even be arsed to come see me.
Without thinking, I turn north out of Ardglass instead of south toward the border. Out of habit, I’m driving toward Greyabbey. Soon I’m on the lough road, and something is swelling and rising through me. To my right a low stone wall stands covered in moss below gnarled green trees, their branches knotted above the road, and god, this place is every bit as beautiful as I’d remembered.
I look at the wooded islands in the lough and the vast expanse of silver water flooding around them, the tide fast enough to make whirlpools. The Vikings who sailed here thought the whirlpools sounded like snoring, and I can’t believe I’d forgotten that sound. The road curves back and forth alongside the lough, and then the Orange Tree House comes into view. When we lived here, I could hear the music at its weddings from our garden.
I turn up my road and park outside our old house. This is Eamonn’s fault. Strangers are living inside my house because of him, because he failed to protect us. I sit in my car, biting the inside of my cheek to stop myself from crying. Wise up, I tell myself. It’s only a house. And not up to much, either, as houses go. Four walls. Bit of garden. Small rooms, doors that always jammed.
But I gave Finn his first bath in that tub. Two weeks old, right after his umbilical stump came away, and he was small enough to fit in my cradling hands. I still remember the face on him, when he felt the warm water slipping over him for the first time, his small bowed legs, his wariness, and then his bliss, rotating his head to feel the water moving against it.
Even if we’d stayed in Greyabbey, Finn would still be growing up. It wrecks my head, how fast he’s changing. Staying here wouldn’t have slowed that down.
When Finn was two years old, mam said, “He will never remember living in Northern Ireland,” and part of me refused to believe her. None of his first year? None?
I was pregnant with Finn in Greyabbey, I brought him home from hospital to Greyabbey, to sleep in a bassinet beside my bed. I spent hours walking down the lanes behind my house with him in his front carrier.
When we left the North, Finn was just learning to walk. I remember watching him pull himself up to stand, holding on to the stone wall at the bottom of our garden. He pointed out across the field toward the sheep, smiling, turning his head back to show me.
On our last morning in this house, I lifted Finn into his high chair and fastened a bib around his neck. “Are you hungry?” I asked, and he kicked his feet in the air. I was carrying a bowl of porridge toward him and then the thread snapped.
Two men in black ski masks were standing behind my garden wall. They agreed to let me bring my son to my neighbor’s house before they took me away. I unstrapped Finn from his high chair and carried him out of the room, stepping over the mess of porridge and pottery shards on the floor. The men had guns. If I tried to escape, they said, they’d kill both of us.
Finn was one year old. We won’t be able to pick up where we left off. I’ll never set that bowl down on his high-chair tray. That morning is over, it’s done, it’s finished. There is no other life in which Finn learns to talk, and to drink from a glass, and to ride a bicycle in Greyabbey and not Dublin. I don’t know why I keep thinking I’ll be able to do his childhood over again, but this time somewhere safe.