Tom is bringing Finn home from Donegal this evening. I hurry out of work, and then spend the hour before they arrive cleaning the house, putting fresh sheets on the beds, sweeping the floors, hoovering the stairs. The dryer cycle ends, and when I pull out the clothes, the clean laundry gives me shocks of static electricity. The shocks feel good, they feel like something I need right now, like a defibrillator, like a stronger version might restart my stalled heart.
When Finn runs in the door, it’s like sunshine pouring through the windows, like the house warms by ten degrees. He launches himself at me and I let him tackle me to the floor, laughing, ignoring the hard screws of pain in my ribs. “I missed you,” I say, with my forehead against his. I lie on the floor with my son clamped to my front and close my eyes, tears sliding into my hair.
Tom hovers by the door. “You all right?” he asks, and I nod, barely listening, still breathing in the clean, canine smell of Finn’s hair. “How was your week, Tessa?”
“Oh, you know. Quiet.”
Finn is busy at once, untidying all his toys, setting them on the floor, getting to work. He bowls over to me to ask if I want an ice cream. “Strawberry, please,” I say, and he shakes his head sorrowfully. “Vanilla?” asks Tom. “No, we’re out of vanilla,” says Finn, since this is his favorite game, shopkeeper out of stock.
I look at Tom’s broad frame, his light brown hair and beard. Tom is friendly and affable, and he cheated on me when I was two months pregnant. I don’t hate Tom for cheating, I don’t wish we were still married, but it’s his fault that Finn doesn’t have both his parents in the same house, and I’ll take that grudge to the grave.
Tom tells Finn he’ll ring him from Belfast. His voice is cheerful, but I can see how reluctant he is to leave and drive home without Finn. He says, “Right, I’m double-parked. I should head on.”
“Safe trip home,” I say, closing the door gently behind him.
In the morning, I’m making coffee when Finn wanders by in only his underpants, strumming a ukulele and singing loudly. Funny age, four. It’s playdates and swim classes, tantrums and the time-out stair, colds and stomach flus. It’s wearing me out, it’s sending me near the end of my rope, and then suddenly not. For a long time, Finn was shorter than the doorknobs in our house, now his head is level with them. He is stubborn and curious and silly, and I’d like him even if he wasn’t my son.
I wipe down the kitchen surfaces and scrape the coffee grounds from the plunger, nodding my head along to Finn’s singing. “I’ve a surprise for you,” I say.
Yesterday I bought a cheap inflatable paddling pool for Finn. The child has just spent a week at one of Ireland’s most beautiful beaches, you’d think a pool in a Dublin back patio wouldn’t impress him, but Finn is delighted. He barely leaves the pool for all of Saturday, and I sit with him, cross-legged, in my black swimsuit, the warm water slopping around my waist, with the trains going past above us.
I cup water in my hands, chatting with Finn about whatever runs through his mind, looking at his wet lashes and freckled nose. “I think train is faster than people,” he says.
“I think you’re right.”
In the afternoon, we walk down Ranelagh Road for ice cream. I get two scoops of pistachio and hazelnut, he gets a vanilla twist, which melts onto every inch of his person, trickling down his arms and smudging his shirt.
On Sunday morning, I pull on jeans and a sleeveless linen top. “Is this the right way?” asks Finn, with a shirt tangled around his shoulders, and I fix his sleeves.
“No shoes,” says Finn, hiding behind the sofa.
“Of course shoes,” I say, finishing my coffee and pushing my own feet into a pair of woven leather sandals by the door.
Outside, I use my keys to bolt the locks. Finn runs ahead of me up the road while I follow, shouting, “Too far.” He waits for me at the corner of Dartmouth Road, and I take his hand, a sprite in red shorts skipping at my side. We turn onto the footpath along the canal. Office blocks rise to the north side of the canal and buses trundle through Ranelagh to the south, but the canal itself is pastoral, like an old millstream deep in the countryside. Under the willows, sparks of sunlight flash on the water, their reflections climbing the green branches. Ahead of us, cars and cyclists cross the rounded stone bridge, and joggers trot down the path. I like to run on the canal path, too, when I have time, which I never do.
“How do helicopters work?” asks Finn, and we chat as we walk toward the Liberties. The large clouds over Dublin have a pink tinge in the heat. I can feel the sun flushing my cheeks, and I scoop my hair from my shoulders into a knot. We turn up Clanbrassil Street, into the cool shadows of its buildings. When we reach the playground at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Marian is already there, pushing Saoirse on the baby swing. “Hello, Finn, how are you, you well?” says Marian, bending down to tackle him.
“Can I go in there?” asks Finn from inside his aunt’s embrace, pointing at the baby swing.
“No, sweetheart, you’re too big,” I say, and his brow lowers. I tickle Saoirse’s feet as she swings toward me, and she squawks with laughter. Finn climbs onto the next swing, and he looks so tall beside her, so grown.
I push Finn on the swings, far below the cathedral’s gothic spires. On the ground, the shadows of the swing’s chains thin as they lengthen, darkening as they sweep back toward me. The cathedral lawn is filled with couples and groups of friends, and children’s voices bounce across the playground. High above us, gargoyles cling to the stone vaults of the cathedral, screeching into the air above the city.
Today Marian has on a blue dress with a pattern of tiny daisies, cheap sunglasses pushed up on her head. We are standing together, chatting, pushing our children on the swings. Anyone glancing over at us will see two smiling, tired women.
We don’t talk about Eamonn. There’s nothing to say yet anyway, not until I signal him again, and we don’t talk about what Royce will do to us if we fail. Instead we talk aimlessly about the heat wave.
Every so often another parent waves to her across the playground, and Marian calls out, “Hiya, how are you, how’s things?” Some of the other parents know that Marian works for the air-ambulance service in south Dublin. They will bring their child over to her after a fall or a scrape, and Marian will run through a set of steps, talking to the child all the while in her lilting, reassuring voice. The parents are always grateful and apologetic. None of them know the truth, that Marian was a terrorist.
I look at the daisies on my sister’s dress, at her strong arms. When she was twenty-one, Marian joined the IRA in west Belfast. She spent seven years working in an active-service unit, and I’d no idea, not one clue. Somehow Marian kept her involvement hidden from me and our mam. That was years ago, though. Another lifetime. Finn drops toward me on the swing, and I raise my hands to propel him back into the air.
Saoirse starts to cry in the baby swing, and Marian scoops her up. The pair of them have the same eyes, though I can see a bit of Seb’s in the baby’s, too. I hold the chains steady so Finn can hop down, and he races toward the climbing frame while I follow Marian to a bench in the shade of an oak tree.
Around the cathedral lawn, the old oaks and elms stand heavy in the humid air, their thick leaves casting dark shadows. My eyes chase Finn around the playground, tracking his bright orange shirt as it flashes in and out of view. Marian is rocking Saoirse when an alert pings on her phone, and she cups her hand around the screen to read through the glare.
“Oh, god,” she says, and the back of my neck stiffens. Above us, the oak leaves have started to shiver, like a thunderstorm is coming.
“What is it?” I ask, and she hands me the phone, her hot fingerprints still smeared on the screen. Under the loops and whorls of her fingerprints, I can see a news photograph of a small cottage in Ballynahinch. The start of the article says “An IRA brigade commander was seen leaving a County Down property owned by a rumored loyalist leader early Sunday morning.”
“Jesus christ,” says Marian. “You know what that means, right? That means they’re talking about a joint ceasefire.”
“It won’t happen,” I say, and Marian’s mouth opens, then closes. “Or the IRA and UVF will call a ceasefire, and then one of them will wreck it before the peace talks even get going.”
“When did you give up?” she asks, and I turn away from her, looking across the lawn. I say, “Did you even read the rest of the article? The threat level for Northern Ireland was raised from severe to critical.”
In the past, the days and weeks before a ceasefire have often been the bloodiest, with each side trying to weaken the other before negotiations start. It’s as if any limit, any line of decency, disappears. Not long before the 1994 ceasefire, the IRA held a man’s family hostage and forced him to drive a bomb into an army camp. They call those operations, the big ones, the ones that make headlines around the world, spectaculars. One will be coming now, too.
Beside me on the bench, Marian’s body is bristling with energy. She looks, somehow, like she wants to be there, in the North, part of the action. I don’t know why this surprises me so much. Marian left her active-service unit years ago, but maybe she hasn’t really changed. She named her daughter Saoirse, after all. Her daughter’s name means freedom.