A little before seven in the morning, I sit on my back step, wrapped in a coat, with a cup of coffee and an unlit cigarette. I bought the pack and a bottle of cheap red wine from Tesco Express last night, like I did after every breakup in my twenties. When I got them home, I realized that I didn’t actually want either. I wanted a cup of herbal tea, a takeaway, and something stupid on television, which makes sense, since I’m not twenty-two anymore.
Now, though, my hands are unsteady, and I like the feel of the cigarette between my fingers, like an anchor. Above my patio, wind is sending heavy clouds surging over the sky, and the city has that particular damp scent of rain coming. I take a swallow of coffee and lean my head against the back door. Finn is still in Donegal with Tom, and I’m both desperate to hold my son and glad that he can’t see me right now. I didn’t sleep last night, and my eyes are sore from crying.
During the long hours of the night, I kept having two thoughts: that I love Eamonn, and that I will love someone else, one day. The second thought is too delicate to consider directly, but I believe it.
I check my watch. Nearly seven. I light the cigarette and let it smolder in my hand. DI Fenton will already be on the beach in Ardglass, waiting, with an overcoat on over his suit against the wind. The sea will be stormy behind him, rough gray waves crashing onto the sand.
The second hand keeps ticking. I watch it, breathing out slowly. Seven o’clock. Eamonn will be walking down the wooden path now, and then he will be stepping off it onto the sand, and feeling the full force of the wind off the sea, blowing straight at him over acres and acres of open water.
He’s an informer now.
After finishing my coffee, I toss the cigarette end in the bin and lace up my trainers to run along the canal. Normally my body feels stiff at the start of a run, but today I barely feel a thing.
As I’m coming out of the shower after my run, Marian sends me a message. “Want to come over? x.” I hesitate, worn out from not sleeping last night, considering the leftover takeaway in my fridge, and all the episodes of television I could watch, but it will be good to see my sister, to hold Saoirse.
I don’t listen to music on my way to the Liberties. I don’t need anything to make me more emotional, not now, not for a while yet. Outside Marian’s house, I use my key to open her door and stop inside to take off my ankle boots, padding down the hall in my stockinged feet, calling, “Hiya.”
I can hear Saoirse crying at the back of the house, wailing. Poor lamb. All the lights are on, I notice, even in the upstairs hall. I come into the kitchen and my whole body rears back. A man is standing by the cooker, another man is sitting at my sister’s kitchen table, and Saoirse is strapped in her rocker, and sobbing.
I cross the room in two steps and crouch in front of Saoirse, undoing the straps of her rocker and lifting her into my arms.
Saoirse is panting from crying, her face splotched red, and I hold her to my chest, with a hand cradling her head. I can feel my own heart knocking wildly against hers as I murmur to her. “Where’s your mammy?” I say to her, and turn to look at the men, thinking, Where’s her mam, where’s her mam, what the fuck have you done with her mam?
The two men watch me. I recognize them. They’re the driver and the younger man who crashed into my car in Wicklow, and I should have called the police on them that night. Neither of them has a gun out, I notice. They’re both wearing dark hooded shirts and ski masks rolled up above their faces.
Silence flicks through the room suddenly as Saoirse stops crying. The younger man tugs at his ears, like they’re ringing from the sound of the baby crying.
“Where’s Marian?” I ask, which they don’t answer. They sent me the message, I realize. Marian doesn’t end her messages with a kiss. “Why did you ask me to come here?”
“The baby wouldn’t stop screaming,” says the driver. “Someone might have called the cops, if she’d kept at it. We need you to keep her quiet.”
I feel another updraft of panic. “How long have you been here?” I ask, which they don’t answer. Jesus christ, I think. “We gave the baby some water,” says the younger man, shrugging, and I want to hurl myself at him, to claw his eyes out.
I carry Saoirse into the hall, rushing toward the front door with her in my arms.
“Where are you going?” asks the driver, following me into the corridor.
“You don’t need her here. I’m taking her outside.”
“No, I can’t let you do that,” he says. At my side, the curtains are drawn over the front window. I should have noticed that from outside, the curtains drawn in daylight. “She’s hungry,” I manage to say.
“So feed her,” he says, cocking his head toward the kitchen.
The front door is five paces behind me. I’ll never make it in time. Slowly, I move back down the hall to the kitchen. I open the fridge and find some pumped milk and a clean bottle. A knife is on the draining rack. A small paring knife, with a wooden handle. The blade will be dull, though. Seb’s away on reshoots, and Marian never sharpens her knives. I’ve told her she should, I’ve told her a dull knife is more dangerous, you’re more likely to cut yourself.
I screw the cap on the bottle, trying to work out how to slide the knife into my shirt pocket without the men seeing. There are two of them, though. How can I fight them with Saoirse in my arms?
Saoirse drains the bottle greedily, her hand wrapped over mine. She must have been ravenous. I listen for any sounds from upstairs, but we’re alone in the house. The younger man has a laptop open on the kitchen table. It looks like he’s watching a film. I can see a narrow road rushing by, with trees alongside it.
“Where’s Marian?” I ask again.
“Here,” says the driver, and points at the laptop. He isn’t watching a film, I realize. He’s watching live footage from a dash camera. Marian is behind that camera, driving a car down a country road.
“Marian,” I say, and I start to tell her Saoirse is all right now, I’m with her, when the driver interrupts me. “She can’t hear you. It’s just a camera feed, there isn’t any sound.”
I watch the screen. Right now, Marian is driving on a road between potato fields. The driver checks his watch. Into his phone, he says, “Five minutes out.”
I turn toward him, horror rattling through me. “What’s in the car?” I ask. He doesn’t answer, and I feel my eyes roll back in my skull. My arms jerk tight around the baby, her weight stopping me from fainting. “Is there a bomb in the car?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I sway on my feet. “What are you making her do?”
“We’re not making her do anything,” says the driver. “We gave her two options.”
“What was the other option?” I ask, and the driver looks at the baby. I feel pressure crushing my lungs. “You’re monsters.”
I stand in my sister’s kitchen, with snaps of her and her family on the fridge, with water dripping from the tap. I can feel Saoirse’s hair against my hand, and smell the laundry soap on her cotton suit.
“What’s the target?” I ask, but I already recognize the landscape, the shape of the hills in the distance. Marian’s driving toward a border checkpoint.
“Don’t worry,” says the driver, and his voice seems to refract and bend as it comes toward me, to telescope around the room. “This is what she was born to do. She’ll die helping the armed struggle.”
“She won’t do it,” I say. “She’ll run.”
“I doubt that,” says the younger man. “She’s cuffed to the steering wheel.”
I can’t breathe, I can’t think straight. Everything is happening too quickly, the tarmac rolling under her car on the monitor, the trees whipping past. I look at the younger man’s hands, resting on the table, his skin scratched red around his nails.
Both men are watching the monitor, and I back away until I can take hold of the paring knife, hiding it under the cuff of my shirtsleeve.
“She’s three minutes out,” says the driver into his phone. He must be talking to whoever is waiting near the checkpoint, hiding with a detonator. That person is miles away, and I can’t get to him. I try to hold myself steady against another surge of vertigo.
“Two minutes,” he says, and another sheet of terror moves through me. She has two minutes left to live. My sister, my younger sister.
This is her view, right now, and it’s beautiful. The silver light coming between the clouds onto the green fields and the thick branches.
“One minute,” he says, and I start to pray. Not to god, to her, to my sister, to the life inside her. To her swimming into the caves on the north coast, diving under the arches and surfacing with the cold swell, to her dragging herself across the hospital ward to meet her newborn daughter, to her laughing at one of her husband’s jokes, to her curling up on the sofa against her mam, to her slinging off her rucksack and tearing across the playing fields on her last day of school, to her rolling over in our shared bedroom and saying, “Wake up, Tessa,” because it was morning and she wanted to play.
“Forty seconds.”
I watch the monitor with tears soaking my face and her baby’s hair. I want to hold Saoirse up, I want Marian to see her, but I know she’s already seeing her anyway, that Saoirse will be the only thing she can see, golden and blooming.
“Thirty seconds.”
I will never forgive myself, I know that. Seb will never forgive himself. Mam will never forgive herself. The three of us will spend the rest of our lives wondering what we could have done differently to save her.
“Twenty seconds.”
Marian would hate that. She would want Saoirse to grow up unencumbered by the past. Ours, and this island’s, and I’ll do my best to help her, I promise.
“Ten seconds.”
The target is in view now. It’s one of the larger border checkpoints between the republic and the North. A concrete watchtower, two portacabins. And I can see a handful of young men out on the road. British soldiers, in their khaki uniforms. They’re going to die. Marian has been ordered to drive straight into them, in exchange for Saoirse’s life. Even from this distance, I can see how young the soldiers are.
“Five seconds.”
Marian is slowing down, the tarmac unraveling more slowly, then the car stops. Marian is about twenty meters from the checkpoint. “What’s she doing?” asks the younger man.
On the monitor, the soldiers are coming toward her car with their rifles drawn. They must be able to see her, a woman behind the windscreen, pale and sweating. I watch the soldiers moving closer, and then something happens. They all stop suddenly. I can’t tell what they’ve seen or heard, but then they are backing away, breaking into a run, scattering from the car.
It’s Marian, I realize. She has rolled the windows down, and she is screaming at the soldiers to run.
Everyone else is clear of her car now. I can see the empty road ahead of her, the grasses and weeds blowing alongside it, the sun coming down through the splits in the clouds. I hold my breath, bracing myself for the explosion, for the blinding flash of light.
The device hasn’t gone off yet. The road hasn’t erupted, ripped up by a bomb. Both men are shouting now, at the screen and down the phone, and I take a step away and then I am wheeling out of the room with Saoirse in my arms, racing down the hall. I throw myself against the front door, drawing back the lock.
I can hear a swish of fabric, and the driver is behind me, grabbing on to my shoulder. I clamp my arm around Saoirse, and bring up the other hand with the paring knife, slashing hard at his face. I feel the blade tear across the bridge of his nose, then he stumbles back, cursing. I wrench the door open and hurl myself outside with Saoirse tight against me, and pelt up the center of the road. A taxi coming toward me slams on its brakes, and I veer around it without slowing, careening onto Bride Street, jostling between the people on the crowded footpath. Some of them call out, but I duck away from them. I can’t stop running, not yet.
Two uniformed officers are standing outside the garda station. I can’t hear myself screaming, but the officers are turning now and running toward me.
One of them is speaking into her radio, and the other is trying to check me and the baby for injuries, and I shake him off. I turn to the woman, who grabs hold of me, and I say, “Was there a bomb at the border?”
She looks at me, and I search her gray eyes. “Yes,” she says, and my knees drop me to the pavement. I cradle Saoirse against me, pain howling through my chest.
The officer is kneeling down, too, and I feel her hands moving on my shoulders, keeping me from flying apart into pieces.
“There’s a bomb at the border,” she says. “But it didn’t go off.”