Northern Spy(11)

The detectives restrained Eoin quietly, without drawing attention. The market remained intact. People walked under the fairy lights along the rows of red-and-white painted stalls, drank mulled wine, bought presents for their families. A few feet away from him, children carried on riding the carousel.



* * *



—



After clearing away our dishes, I carry Finn outside. He rocks forward, testing his weight on his hands, trying to work out how to crawl. Past the garden wall, the sheep field dips and then rises over a hill. Through the sliding door, I can see my mam on the phone with her brother at the kitchen table.

A picture of Marian is taped to the fridge, from her birthday dinner at Molly’s Yard, and I look at her bright eyes, her red lipstick. Marian’s not vain, but she does have elaborate regimens. Recently, on seeing all the expensive cosmetics and pots of lotion in her bathroom, I said, “How can you afford this?”

She shrugged. “No overhead.”

Paramedics here don’t make much money, which is odd, considering the utility of their job compared to, say, mine. But she lives in a postage-stamp-size flat. Her budget doesn’t have to cover a mortgage, childcare, or student loans, like mine.

“You should save,” I said.

“What’s the point? I’ll never be able to afford a house anyway.”

We’re only two years apart, but lately it has felt like more.

A few weeks after he was born, I brought Finn over to her flat. We’d been up for hours, but Marian had just woken. At the door, she rubbed her eyes, smearing last night’s mascara, and I had the completely foreign sense that she might not want to see me, that we were intruding.

She’d had friends over the night before, and the flat was littered with empty bottles of red wine, a wooden salad bowl plastered with wilted leaves, a scraped pan of lasagna. Her friends had stayed late talking and listening to music. Some of them had gone on to Lavery’s.

My weekend wasn’t worse, but it was incomparably different from hers. It had involved a fair amount of toil—cleaning, laundry, washing—and very little sleep, but then here was Finn, curled against me, gripping my shirt in his small hands, blinking around the room.

“I think he’s hungry. Sorry, do you mind—?” I asked, suddenly shy about nursing him in front of her. Marian cleared a tangle of clothes from her velvet armchair. While I fed him, she began to clean up from the party. I hated feeling different from Marian, like one of us must have betrayed the other for our circumstances to have diverged so much.

She seemed defensive about having still been in bed. I wanted her to know that I didn’t think her weekend was silly or inconsequential, that I didn’t judge her for her freedom or how she used it, that I didn’t feel sorry for her or for myself. One of our lives wasn’t smaller than the other’s.

And I needed to know she felt the same. That she didn’t pity me, alone in the countryside with an infant. Or the opposite, that she didn’t think I’d become smug and insufferable.

Marian might not be able to have a baby. Three years ago, she had an ovarian cyst removed, and afterward was told she has asymptomatic endometriosis. Her obstetrician put her odds of a pregnancy at about half. It’s very hard to wrap your mind around that percentage. Marian said she’d be more optimistic if the odds were slightly worse, that she’d be able to convince herself she’d be in the lucky, say, 40 percent.

After her surgery, I promised to help, if the time came, to donate an egg, or be her surrogate. It will be difficult for her to adopt while Northern Ireland is a conflict zone.

When Finn was born, I watched Marian look around the maternity ward, and knew she was wondering if she’d ever be there herself.

So we were quiet in her messy flat, me nursing the baby, her upending a bottle of red wine in the sink. I wondered if she wanted me to leave. But then Marian said, “My friend brought baklava last night. Do you want some?”

I nodded, and she sat down across from us and handed me a plate.

Since then, we’ve slowly reverted to normal. We’ve gone back to complaining to each other about our lives, cheerfully competing over who had the worse day, criticizing each other, arguing. Our last argument, about a film that she liked and I hated, went on for so long that near the end I thought we were about to switch sides and argue the other’s point.

The two of us shared a room until I left for university. I’m so accustomed to her company, her physical presence. I would drive to the cottage on the coast now to feel near her, if the police weren’t still searching it. The last sighting of her wasn’t in Ballycastle, though, but during the robbery in Templepatrick.

On the sofa, my mother rubs her eyes, then notices Finn watching her and pulls her face into a smile for him.

“When are the visiting hours at Maghaberry?” I ask.

“Four to six,” she says.

“Can you mind the baby before then?” I ask, and she nods. Templepatrick is only thirty miles north. The staff at the petrol station might have noticed something useful, and I can be there and back within a couple of hours.

I set Finn on the bed while I dress, to have a little more time with him before leaving. He pushes himself up on the duvet, delighted by its soft, broad surface, while I pull on jeans and an oversize jumper. When I turn around again, Finn has found the label on the pillowcase. I curl on the bed next to him, rubbing his back while he lowers his face toward the label, his eyes wide. A few weeks ago, Marian said, “Why tags? Is it all babies or just him?”