Northern Spy(51)

“I’m not spying on my sister for you.”





31


OUTSIDE THE CAR, THE woods around Mount Stewart are dark. Finn is asleep in his car seat, and Marian is telling me about a bunker in a field outside Coleraine. “We use it for target practice,” she says, “but it might be where they store the gelignite from the boat.”

With effort, I turn my attention from the dark woods to her. “Have you been there? Have you been inside an underground firing range?”

She nods. “During training.”

I’d thought those were myths, those rumors of IRA bunkers buried under farms, but now my sister is describing another one in Tyrone, which might also be used to hide the explosives from the shipment. She thinks that the fishing trawler will land soon, based on a conversation she overheard. It might already be steering up the Bristol Channel.

We’re close together, in the enclosed space of the car. “Are you lying?” I ask.

“Sorry?”

“Eamonn doesn’t know if you’re genuine. He thinks the IRA might have sent you to give the government disinformation.”

Marian lets out a sound. “That’s mad,” she says.

“Why did you become an informer?”

“It wasn’t only one reason,” she says.

“Why are you still lying to me?”

“I’m telling you the truth,” she says. “I stopped believing that what we were doing would work, but it happened slowly, it was a series of moments.”

The moon rises above a serrated row of trees. “Tell me about them.”

Marian has started to cry. “Um,” she says, “one was you. One was your miscarriage.”

I close my eyes. I was four months pregnant when blood slid down my legs in the shower. She says, “I didn’t want to keep going afterward. There was enough pain out there already without us causing more.”

“You caused worse,” I say, though it’s hard for me to imagine worse.

After the ultrasound, after the doctor told me my baby’s heart wasn’t beating, I called Marian from the hospital car park. The D&E had been scheduled for the next day. I couldn’t find my car, and I was telling Marian what had happened while searching for it with worsening panic, like if I found the car then everything would be all right, and after a while of this I leaned my head against one of the cement pillars and began sobbing. Marian said, “Stay right there,” and minutes later she was running up the steps, flying toward me.

She had already given me a newborn-size sleepsuit. I asked her if I had to give it away now or if I could keep it, and she said, “Of course you can keep it, Tessa.”

Marian knows that my daughter was going to be called Isla, and whenever she meets an Isla, she says, “That was my niece’s name.”

Is that my sister? Or is she the woman firing a gun in a bunker?

“Who are you?” I ask. It’s not a rhetorical question, I want her to answer.

“I’m going to prove it to you,” she says. “Give me a little time.”



* * *



—

I drive home on the lough road past the Georgian houses, their windows golden against the black sky, and for a moment I allow myself to imagine that there are two car seats behind me, that my two children are both currently asleep in the back, each with their own blanket and bear.

My daughter would be three years old in March.

After the awful procedure, the D&E, I read the section in the pregnancy book on recovering from a miscarriage, and then I skipped to the chapter I wanted to read, “Bringing Your Baby Home from Hospital.”

I read about night feeds and swaddling techniques, latching on and mastitis. I read that vests with snaps on the side are best in the first weeks, and about using witch hazel to clean the umbilical stump. My baby was gone, but the information still seemed intimately, urgently relevant, like I needed to know how to take care of her.

For weeks afterward, I’d catch myself cupping my breasts or stomach in my hand, as I’d been doing for the past four months, to check how much they’d grown. It seemed, often, that time had stopped, the way it can on long flights, that the days were not progressing. Tom wanted us to take a holiday, he thought it might make me feel better. I said I didn’t fancy a trip, and tried not to hate him for offering that as a solution.

At my follow-up appointment, the doctor told me that the miscarriage wasn’t my fault, but other doctors had told me to avoid sleeping on my back, or drinking too much caffeine, or eating licorice, or performing strenuous exercise, since those can cause a miscarriage, so maybe I had caused it. They’d also said that stress is bad for a baby, which is singularly unhelpful advice for anyone, but especially someone living in Northern Ireland.

A year later, during my pregnancy with Finn, my ankles became swollen with a thick collar of fluid. My jeans no longer fit, then my dresses. After a shower, I noticed that the veins across my breasts were a brighter blue, like there was more blood, or it was closer to the surface. None of this convinced me.

I felt like a fraud, taking a prenatal vitamin, having cravings, complaining of being tired, like this act wasn’t fooling anyone. At any point, I might have already lost the baby. I hadn’t known the first time either.

The pregnancy book seemed to be addressing someone else, someone who had never come home from hospital and scrubbed the bloodstains from her bathroom floor on her hands and knees.