Northern Spy(70)

I start having flashbacks. Not of Seamus’s death—those few seconds were so shocking that they recur to me as flat images, outside of time—but of Finn strapped in his high chair, twisting to free himself. That’s what wakes me up at night, thinking about how the men might have forced me to leave him alone in his high chair, and what would have happened to him.

Our story has held. We’re only minor figures, lost in the chaos of the conflict, others have left far more loose ends behind. But the fear still spreads out, like black ink in water.

The roads here are narrow, and I worry about rolling the car into a ditch with Finn strapped in his car seat. I watch him eat a piece of bread and worry about him choking, picture myself running out into the road holding him, screaming for someone to help. I worry that his cold is actually meningitis. I worry about concussions when he bumps his head, and hold his face level with mine to check that his irises are the same size.

One afternoon, my mam watches me take Finn’s temperature. I squint at the thermometer. “No fever,” I say.

“I told you, Tessa. He’s fine, it’s only a cold.”

I clean the thermometer with rubbing alcohol, while Finn reverses a toy car across the living-room floor.

“It will only get worse, you know,” says my mam.

“Sorry?”

“This is just the beginning,” she says, and then starts to count them off on her fingers. The time I had a febrile seizure as a toddler, the time Marian fell out of a tree, the time I crashed the car as a learner driver, the time Marian had pneumonia.

“I don’t see your point.”

“You can’t raise him like this,” she says. “You can’t be this scared all the time.”

He will learn, eventually, about my informing, and abduction. “How will I tell him?” I ask my mam.

“You don’t know how he’ll react,” she says. “He might not find it frightening, he might be curious.”

“He’ll think I didn’t protect him.”

“Oh, Tessa.”



* * *



—

Weeks ago, Fenton sent me a brochure from Victim Support, and I dig it out of the drawer. The guide isn’t very specific. It says to be patient with yourself in the beginning. It says that recovery can be challenging, and advises taking part in activities that aren’t too physically or emotionally taxing. At the moment, I can’t think of a single activity that would be neither physically nor emotionally taxing.

This fatigue is to be expected, apparently, but the guide doesn’t say how long this state will last, or what will come afterward. It does say not to expect to do much at all for the first six weeks after the incident, and not to make any important decisions for six months. I’ve lost my house, my job, my friends. I wonder if that counts as a decision.

Often I just want to go home. I miss the lough, and the lanes, and the view from my kitchen window. I still check the weather for Belfast first most mornings.



* * *



—

The winter lasts and lasts. We have weeks of rain, ice storms, heavy clouds roiling over Dublin Bay. Being out after dark makes me nervous, which is inconvenient when the sun starts to set at four in the afternoon, but the clocks go forward finally, and the days start to lengthen.

One morning I am pushing Finn on the swings in the playground, talking with the woman next to me, and realize that I haven’t scanned the fence for a gunman once.

Afterward, Marian is waiting for us at a café on the main street. When we arrive, she hands me some papers. “Can you read this over for me?”

“What is it?”

“My application,” she says.

Marian has found what to do, she will be studying law at University College Dublin this autumn. I still have no idea. We’ve survived, I want to do something useful.

On the weekend, I drive with Finn to the Wicklow mountains, and we walk past rowan trees and thin streams running through the peat. On clear days, you can the Mournes across the border. These mountains and the Mournes were once part of one unbroken chain, stretching across Europe to Russia. The granite beneath my feet is the same here as in the Mournes.

When his legs grow tired, I carry Finn on my back, and we are coming down the slope like that when two men appear on the path, moving in the opposite direction. We nod at each other as we pass. They have on red jackets that say Wicklow Mountain Rescue, and lightness rushes up my legs as I wonder about that as work, as something useful.





EPILOGUE





WE’VE COME TO THE NORTH COAST. Finn wanted to see it. He has heard about it all his life, and he knows that Dunseverick castle was the model for Cair Paravel in Narnia. I worried that he’d be disappointed, that the actual castle would pale in comparison, but he loved it. He loved the checkerboard floor, and hearing that part of the cliff once collapsed, so the castle kitchen fell into the sea.

After leaving Dunseverick, we walk along the cliffs to the rope bridge. Finn goes ahead of me, holding on to either side, the sea sweeping far beneath him. We stop in the middle, suspended above the water, between the two cliffs.

When the wind lifts, the ropes begin to sway. I’m about to reassure him that we’re safe, then notice that he’s not scared. He is, in fact, bouncing a little to make the bridge rock more. I start to laugh.