I lift Finn from the crib and onto a pillow on my lap. It hurts when he first latches on, and I flex my feet toward me. He settles to nurse, a steady, diligent expression on his face. Where is my sister? How do we get her back? After settling Finn down again, I find the surveillance footage from the robbery online. I pause the video and study the two men.
They seem to be about our age. Marian has a slighter build than either of them. In the footage, she has the same distant, fixed expression as she did in school while taking an exam.
I rub my forehead. The police will be in Ballycastle, searching the lane out to the headland and inside the cottage. They might find blood on the floor or the walls.
Marian doesn’t look hurt in the surveillance footage, but I still feel sick. She would have been alone in the cottage when they came. She must have been so scared. I imagine her begging them not to hurt her, and fury drops over me like a hood. I wish I’d been there with her. I wish I’d been there, and I wish that both of us had been holding baseball bats.
I go back to bed, and for a long time I lie in the dark with my eyes open. How is this fair? How can I be here while she’s there? Marian should be able to come here to rest while I take her place. We should at least be able to take it in turns.
5
MORE RAIN HAS REACHED the north coast this morning, according to the radio. I crack eggs into a bowl on the counter. Finn bounces in his swing, then tips his weight forward. “Careful,” I say, pointlessly.
I turn to see my mam standing in the doorway. She seems taken aback by the flour spilled on the counter and the cracked eggshells in the sink.
“What are you making, then?” she asks finally.
“A Dutch pancake.”
I continue whisking flour into the batter. My mother hesitates. I can tell she wants to ask if there’s not something more urgent for me to be doing right now than making a pancake.
I don’t try to explain my sense that the IRA wants us to act in a certain way, and we have to do the opposite. I’m so sick of having them decide how we will behave. They tell us when to be scared, when to be quiet. When Colette’s cousin tried to leave her husband, an IRA representative came to her house and said, “He’s going crazy up in that prison. You can’t be leaving him. It’d be bad for morale.”
If we refuse to play our parts, maybe this will be over sooner. Marian will come home.
The butter is starting to burn. I tug the pan from the heat, pour in the batter, and place it in the oven. I wipe my hands on my jeans. Out the window over the sink, a dull wash of cloud stretches across the sky. The rain will arrive here soon. Already the storm has knocked the heat from the air, when yesterday I was hot in only a linen dress.
“When will it be ready?” asks my mam. “Do I have time for a shower?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Neither of us will go to work today. I’ve already told Nicholas, and asked Clodagh to cover for me. When I rang the day care owner, to tell her Finn would be staying at home with me, I wondered if she’d seen the news. All my friends did, though I haven’t returned any of their calls or messages yet.
On the coast, rain will be falling past the mouths of the caves, drifting over the headlands, dripping from the lobster traps on the quays. Marian should be there. I keep thinking that she is, that this stricken feeling has nothing to do with her, that at any moment my phone will light up with a picture of Dunseverick castle in the rain.
When the timer sounds, I use a dish towel to pull the hot pan from the oven. I blow on a piece before handing it to Finn, while my mother settles at the table with damp hair.
“Do you want plum jam or apricot?”
“Apricot.”
I hand her the jar and we both start to eat, quickly, my mother with her usual neat strokes, and myself with more mess. Her generation holds a knife and fork differently than mine. I lick jam from the knife, my tongue grazing its sharp edge.
My mother sets down her fork and wipes the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “I’m going to try and visit Eoin today,” she says. “He might be able to help.”
“Eoin Royce?”
She nods. Her friend Sheila’s son was stopped last year outside the holiday market with two semiautomatic rifles in a duffel bag. He’d joined the IRA as a teenager. I can’t remember all the charges. Conspiracy to commit murder, membership of a terrorist organization, possession of banned weapons, enough for a life sentence.
“Where is he?”
“Maghaberry,” she says. “I’ve already requested a visitor’s order.”