Francesca rings me back after another half hour. “Has he stopped?”
“No.”
“Have you tried the hair dryer?”
The moment the hair dryer turns on, Finn stops crying. He swivels his head, blinking. I sink down to the floor with the hair dryer running beside us. After a few moments, his body softens in the crook of my arm. His eyes start to drift, and slowly the lids come down. The red splotches fade from his skin. In his sleep, he looks impeccably peaceful, like the last five hours never happened.
I can’t say the same for myself. My nerves feel sandpapered. I remember this sensation from his first few months, when he had reflux. During one crying spell, my mam came to take him out of the house. I watched her carry him away, his small, worried face poking over her shoulder. He was wearing his white safari hat, like he was setting off on a much longer expedition. Come back, I thought.
That seems like years ago, but it was only in March, he was born in December. When I arrived at the hospital, my legs wouldn’t stop shaking, from the pain or the adrenaline. I remember kneeling over the triage bed, wanting to bite through the metal. When she arrived, the anesthesiologist told me to round my back, like a scared cat. I remember her wiping down my skin, placing an antiseptic dressing, and then the calm from the epidural drip, the sulfurous light in the delivery room, the drifting of my thoughts. An IV line was taped to the back of my hand, and a nurse gave me a pink jug of ice water with a straw.
For hours, we heard the monitor on the baby’s heart. Afterward, Tom and I thought it was still playing in the recovery room, a phantom sound still revolving. Sometimes, during the labor, the monitor slipped and the line on the screen broke into dashes.
“You don’t actually want to hear all of this,” I said to Marian after coming home from hospital.
“Of course I do,” she said.
“Aren’t labor stories boring to other people?”
“No. Why would you think that?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Because they only happen to women?” Marian suggested.
At some point, the doctor fitted an oxygen mask over my face. I could feel the baby moving downward. I haven’t tried to describe to anyone the moment when he was handed up onto my torso. My eyes were closed and I felt a warm, wet shape on my stomach, larger than I expected, slippery limbs moving, and gasped before lifting him to my chest.
* * *
—
When my mother returns, I’m still on the floor beside the hair dryer, with Finn asleep in my arms. She looks down at us. “What’s happening here?”
“He wouldn’t stop crying.”
“Did you try feeding him?”
“Of course I tried feeding him.”
“Formula?”
“No, I nursed him.”
“Your stress isn’t good for him,” she says. “He’s getting your cortisol in his milk.”
“So it’s my fault?”
She sighs. “Do you want me to put him in his crib? Or are you planning to sit there all night?”
I let her lift the baby from my arms. While she sets him in the crib, I take one of the plastic containers of pumped breast milk from the freezer. She might have a point about the cortisol. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but I wouldn’t drink a pint of vodka or espresso and then nurse him, and this fear is stronger than alcohol or caffeine. It might be clouding my milk, agitating him.
I hold the container under the hot tap, and the frozen milk starts to melt. I pour the milk into a bottle and set it in the fridge, feeling for a moment normal, suburban.
“I’m going to make tea. Do you want one before you head home?” I ask, and my mam nods. I let myself believe that the day is over, that I’ll make our tea, switch off the lights, and go to bed, leaving the dishwasher to churn in the darkness. Instead, we slump onto chairs at the table. My mother takes off her glasses and rubs the raw indents on the bridge of her nose.
“Were you nervous to see him?” I ask.
“Eoin?” she says, sounding baffled by the idea. She might be remembering the little boy in the paddling pool, who closed his eyes while she rubbed sun cream onto his face. I want to tell her that doesn’t mean anything, he’s thirty-four years old now and in prison on a life sentence for conspiracy to murder.
“Eoin told me the IRA has done this before,” she says. “He said it’s a new tactic, forcing ordinary people to do their robberies for them. They don’t want their own lads lifted.”
“Why didn’t Fenton tell me that?”