He Told Me I Lost Our Baby, and Five Years Later I Met Him at His Door novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Back Room

Oonagh says the boy is a friend's orphan, Cormac clears the room, and Padraig drives Siobhan home and says the boy was an early one. In her rented room she reads the date on her own scan and decides to go back.

Oonagh took her hand off the boy's sleeve, and she did it slowly, so that everybody could see she was choosing to.

"Maureen, you're upset," she said. "You've had a long journey. Cormac, take Fintan to the kitchen."

"No," I said.

The boy's arm tightened around my neck.

I could feel his heart going against my collarbone, fast and light.

"He's frightened," I said. "I'll hold him a minute."

"He's a stranger's child to you," Oonagh said.

"Then it won't hurt either of us."

Cormac stood up.

He was six foot two, and when he stood, the men at the table shifted in their chairs.

"Ma," he said. "Sit down."

"I'll not have this in front of the parish."

"Sit down," he said, and he did not raise his voice.

She sat.

I had never once seen her do what he told her.

He turned to the room.

"Dinner's over," he said. "Go home. Thank you for coming."

Thirty people rose at once, with the scrape of chairs and the low sound of people who will say nothing on the way out and all of it at the door.

A woman in a green dress lingered at the end of the table, looking at my coat.

"Mrs. Shanahan," she said, with a little nod, as if I'd come back from a trip.

"I'm not," I said, and she went red and left.

The room emptied.

Cormac did not come near me.

He stood with his hands at his sides.

"Siobhan," he said. "Please let me talk to you. Not here."

"You can talk to me when I say."

"Yes."

He said it at once, with no argument, and that was new.

The boy loosened his grip on my coat.

"Are you going to take me away?" he asked into my collar.

"No," I said. "I'm going to put you down, and you're going to tell me about your dog."

I set him on his feet by the table leg.

He stood there in his socks and held up the stuffed animal by one ear.

It was brown and floppy, worn pale on the muzzle where small hands had held it.

"This is Biscuit," he said. "He's a boy. He doesn't like loud noise."

"Neither do I."

"Nana says he's too old to carry." He tucked his lip in again. "I don't think so."

"I don't think so either."

"Fintan," Oonagh said. "Kitchen. Now."

He went.

He looked back at me from the door with those grey eyes, and then the door swung shut behind him.

I put my hand flat on the table, because my knees had started to shake.

"Padraig will drive you wherever you're staying," Cormac said.

"I'll take a cab."

"Please. Let him."

The door at the front of the bar opened, and a big man in a grey Carhartt jacket came in, wiping his hands on a rag.

Padraig Shanahan was Cormac's cousin, forty years old, and he had driven the Shanahan cars since before I met them.

He used to leave a paper cup of tea on the dashboard for me on cold mornings, and say nothing about it.

I had not thought about that tea in five years.

"Mrs. Shanahan," he said, and his eyes went to my shoes and stayed there.

"It's Siobhan, Padraig."

"Siobhan." He put the rag in his pocket. "The car's at the curb."

He held the back door of the Lincoln for me, and I got in.

He pulled away from the curb on Dorchester Avenue, past the bakery with its lights off and the towing yard behind its chain-link.

He drove with both hands on the wheel.

"I'm on the avenue," I said. "The room above the laundromat."

"I know where it is."

"How?"

He didn't answer for a block.

"Cormac's had a man watching it since Tuesday," he said at last. "Not to hurt you. So nobody else would."

"That's one way to put it."

"It's the true way."

We stopped at a light.

I looked at the back of his big neck, red above the collar.

"The boy," I said. "Who is his mother?"

"Oonagh says a girl called Aoife," Padraig said.

"Where is she?"

"Dead, in childbirth. The way she tells it."

"The way she tells it," I said. "Did you know her?"

The light turned green.

"No," Padraig said. "Nobody did."

"Nobody knew a girl who had a baby in the Shanahan house," I said.

"She was never in the house," Padraig said. "The boy was brought home when he was a few days old."

"From where?"

"From a doctor's." He stopped, and his hands shifted on the wheel.

"Padraig," I said.

"He was an early one," he said quietly. "The boy. That's all I know. He was an early one, and small."

He said no more.

When I tried again, he looked at the road and turned the radio on.

He let me out in front of the laundromat, under the sign that said SUDS & DUDS in red letters with one bulb missing.

I thanked him, and he nodded and did not look at my face.

He drove away slowly, as if he did not want to go.

The room was on the second floor, up a narrow stair that smelled of dryer sheets.

It had a bed, a hot plate, a chair, a window onto the avenue and a single hook on the back of the door.

I had been living out of one bag for nine days, and the bag was where I had left it on the floor.

I sat down on the bed in my coat.

I took the scan out of my pocket.

It was soft at the corners, because I had carried it across an ocean in a wallet and unfolded it more times than I could count.

The picture showed a curled shape and the white line of a spine, and the white digits in the corner that read MAR 12.

At the bottom was my name, DOLAN M., and the due date.

EDD 2 MAY.

I had been twenty-eight weeks that day.

I counted on my fingers, as I had counted a hundred times in Lisbon.

Two days after the scan was March fourteen.

That was the night they brought me back from Worcester.

That was the night of the whisky.

That was the night I was told I had lost him.

I folded the scan along its old creases and put it back in my pocket, against my ribs, where I would feel it if anyone tried to take it.

Oonagh Shanahan's girl called Aoife had died in childbirth, and nobody had known her.

The boy was an early one.

He was small for five.

I sat in the dim room with the avenue going by below and made myself think it through plainly.

There were two stories.

In one of them I was a woman who had lost her mind with grief, and was seeing her dead child in every small boy with grey eyes.

I had lived in that story for years, and I knew its rooms.

In the other, a woman had put one drugged glass of whisky in my hand, and I had no way yet to prove it.

I took off my coat and hung it on the hook.

I was going back to that house.

I did not know how, or what I would say, or whether I would be let in.

I knew I would go back, and that I would take my time and be careful.

Nobody was going to tell me where my son was buried until I had looked at every grave myself.

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