“He’s not breathing,” I pant. “I don’t think he has a pulse.”
“I’m getting the paddles.”
But he’s taking too long, searching through a cupboard, so I duck to blow air into Samuel’s mouth and then because he’s too high and too large I climb up onto the kitchen bench and I straddle his large girth, and I start pumping his chest as hard as I’m able. I don’t feel as though I’m making any difference. He is too firmly built, the bones and muscles too protective of his heart for me to get to it. I give him another breath of air, a long one, feeling him inflate beneath me in a way that unnerves me deeply.
“Off, quick.”
I scramble down and Anik unzips Samuel’s parka and cuts his shirt open. Then he places the small patches over where the heart should be. They connect with wires to a small black box with a monitor.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” I ask.
“No.”
“I think you have to put one to the side and one to the bottom.”
“How do you know that?”
I shrug helplessly.
He hesitates, unsure, then does as I’ve said. The pack is energizing itself, and we watch the charge climb higher and higher until the light goes green.
Anik’s eyes are frantic. He reaches for the button but he doesn’t need to press it—the device automatically shocks if it can’t detect a heartbeat. Electricity jolts through Samuel’s large body. He is immediately a thing of meat and blood. But Samuel isn’t dead—this isn’t that, it isn’t—he gasps and returns to consciousness, more quickly than I would have imagined possible. He groans and vomits all over himself, and we have to roll him onto his side so he doesn’t choke.
“The fuck happened?” he asks.
“No clue,” I say. “You got hit and your whole body shut down. Your heart stopped, Sam.”
He rolls onto his back once more and stares at the ceiling. We watch him, frightened. I don’t know what kind of injury could cause your whole body to shut down like that, and I imagine jumping back onto his chest and pumping it once more, blowing my breath between his cold lips once more. If he goes again I will have to.
But instead Samuel says, “Like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves…”
And I laugh, startled—because even now—and I say, “As though we were drowning inside our hearts.”
Samuel says, faintly, “You Irish.” And then he closes his eyes and continues to breathe.
* * *
The catch is lost to the storm and the broken cable. Samuel has a laceration from the cable that cuts clean across his back. The crew is exhausted and heartsick over the lost catch, worried for Samuel. Ennis is so furious with himself that he’s stopped speaking altogether.
And me?
I’m no longer the thing with feathers.
Because the tracking light for my tern has blinked out, snuffed away by the storm, dragged into the deep below where no sun can find it. Just as she must have been.
11
WOMEN’S PRISON, IRELAND FOUR YEARS AGO
I flinch at every sound. My nerves are shot. The numbness has worn off and now there are sharp edges everywhere.
Because I’m on remand my lawyer can visit me any day of the week. I am led by a guard into the open meeting room and shown to a table. The glass windows are set high into the walls, right up near the ceiling, and they’re open only a crack. It’s better than my cell, though.
I wait what feels an age for Mara Gupta. She is a tenacious fiftysomething barrister, and she’s brought her handsome and extremely clever young assistant, Donal Lincoln, who I’m fairly certain must be at least thirty years her junior. From previous meetings with them I’ve got the impression they might be sleeping together. A distant part of me loves them for it, loves Mara for it. But the part of me that loves anything is right now being resoundingly silenced. My heart has gone cold.
Because.
The world of fear. My new home. Fear that I won’t survive this, fear that I will.
“How are you?” Mara asks me.
I shrug. There aren’t words for what I am.
“Do you have enough money?”
I nod blankly.
“Franny, we need to talk about new evidence that’s come in from forensics.”
I wait, noticing her delicate gold watch. I wonder what it’s worth. Having spent a painful eight years getting to know Niall’s parents, I can say with certainty that it’s probably a lot. The thought occurs to me to fire her again. I have done so twice already. She has been rehired. The Lynch family gets what they want, and they want me out of here.
I used to want enormous, unrealistic things, too. Now I only want my husband.
“Franny?”
I realize I’ve missed what Mara said. “Beg your pardon?”
“Focus on what I’m telling you because this is serious.”
Serious. Ha. “Can you get me time outside? They won’t let me outside.”
“We’re working on that but as I’ve said, you need to speak clearly with a psychologist about your claustrophobia.”
“I did.”
“Franny, she said you sat in silence for thirty minutes and she couldn’t diagnose you.”
I don’t remember that.
“I’ll arrange another session and this time try to speak, okay? We’re going to talk about the evidence now.” Mara’s eyes are enormous. Someone coughs and I jump, shattered, exhausted, so fucking terrified I can barely function. Mara takes my hand and centers me, forces me to concentrate on her next words.
“There’s new forensic evidence and the prosecution are claiming it means this wasn’t an accident. You and I both know it was, but it now looks premeditated, and I’m going to need your testimony to help me argue against it. So I need you to tell me again what really happened—”
“Premeditated.”
“You wanted to do it,” Donal supplies. “You made plans and carried them out.”
“I know what premeditated means,” I say, and watch him blush. “What’s the evidence?”
“We’ll get to that, Franny, just listen for a second. This changes things,” Mara says. “They don’t want you for manslaughter. They want you for two counts of murder.”
I stare at her and stare at her. Neither of the lawyers says anything, perhaps letting me process this. But I have processed it a thousand times over. I’ve been waiting for it. I squeeze Mara’s hand and say, “You shouldn’t have taken this job. I tried to tell you. I’m sorry.”
The Saghani, NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MIGRATION SEASON
“I’m sorry,” Léa says when I tell her of the drowned terns. If mine couldn’t survive the storm then it’s unlikely any of the others in her group did. “I’m so sorry,” she repeats, and I can see that she too is stricken by what’s happened.
I nod, but can’t think what to say. I’ve only told her so that she’ll inform the crew for me. There’s a yawning mouth in my chest. When I close my eyes I see the birds, one after the other, sinking into a watery grave.
* * *
Dinner is quiet tonight. Poor Samuel can’t get up from his bed so we’re without his comforting presence. Basil’s large knee is digging into my leg and I hate it, I hate his touch, but there’s no room for me to move.