“Maggie, stay down,” Griz yells and I look up to see her in shooting stance, looming over Cathal Deasey, who’s clutching his leg and screaming. The lights from the cars stream in the windows. The room is full of people.
“It’s okay!” she shouts to me. “It’s okay now. We’re here.”
“She’s in there!” I shout to them, pointing to the closet. “At the back! Get her out.”
And it’s only a minute before they’re pulling her out, Niamh Horrigan, her hands and mouth duct-taped, her eyes wild and terrified. And I think, Erin? Erin?
But they go in and search the crawl space and there’s no one—nothing—else there and I’m up and running and out the front door and it’s then I see Roly on the ground. They’re working on him but the blood is everywhere and when I look at his face, I can’t see anything there to tell me he’s alive.
I’m two days over my due date when the doctors tell me they’re worried about Lilly. “Her fluid’s low,” a nurse says. “We want to get her out.” I call Brian at work, and Uncle Danny. Brian meets me at the hospital, carrying my bag. He looks scared, so young I almost laugh, but I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life. He grins and says, “Here we go, Mags. She’ll be here soon.” In that moment, I love him more than I have ever loved him. He’s safety. He’s home. He’s mine.
The Pitocin hits me like a wrecking ball. I start to feel a few small contractions and then the next one feels like someone’s got me in a vise and is whipping my body back and forth. It goes on for what feels like forever, a powerful contraction gripping me and rising to an unbearable peak, then easing off for a minute or two only to rise again, worse than before.
Brian keeps me going. He counts for me, tells me it’s going to be over soon. And then suddenly they’re pushing me down on the bed. Someone’s talking to Brian. The bed is moving. They tell me they’re going to get the baby out.
Something on my face. Pain. I don’t remember anything after that.
I wake up to a blurry ceiling, thirst, more pain.
Brian is standing there, holding Lilly.
“Here she is,” he says, smiling and holding her out to me. “Here she is, Mags. What’s her name?”
“Lillian Erin,” I say. “Lillian Erin Lombardi.”
I whisper her name to her. She’s tiny, wriggling a little as she gets close to me. “You should see her, Erin,” I whisper into her soft hair. “You should see her.”
46
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8,
2016
It’s touch and go all the way to the hospital, but then they get Roly stabilized and by the time they get him to St. Vincent’s, they can tell us they think he’s going to make it.
I sit with Laura until they tell her he’s awake and that she can go in, and when she asks if I want to come, too, I tell her I’ll catch up with her tomorrow. When she hugs me, I can smell her perfume and feel the tears on her cheek. She says, “A good few times now, I’ve had to sit with the wife at the hospital when her husband doesn’t come home. One of my best friends, like. She was widowed at thirty-six. Bernie. We sat here for days. But I never thought we’d be here. I never thought it would be him.”
“He’s going to be okay, though,” I tell her. “You’re going to feel guilty about that, in the coming days, but don’t let it take away from how grateful you are. I’m grateful, too.”
She smiles and I watch the nurses let her into his room.
* * *
When I come out of the hospital to hail a cab, Stephen Hines is up at the front of the clot of reporters. There are a couple of guards keeping them away from the entrance and they nod to me as I walk past. The reporters feel him watch me and they all converge, shouting questions to me: “Is your cousin’s body in Ballyclash, Detective D’arcy?” “What is Niamh Horrigan’s condition?” “Who kidnapped her?” I ignore them and keep walking.
But Hines breaks away and follows me. “Any comment, Detective D’arcy?” he asks. His hair is loose on his shoulders and he’s wearing a dirty T-shirt under his jacket, as though he leapt out of bed to come here.
“No, I don’t have any fucking comment,” I say, but good-naturedly. I smile at him.
“Come on, give me something. You saved Niamh Horrigan’s life.” He’s holding his phone out, recording whatever I’m about to say.
I talk to the phone. “No, I didn’t. Detective Inspector Byrne and Detective Garda Grzeskiewicz saved her life. They’re the heroes here. I just happened to be there.”
“Does it give you any peace, knowing what happened to your cousin?”
I stop walking and meet his eyes. “No, it doesn’t give me any fucking peace. What do you think?” For a second I wonder if he’s going to keep badgering me, but instead he nods, as if to say okay, and lets me pass.
When I look up, past the reporters, Conor’s standing there waiting for me.
“I called your phone,” he says. “And the woman who answered it said you were here.”
“My…?” I realize my phone must still be in Roly’s car. Griz.
“Can I drive you home?”
“I guess so.” I look up at him for a long moment. His face is in shadow, his eyes dark and liquid. The car is warm. I wince putting on my seat belt and he touches my shoulder and then he pulls out into traffic and starts driving.
“I heard about what happened on the news,” he says. “I saw you. They had a shot of the house and there you were in the background and I felt like my guts had been ripped out. You saved that woman. You saved her life. They said Detective Byrne is stable. I’m glad.”
We’re completely silent. I feel the weight of him, the inevitability of something. He drives smoothly. The road is clear and empty this time of night. “You haven’t been honest with me,” I say finally, into the emptiness. “There’s something you haven’t told me. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something. Will you tell me now?”
He turns the wheel, slowly, getting off onto a side street. He shuts the car off and puts both hands on the wheel. I wait.
A man walking a dog crosses in front of us. The car makes a settling sound, a fan shutting off somewhere beneath the hood.
He doesn’t look at me. “You know when you meet someone and you recognize something in them? You think, ‘Ah. I know you’? I felt like that when I first met Erin. She walked into the café and it was like I recognized her. I think she felt the same way. We just liked each other. We liked talking and I started walking her home sometimes.”
I feel it as a physical pain. He loved her. I had known all along. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.
“The gang of us from the café went out drinking one night. There’d been some conversation about a case that was in the courts then. It was in all the papers. She must have seen something on my face. I was walking her home and she said, ‘How old were you? When it happened. How old were you?’ and without even thinking, I said, ‘Twelve,’ and she said, ‘It happened to me too. I was fourteen.’”