he started walking yet?”
“Oh aye.”
“I ask because he seems weak.”
She unhooks Cian from her breast and sits him up on the couch. “Will you walk for the man, then?” The lad widens his hazel eyes at the officer then hides his face in her shoulder. “He’s not seen the likes of you before,” she says.
“The uniform, I suppose. You take him out, right? The park, the doctor’s?”
Why doesn’t the officer leave, now he’s delivered his news? She pulls the strap back over her shoulder, tucks in her breast and lifts her hair from her perspiring neck. She doesn’t lie but she’s learned to remain silent when it suits her.
Nolan stares at her straight on, his cheeks flushing, his Nicholas-brown eyes intense. “I’ve got a three-year-old daughter and my wife’s expecting again. We’re hoping for a boy.”
“Why is that, now?”
“I don’t know.” He laughs self-consciously and rubs the back of his neck. “Don’t most men want sons to carry on their names?” He clears his throat and straightens his spine. “Who’s your boy’s father?”
Some mysteries cannot be expressed in words to the unready, James says, for they will not be understood. She is sworn to secrecy for the child’s sake. She peers down at Cian clinging to her and softly sings his favorite song: “There was an old man called Michael Finnigan, he grew whiskers on his chinnigan.”
Cian lays a finger on her mouth and says, “Mandy.”
She sucks in the finger and he laughs, a deep chuckle that threatens to loosen her fragile hold on the tears pooling behind her eyes. Without James, who will guide Cian to his calling? Who will brush her hair?
Nolan pulls his notepad from his shirt pocket. “That your name? Mandy?”
“Only to the lad.”
He slaps the notepad on his open palm, an angry sound that jolts her. “I’m trying not to push you but I need more to go on, here, Miss Whoever You Are, more than you’re giving me.”
James flashed with impatience, too, yesterday morning, when she asked would he bring back strawberries. “I cannot cover the sun with my finger, can I?” he said.
Well, she, too, can be stroppy. “How are you knowing the dead man is James?”
“He had a library card with him.” Nolan glances at the bookshelves lining two walls. “Seems he liked to read.”
The card was for her benefit. Most books on the shelves were published before Miranda was born. They don’t hold all James wants her to learn. “I mean to see him,” she says. The dead man might have stolen that card. James could be in a public house right now, performing card tricks for drinks.
“I can arrange that, provided you’re next of kin.”
His words call up a line from a book forgotten until now: It is understood that the next of kin is Mr. Henry Baskerville.
“James is my father,” she says, thinking how deficient a word is father. “My mother passed over years ago and there’s no one else.” She thinks on her mother’s parents, brothers and sisters all perishing in their summer cottage when it was swept out to sea by a fierce storm two years before Miranda was born. James spoke of it only once because she trembled and cried for days afterward, imagining herself tossed about and pelted by flying crockery. If there be family alive in Ireland she doesn’t know of them.
Nolan is quiet for a moment. Then, “That’s rough. I’m sorry.” He reaches over and pats her knee, sending a shiver of longing through her. “There a priest or minister I can call for you?”
She shakes her head. James says a soul’s journey needs no priest, no mediator.
“An unusual name, that—Key-uhn. How’s it spelled?”
She tells him and, sensing the need to offer more, adds, “It means ancient one.”
“You and the boy can’t stay here by yourself,” he says, putting words to the terrible truth creeping into her mind: only James knows where the money tree grows, how to find food, bless the well, chop wood.
“And where shall we go?”
“Children’s Aid will find you a family, might take a day or so.” He spins his hat around in his long-fingered hands. “You can stay at my house tonight, at least.”
She cannot recall being anywhere but here.
“I don’t suppose you have a telephone,” he says.
“We do not.” Or anything else that would allow a tradesman access to the house.
“Did your father have an employer we should contact?”
“He did not.”
“Will you be okay if I leave you a few minutes to radio the station? I should let my wife know you’re coming.”
She nods and stands with him, follows him to the door and watches it close behind him. With both men outside, now, she considers locking it. The family they found for Jane Eyre treated her badly: You ought to beg and not live with gentlemen’s children like us.
She’s never tried to leave their house before, though she could have easily. James locked the back from the outside when he made his forays into the World but he always left the key inside the front door. Finding her gone would have shattered him after all he’d forfeited for her: a professorship, old mates, traveling to his mother’s wake. She could never be that ungrateful.
Her mind flies through each room of the house. The windows facing the back are shuttered from the outside. The small window on the back door at the bottom of the kitchen stairs isn’t. She’d have to smash it, drag a chair down the stairs to the landing, stand on it and crawl out. Push Cian through first and drop him to the ground. Would the officers hear? Would Cian get hurt? And Nicholas, how could she leave Nicholas? Her mind is surveying the upstairs when Cian lets out a high-pitched cry. She turns to see him toddling toward her, clutching his groin and dribbling urine. His face twists in pain. She scoops him up, rocks him in her arms and softly finishes the verse, “The wind blew up and blew them in again. Poor old Michael Finnigan.” He smiles up at her with such love and trust she can no longer dam her tears. She carries him into the kitchen and crumbles to the floor next to Nicholas, who licks her salty face.
There’s naught to deliberate. She must accept Nolan’s help.
He and Dunn return with two sweaty-faced men and contraptions for which she has no words. To catch and contain Nicholas, they explain, so they can transport him by truck. He can’t ride with her and the child, they say in response to her question. Not enough room. No, the cage isn’t cruel. It will prevent him from being thrown about the truck and getting hurt. She doesn’t know how else to resist.
The net isn’t needed. Head down, tail drooping, Nicholas meekly enters the cage when she directs him to. “Anon,” she tells this creature she has loved from the time they stood nose to nose. He refuses to meet her gaze.
Nolan
