by Tana French
“Yeah, I got it. Geri—”
“Andrea! I saw that! You give it back to him right now or I’ll let him have your one, and you don’t want that, do you? No, you do not.”
“Geri. Listen to me. Dina’s losing it again. I have her over at my place, she’s taking a shower, but I’ve got stuff I have to do. Can I drop her down to you?”
“Oh, God…” I heard the breath leak out of her. Geri is our optimist: she still hopes, after twenty years of this, that every time will be the last, that one morning Dina will wake up cured. “Ah, God, the poor little thing. I’d love to take her, but not tonight. Maybe in a couple of days, if she’s still—”
“I can’t wait a couple of days, Geri. I’m on a big case, I’m going to be working eighteen-hour shifts for the foreseeable, and it’s not like I can bring her to work with me.”
“Oh, Mick, I can’t. Sheila’s got the stomach flu, that’s what I was telling you, she’s after giving it to her dad—the two of them were up all night getting sick, if it wasn’t one it was the other—and I’d say Colm and Andrea’ll come down with it any minute. I’ve been cleaning up sick and doing washing and boiling 7-Up all day, and it looks like I’ll be doing the same again tonight. I couldn’t manage Dina as well. I couldn’t.”
Dina’s episodes last anywhere between three days and two weeks. I keep some of my annual leave saved up just in case, and O’Kelly doesn’t ask, but that wasn’t going to work this time. I said, “What about Dad? Just for once. Couldn’t he… ?”
Geri left the silence there. When I was a kid Dad was straight-backed and lean, given to clean, square-edged statements with no wiggle room: Women may fancy a drinking man, but they’ll never respect him. There’s no bad mood that fresh air and exercise can’t mend. Always pay a debt before it’s due and you’ll never go hungry. He could fix anything, grow anything, cook and clean and iron like a professional when he had to. Mum dying blew him right out of the water. He still lives in the house in Terenure where we grew up. Geri and I take turns calling down to him at the weekends, to clean the bathroom, put seven balanced meals in the freezer and check that the TV and the phone are still working. The kitchen wallpaper is the acid-trip orange swirl that Mum picked out in the seventies; in my room, my schoolbooks are dog-eared and cobwebbed on the bookshelf Dad made for me. Go into the sitting room and ask him a question: after a few seconds he’ll turn from the telly, blink at you, say, “Son. Good to see you,” and go back to watching Australian soap operas with the sound turned down. Occasionally, when he gets restless, he extracts himself from the sofa and shuffles around the back garden a few times, in his slippers.
I said, “Geri, please. It’s only for the night. She’ll sleep all day tomorrow, and I’m hoping I’ll have work sorted out by tomorrow evening. Please.”
“I would if I could, Mick. It’s not that I’m too busy, you know I wouldn’t mind that…” The background noise had faded: she had moved away from the kids, for privacy. I pictured her in their dining room strewn with bright jumpers and homework, tugging a strand of blond out of its careful weekly set. We both knew I wouldn’t have suggested our father unless I was desperate. “But you know how she goes if you don’t stay with her every minute, and I’ve Sheila and Phil to look after… What would I do if one of them started getting sick in the middle of the night? Just leave them to clean up their own mess? Or leave her and have her start carrying on, wake the house?”
I let my shoulders slump back against the wall and ran a hand over my face. My apartment felt airless, stuffed with the reek of whatever fake-lemon chemicals the cleaner uses. “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”
“Mick. If we can’t cope… Maybe we should think about somewhere that can.”
“No,” I said. It came out sharp enough that I flinched, but Dina’s singing didn’t pause. “I can cope. It’ll be fine.”
“Will you be all right? Can you get someone to sub for you?”
“That’s not how it works. I’ll figure something out.”
“Oh, Mick, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. As soon as they’re a bit better—”
“It’s OK. Tell them both I was asking for them, and you try not to catch whatever they’ve got. We’ll talk soon.”
A distant yell of fury, somewhere on Geri’s end. “Andrea! What did I say to you? . . . Sure, Mick, Dina might be better herself by the morning, mightn’t she? You never know your luck.”
“She might, yeah. We’ll hope.” Dina yelped, and the shower shut off: the hot water had run out. “Gotta go,” I said. “Take care,” and I had the phone stashed away and myself neatly arranged in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, by the time the bathroom door opened.
I made myself a beef stir-fry for dinner—Dina wasn’t hungry. The shower had settled her: she curled up on the sofa, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants that she had taken out of my wardrobe, gazing into space and rubbing dreamily at her hair with a towel. “Shh,” she said, when I started to ask delicately about her day. “Don’t talk. Listen. Isn’t it beautiful?”
All I could hear was the muttering of traffic, four floors down, and the synthesized tinkle of the music that the couple upstairs play every night to send their baby to sleep. I supposed it was peaceful, in its own way, and after a day keeping hold of every thread in that tangle of conversations, it was good to cook and eat in silence. I would have liked to catch the news, to see how the reporters were spinning things, but that was out.
After dinner I brewed coffee, a lot of it. The sound of the beans grinding sent Dina off on a fresh fidget: padding restless barefoot circles around the living room, taking books off my shelves and flipping the pages and putting them back in the wrong places. “Were you supposed to be going out tonight?” she asked, with her back to me. “Like on a date or something?”
“It’s Tuesday. No one goes on dates on Tuesdays.”
“God, Mikey, get some spontaneity. Go out on school nights. Go wild.”
I poured myself a mug of espresso strength and headed for my armchair. “I don’t think I’m the spontaneous type.”
“Well, does that mean you go on dates at the weekends? Like, you’ve got a girlfriend?”
“I don’t think I’ve called anyone my girlfriend since I was twenty. Adults have partners.”
Dina mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, with sound effects. “Middle-aged gay guys in 1995 have partners. Are you going out with anyone? Are you shagging anyone? Are you giving anyone a blast from the yogurt bazooka? Are you—”
“No, Dina, I’m not. I was seeing someone until recently, we broke up, I’m not planning on getting back in the saddle for a while. OK?”
“I didn’t know,” Dina said, a lot more quietly. “Sorry.” She subsided onto one arm of the sofa. “Do you still talk to Laura?” she asked, after a moment.
“Sometimes.” Hearing Laura’s name filled up the room with her perfume, sharp and sweet. I took a big swallow of coffee to get it out of my nose.
“Are you guys going to get back together?”
“No. She’s seeing someone. A doctor. I’m expecting her to ring me any day to tell me that they’re engaged.”
“Ahhh,” Dina said, disappointed. “I like Laura.”
“So do I. That’s why I married her.”
“So why did you divorce her, then?”
“I didn’t divorce her. She divorced me.” Laura and I have always done the civilized thing and told people the breakup was mutual, nobody’s fault, we grew in different directions and all the usual meaningless rubbish, but I was too tired.
“Seriously? Why?”
“Because. I don’t have the energy tonight, Dina.”
“Whatever,” Dina said, rolling her eyes. She slid sinuously off the sofa and padded into the kitchen, where I heard her opening things. “Why don’t you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”
“There’s plenty to eat. The fridge is full. I can make you a stir-fry, or there’s lamb stew in the freezer, or if you want
something lighter you can have porridge, or—”
“Ew, please. I don’t mean stuff like that. Fuck the five food groups and antioxidant blah blah blah. I want like ice cream, or one of those shitty burgers you stick in the microwave.” A cupboard door slammed and she came back into the living room holding out a granola bar at arm’s length. “Granola? What are you, a girl?”
“No one’s making you eat it.”
She shrugged, threw herself on the sofa again and started nibbling a corner of the bar, making a face like it might poison her. She said, “When you were with Laura you were happy. It was sort of weird, because you’re not one of those naturally happy people, so I wasn’t used to seeing you that way. It actually took me a while to figure out what was going on. But it was nice.”
I said, “Yes, it was.”
Laura is the same kind of sleek, highlighted, labor-intensive pretty as Jennifer Spain. She was on a diet every day I knew her, except birthdays and Christmases; she tops up her fake tan every three days, straightens her hair every morning of her life, and never goes out of the house without full makeup. I know some men like women to leave themselves the way nature intended, or at least to pretend they do, but the gallantry with which Laura fought nature hand to hand was one of the many things I loved about her. I used to get up fifteen or twenty minutes early in the mornings so I could spend that time just watching her get ready. Even on days when she was running late, dropping things and swearing to herself, for me it was the most restful thing life had to offer, like watching a cat put the world in order by washing itself. It always seemed to me that a girl like that, a girl who worked that hard at being what she was supposed to be, was likely to want what she was supposed to want: flowers, good jewelry, a nice house, holidays in the sun, and a man who would love her and put his heart into taking care of her for the rest of their lives. Girls like Fiona Rafferty are complete mysteries to me; I can’t imagine where you would start trying to figure them out, and that makes me nervous. With Laura, it seemed to me that I had a chance at making her happy. It was moronic of me to be taken by surprise when she, with whom I had felt safe for exactly that reason, turned out to want precisely what women are supposed to want.
Dina said, without looking at me, “Was it because of me? That Laura dumped you?”
“No,” I said, instantly. It was true. Laura found out about Dina early on, in much the way you would expect. She never once said or hinted, I believe she never once thought, that Dina wasn’t my responsibility, that I should keep her crazy out of our home. When I came to bed, late on nights when Dina was finally asleep in our spare room, Laura would stroke my hair. That was all.
Dina said, “Nobody wants to deal with this shit. I don’t want to deal with this shit.”
“Maybe some women wouldn’t. They’re not women I’d marry.”
She snorted. “I said I liked Laura. I didn’t say I thought she was a saint. How stupid do you think I am? I know she didn’t want some crazy bitch showing up on her doorstep, fucking up her whole week. That one time, candles, music, wineglasses, both of your hair all messed up? She must have hated my guts.”
“She didn’t. She never has.”
“You wouldn’t tell me if she did. Why else would she have dumped you? Laura was mad about you. And it’s not like it was your fault, like you hit her or called her a slag, I know how you treated her, like some kind of princess. You’d have brought her the moon. Her or me, did she say that? I want my life back, get that loony out of here?”
She was starting to wind tight, her back pressed against the arm of the sofa. There was a flare of fear in her eyes.
I said, “Laura left me because she wants children.”
Dina stopped in mid-breath and stared, open-mouthed. “Oh, shit, Mikey. Can you not have kids?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t try.”
“Then… ?”
“I don’t want to have children. I never have.”
Dina thought about that in silence, sucking her granola bar absently. After a while she said, “Laura would probably chill out a lot if she had kids.”
“Maybe. I hope she gets the chance to find out. But it was never going to be with me. Laura knew that when she married me. I made sure she did. I never misled her.”
“Why don’t you want kids?”
“Some people don’t. It doesn’t make me a freak.”
“I didn’t call you a freak. Did I call you a freak? I just asked why.”
I said, “I don’t believe in Murder Ds having kids. They turn you soft: you can’t take the heat any more, and you end up making a bollix of the job and probably the kids too. You can’t have both. I’ll take the job.”
“Oh my God, great big bullshit. Nobody doesn’t have kids because they don’t believe in it. You always blame everything on your job, it’s so boring, you have no idea. Why don’t you want kids?”
“I don’t blame things on my job. I take it seriously. If that’s boring, I apologize.”
Dina rolled her eyes and did a huge fake-patient sigh. “OK,” she said, slowing down so that the idiot could keep up. “I’d bet everything I’ve got, which is fuck-all but there you go, that your entire squad doesn’t get sterilized their first day on the job. You work with guys who have kids. They do the exact same job you do. They can’t be letting murderers go all the time, or they’d get fired. Right? Am I right?”
“Some of the guys have families. Yeah.”
“Then why don’t you want kids?”
The coffee was kicking in. The apartment felt small and ugly, harsh with artificial light; the urge to get out, start driving too fast back to Broken Harbor, nearly launched me right out of my chair. I said, “Because the risk is too big. It’s so enormous that just thinking about it makes me want to puke my guts. That’s why.”
“The risk,” Dina said, after a moment’s silence. She turned the wrapper of the granola bar inside out, carefully, and examined the shiny side. “Not from the job. You mean me. That they’d turn out like me.”
I said, “You’re not who I’m worried about.”
“Then who?”
“Me.”
Dina watched me, the lightbulb reflecting tiny twin will-o’-the-wisps in those inscrutable milky blue eyes. She said, “You’d make a good father.”
“I think I probably would. But probably’s not good enough. Because if we’re both wrong and I turned out to be a terrible father, what then? There would be absolutely nothing I could do. Once you find out, it’s too late: the kids are there, you can’t send them back. All you can do is keep on fucking them up, day after day, and watch while these perfect babies turn into wrecks in front of your eyes. I can’t do it, Dina. Either I’m not stupid enough or I’m not brave enough, but I can’t take that risk.”
“Geri’s doing OK.”
“Geri’s doing great,” I said. Geri is cheerful, easygoing, and a natural at motherhood. After each of her kids was born, I rang her every day for a year—stakeouts, interrogations, fights with Laura, everything else in the world got put on hold for that phone call—to make sure she was all right. Once she sounded hoarse and subdued enough that I made Phil leave work and check on her. She had a cold and obviously thought I should feel like an idiot, which I didn’t. Better safe, always.
“I want kids someday,” Dina said. She balled up the wrapper, threw it in the general direction of the bin and missed. “I bet you think that’s a really shit idea.”
The thought of her showing up pregnant next time made my scalp freeze. “You don’t need my permission.”
“But you think it anyway.”
I asked, “How’s Fabio?”
“His name’s Francesco. I don’t think it’s going to work out. I don’t know.”
“I think it would be a better idea to wait to have kids until you’re with someone you can rely on. Call me old-fashioned.”
“You mean, in case I lose it. In case I’m minding this little tiny three-week-old baby and my head starts to explode. Someo
ne should be there to watch me.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Dina stretched out her legs on the sofa and inspected her toenail polish, which was pearly pale blue. She said, “I can tell when I’m going, you know. Do you want to know how?”
I don’t want to know anything, ever, about the inner workings of Dina’s mind. I said, “How?”
“Things start sounding all wrong.” A quick glance at me, under cover of her hair. “Like I take off my top at night and drop it on the floor, and it goes plop, like a rock falling into a pond. Or once I was walking home from work and my boots, every time my boots hit the ground they squealed, like a mouse in a trap. It was horrible. In the end I had to sit down on the footpath and take them off, to make sure there wasn’t a mouse stuck inside—I did know there wasn’t, I’m not stupid, but just to make sure. I figured it out then; what was happening, I mean. But I still had to take a taxi home. I couldn’t stand hearing that, all the way. It sounded like it was in agony.”
“Dina. You should go to someone about it. As soon as it happens.”
“I do go to someone. Today I was in work and I opened one of the big freezers to get more bagels, and it crackled; like a fire, like there was a forest fire in there. So I walked out and came to you.”
“Which is great. I’m delighted you did. But I’m talking about a professional.”
“Doctors,” Dina said, with her lip curling. “I’ve lost count. And how much use have they ever been?”
She was alive, which counted for a lot to me and which I felt should count for at least something to her, but before I could point that out, my mobile rang. As I went for it, I checked my watch: nine on the dot, good man Richie. “Kennedy,” I said, getting up and moving away from Dina.
“We’re in place,” Richie said, so softly I had to press my ear to the phone. “No movement.”
“Techs and floaters doing their thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Any problems? Run into anyone along the way? Anything I should know?”
“Nah. We’re good.”
“Then we’ll talk in an hour, or sooner if there’s any action. Good luck.”