Page 25 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
He watches my face the way a man watches a tide. “Right.”
“Where?”
He names a town that could be anywhere. New England’s got a hundred of them—a two-block center, a coffee shop that sells art, a hardware store that perfumes the entire street with the smell of oiled cedar, a bay the color of pewter three days out of four. I send Callum because he looks like someone you’d trustto carry hymnals. He brings back a paper menu damp from a pocket and a photograph taken from across the street—the kind of picture than anyone could be in if you squint. The woman in the doorway has a scarf wound around her hair and a smile that breaks something in my chest I’ve been pretending is reinforced.
It’s not her. I know in half a second. But the menu reads like she taught someone to write. “Starter: onion broth with brown bread ends and a kiss of vinegar so the dead sit up and pay attention.” It’s her humor, her blade. Not her hand.
I don’t break the frame on the mantel that holds the only photo of my father I can stand to look at. I don’t put my fist through the plaster like I did at nineteen when the first girl I wanted left me for a law student who said he could give her weekends and a lake. I fold the menu and put it in my wallet next to a half-torn page from an O’Connell ledger that reads, in another ancestor’s hand, “Trust who feeds you. Fear who doesn’t.”
Months pass. I turn thirty-six, then thirty-seven. The men bring me cake with candles and I make it disappear in three bites like a man who doesn’t believe in wishes. Moira stops saying Aoife’s name. She says “that girl” and “the cook” and, once, “the ghost”, which is poetic enough to make me forgive it.
One night, the wind is wicked from the east, and the estate rattles like an old ship under full sail, and the power goes for two hours. We light lamps. The staff gathers in the kitchen. Someone starts a story about a headless nun you can hear at the back door if you’re careless. I sit in my father’s chair and watch flames climb and fall and think about how much of power is simply arranging for men to be warm while the world howls.
The lights return. So does the work. It’s not that I stop looking. It’s that I stop letting the looking cost me hours I need to keep the roof on and the doors shut. I ask fewer people fewer questions. I turn the machine to a low, constant hum. I go tobed alone and wake up earlier. I become a man you can set your watch by and still fear stepping in front of.
The lead comes on a Thursday like a verse hummed in the back pew when you weren’t listening for music. Callum knocks once and enters without a coat, which tells me the thing in his hand outran weather. He sets a small stack of prints on the desk and steps back like the air around the paper has teeth.
“What am I seeing?” I ask, my voice steady because I’ve taught it to be when my hands want to tremble.
“Shoreline photo essay. Local paper up the coast. Some volunteer with a decent camera and a bad eye for captions,” he says. “Story’s about a holiday market and a winter walk they’re trying to make a tradition. First four shots are driftwood and dogs. Fifth one is…” He clears his throat. “This.”
I pull the top photo free. The sea takes up half the frame and the sky eats the rest, low and white and heavy, but the eye is dragged to the pair on the right where the rocks meet the sand: a little boy in a wool cap with dark curls that refuse to stay tamed, wearing a sweater that someone loved enough to darn twice, one hand clutching a paper boat, the other lifted toward the woman beside him. She’s braced against the wind, hair braided, head turned toward him like people turn toward prayers, and though the photographer is twenty yards away and the light is stingy, her profile is a map I learned by heart and then pretended I’d lost.
The boy’s eyes are steel-blue, rings of gold around the pupil like coins sunk in winter water. He’s got a mouth that slants when he smiles like he’s both delighted and not entirely convinced joy is allowed. His jawline is small and stubborn. His ears—Christ. My ears. I put a hand on the desk to anchor myself and it doesn’t work because the floor goes a fraction to the left anyway.
“How recent?” I ask, hearing the scrape in my throat.
“Last week,” Callum says. “Posted the same day. No names in the caption. Just ‘Mother and Son.’ Town is…” He names it. Not far. Not close. A place you drive to when you want the city to stop talking.
I look up. Kieran has appeared in the doorway as men do when they smell lightning. Mother is not there. Thank God. My mother would turn this into chess. This is not chess. This is a church with the roof ripped off and rain coming down where it pleases.
I set the top photograph aside and look at the next. Another angle. The boy crouches, the paper boat in a tide pool, the woman pointing with the kind of concentration that means she is teaching him something about water and patience and release. The third shows that smile, crooked, defiant, too big for his face. I can feel the echo of it in muscles I haven’t used since I was five.
“What do you want us to do?” Kieran asks, very quiet.
I don’t wait for confirmation. I don’t call the priest or the lawyer. I don’t seek my mother’s counsel. Moira will say the thing she always says, about hearth fires and targets and the wretched, hungry power of love to make men stupid. I stand, take my coat, and say the only sentence that has any oxygen left in it. “Find me the mother.”
We split the work the way we always do. Callum handles the paper—who shot, who edited, who uploaded, who commented. Kieran drives north with two men who look like fishermen and aren’t. I take the lines I can pull without drawing blood—water bills, a rental permit on a storefront turned winter market, the name of the church attached to the fellowship hall where three Christmases ago a woman named A. Kelly started a supper that filled the room and emptied the pots.
By sundown, the gray turns to the kind of purple Boston wears like a bruise, and the estate glows with lamps because I told them to make it bright. I don’t intend to come home empty.My phone rings with updates I don’t let finish. The car idles at the front steps with the driver watching the sky like weather is another crew to outmaneuver. The men move like good men do when their boss stops pretending he is made entirely of ice.
Kieran’s voice hits my ear at nine. “She’s cautious. Paid cash at the market. Doesn’t use the same cafe twice. Boy’s got a rhythm—library on Thursdays, toddler art class that’s now, well, a little old for him but they let him stay on. Neighbors think she’s a widow, or they say it like a question.”
“What’s the boy’s name?”
“We’re working on it,” he says, and for the first time in months I understand why men used to leave offerings to saints. I want to bribe one. I want to make a deal with the whole pantheon and throw in my rings for good faith.
Callum comes through from a different angle. “Found a pediatrician’s office that got a laudatory review on a foodie blog, of all things. Grammar, cadence—again, not proof. But the timing fits. The file runs quiet. Private pay. No insurance trail.”
I breathe. In. Out. Two counts, four. The way I learned to do at twelve when a priest with coffee on his breath taught a boy with fists for hands that prayer and control feel similar in the body if you do them right.
Mother steps into the doorway as if summoned. She reads a room like a magician reads a marked deck. Her eyes go to the coat in my hand, to the keys on the table, to the open safe that I did not realize I left open because my mind is twenty miles up the coast on a strip of shore where a boy crouches with a paper boat.
“Where?” she asks.
“North,” I answer.
She looks at the phone on my desk, at the open ledger, at the photographs I don’t bother to hide. She sees the boy and saysnothing for a long heartbeat. When she speaks, her voice is as clean as a winter blade. “What will you do? Bring her here?”
