Page 72 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
Aoife looks up at the sky and breathes like a swimmer after a long dive. I shelter her with my body out of habit and out of the particular selfishness that is relief, and I am aware of two cameras, a pair of pedestrians, and the way sirens turn corners when they smell a chance at headlines.
“It is over,” I tell her, because sometimes, lies are anchors until truth can catch up. “No one touches you again.”
She nods once and sways into me for a breath that feels like absolution. Then she straightens and I remember the line in her that has always refused to bend.
At the curb, I turn to Keane. He is my mother’s most loyal blade. He is also the man who learned too young how to hold a line in a house like ours.
“Bring her to me,” I say, very quiet. “Alive.”
He looks at me the way men look at orders that will cut old ties, then nods and vanishes into the dark, taking two with him. Siobhan watches him go with a small, proud smile that has nothing to do with victory. My men guide her toward a second car. She goes with the grace of a person who believes herself misunderstood and destined.
We push through the door of the estate an hour later and the house tilts to meet us. The old floors know the weight of bad nights. Lights bloom along the corridor. A fire crackles because someone had the sense to start one. The staff make themselves silent. The doctor waits in the small parlor with a bag already open. He cleans Aoife’s mouth with gauze and solution that stings. He checks her pupils and asks soft questions and gets softanswers. He gives me a look that means she needs tea and quiet, not a hospital.
I walk her toward the stairs. Her hand finds mine without asking my permission to do so, and I hold it like a holy thing. At the landing, I feel the room before I see it. The air shifts into something cold and precise. I lift my head.
Moira stands in the doorway to the drawing room in a dress the color of a closed casket. Her hair is pinned back in the old way, the way of photographs and family wars. She says nothing. She does not need to. Her eyes move from my face to Aoife’s mouth to the blood I did not manage to clean from the cuff of my shirt.
I stop two paces from her and feel every word I am about to say line up behind my teeth like soldiers who understand they will not come home the same.
Aoife’s fingers tighten on mine once, a small pulse, then let go.
I turn to my mother. “Not here,” I say to myself, to her, to the ghosts. “We do this in the morning.”
She does not blink. She does not speak. The room hears us anyway. I take Aoife upstairs and close the door.
31
DECLAN
The long table looks longer in daylight. Windows throw winter light across the wood. The chairs are all occupied by people who understand that the shape of a house can change in an hour. The portraits in this room have watched arguments that never reached the hall. They will watch this one and remember.
Mother sits at the head in black, not because she is grieving but because black is the uniform for wins and losses in our family. Her hands are folded on the table as if it were a chapel rail and she were about to take the host. Her face is the face she wore when I was a boy and came home with a split lip and a story about how the other lad started it.
I stand across from her with Liam at my side. He holds two small cars and bangs them together under the table, making a sound that is blissfully wrong for this room. Aoife stands in the doorway, not in shadow, not in light, cheek healed to the color of a rose that learned about frost. Her chin is up. There is a band of calm around her that makes me think of tidepools, glassy on the surface and full of bright life that can cut.
Keane stands near the mantel with three men I trust on his left. There are two chairs empty for people who are not invited today. One belongs to the woman at the head of this table. The other belongs to the past.
I do not sit.
“You are done,” I say to my mother, and the room does not flinch because the room has heard worse.
She lifts her chin, and every bone in me recognizes the motion. “I did what needed to be done,” she answers, and if there is a tremor under the words, it hides where only I can hear it.
“You crossed a line that cannot be recrossed,” I say. “You put your grandson and his mother in danger. There is no forgiveness for that, not in this house, not in any church worth its salt.”
Her eyes flick to the boy at my side, to the cars, to the tiny shoe scuffing an old rug worth a small ship. She looks at Aoife and sees the woman she underestimated twice. She looks at me like a woman who has lost a battle and is not yet ready to admit it was a war.
“I kept this family standing when your father lost his nerve,” she says, quiet and clean. “I taught you where to spend and where to starve. I cut the fingers that went into our pockets. You will not hand me my life and call it a sin.”
“I am not handing you your life,” I say. “I am taking back mine.”
The staff have gone museum-still. The air vibrates with things nobody wants to be asked to swear to later. A clock ticks behind my left shoulder and holds the beat for the rest of us.
“You will pack,” I tell her. “You will leave by evening. You will go to the house in Kilrush. You will not return without an invitation. Your rooms are locked as of now. The keys are in my pocket. The portraits in this wing come down today. The giftsyou gave this house remain in it. The debts you called in do not buy you a day more here.”
She breathes in through her nose and out again. It is a practice she taught me, the small truce with the body during a negotiation. “You think this will make you clean?” she says.
“I think it will keep my son alive,” I answer.
