“What do you think he got from it, Tom?" the guard asked.
"From what?"
"Doin' himself in like that."
Tom Foley pulled his knees up toward his chest. He wrapped the blanket about his shoulders. He couldn't see the guard, didn't know his name. The voice simply came into the cell through the small window in the iron door, which the guard slid aside every few hours to see what was happening inside the cell.
Nothing was happening inside the cell.
"Peace in heaven," Tom said. "That's what." He could hear himself breathing, a rasp that seemed always to be with him. It made sense especially in a spring like this one, when the cold Belfast winter was not yet a simple memory, when at night the cold still lay across his very skin, blanketing it.
"Why haven't you gone on the strike?" the guard asked.
Tom placed his forehead against his knees.
"You know, you might enjoy it!"
Tom closed his eyes. His anguish ruptured.
"Especially when we'd come in to force you to eat, Tom. Bobby always liked that."
"I'm not Bobby," Tom said. Bobby Sands, a volunteer for the Irish Republican Army, twenty-seven years old and a member of the British Parliament, had died here in the Long Kesh prison the day before, May 5, 1981, not having eaten for sixty-six days.
"Sure you're not," the guard chuckled. Tom and other prisoners were on the blanket in solidarity with Bobby, protesting their status as criminals. They believed they were political prisoners, although most were also bank robbers and kidnappers, criminals like Tom himself.
But we were driven to it, weren't we? Tom thought…well, he occasionally thought this. Really, he knew already that he himself was just a murderer, nothing more.
"It takes a lad with a true living talent for it, to make men like you and Margaret Thatcher suffer," Tom grumbled.
"Margaret Thatcher's a man, Tom?"
"She is, purse and all."
The guard chuckled. "You've been in here too long."
"Six months. That's not too long."
"You'll be here for much longer, though. Much longer."
"I'll bring my children to your home when I get out."
"No, Tom."
"You don't want me to bring my children?"
"No, it is that you'll never get out."
That night, several guards broke into his cell with buckets of soap and water, hydrogen peroxide, a hose, clubs. The shouting as Tom resisted them, as they beat him and shackled him to his cot, as they sprayed him and the walls with cold water and soap, was itself like a dream, uncontrolled and demonic.
"So did you sleep well last night, Tom?" the guard asked the following morning.
"Like sweet heaven."
"That's different from what I heard."
Tom fingered the swelling laceration on his upper lip. An index finger had been broken when he had hit one of the guards. The guard had responded by clubbing Tom, getting him once in the face as he had fallen away.
"Bobby resisted like that," the guard said.
"I'm glad to hear it."
"Until he couldn't anymore."
The index finger was taped to the middle finger. Tom also reached behind him, where one of the guards had beaten his back as he lay on the concrete floor. The bruises were just over his left kidney and felt much worse than the broken finger.
"But he didn't eat for you, did he?" Tom said.
"Sure he did. And it was a struggle for us, mate."
“You forced him."
"We did."
"Then how is it he died of starvation?"
"We didn't want to shove it down him anymore. Didn't want to touch him." After a moment, the guard spoke again. "I've told you what it was like, trying to get food down his gullet, haven't I"
"No."
"Would you like to hear about it?"
"No."
"He was…he was contagion itself, Tom."
"You were afraid of him?"
"Not of him."
"Of what then?"
"The rot that had invaded him."
"His ideas, you mean."
The guard laughed. "No, Tom. Not that."
Tom had never met Bobby Sands. He had gone on the blanket because he knew what the others were doing, and wished to be with them in whatever way he could bear himself. He would refuse to wear the prison uniform. He would spread his own excrement on the walls. But starvation…. He thought the guard's question was a good one. What had Bobby Sands gotten from it?
"What kind of rot?" Tom asked.
For a long moment, the guard remained quiet. Tom's breathing was all there was. "You had to see it to believe it, Tom." There was in the guard's tone of voice a note of such resignation that Tom needed no more of an explanation. The conversation ended. Tom did not have the spirit to keep it up, and he sensed that the guard, whoever he might be, didn't have it either.
—
"I don't think anyone cares about that anymore," Tom said.
He was having a drink with his friend Owen Sizemore, the American editor and attorney who had published Tom’s books in The States, while also trying to help get him out of prison. That effort had succeeded in 2007, but not until Tom had done twenty-six years. His first prose book—a sad, hilarious telling of the prison-bound longing for his youth in Belfast—had been followed by others about the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, about the murder in which Tom had participated and his imprisonment…and the foolishness of it all.
"You know, Bobby Sands and Gerry Adams and the H-Block," Tom said.
"No one cares! Tom!"
"That's right. There's been so much written about all of us and the hunger strikes and our shite on the walls…"
Tom took up his glass of Guinness. They were seated in Pat O'Shea's pub on Geary Street, about to have lunch. It was a fine San Francisco day, the sunlight giving off a clear blaze of cold. They were waiting for Tom's daughter Eden, who had reluctantly agreed to join them, and now was late.
"It's too old a story," Tom said. "And this idea you've got, to have me writing even more about it… I mean, does the world really need another book about my you-know-what on a wall, Owen?"
Tom had suggested instead a memoir about his wife Diana, who had died in childbirth seven months after he had been sent to jail. And about his daughter. Eden was now twenty-seven, and he had watched her grow in the care of Diana's mother, from behind bars, behind glass, behind wire. He recalled how he had anguished the first time he had seen her, an infant little treasure whose hands had raced around before her face like small birds. She had had a green cap that Diana had knitted while waiting for her. Eden had had no concept of a father at the time…although she certainly had developed one as she had grown up. A very difficult one. But Tom had understood what a daughter was on that day, and he had barely survived the following night, bewildered on his cot, surrounded by his own excrement in the bright light of the single bulb and dreaming of his little girl's happy oblivion. Then as a toddler she had visited him many, many times, and he could not touch or kiss her or play with her and the toys she had brought with her.
He wondered over the years what he looked like to her. In the beginning he had been on the blanket like the others. But then, as he had passed through his late twenties, his thirties, and his forties, he had given in to the requirements first imposed on him by Mrs. Thatcher, then by Mr. Major, and finally for several years by Mr. Blair. Prison garb had replaced the blanket, fresh paint the offal on the cell walls, and good behavior the raised fist and the profanity that he had early on reserved in all its fury for Margaret Thatcher. Graying, thinning hair had replaced the Beatles-influenced mop that had been gracing his head the morning they had arrested him in Belfast in 1980.
Through all those years, Eden barely spoke to him. As a teenager she had come to deeply resent the indifference he represented, and he still represented that to her. But she had written to him six months ago, to tell him that she was pregnant, and since his arrival in San Francisco, they had visited many times. So, despite Eden's reticence, things were looking up, as far as Tom Foley was concerned.
Eden had been living with her boyfriend, a wanna-be Irishman named Dooley whose red hair and verse-and-chapter knowledge of Irish history made Tom a little sick to his stomach. One of these Yanks who enjoy instructing the Irish on how to save their country. An idiot corporate lawyer, The Boyfriend was, and forty-three years old, too, isn't he! whom Eden seemed to love a good deal more than she loved her own father. Well, if she loved her father at all. Eden had a gracious demeanor nonetheless, made even more so by her pregnancy, which she seemed to cherish. She was calm and very beautiful in the way of Siobhan McKenna or perhaps, Tom thought with considerable pleasure, of a seeded English garden flourishing toward spring. But she had long distrusted her father, having seldom written to him through his years in prison, and the visits they had had in the past few months in San Francisco had been notable for the indifference…usually followed by only half-sincere kindnesses…with which Eden spoke with her father.
The Boyfriend had hovered over many of these conversations, his curls like little taunting gestures calling shame upon Tom's revisionist politics. The Boyfriend believed of the Irish that they should push the god-damned Brits into the sea right now. He had said so, cantankerously sputtering it out one evening over a dinner of spaghetti and tomatoes at Eden's apartment. Tom had told The Boyfriend that, though sure it was right that the Irish had a beef with the British, he himself Tom Foley was sorry for what he had done so long ago. “As you would be yourself, had you been there," Tom had said. That remark had signaled the effective end of the relationship between the two men.
And suddenly The Boyfriend had disappeared, just a month before Eden was to deliver. Tom had insisted on coming to see her the very day he had found out. He had hoped that their shared outrage would bring them closer together.
"Oh, it's not that he left me, Daddy," she said, in her new Americanized accent. "He was a nice enough fellow. But he was…well, you know," she pointed at her protuberant stomach, "he was just the donor!"
The donor! Tom tried imagining what Diana, God rest her, would have said upon hearing of such a concept. Wouldn't she put a hand to her mouth, in shock itself, standing there in her cotton dress, all pregnant, her apron, her wool slippers, the photo of the late Pope John XXIII hanging as it always had on the refrigerator door?
The donor, for Christ's sake! The thought rummaged through Tom’s mind.
—
Diana…poor Diana had tried to get Tom to give up the I.R.A. At first, when they had both been seventeen, she had found it romantic, as though Tom were some sort of Zorro or Robin Hood or something.
She had enjoyed all the talk about Wolfe Tone and Padraig Pearse and the betrayer Michael Collins. Dying for Ireland had made sense when they were seventeen. Getting rid of an appeaser like Collins so long ago had made sense. But then a mutual friend of theirs, Joseph Haskins, who had been recruited into the I.R.A. with Tom, had indeed been killed, blowing up in a Derry street with an incorrectly fused car-bomb that he had set himself. He had been reduced to…very little.
"Tom, please stop," she had said to him the night Joseph had been killed. Several months later when she found that she was pregnant, she had grown angrily insistent on it. "I don't want my kid's father to be some kind of murderer! Or somebody murdered!"
But by then Tom was already a murderer. A reprisal bombing of a Protestant pub. He had been arrested by the R.U.C. two weeks after the terrible event, the makings of bombs in the boot of his car. He was guilty. He had had other wires and blasting caps and a timing device like the one he had delivered to Pat Foy, who had placed the bomb in the pub, then been arrested himself. Foy had given in to the interrogation, and Tom, among others, had then been taken prisoner, put on trial and forgotten in Long Kesh Prison. Seven people had died in the pub explosion, unrecognizable among the smithereens.
"Oh, Tom, what are we going to do?" Diana had asked during her first visit to him in prison. He felt ashamed of himself, though thrilled by her condition, her full-cheeked fecundity, five months along. He couldn't touch her, kept at a distance, a criminal, sensing fecklessly, foolishly the warmth that his wife represented, her womanliness, her kindness. But he was able only to sense it because they wouldn't let him touch her.
—
Owen took up his Guinness once more. "Tom, you've got a public to satisfy." He sipped from it. "You've got to sit down and write."
While in the H-Block cells at Long Kesh, Tom had discovered a talent for verse, and had published a book of poems. Like samizdat, smuggled out of his cell in manuscript by his lawyer, poems written on toilet tissue. An Irish publisher had asked him to keep a journal of his time in prison, to see whether there might be an audience for it.
When the book came out in the United States a few years later, Tom Foley was congratulated by The New York Times as "part of that small community of geniuses that immortalize their incarceration". The article had gone on to mention Oscar Wilde, of whom Tom knew, as well as Eldridge Cleaver and Jacobo Timerman, of whom he didn't.
"You should capitalize more on your own fame," Owen continued. "Especially these days when, if you don't maintain some kind of notoriety, you can't even get your obituary published."
Smiling, Tom wrapped his hands around his own Guinness.
"It's Bertelsmann, see? Rupert Murdoch," Owen grumbled. "The corporate mentality. The bottom line. You can't just sit on your twenty-six years of laurels as a committed political prisoner. You've got to sell the idea, over and over."
"The idea of being a murderer, you mean."
Owen blinked, then looked down at the table, suddenly mortified. Like many of the Irish and English barristers with whom Tom had had to deal, the American Owen was baggy and disorganized-looking, his coat-sleeves deeply wrinkled, the shoulders displaying a light frost of dandruff. He was sixty years old with quite frowsy hair and the kind of enflamed cheeks that, in Ireland, would have signified a leaning toward drink. In Owen's case, here in San Francisco, it was the same, a city, Tom had noted, where it was easy to get a drink just about anywhere you went.
"No, Tom, I didn't mean that," Owen said.
"I'm sorry. It's just the truth."
"I know, but that's not what…"
"Murder. You know what that is, don't you?"
Owen leaned close, waving a hand before his face. "Tom, here in the States, they're just waiting for you to take advantage of what you've got, that's all."
Tom laughed, looking away. Owen, the crafty American entrepreneur, could be expected to have such sentiments. But that phrase…“to take advantage of what you’ve got”…stuck in the lining itself of Tom's gut, like acid. His guilt had been immediate in 1980—although put aside for the moment by the politics of the H-Block—and constantly with him ever since.
He remembered the dreams he had had in prison, in which he had seen, over and over, what that blast must have done to the people it had killed. He had had one such dream just the night before this meeting with Owen, and the carnal dismemberment that it so featured—re-appearing in his sleep for many years, the same dream again and again—remained in his thoughts at this very moment.
"It's a blockbuster mentality here," Owen went on. He pointed an index finger at Tom's chest. "And you've got the ability to write one!"
Tom recalled the programs he had seen on television, in prison, about hydrogen bombs, the extraordinary light and the apocalyptic cloud's intensity, the power of the air moving in a circle from ground zero, taking everything with it…palm trees, ships, whole islands, native peoples, Japanese fishermen.
Now there, he thought, there's a blockbuster for you! He had often mused that it was a shame that they didn't set one of them off in Long Kesh, just to get rid of the tossers lying around in their blankets all day. By contrast, his books were just self-punishing entertainments shocking in their detail, with maybe a request here and there for a little personal forgiveness. Blockbusters? No. They’re just public whining, Tom thought as he took another swallow of stout, that had sold a couple hundred thousand copies and made him, even while in prison, a fortune. He was living on the proceeds.
Upon his arrival in San Francisco, Owen had given Tom the login and password to the Charles Schwab account that Owen had kept for him in The States. A very nice young American woman named Gladys Echeverría, who worked for Schwab, had explained to him the size of his holdings: the stocks, the bonds, the CD's, the annuities. Listening to her cooperative, encouraging voice, Tom had concluded that all those things were just lucre seeping from the grave. The dead were still down there, he knew, surrounded by Tom Foley’s money, and suffering. So, a hydrogen bomb at Long Kesh… Yeh, now that, that…
No. Tom brushed the image aside. It wouldn't have been right for the prison to just evaporate in a burst of solar, excited light, because then Tom Foley would have disappeared too. And he knew in his heart that he had a book to write, in which he wished to dwell on his poor wife Diana's sweet gifts of passion, their resentful daughter Eden, and the beautiful baby that Eden—well, that she and the donor, in love and frenzied desire—had made.
—
"You look terrible," Patrick O'Connor had said. He had entered the cell with a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. The guard stood behind him at the door. The excrement had dried. On the walls, it looked like one of those American paintings, Tom thought, those abstract…What was his name, Pollack? Was that it? Patrick O'Connor was a parish priest, a scattered man who gave insincere advice, who had baptized Tom's sister Antoinette seven years earlier.
"Thank you, Father."
"You need to get cleaned up, Tom."
"No, Patrick." Tom glanced at the guard, who, unperturbed, kept a close eye on the two men.
The priest folded the handkerchief and put it in his pants pocket. In the cell, with Tom looking like poverty itself in his stained blanket, his hair like sticks, his eyes red, the priest in his black suit and clerical collar resembled somber purity, clean-shaven and well-washed, a man shot through with silently confessional sympathy.
"Tom." Patrick looked aside. He reached into a pants pocket and began pulling a rosary from it. The beads were made of some kind of dark plastic. The crucifix resembled rusted iron. He lowered his head in sorrow.
"What is it?" Tom said.
Patrick slumped forward on the stool, placing his elbows on his knees. The rosary hung between them. "Tom. Diana…" The priest swallowed, shaking his head as he stared at the drain in the concrete floor. "Tom, Diana's gone." He shivered. “We lost her yesterday.”
A club battering his chest, the sentence surged through Tom's heart. Hatred…Diana's gone! “Died?” The wish to attack the priest…even though he knew it was not Patrick O'Connor's fault that Diana…. “She’s dead?” Tom gagged. "The baby? The baby?"
"She's all right," Patrick said. "You needn't worry about her."
Now the priest himself looked over his shoulder at the guard. "Could you leave us alone a moment, please?"
The guard shook his head. "Not permitted," he said.
Patrick sighed, turning back toward Tom. He fingered the rosary. "I'm…I'm sorry to be the one…"
"Patrick."
"But…" The priest glanced once more at the guard, then turned to face Tom again. "Saying your Confession often helps in a moment like this."
—
"We missed you at lunch yesterday," Tom said. He stirred the Earl Gray tea in his cup with a small spoon. It didn't need stirring, but he was nervous.
"Well, you didn't miss much, did you?"
Tom shrugged. This was the sort of response he had been getting from Eden ever since his arrival in San Francisco. He loved her with confused distraction. He had never once seen a more beautiful girl than his daughter. Even her mother Diana, a particular beauty whose brown hair had seemed so brown that no other could match its intensities of oak and bitter chocolate, a kind of South American largesse in her hair that Tom had long ago blamed upon the Spanish coming ashore in Ireland, freezing, almost drowned after the sinking of the Armada in 1588…even Diana's hair had not had the finesse of her daughter Eden's.
"Couldn't you speak to me with more…more kindness, Eden?" Tom replied. He replaced the cup and saucer on the table. The little butter cookie from which he had taken a bite lay in its crumbs on a plate.
"Hmph," she whispered, her back to him as she stirred a pot of colcannon, to accompany the pot roast she was making for her father. She was very greatly magnificent with child. She was also a software engineer at Apple Computer in Cupertino. Tom barely knew what software was. But he admired anybody who had reached, especially at such an early age, the vice-presidential level of a famous American corporation, and therefore he admired his daughter. At least he had told her so, although she hadn't believed it.
"You go on about wanting kindness," Eden said. "Why didn't you ever call me?"
"I was in prison."
"But why were you in prison?"
"Because…well, because I…" Tom did not finish the sentence.
Eden knew the reason why, so he wondered why she had to rehearse this yet one more time. She lowered her head over the pot, her gold-tinged hair falling long over the volume that represented her child.
"Oh Daddy, I'm sorry." She shook her head. "I can't help it."
"Give up this idea that I abandoned you, Eden. Please."
Eden remained silent for a long moment. She shook her head once more, still unable to speak, still unwilling to tell the truth. Or just unwilling to speak to her father at all. She sighed. "Give it up! You represent it to me, Daddy."
"What?
"Betrayal! What else do you expect?" she said. "Your time in prison was just an emptiness to me. I knew I had a father. I knew who you were. But you can't imagine…you can't…" Eden turned toward him and sat down a moment, her hands open, palms-up, on her lap. She stared at them, and the slim lines in their palms and the willowing length of the fingers, which closed and opened so lightly, reminded Tom of some kind of caressing anemone. "You can't imagine how many times I laid in my bed in Grandma's house, poor Grandma who had always thought so well of you, she said, dying even as she prayed for you to get out some day, her only son-in-law…you can't imagine how many times I laid there and wished that you could come into the room and sit down on the edge of my bed, the way a father is supposed to, to put your hand on my head and to wish my dreams…to wish my dreams well." Eden turned her hands over and laid one on top of the other as she looked up at her father. "It was so dark in that room."
Tom was warmed by the afternoon sunlight coming in the kitchen window. He knew what real darkness was. And cold. A blanket is a poor guardian against the cold if it's all you've got, he thought. Sheets and a proper mattress, yes, those help, and a proper pillow, that, too. But he hadn't had any of those because he had told the guards to put them all up their arses. That's the kind of thing you do when you're twenty-four years old, he mused now, and think that the British, though the defenders of Will Shakespeare and Jane Austen and the rest of them, are still nonetheless terrorist murderers and robbers to boot that had looted the whole of Ireland.
So, Tom had just had his blanket, the one single brown wool blanket that was never washed, the odor of which he eventually could not distinguish from that of the shite on the cell walls because that odor permeated everything…his hair, his nose, his mouth, his skin. And the cold at night did nothing to alleviate it either. He remembered being amused by the idea that if he were in a tropical prison, in Bombay or Kinshasa or some other hole, the odor would be even worse because it was not refrigerated, the way it had been in Tom's cell at night. But now he scratched his head, smiling to himself, because he knew for certain that shite and the body’s rot smell just as bad in cold weather. The odor from his cell had imbued itself within his every breath especially in winter.
In whatever season, though, prison had always been the worst at night, when Tom too had dreamed of being caressed in his bed at home, by his lovely living wife and her beautiful Eden. He had dreamed of Eden for years, able to ponder the details of her occasional visits to him in prison and to bring from them the same kinds of joy that he had felt for Diana's visits before she had died.
Eden's red dress the Christmas she had been six, the one with the white lace bodice. The bracelet that Owen Sizemore, whom Tom had met a few years previously, had sent to her from New York when she was getting ready to graduate from primary school. There had been a ribbon…When she was twelve? Thirteen?…a green ribbon settling throughout her curls, appearing within them, on Saint Paddy's Day 1992. Or was it 1993? She had worn a new black coat that day, almost ankle length, that her grandmother had bought for her at the House of Fraser in Belfast, a gift for Eden's having won a national science prize in school. Something about these computers, whatever they might be.
Tom remembered how even the tears that had emerged from her on the visit she had made to him after her grandmother had died had been so compelling, pearlescent light glistening on the softly curved cheekbones below her green eyes. And her voice that day. "She's gone, Da. What am I going to do?" The voice that had become a woman's voice even though Eden was only seventeen then.
Those memories had shimmered in his heart for years, in Tom's various cells in Northern Ireland and England, because it had been so dark at night in so many of them. Indeed, Tom often had had the same image in his heart that Eden had just described. How he missed it! the idea of sitting down next to her and taking her hand in his as she floated asleep, her hair mussed by her pillow, his other hand caressing her hair and making her dreams even more warming. This was the same feeling, the love he felt for Eden herself right now, when he could touch her, when no one was there to prevent it. Except, of course, for Eden herself who sat quietly, gazing into Tom's eyes as though there were nothing about him that she understood.
—
The caged light bulb had been devoid of gleam or shimmer. Thomas Edison had not been one to understand such nuance, putting in his bulbs just one possibility, that of being on or off. Subtlety was not one of a light bulb's properties. In that respect, Tom had grumbled, it's like the hydrogen bomb.
He had tried turning away from it. But in this cell, there was seldom darkness. Light was torture. Light burrowed into him and kept him awake, so that the change of heart that the Long Kesh authorities demanded of him every day, that he give up this idiocy, all this political tripe, Tom, this illusion that you're some sort of revolutionary and therefore an ultimately virtuous man…that he give up all that and put on the prison uniform. That's all we're asking, mate. Put on the uniform, sign the paper here, and we'll turn off the light.
So, he dreamed in bright light, of Diana and Eden. The dreams were always short and interrupted. Diana holding his head between her hands as she kissed him. Eden squirming out of Diana's body, her cries invasive of her mother's mortal silence. Diana's eyes. Diana walking around in a slip. Diana laughing. Short dreams, seconds short. Of Eden growing in her mother's womb and saved—just barely—by the doctors.
—
"Daddy, he's coming."
"Who?"
"The baby!"
Tom hurried the phone from his left ear to his right. He sat up in bed, his heart beating hurriedly, a-rhythmically. "You know what you've got?"
"Of course!"
He briefly asked himself, putting down his sudden nervousness, why Eden had not told him. But what did it matter?
"Will you come now?" Eden asked.
"Of course. It'll take me a while to get a taxi."
“We've got time." Eden's voice was strained, her breathing quick and raspy.
"I'll be there in a couple of minutes."
He put the phone aside and reached for the lamp. For a moment he couldn't find it, and his hand slapped about on the table surface until he located the base. His fingers hurried, crawling, up the body of the lamp. But when he pressed the switch, the lamp lighted for just a brief second before going black.
"Shite," he whispered. He threw the blankets aside and sat up in bed. He had no clothes on. His pants and shirt were on a chair across the room, having been prepared by him for just this moment, and Tom felt his way to them, avoiding the two shoes that he had lined up carefully at the side of his bed, each with a sock next to it. Finding the wall switch, he allowed a moment for his eyes to become accustomed to the light, then made his way to the shoes. The light continued dazzling his consciousness, the exact opposite of what light is supposed to be. He had been blinded by it, everything too well illuminated.
When he stepped out onto the street, thick fog had muffled the street lamps. It was four AM. The lights were barely visible. The fog was black, but Tom could see, at least enough to make his way the one block to Geary Street, a major thoroughfare on which he knew he could get a taxi.
Eden held herself together during the ride to the hospital. She had a cell phone, and she called the Emergency to let them know she was coming. The short conversation was violently interrupted by a contraction, the spasm of which caused her to hand the phone over to her father, who completed the message to the hospital attendant. Eden writhed, rigidly, in the back seat next to him, and she squeezed his hand, holding onto his fingers as though trying to get them to soften the electric strike that was attacking her.
"Oh, Daddy," she moaned. The contraction lasted only a moment, although she told him there would be another one soon.
Inside the hospital, a nurse helped Eden onto a gurney and handed Tom the plastic bag that carried her clothes. She was a black woman, quite small, with a name tag that said "Millie Richardson, R.N." She had told Tom to put Eden's watch and her pearl ring into her purse, and to bring it with him. "We can't keep them," she had said. "So, we need a responsible person to look after them." Smiling, Millie placed the purse in Tom's slightly trembling hands. "Someone with nothing to hide, you know." She turned and took up Eden's hand, caressing it. "And with a daughter like Eden, I'll bet you're just that man, Mr. Foley."
Tom ceased breathing, surprised by Millie's humor. She looked back at him, and her smile remained. "Well, I guess it's either me or the pope," he whispered.
"OK." Millie pointed toward a door into a linoleum hallway. "Follow me."
Walking behind the gurney, purse in hand, he observed Eden's belly, which reminded him of a fine grassy hill in the Irish countryside, albeit covered over with a cotton blanket striped broadly in baby-blue and white. Eden was at the moment having another contraction, and Tom was intimidated by the glaring light in the hallway, so strong that there seemed to be no shadow at all, no obscure place where a person seeking safety could hide, no comforting darkness where he could attempt to offer Eden a moment's consolation.
—
"You've got to love a kid like this, don't you?" Tom said.
Eden lay back against her pillow. She was exhausted, radiant, and charged with fatigued happiness. "We'll call him Tommy," she said.
"What's that?"
She brought a hand to her forehead and took away a remnant of sweat that remained there. "After you, Daddy."
"After me."
Eden reached out to lay a hand on Tom's coat sleeve. "That's good, I hope."
"It's a wonderful name, Tommy is," Tom said, still looking into the baby's eyes. "Although maybe only for now, until he's three or four, something like that." He touched Tommy's lips with an index finger. "Won't do when he runs for president." He held Tommy in his arms, supporting his head. The baby mewed and gurgled, struggling to understand what had just happened to him. His mother held the index finger of Tommy's right hand. She smiled at the boy, then let her gaze move up to her father's face, into his eyes as he watched her slight caress of the baby's finger.
"They're perfect when they come out, aren't they?" Tom muttered.
"Da." Eden smiled at him, at the…naivety of what he had said. Tom recalled the dream, the ruinous explosion, the blood and smoke. He remained a murderer. But at least now Tommy was here with him. He sensed that few had forgiven him, or ever would. But he hoped that the child in his arms would grant him a moment, someday, to explain himself. His remorse. His wish that he had not done what he had done. The simple horror that had come of the pub explosion. It’s very ignition. That's all he wanted, and it was something he had never succeeded in, really, in all the books he had written. The bravado and congratulation they had received had been empty for him in his prison cells. Blather that had brought his soul little, that had brought Eden nothing. But now, with his grandson, maybe there was a chance for such explanation, at least with Eden.
Copyright ©2012 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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This story is one from my collection titled Little Bridget and The Flames of Hell. Available on order everywhere.
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