Caroline went into labour at 4:35 in the morning nine months to the day later, in the back room cluttered with shoes and magazines. She'd been bundled into Mickey O'Faolain's dented DeSoto while Feargal scrambled with overnight bags and cameras and the birth license, a real one they'd got at the last minute. He'd been wearing it in a little baggy in his underwear, just to make sure he wouldn't forget it when the time came. There was no way in Hell they would have gone through this only to have the baby taken away as soon as it could breathe.
Feargal had spearheaded the mass of men that had stormed into the National Maternity Hospital, the one to bark orders to nurses to move, lass, move, we got a woman givin' birth here, get a move on, ain't that your job? C'mon, y'bloody doctor, getcher lazy arse outta t'at chair, get t'is baby outta 'er.
If the doctors and nurses had looked at the scene closer, they would have burned with anger at being ordered around by a seventeen-year-old kid with deep bags under his eyes, but they were more concerned with the eight gorillas he was surrounded by and seemed to control, as well as the fact that the woman in question was indeed giving birth and yes, that was their job. So without further ado they ducked their heads, muttered profuse apologies and whisked the woman into a whitewashed room full of harsh light.

Feargal and his brothers-in-law had been shut out of the room immediately, and Feargal sat cross-legged on the cold linoleum filling out a clipboard thick with forms and downing cup after cup of shitty coffee Mickey brought him from the machine at the end of the hall. It started tasting better after the third cup, and by the fifth he was so far gone with worry and exhaustion that he could have been drinking liquid dog shit and not have noticed. To relieve the boredom, the tension, the sheer tiredness seeping through his bones he paced, hummed, stretched, drank cup after cup of coffee, checked and rechecked the forms he was filling out.
Anthony if it was a boy.
Bernadette if it was a girl.
Mary as the middle name either way.
Shit, he was tired.

He'd been let back into the room three hours later, when gray fingers of sunlight began to peek through the thick clots of clouds that smothered the city most days. Caroline was lying propped up in bed, exhausted but with a little ghost of a smile as she saw him enter. Lying in her arms was a tiny red bag of flesh, squirming inside its fuzzy blanket sprinkled with blue dots. It was a boy, the doctor had told him. A boy. Feargal McPherson was a father. He had a son. He had officially joined the ranks of PTA functions and Cub Scout meetings, arithmetic homework and boogeymen in the closet. It was a boy. He had a son. Feargal McPherson was a father, and he wasn't old enough to order a pint to celebrate.
Caroline gazed intently at the tiny red creature feasting hungrily at her breast, a tiny knot nestling between her eyebrows. She turned her head up to Feargal then, the round tip of her nose starting to flush with crimson as she swallowed, looking at him with her big watery eyes.
"Love you."
The words were forced, heavy, clipped, as if her tongue felt ashamed for making sounds it did not understand and had no right speaking. Her eyebrows drew down for a moment as she quickly scanned his face, looking for some reaction, any reaction, before she tried again, tentatively. "Love...you?"
Feargal had kissed her forehead then, breathing in her scent-- shampoo and sweat, a good honest smell laced with the sea water smell that you could never escape. "I love you too," he told her, and this time he was sure that she understood.

Caledonia Mary had been born five years later, in the back bedroom of Eamon O'Faolain's flat. This time Feargal had made sure to be next to Caroline throughout it all, squeezing her hand, timing the contractions, telling her she was so brave, so beautiful. Although Caroline had refused to go to the doctor throughout these last nine months, somehow as he held her hand and told her she was so brave, he knew that everything was all right, that this baby was healthy, was perfect, and was a girl.
He didn;t know how he knew any of this. He wasn't a doctor, he wasn't psychic, but ever since Caroline had gasped and grabbed her swollen stomach in the kitchen, since she'd been led to the back of Eamon's flat, Feargal knew that before the day was over he would have a daughter. Otherwise, he had no expectations, no idea of how this would turn out.
Firstly, he hadn't expected her to be blue. Babies weren't supposed to be blue, they were pink and white and yellow, but not blue. This didn't look like the head of a baby coming from between Caroline's legs, it was purple and shrunken and wrinkled like a rotten squash, like something they dragged out of the bay. Then, she had looked at him.
That had shocked him. This baby-- his baby, his daughter-- had been in the world for a minute, perhaps, and only her head at that, and she was looking at him. She had her mother's gray eyes and she stared at him with a shadow of indignation crossing her blue wrinkled face. This was obviously not how she'd planned on spending her day, she had not planned on being forcibly evicted from her warm wet home and she didn't like it one bit. She screwed up the tiny moist crescent of her mouth in silent protest as her mother gave one final violent push and the tiny creature was spilled onto the sheets, wet and slick and looking utterly, irrepressibly annoyed with her new situation.
After a few minutes the blue began to fade from her skin and within the hour she was the familiar pink rosy colour Feargal had come to expect from babies. She lay in his arms, not squirming like Tony had when he was picked up, but laying peacefully with her tiny soft head curled in the curve of his neck, her ribs rising and falling evenly as she took her first few breaths in this new world. Tiny stubs of fingers topped with a clear swatch of nail wrapped around his finger, and he felt her tiny heart, no bigger than a walnut now, pounding fiercely through her flannel suit, through the receiving blanket and into his own chest. He gently rested his nose on her head and took a small sniff, and her light brushing of orange hair smelled like vanilla and wet wool, and the thought crossed his mind that Caroline must smell like that inside, like a warm wet vanilla-soaked sweater.
Caroline's mother had been the last to leave, and when she closed the door the family was curled on the bed, two children, two parents, asleep in each other.

Thirteen months later Feargal pleaded no contest to hampering a police investigation, and had been sent to Arbour Hill Correctional Facility.
They had arrested Feargal in front of the house, and he had gone without a fight, confessed to everything they charged him with, confessed to things he hadn't even done and that they knew he was innocent of. He had been changing Cally's nappy, seen the cruiser pull in front of the building, and felt his throat go dry when Caroline called out in her own peculiar way that she would get it, don't worry.
They could not come into the house. He had to keep them out of the house, he had to keep them out of the flat, away from Caroline, away from the babies. He knew what he had done, a little lie, so what? He could accept the time he would serve, but he would not, he refused to come back out and learn that Caroline had been arrested and sterilised, that his babies had been taken by the government. He had committed the crime, not them-- and he could not let the police charge them for it.
So he had kissed Cally, told her to be a good girl, not to cry out, please God don't cry out, and tore through the flat, grabbed Caroline before she reached the door, pushed her back and confessed to everything before the police had asked. He edged past them to the front of the house, leading them away towards the cruiser, spilling his guts over what he'd done, demanding that they arrest him, take him away guilty as charged. They'd slammed him against the car then, telling him of his minimal rights, damn Mick bastard he was, before slapping the cuffs tight around his wrists, pinching skin and grinding against bone before shoving him into the back of the cruiser.
The cruiser backed up, started out down D'Olier to Pearse Street, the house becoming smaller as they picked up speed, and he'd turned to see Caroline standing on the stoop, her hands to her face and her shoulders shaking. He'd raised his cuffed hands, already raw and red at the wrists and given her a small final wave, a small smile as they turned the corner and she vanished from view.

He'd been allowed one last morning with Caroline, watched her over the scratched desk that stood between them, long-forgotten names carved into the once-polished vermeer, a hundred thousand wives' tears slowly dissolving the wood, a billion packets of cigarettes slowly scraping the surface away with each contraband slide. The desk had outlived these tears, these cigarettes, the names carved into it over the many years it had served this purpose. The couple sitting at it now-- a woman smelling of talcum powder with a red nose, a man with piercing blue eyes and a shaved head-- were no different than the millions of other couples it had seen since its construction, the same scenario played out with new characters.
Feargal had smiled that heartbreaker's smile at her, held his wife's hand while she cried, told her she'd be all right, everything would be all right. Don't worry, love, I'm going to make this all better. Look at me-- don't you believe me? It's not even for a year-- your brothers will take care of you, don't worry love. Caroline had run her hand over his head, shaved to a brown fuzz, and managed a small watery smile. She didn't understand, of course she didn't and so she didn't respond, but her eyes roved over his face, his hands, memorising his touch and smell with a fervent urgency.

I don't think I can do this.
Of course you can, love.
I'm so scared.
Don't be scared, sweet'eart. There's nothing to be afraid of, I promise.
You'll come back to me, won't you?
You know I will. I'll come back and everything will be so much better, I swear.
You promise?
I promise.
Love you.
I love you too, sweet'eart.

After twenty minutes hed been pulled from his chair by two guards in starched blue uniforms and herded unceremoniously through the door. He walked through calmly, his chin high, betraying no emotion, no trace of feeling. He would not turn back to her, he would not sneak one last glance the way they did in those prison dramas on late night television, he wouldn't see her blow one final kiss as the metal door slid shut. He wouldn't allow himself to do that, because seeing the pain on her face would last throughout his sentence of isolation, and he knew that if he went in seeing that he would never really come out.
He kept those thoughts pushed to the back of his mind, out of sight while they stripped him of his gray prison coveralls, crammed the thoughts into a tiny little lead box somewhere in his skull while they led him though the cold hallway towards the rows of cryogenics tubes already mostly filled with the fellow denizens of Arbour Hill. He shut this little lead box with a lock of fourteen combinations and a keyhole, then swallowed the key as he stepped onto the slick metal and Plexiglas tube labeled 23-5636-28 McPherson , his toes curling around the grate below him. He sealed the edges of this box with steel solder as the guards fastened the cuffs on the back of the tube around his wrists, covered the box with wax as the Plexiglas shield slid closed in front of him, leaving him locked in the cold tube. Then, as a whirring noise above his head alerted his mind to the fact that the sedatives were being pumped through the tube, that soon he'd feel nothing, he took the box and threw it as hard as he could-- across New Dublin, across the Liffey Bay, across the Irish Sea and clear into space, shooting into a far orbit as his lids grew heavy and his head sagged.
As the drugs pumped through his body, his feet numb to the freezing solutions swirling higher around his legs, preserving him for his sentence, Feargal's last conscious thought-- the one thought he would remember throughout his cryogenic suspension, was a last, desperate prayer.

Please God, take care of my babies.

He'd been resurrected nine months later.
Nine months.
Nine months of darkness, nine months of obliviousness, nine months of Please God Take Care of My Babies. He was like a baby now, he thought. Emerging from the womb, emerging from the darkness to begin life. The latches on the side of prisoner 23-5636-28 McPherson's cryogenic suspension unit had turned on their own accord when the timer commended them to. The chilling solutions that had kept him suspended in sleep, like formaldehyde with just enough oxygen to sustain life, slowly drained into the grates below while new drugs, new stimulates pumped through the newly-opened air vents. The Plexiglas slid aside and the cuffs had released, sending the contents of the tube spilling onto the floor, smashing him back into consciousness, into life.
The guards had found him kneeling on the ground, trembling from cryogenic shock, rasping painfully as pure, dry oxygen pumped into his lungs for the first time in nearly a year. Theyd picked him up, cleaned him off, shoved his belongings at him. He'd dressed in silence, his voice shriveled from disuse, shrieking painfully at him as it shrunk away from the dry air. He had glanced at himself in the mirror, noticed the brown fuzz hadn't grown out, that his cheeks were still clean-shaven. When he emerged from Arbour Hill's front gates, he found Mickey, Ryan and Eamon O'Faolain were waiting for him, surrounding the dented black DeSoto while he stumbled out into the cold winter air.
"Hey, Feargal."
"Heya, Fear."
"Nice t'see ya, boss."
Feargal swallowed, the saliva thick and gummy as it crawled down his mummified throat to the dusty pit of his stomach. He slowly turned his icy eyes towards Mickey, smoldering with fire under heavy lids as he spoke, a puff of breath, or perhaps dust, crystallising in the sharp air. "How are they?"
Eamon nodded. "We've taken cara t'at, Fear. C'mon, let's getcha outta t'is fuckin' joint."

His head rested gently against the window, bumping along with every pothole while his glazed eyes stared out at the dustings of snow and strings of multicoloured Christmas lights that snaked haphazardly around porch supports, hung limply from windows. The drugs were wearing off and the shock was seeping in, the shock that came from being put in a liquid coma, from coming out nearly a year later with no physical change, no mental change really except for the fact that he knew that things would be different when he stepped outside, that the world would have marched on without him. This shock, this change was what helped curb repeat offenders, what caused grown men hardened by the realities of life to grow soft and straight upon their first step into the outside world. Their parents had shriveled and died, their wives grown old while their children married and started the next generation-- all while they had slept soundly in a chemical tomb, to emerge looking as if a day had never passed for them.
While he negotiated a parking place, Mickey apologised for the cars piled in front of the house, for the crowds beginning to spill onto the stoop despite the chill. We tried to make this simple, but you know Da, hes always got to make everything a big deal, and after all, you are his only son-in-law, so what could we do?

Feargal had felt an odd numbness as the guests poured around him, as he opened the front door and stepped into the house warmed by radiators and the dozens of crushing bodies, flooded with the strains of Rosemary Clooney. There had been cheers as he entered the house, hearty handshakes and slaps on the back, tearful kisses and many beers thrust at him by a mass of faces he barely recognised. There were laughs about his haircut-- what, Feargal, y'join the Skinheads on us now?-- and good-natured ribbing.

Aw, Feargal m'lad, y'musta felt like-- what were 'is name? Han Solo, t'ats right! Yeah, jest like Han Solo. Havannuther beer, lad, y'deserve it.

"Feargal!"
He'd barely acknowledged his name had been called before hed found the beer knocked from his hand, a pair of skinny pale arms around his neck, a mass of Caroline in his arms. She buried her face in the curve of his neck, babbling in her own language, rapid and breathless as she squeezed the life out of him. He rested his nose at her temple, inhaled the smell that was part housewife, part wharfside and full Caroline before letting her down, staring into her cloudy gray eyes, his own softening as she smiled.

She'd taken his hand, led him to the stairs and began to climb, recounting the days and weeks and months that had passed in every minute detail, telling him of how the police had come to the door after his suspension and how Eamon and Frank had stood in the doorway and told them to piss off or they'd regret it, how Tony had asked where Da was and how she'd been unable to answer. Had Feargal been able to understand her his heart would have shriveled with the rest of his organs, but to him it was a cacophony of growls and trills that could have meant anything. She was wearing the burgundy dress hed seen her in the first time they'd really met, and he suddenly remembered she'd worn that dress to their wedding, that there was a dark spot on the left breast from where his blood had spotted it during their crimson kiss.
All that seemed a thousand years away and yet so present, and he wasn't sure how.

He had expected Tony to act moody, sullen, petulant, even. He'd steeled himself for the questions: Why'd ya leave us, Da? Why'd ya go? Feargal had known these questions would be asked, had known it since he first opened his eyes that morning, and had begun to supply answers as soon as he took his first painful, rasping dry breath.

Why'dja leave us, Da?
Because I'd done something bad.
What'ja do?
I lied to the police.
Why'dja do t'at, Da?
Cos I wanted to protect a friend.
Are y'gonna stay wit' us now, Da?
Yes.

Tony had surprised him. He sat on Jack O'Faolain's hand-me-down orange striped couch in his best Sunday clothes, kicking his feet in a bored way, muttering a "Hiya, Da," as Caroline led Feargal into the living room.
"Hiya, Tony," he answered, sitting down next to his son and ruffling his hair. "You okay?"
Tony shrugged. "I guess. Nice t'see you."
"Good t'see you." He remembered the bag at his feet then and pulled out a small action figure, a fireman with a plastic ax and helmet. Feargal had made Mickey stop at a store before he got home, it felt wrong to come back empty-handed. So hed bought Tony this little plastic fireman, the memory that Tony had liked firemen last year worming its way out of his chilled head. "'Ere, gotcha this."
Tony's face screwed up when he took the fireman. "I like astronauts." There was a small cough from the other side of the room, and Tony looked up to see his mother glaring at him. He swallowed and managed to smile. "Thanks, Da, I love it."
"You're welcome," he answered, hugging Tony, who squirmed for a moment before slipping out of his father's arms and jumping off the couch. "I'm goin' downstairs!" he called out as he clomp-clomped down the stairs, two at a time.
"Anthony!" Caroline called sharply after him, but Feargal had stood up and held her shoulders.
"Leave it, sweeteart, its all right..." he'd stopped because he felt two sharp pinpricks piercing the back of his shorn neck, two little spots of fire that burned into his spine, rippled hot iron through his nerves and seared his brain. Feargal closed his eyes briefly, and then turned around.
Cally stood in the doorway-- she was standing now, without help? And walking-- good God. He remembered the last time hed held her, the morning before his arrest, and she had been so happy and rosy, her hair only starting to curl, and she reached up to him and smiled and laughed in the baby babble that defined her world. Hed tickled her chin, kissed her, told her he loved her, how beautiful she was, before handing her back to her mother. Somehow hed expected her to still be that little, rosy bundle of flesh stumbling over her feet, fascinated by the sunlight that filtered through the laundry room window and the pigeons in the back yard. It occurred to him that she was probably talking now, really talking, and wondered what her voice sounded like. This suddenly opened a yawn of vacancy in him, a grim realisation of how much he'd missed.
Feargal walked over, kneeled in front of her, his heart racing with the fact that she probably did not know who he was, she wouldn't remember that this was her father. Oh, God, oh God, this wasn't what he expected, this wasn't what he wanted and he was suddenly terrified of the tiny creature barely standing in front of him.
Feargal touched her face, and Cally broke out in sobs.
It was a jarring, painful sound, a cry that ripped through the flat, his brain and his soul, suddenly flushed life into those mummified organs rattling inside him, made his cheeks burn in a mix of anger and shame-- at who, at what we wasn't sure-- that was altogether unfamiliar and unwelcome, and without thinking he drew the tiny screaming child into his arms. Feargal gritted his teeth as he rocked her slowly, the harsh choking wails filling the small room, tearing into him with every new note.

I'll make this all better, baby. I'm going to make this all better, and I'll never leave you again. Please believe me, I'm going to make this all better. I swear to God, I'll get an honest job, I'll work in a bloody McDonalds if I gotta, but I'm never going to leave you alone again.

Ever since that afternoon, Cally was never far from Feargal's side. She was the last one to leave the dinner table, the kitchen, the couch while her parents read and knit and listened to Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra. She held his neck the tightest when he brought her to the room she eventually shared with her sister Charlotte, she was the first one to run to the door when she heard the car's rattle pull in front of the building. If Feargal left her in the car to buy a pint of milk, she would start weeping uncontrollably until he picked her up, told her he wasn't going anywhere, he'd just be a minute. Eventually she grew out of the crying and could be left alone, but always as he retreated she had a look on her face, a shadow of a look that told him she was preparing herself to never see him again.