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“Ma’am,” the doctor says, “this man has had enough excitement for one night. He needs his rest.”
“I know. I’ll go. But Danny… why did you have that dream? Why? Do you have any idea at all?”
He laughs. It’s a sorry laugh. “Why does a man get hit by lightning twice?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.” He points. “I see you’re wearing your cross.”
She touches it. “I always wear it.”
“Sure. But belief is hard, isn’t it?” He lies down on his pillow, puts his hands over his eyes—as if to blot out both worlds, the one seen and the one behind it, so rarely revealed—and says it again. “Belief is hard.”
He drops his hands. They look at each other without speaking. There’s nothing to say.
FINN
Finn had a hard go of it from the very beginning. He slipped through the hands of a midwife who had delivered hundreds of babies and gave his birthday cry when he hit the floor. When he was five, there was a house party next door. He was allowed out to listen to the music (The Pogues blasting from pole-mounted portable speakers) on his side of the street. It was summer, he was barefoot, and a cherry bomb thrown by an exuberant partygoer flew up, arced down with the stub of its fuse fizzing, and blew off the baby toe on his left foot.
Wouldn’t have happened again in a thousand years, his grandma said.
At seven he and his sisters were playing in Pettingill Park while Grandma sat on a nearby bench, alternately knitting and doing one of her word-search puzzles. Finn didn’t care for the swings, had no use for the seesaws, could have cared less about the roundy-round. What he liked was the Twisty, an entrancing curlicue of blue plastic twenty feet high. There were steps, but Finn preferred to climb the slide itself on his hands and knees, up and around, up and around. At the top he would sit and glide to the packed dirt at the bottom. He never had an accident on the Twisty.
“Stop that awhile, why don’t ya,” Grandma said one day. “You’re always on that old Twisty. Try something new. Try the monkeybars. Show me a trick.”
His sisters, Colleen and Marie, were on them, climbing and swinging like… well, like monkeys. So, to please Grandma, he went on the monkeybars and slipped while hanging upside down and fell and broke his arm.
His teacher that year, pretty Miss Monahan, liked to end each day by saying, What have we learned today, kiddos? At the Urgent Care, while having his arm set (the lollipop he was given afterward hardly seemed adequate compensation for the pain), Finn thought what he’d learned that day was Stick to the Twisty.
At fourteen, running home from his friend Patrick’s house in a driving thunderstorm, a stroke of lightning hit the street directly behind him, close enough to frizz his hair and char a line down the back of his jacket. Finn fell forward, hit his head on the curb, suffered a concussion, and lay unconscious in his bed for two days before waking up and asking what happened. It was Deirdre Hanlon from across the street (one of the partygoers on that long-ago Pogues day, although not the cherry bomb thrower) who saw him and fished the unconscious boy out of the gutter. “I thought poor old Finn was dead for sure,” she said.
His late father said Finn was born under a bad sign. Grandma (who never apologized for the monkeybars day) held a different view. She told Finn that for every stroke of bad luck God dealt out, he gave two strokes of the good. Finn thought that over and said he’d had no good luck to speak of, unless it wasn’t being hit dead center by the lightning-bolt.
“You should be glad your luck’s out,” Grandma said. “Maybe it will come in all at once and you’ll win the Lotto. Or a rich relative will die and leave you everything.”
“I don’t have any rich relatives.”
“That you know of,” Grandma said. She was the kind of woman who always got the last word. “When things go wrong, just remind yourself ‘God owes me.’ And God always pays His debts.”
Not soon enough to suit Finn, however. Worse luck awaited.
One evening in his nineteenth year, Finn came running home from his girlfriend’s house, not because it was raining but because even with a case of blue balls, all that hugging and touching and smooching had left him exhilarated. He felt he had to run or explode. He was wearing a leather jacket, jeans, a Cabinteely cap, and a vintage tee-shirt with the logo of an old band—Nazareth—on the front. He rounded the corner onto Peeke Street and ran into a young man running the other way. They both fell down. Finn picked himself up and started to apologize, but the young man was already legging it again, looking back over his shoulder. He was also wearing jeans, a bill cap, and a tee-shirt, which didn’t strike Finn as particularly coincidental; in this city, it was the uniform of the young, men and women both.
Finn carried on running down Peeke, rubbing a scraped elbow as he went. A black tradesman’s van came toward him, lights off. Finn thought nothing of it until it pulled up beside him and some men—at least four—came rushing out of the back even before the van had rolled completely to a stop.
Two of them grabbed him by the arms. Finn managed “Hey!”
A third man said “Hey yourself!” and pulled a bag over his head.
There was a sting in his upper arm just above his scraped elbow. He was aware of being hustled, feet not touching the pavement, and then the world flew away.
When Finn came to, he was lying on a cot in a small room with a high ceiling. In one corner was a table lamp with no table beneath it. In another was a commode. The commode was blue plastic, exactly the same shade as the Twisty in Pettingill Park. There was no other furniture. There was a skylight, but it had been painted black in slopping, careless strokes.
Finn sat up and winced. He didn’t have a headache, exactly, but his neck was terribly stiff and his arm hurt the way it had after he’d gotten his Covid shot. He looked at it and saw someone had put a sticking plaster above his scraped elbow. He peeled it back and saw a tiny hole with a red corona around it.
Finn tried the door and found it locked. He knocked, then pounded on it. As if in answer, AC/DC blasted at him: “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” at what sounded like two thousand decibels. Finn clapped his hands over his ears. It went on for twenty or thirty seconds, then stopped. He looked up and saw three speakers mounted high up. To him they looked like Bose models, which meant expensive. In the corner above the table lamp without a table, the lens of a camera stared down at him.
Unlike the time when he had almost been struck by lightning, Finn remembered what had happened before he temporarily lost the plot, and guessed what it meant. It was absurd but not amazing. Being kidnapped was just another example of Finn Murrie luck.
