The Return of Maeve Carver

It was the eighth day. Mairead rang the house at twenty to eleven at night. She rang on the landline, because my mother had told her, years ago, to ring the landline. I answered. My mother was in bed. My mother had gone to bed at half nine, which was unusual, and I had been sitting in the kitchen with a glass of the mean whiskey and the laptop open and the lighting plot still unsolved, and I had been not-solving it in the pleasant way you can not-solve a thing when you have given up being ashamed of not solving it. "Maeve," Mairead said. "Can you come in, pet." "Is he — " "He's not gone. He's had a turn. He's stopped speaking on us. It's the thing we've been watching for. I'd rather ye were in." "I'll wake Mam." "Do." I went to my mother's room and I knocked. I had not knocked on my mother's bedroom door in twenty-five years and I knocked now, and she said, "Yes," as though she had been awake, which she had been, and I opened the door and I told her, and she got out of bed in her long nightgown and she put on her dressing gown and then she took the dressing gown off and put on a jumper and a skirt over the nightgown, which was the way she had always dressed for an emergency, layered over whatever she had been sleeping in, with the practical refusal to be caught. I rang Sean. Sean said, "I'll meet ye there." I drove. My mother sat in the passenger seat of the Skoda with