The Boy That Never Was by Karen Perry

day.
    ‘Harry,’ she said. Whenever she uses my name directly, I know it is something important. Usually, it’s something serious. She wants to, as gently as she can, suggest that I drink less, or spend more time at home, or consider going away with her for the weekend, or have dinner with her parents. Oh fuck, I thought, not Christmas; she wants us to have Christmas with her folks. She’s going to pay the bill and plead.
Please, Harry
, she’ll say.
Do this for me.
    But she did not ask me. Instead, she said, quite matter-of-factly, ‘Harry, I’m pregnant.’
    I stared at her. Not in surprise, really. Shock, more like.
    She gave me a nervous smile, then bit down on her lip. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked softly.
    I had heard. It was crystal clear. But somehow I couldn’t respond. My mind filled and surged; it opened like a dam, a dam spilling out doubt and quandary. Finally I managed, ‘I don’t know what to say.’
    I felt a strange mixture of emotions. Something rose in me, a wild excitement. I was to be a father again. Seeing Robin look so happy, radiating new possibilities for the future, made me doubt myself. It dispelled the thoughts that suggested that I did not want her to be pregnant. She reached out her hand, and the gesture brushed away my doubts, dismissed the afternoon, my visions, because that is what they must have been. The trickle of doubt I had felt over my sighting of the boy now strengthened. It became a rushing river. All my certainty was washed away, and with it my fury at the Guard’s inaction, my guilt over Diane, my own frustrated urge to comb the streets of Dublin to find my missing boy. The image dwindled and faded.
    ‘You’re going to have to say something, you know,’ Robin said.
    I knew in that moment that I would not tell her about Dillon. About what I thought I had seen that day,
who
I had seen. I would have to keep that from her, because what she had told me made it so much more unlikely.
    I said, ‘I can’t believe it.’
    ‘Believe it,’ Robin said. ‘It’s true. It’s going to happen. Harry, I’m so –’
    I thought she was going to say ‘happy’, but she didn’t. She said something that surprised and puzzled me. She said, ‘– relieved. I’m so relieved.’
    She was close to tears. Her hands were shaking. I got out of my seat and rounded the table. I slipped in besideher and took her in my arms, felt the warmth of her there, the brush of her hair against my face. I whispered to her that it was wonderful news, that I couldn’t believe it. I tried to say all the right things, to use all the right words. I felt her hands on my back, the pressure of her fingertips against my spine, and all my hopes seemed to anchor themselves to her.
    For the rest of the night, we talked about the baby. We talked about dates, night feedings and nappies, yet all the time, the ghosting image of Dillon wavered in and out of my consciousness. I could see, at different points in the night, his gaze, unsure but still and fixed.
    Later, I stood in the bedroom, and the world spiralled about me as I tried to make sense of everything in and outside my head.
    Robin got into bed. In her hands was a book, a book on pregnancy. I had never seen it before. Or had I? Was it an old one? Was it the one she had found in Cozimo’s secondhand bookstore in Tangier?
    ‘Are you coming to bed?’ she asked, putting down the book. She smiled. Her hands beckoned me to her, and I found myself reaching for her and pulling my clothes off within her embrace. Our bodies knew each other’s pulse, and we moved this way and that and found the groove and spell our love had known for so long. Her hands held me firm against her, her fingertips sinking into my back. Spent, we lay side by side, breathing heavily and sweating. Robin turned over and gradually fell into a deep sleep. After some time, I got out of bed and went to the bathroom.
    On the way back to bed, I found a bottle of water on the floor,