The Wrong Kind of Blood (39 page)

“I don’t understand what that means. What does that mean?” I said.

“It means you’re not her father,” my wife said. “You’re not… her blood father, Ed.”

It didn’t matter, not just then, there were so many other factors complicating my girl’s blood that I could have been her father and it still mightn’t have matched. But they couldn’t find her blood father, and they couldn’t find any blood that matched either. They tried a transfusion with the closest O blood they could get, but it was the wrong kind. She had already lost so much, and her little heart couldn’t take the strain of it all. She died before we had fully taken in what was happening. I remembered how my wife and I scattered her ashes in the ocean at Santa Monica, how, in our helpless, hopeless grief, we couldn’t hold each other, couldn’t even look each other in the eye, and how nothing I had done since had mattered a damn to me, and still didn’t until now.

I
was
her father. Blood can’t tell the whole story.

You can’t outrun your past. I spent twenty years hiding in a country dedicated to that very idea. But it doesn’t work. Your blood might be wrong, but it’s your own. Your past is always waiting for you, and the longer you leave it, the less prepared you are. I had left it long enough.

I climbed up the cliffside through the gorse and scrub as far as the edge of the old pine forest. Dublin lay before me, waiting. I could see the city lights up ahead, connecting with each other in the dark, like the quick breath of the living amid the souls of all the dead.

Closer, I could see the great harbor of refuge at Seafield, built with granite hewn from the old quarry on Castlehill. In between lay Quarry Fields.

I turned into the wind and walked down the hill toward home.

DECLAN HUGHES has spent twenty years working in the theater in Dublin as director and playwright and helping to run Ireland’s leading independent theater company, Rough Magic.
The Wrong Kind of Blood
is his first novel, with a second Ed Loy thriller,
The Color of Blood,
coming soon in hardcover from William Morrow.

T
HE
W
RONG
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IND OF
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Coming soon in hardcover

T
HE
C
OLOR OF
B
LOOD