Torn Away by James Heneghan

and set it alight in the street beside the McLarens’ house. The car exploded. The firetrucks came and were lucky to save theblock. As well as the McLarens there were the Carneys and the Sullivans made homeless that night.
    Declan had not been having his nightmare so much lately, but tonight, because he had been thinking about the car exploding in the street, it returned.
    The nightmare started as it always started with the white wool sweater and a pale sun with no warmth in it shining fitfully through Belfast’s toxic gloom and through the tea shop window onto Mairead’s white sweater. Declan was outside the window of the tea shop. He could see his ma and his sister inside, drinking tea, smiling at each other. He hammered on the window, trying to warn them, but they did not see or hear him. He yelled and screamed at them, but they went on drinking tea and smiling. He ran around the corner to the entrance, but the door was locked and he could not get in. He ran back to the window where they were sitting and he pulled off one of his shoes and pounded on the window with it, and just as they turned, surprised to see him there, the bomb exploded.
    The nightmare now erupted into a thousand fragments of flying glass as the front of the tea room blew out into the street. Which made no sense, for it had been a car bomb in the street that caused the explosion. Declan was untouched by the blast, but everyone in the tearoom was blown up high into the sky. They began to fall to earth in slow motion. He ran around frantically among the falling debris, his face upturned to the smoke-filled sky, searching for his ma and his sister. If he could catch them, they would be safe, he thought. It was his duty to save them; he wanted to save them; he ached to save them. But he could not find them. His arms were stretched wide, ready to catch them, but he could not see properly with all the dust and the smoke. Blood-soaked, once-white linen tablecloths floated to the pavement in terrible slow motion and settled over the bodies to become shrouds. He stumbled over something and fell to the ground. He put out his hand and saw a white wool sweater, now spattered with red, lying crushed on the pavement beside an unbroken porcelain teacup.
    He woke up in a sweat, as always. But this time he was not calling out. He lay there in the moonlit room, listening to the thump ofhis heart and the quiet music of the ocean, a whole world away from a porcelain teacup.
    He remembered the squirrel. It made no sense, any of it. How could Ana and Thomas and Kate get so upset over the death of a rodent—that’s all it was—when on the other side of the world they’d killed his sister and his ma, innocent people blown to pieces?

Chapter Fifteen
    It was a calendar of birds and it hung on a nail over his uncle’s rattan chair in the kitchen. Declan took it down and flipped through the pages. April was the month of the great blue heron. His ma and Mairead died in April.
    September was a horned puffin, October a Canada Goose, November a common loon, and December a bald eagle.
    For Declan the December eagle was an omen, for hadn’t it watched over him during his attempted escape to Sea Island? So it was only fitting that this eagle now guard that promise of freedom, that last day of December which Declan had colored in red with a crayon so that when December came around and his Uncle Matthew glanced up at the calendar he would not fail to notice both the reminder of his promise and the eagle’s fierce eyes and deadly beak threatening revenge should he and Kate renege on their promise.
    Meanwhile, in the month of the puffin, Declan could stop running for a while, he could relax; the deal with his uncle and aunt was forcing him to slow down and take things easy. He was surprised at the relief he felt: for the first time in five long months, he could stop rushing; he could stand still.
    Five months ago, with the deaths of his ma and sister in