Lake of Sorrows

Cormac could feel his friends’ presence strongly here: Evelyn in the colorful tapestry cushions and all the other things that made the house comfortable, Gabriel in the worn leather armchair by the fire, and both of them in the hundreds of books that lined the walls. He had been the anchor around which her energy swirled. To Cormac their union had always seemed a near-perfect balance: strong individuals married together to make a separate entity greater than either of them alone, a mystery unfathomable even to themselves. The deference they’d invariably shown each other used to calm him when he felt anxious. He remembered the way Gabriel sometimes used to catch Evelyn’s hand when she passed by. He had always felt embarrassed but also fascinated by the tenderness between them.

He sometimes imagined that he could feel the same way about Nora as Gabriel had about his wife. Evelyn had come here, to a place not known for its amenities, and made a home for herself and Gabriel, amid the bogs that were his life and his passion. Cormac knew he wasn’t Gabriel, that he could never be half the intellect, half the scholar, half the man Gabriel had been. He couldn’t ask Nora to come with him to this remote place. She had her own work as well, with a different center, a life that was not his life.

It wasn’t just that his work was here. He’d spent the past year trying to create a bridge with his long-absent father, now an old man retired from the world, living at his home place up in Donegal. It was not an inconsiderable thing for a man to know from whence he came. It was Nora who’d convinced him to keep trying, though the going had been rough at times.

It suddenly struck him that it was in this house that he had first heard her name. He’d been down for the weekend with the McCrossans, and Evelyn was already asleep. He and Gabriel had stayed up late, waxing philosophical over a few large whiskeys, and Gabriel was becoming more than usually sincere. Others might become uncoordinated, or belligerent from strong drink, but with Gabriel, utter sincerity was always the best indicator that he’d achieved a slight state of inebriation. He heard the old man’s voice: There’s someone I’d like you to meet. Nora Gavin is her name. I think you might get on. Cormac remembered protesting, as he usually did when any of his friends tried a hand at matchmaking. But Gabriel had persisted: She’s lovely, very intelligent, and she has a fierce good heart. And you need someone, Cormac, someone to get your arms around at night. Believe me, it makes all the difference.

And of course Gabriel had been dead on, as usual. Nora was all the things the old man had said, and more. The idea of sharing his life completely with anyone had never before circled the edges of Cormac’s consciousness. Now it hovered, light and capricious as a butterfly. In many ways, his daily life had not appreciably altered since they’d been together. He still rose each day at seven, and cycled to the university for morning classes three days a week. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he’d go down to the boat club and take his scull out for an early morning row down the Liffey. When the water was calm, it was the nearest thing to flying he’d ever experienced. He loved the dank smell of the riverbank, the dripping green moss and algae on the bridge pilings, and the image that always filled his mind as he rowed, of the river water merging with the seawater, brown and green. These things were all part of the life he’d made, layer by layer, over many years. And Nora was the mercurial salmon, that bright flash of silver he glimpsed only occasionally, swimming against the current in that steady stream. What would happen if he caught her?

He thought back to the last time they’d made love. She’d begun to weep, quietly but uncontrollably, and when he’d asked whether it was something he’d said or done that had upset her, she had only shaken her head. Her wordless sorrow had moved him to the point of tears as well, though he hadn’t shed them in years—not since his mother died, in fact. He hadn’t even been able to cry for the loss of Gabriel, his truest father in any real sense of that word. But he had felt so helpless, so completely defenseless against Nora’s tears. He’d wanted to gather her up like a small child, to tell her everything was all right, or would be all right, but he couldn’t do it. Because it wasn’t all right, and never would be, with that cleft in the world where Triona used to be, where Nora’s own life used to be. How often had she replayed that last conversation with her murdered sister, each time changing what she had said, so that circumstances would alter, the future would shift, and horror would recede into the realm of nightmare?