Lake of Sorrows

One day she had told him she’d taken up walking. At first he’d been encouraged, hoping that a daily dose of physical activity might help lift her mood. But even that had taken a bad turn as time went on. Coming home, he’d sometimes overtake her on the roadside, walking with her head down, lips moving in some silent litany, weighed down with the burden of words and numbers that had begun to crowd her mind. Eventually she was counting exactly how many steps it took to get to every one of her regular stops around the town: the post office, the newsagent, the chemist. He found her pockets jammed with small items she’d taken: scarves, gloves, lipsticks—all things she didn’t use—which he would return discreetly. No one ever had the heart to confront her directly. Then she’d begun venturing farther afield. He remembered the terrible phone call from the Garda station in Ballingar, six miles away, where she’d turned up in the midst of a downpour, asleep at the foot of the Virgin in the grotto. She’d been completely disoriented when he came to fetch her, like a lost child. He still recalled her blank look when he’d tried asking what she had been doing wandering alone in the rain. She’d not ventured out for a few weeks after that episode, and he had thought she might be taking a turn for the better, not perceiving the nature of the disease that gripped her.

His colleagues had always treated her with deference and been discreet in their dealings with him, but it was a discretion born of pity rather than understanding. He knew what they said behind his back. “Poor auld Ward. You wouldn’t wish that mad wife of his on anyone.” She was slipping gradually into oblivion, and nothing he did could make things better. He lived each day in limbo, in dreadful anticipation. She shouldn’t have been left alone, and yet he knew she would have found some means to get away. There was no such thing as enough vigilance. And if he had allowed himself to admit it, a part of him wanted to let her go, to let her have what she so ardently wanted.

The final phone call had brought him to the river’s edge. Her body lay submerged in the clear water, and her long dark hair streamed away from her face, rippling in the current like the pale green weeds that trailed along beside her. The dress she wore under the raincoat billowed in the water. She had been so peaceful, so beautiful in death, suspended in her otherworldly, watery realm, that never-empty channel pouring itself endlessly into the sea. All at once he felt what she must have felt as the cold water closed over her—a relief that was almost like communion. But in his case, the feeling was brief and transitory. He remembered standing on the bridge as the ambulance men splashed into the shallow water to lift her out onto a stretcher, pale, cold, and heavy, once more subject to the earth’s dreadful gravity. Had he contributed to that gravity, become part of what she could no longer bear? He tried to tell himself that nothing he’d done or failed to do had made the final difference to her, but in the end, that was the saddest testament of all. He thought of her every day, was still tied to her, as he would be always, those river weeds firmly twined around his heart.

Ward looked into the bathroom mirror, settling the knot on his tie and checking the plaster on his throat one last time before leaving the house. He was curious about this new body at Loughnabrone. He’d been out there a few days earlier, along with Catherine Friel, the new assistant state pathologist, who had been making a determination on another set of remains. He was glad that she would again be attending. He’d worked with Malachy Drummond many times, and they got on well, but he had only met Dr. Friel the previous week. He’d felt an immediate lift at the warmth and the acute intelligence in her eyes, and the slight frown of concentration that had furrowed her forehead as she worked. He hadn’t felt anything similar in years—didn’t even know how to describe it, except as a sort of forward momentum of the spirit. He hesitated for a moment at the bedroom door, then crossed back to the chest of drawers, where he removed his plain gold wedding band. He held it in his fingers, feeling the warmth and the weight of it, and finally set it in the shallow tray on top of the bureau.

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