Lake of Sorrows

But Danny Brazil wasn’t the reason for this clenched knot beneath his ribs—not exactly. How did Ursula know about what he’d got up here? She couldn’t know anything; she couldn’t. She was just having him on, playing him. But she must have been here—how else would she know about Brona? He felt the burning shame come over him once more, remembering how it had felt when Ursula sat straddling him, the edge in her voice when she’d talked about Brona. He’d wanted to throttle her, rip her for thinking that way; he couldn’t bear it. Raising a hand to wipe the bitter taste of hatred from his lips, he heard something and stopped abruptly, midstride.

His beekeeping shed had no door, and he could hear a noise from inside, a faint tearing sound. It was her again. He crouched by the window, peering through the weeds up into the loft at Brona Scully, once again illuminated in a shaft of late-evening sun. She sat on her feet, deeply immersed in ripping some piece of cloth to ribbons. Surely she knew that he came here every day; surely she saw that the bees were looked after? But today he was earlier than usual. Watching her behave as though she were completely alone gave him a kind of guilty thrill, the same thing he’d experienced following his mother up here all those years ago. The sun shone through the edges of her shift, and her thin, pale arms looked gilded.

All at once a dog began to bark in the distance, and Brona got to her feet and bolted down the stairs before he had a chance to hide himself. It was the very first time their eyes had met, and Charlie felt electrified by her gaze. She, too, seemed shocked, momentarily paralyzed at seeing him not an arm’s length away. As she came through the door, his arm shot out and snaked around her waist; for a brief, breathless moment he held her there, transfixed by the galvanizing jolt that passed through him as he felt her warmth through the thin cloth. The ground seemed to rise in a roiling wave beneath his feet when she let out a short gasp, the only sound he’d ever heard her make. Then she was gone, pushing past him before he could even react.

She was anxious, frightened—because of him? The idea upset him. He went back over the frozen moment in his mind: the terrified look in the girl’s eyes; her face streaked with tears, he realized now, bright tracks down her pale, lightly freckled cheeks. It wasn’t her eyes he’d stared at when they’d stood face to face, but her lips, moving noiselessly. He found himself wondering if she made any sound at all when she wept. He was seized with a fierce desire to hold her, help her in some way.

He hesitated, wondering whether he should follow her, not wanting to step from the place he’d first touched her, rooted to the spot as if under a spell, weakened by her gaze. Then the feeling passed; he turned slowly and sat on the steps up to the loft, turning over the scene in his mind, reliving the startling shock of touching her, going through in slow motion how he’d put out his hand, how his arm had circled her, briefly. He had only been trying to stop her so that he could see what was wrong, how he might help her—how could he communicate that? Most people said she was a deaf-mute, but others protested that she wasn’t deaf, only refusing to speak, stubborn, touched. He knew the truth; she understood every word you said to her. And there was no mistaking the looks she got, a mixture of pity and contempt. Charlie knew those looks because he’d received them himself—cultivated them, in fact. It was easier than trying to fit in, which was hopeless in any case.

She must have known that they would sooner or later meet on this threshold. What had she imagined happening then? He’d tried to keep from thinking of it, alone in his narrow bed at night, filled with yearning for which there was no relief. He couldn’t allow himself to think of touching her in that way, but sometimes he awakened drenched in sweat, the bedclothes sticky, and he felt ashamed of what his unconscious mind desired. He hung his head and tried to wipe that sensation from his memory, knowing it could never be erased—the feeling of her hipbone under his palm, the friction of the two fabrics rubbing together under the weight of his hand. It was automatic, he told himself, just a reflex. Anyone would have put out a hand to stop her.

Charlie climbed the ladder to the loft to see what she’d been at. He found a cardboard suitcase lying open, its contents jumbled about—a man’s suitcase, by the look of it. Definitely a man’s clothing. Where had she found it? Or perhaps she’d brought it with her. He’d been up here a few times and never found anything like that, but the loft was filled with boxes of nails gone to rust, old milk cans, spools of rotted baling twine. He knelt and lifted one of the shirts. Those were what Brona had been after. There were two completely torn up, the bodies and arms shredded to ribbons. What was she up to?