What the Wind Knows(16)

I was pleased with myself, moving smoothly through the water. The stretch and pull of rowing was new to me, but the lake was as calm as bathwater, lapping softly against the boat, and I found I enjoyed the motion. Sitting for hours at my writing desk was not conducive to good health, and I’d found if I forced myself to exercise, it aided me in my writing. I ran and forced myself to do push-ups to keep my arms from wasting away and my back from growing a hump. The sweat, the motion, and the music that blared in my ears all contributed to getting me out of my head for a blessed hour. It shook off the brain fog and got the synapses firing, and I’d made it part of my daily schedule in the last ten years. I knew I was fit enough to row out a way and have some privacy to talk to Eoin before I gave him to the wind.

My oars slid in and out, pulling and displacing the water with hardly a murmur. I wouldn’t go far. I could see the dock behind me, and beyond that, the manor tucked back against the roll of the hills, its pale roofline stark against the green. I continued rowing, the bag with the urn at my feet, my gaze drifting away from the shore and up into the sky. It was strange, the gray sky melding with the water. All was quiet, almost otherworldly, and I was lulled by the stillness. I ceased rowing for a time and drifted, the shoreline to my right, the sky all around me.

I picked up the urn and cradled it for a heartbeat, then uncorked it, readying myself for the ceremony only I would attend.

“I brought you back, Eoin. We’re here. In Ireland. Dromahair. I’m in the middle of Lough Gill. It’s lovely, just like you described, but I’ll hold you responsible if I get pulled out to sea.” I tried to laugh. We had laughed so much, Eoin and I. What was I going to do without him?

“I’m not ready to let you go, Eoin,” I choked, but I knew I had no choice in the matter. The time had come to say my last goodbyes. I said the words he’d said to me a hundred times growing up, words from a poem by Yeats, words that I would have put on his headstone, had he allowed me to bury him as I wished.

“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,

For I would ride with you upon the wind,

Run on the top of the disheveled tide,

And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”

I clutched the urn to my chest a moment more. Then with a silent prayer to the wind and water to forever keep Eoin’s story on the breeze, I upended it, flinging my arm in a wide arc, gasping as the white ashes melded completely with the wispy tendrils of mist that had begun to settle around me. It was as though the ash became a wall of white fog, billowing and collecting, and suddenly I could not see beyond the end of my boat. There was no shoreline, no sky—even the water was gone.

I put the urn in my bag and sat that way for a while, hidden in the fog and unable to continue. The boat rocked me as Eoin had once done, and I was a child again, cradled in his lap, consumed by grief and loss.

Someone was whistling. I started, the tune instantly recognizable. “Remember Him Still.” Eoin’s favorite. I was out in the middle of the lake, and someone was whistling. The whistling shivered through the mist, a cheerful flute in the eerie white, disembodied and disparate, and I couldn’t tell from which direction it originated. Then the sound waned, as if the whistler moved away, teasing me with his game of hide-and-seek.

“Hello,” I called, lifting my voice into the mist just to make sure I still could. The word didn’t echo but sat flatly in the air, cushioned by moisture and curtailed by my own reluctance to break the stillness. I grasped the oars but didn’t begin rowing, suddenly uncertain of my direction. I didn’t want to come out on the other side of the lake. Best to let the fog lift before attempting to row back to shore.

“Is someone there?” I called. “I think I might be in trouble.”

The bow of a barge slid into view, and I was suddenly staring up at three men, who in turn stared down at me, clearly as shocked by my presence as I was by theirs. They wore the peaked caps of a bygone era, the brims pulled low over their foreheads, over eyes that peered at me with obvious alarm.

I stood slowly, beseeching, suddenly fearful that I would be stuck in the fog forever and that these men would be my only chance at rescue.

It wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done, or maybe it saved my life.

The men stiffened as I rose, as if my standing posed a threat, and the man in the middle, his eyes wide with tension and his lips thin with mistrust, jerked his hand from his pocket and pointed a gun at me. His hand shook, and I swayed. With no warning, no demand, no reason at all, he pulled the trigger. The sound was a muted crack, and the sudden and violent shuddering of my skiff felt wholly separate from his action, as if a great, whistling beast had risen from the depths of Lough Gill beneath my boat and tossed me into the drink.

The frigid water stole my breath and didn’t give it back. I chased it, floundering, and kicked for the surface, sputtering as my face broke free into the heavy white that was almost as wet and thick as the water I’d fallen into.

I couldn’t see anything but white, endless white. No boat. No land. No sky. No men with guns.

I tried to lean back, to force myself to float and stay silent. If I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me, I rationalized. I managed to keep my head above water without a great deal of splashing, listening and peering into the white. Beneath the adrenaline and the clawing cold was a burning fire in my side. I continued treading water, trying to avoid the truth; I’d been shot, and I had to find my boat. If I didn’t find my boat, I was going to drown.