floors. Two weeks later, I decided that the floor in the nursery needed to be carpeted. The house could be drafty, and I had visions of my baby tumbling out of her bed and onto the unforgiving slats. The carpet was installed, the furniture assembled, and the curtains hung, and I told myself I was ready.
In November, I concluded that the soft-green paint on the nursery walls would look better with white stripes. Green-and-white stripes would work for a girl or a boy, and it would give the room some cheer. I bought the paint and supplies, but Kevin insisted that pregnant ladies should not paint and hijacked my project. I made a halfhearted protest, but my enormous belly made a mockery of my ambitions. I was thirty-two weeks along and could not imagine getting any bigger or being any more uncomfortable. But I needed something to do.
Barbara had called earlier in the week to see how my next book was coming along. I had to confess it wasn’t coming at all. I had a story to tell, a love story like no other, but I couldn’t face the ending. My words were a tangled mess of agony and denial, and whenever I sat down to plot or plan, I ended up staring out the window, traipsing through the yellowed pages of my old life, searching for Thomas. There were no words for the things I felt; there was only the rise and fall of my breath, the steady slog of my heart, and the unrelenting ache of separation.
Unable to paint and unwilling to write, I decided to walk. I pulled a pink cashmere shawl over my shoulders and stuffed my feet into a pair of black Wellies so they wouldn’t get wet when I walked to the lough. My hair danced in the gloom, waving at the naked branches of the shivering trees. No need to tame it now. No one cared if it hung halfway down my back and curled around my face. No one would look twice at my black leggings or disapprove of the way my cotton tunic hugged the swell of my breasts or clung to my pregnant belly. The beach was empty. No one would see me at all.
Western Ireland was caught in the damp doldrums of a dying fall, and the moldering mist licked at my cheeks and hovered over the lake, obscuring the sky from the sea, the surf from the sand, and the silhouette of the opposite shore. I stood facing the lough, letting the wind lift my hair and let it go again, watching the fog gather into ghosts and shift in the tepid light.
I’d stopped going into the water. I’d stopped rowing out, away from the shore. The water was cold, and I had a child to consider, a life beyond my own. But I still came at least once a day to plead my case to the wind. The blanket of fog cushioned the air, and the world was hushed and hiding. The lapping of the water and the squelch of my boots were my only company.
And then I heard whistling.
It stopped for a moment and it came again, faint and far away. Donnelly’s dock was empty, his business closed for the season. Light shone from his windows, and a tendril of smoke rose from his chimney, merging with the hazy sky, but nothing moved along the shore. The whistling was not on the land but in the water, like a foolish fisherman was hiding in the fog.
The sound grew stronger, drifting in with the tide, and I stepped toward it, listening for the whistler to finish his tune. It warbled and broke, and I waited for an encore. When none came, I pursed my lips and finished the song for him, the sound breathy and soft and a little off-key. But I recognized the melody.
They can’t forget, they never will, the wind and waves remember Him still.
“Thomas?”
I’d called to him before. I’d screamed his name across the water until I was hoarse and hopeless. But I called to him again.
“Thomas?”
His name hung precariously in the air, weighty and wishful, before it teetered and fell, sinking like a stone beneath the surface. The lough whispered back with liquid lips, slow and sighing. Tho-mas, Tho-mas, Tho-mas.
The bow appeared first, shifting in and out of sight. The lough was playing hide-and-seek. There it was again. Closer. Someone was rowing with steady strokes. The pull and release of the paddle through