out at me. I’d walked too long, not paying attention to how far I’d gone, my eyes gobbling up what was immediately around me. I ducked into a candy shop, needing sugar and directions back to the hotel and to Dromahair if I was going to attempt another afternoon behind the wheel.
The owner was a friendly man in his sixties, selling me on sour licorice and chocolate caramel clusters and asking me about my visit to Sligo. My American accent gave me away. When I mentioned Dromahair and an ancestral search, he nodded.
“It’s not far at all. Twenty minutes or so. You’ll want to take the loop around the lake—stay on 286 until you see the sign for Dromahair. It’s a pretty drive, and Parke’s Castle is along the route. It’s worth stopping for.”
“Is the lake called Lough Gill?” I asked, catching myself just in time and pronouncing it correctly. Lough was pronounced like the Scottish loch.
“That’s the one.”
My chest ached, and I pushed thoughts of the lake away, not ready to think about ashes and goodbyes just yet.
He pointed me back in the direction of the hotel, telling me to listen for the bell tower on the cathedral if I got turned around. As he rang up my purchases, he asked me about my family.
“Gallagher, huh? There was a woman named Gallagher who drowned in Lough Gill, oh . . . it had to be almost a century ago. My grandmother told me the story. They never found her body, but on a clear night, folks say you can sometimes see her walking on the water. We’ve got our own lady of the lake. I think Yeats wrote a poem about her. He even wrote about Dromahair, come to think.”
“‘He stood among a crowd at Dromahair; his heart hung all upon a silken dress, and he had known at last some tenderness, before earth took him to her stony care,’” I quoted, lilting immediately into the Irish accent I’d perfected in my youth. I didn’t know the poem about a ghost lady—it didn’t ring any bells at all—but I knew the one about Eoin’s beloved Dromahair.
“That’s it! Not bad, lass. Not bad at all.”
I smiled and thanked him, popping a piece of chocolate in my mouth as I traipsed back across town to the hotel that reeked of time and bygone eras.
The candy man was right. The drive to Dromahair was beautiful. I plodded along, gripping the wheel and taking the turns slowly for my own safety and the safety of the unsuspecting Irish traveler. At times, greenery rose so thick on either side of me, I felt goaded by the canopy that threatened to enclose the road at every turn. Then the foliage broke, and the lake glimmered below, welcoming me home.
I found an overlook and stopped the car, climbing onto the low rock wall that separated the road from the drop so I could drink it in. From the map I knew that Lough Gill was long, stretching from Sligo into County Leitrim, but from my vantage point, looking down on her eastern banks, she seemed intimate and enclosed, surrounded by squares of stone-lined farmland that rose from the banks and onto the hills on every side. An occasional home dotted the hills, but I didn’t imagine the view could be much different from what it had been a hundred years before. I could have easily climbed the wall and made my way down the long grassy slope to reach the shore, though it might have been farther than it looked from above. I considered it, knowing I could take the urn with me and have the dreaded task behind me. Part of me wanted nothing more than to dip my toes in the placid blue and tell Eoin I’d found his home. I resisted the call of the water, not knowing if the terrain to the lake’s shores was marshy beneath the grass that stretched below me. Being stuck up to my hips in boggy mud with Eoin’s urn was not in the plan.
Ten minutes later, I was pulling down the main street of tiny Dromahair, searching for signs and symbols. I was not sure where to begin. I couldn’t start knocking on doors, asking questions about people who had lived so long ago. I walked through a church cemetery, eyeing the names and dates, the clusters that indicated family, the flowers that indicated love.
There were no Gallaghers in the small graveyard, and I climbed back