I collapsed onto the big bed, which was surrounded by heavy furniture and papered walls in various shades of purple, and fell asleep without even removing my shoes. I awoke twelve hours later, disoriented and starving, and stumbled to the bathroom to huddle in the ridiculously narrow tub, shivering while I tried to figure out how to turn the hot water on. Everything was different enough that it took a moment to adjust but similar enough that I grew impatient with myself for the difficulty I was experiencing.
An hour later, washed and dried, dressed and pressed, I took my keys and headed down the ornate staircase to the dining room below.
I walked down the streets of Sligo in tragic wonder, the girl in me gaping at the smallest things, the grieving woman devastated that I was finally there and Eoin wasn’t with me. I walked down Wolfe Tone Street and over to Temple, where I stood beneath the bell tower of the enormous Sligo Cathedral, my head tipped back as I waited for it to ring. William Butler Yeats’s face—with white hair and spectacles—was painted on a wall next to words that proclaimed this “Yeats country.” The painting made him look like Steve Martin, and I resented the tacky display. Yeats deserved more than a shoddy mural. I passed by the Yeats museum in stony protest.
The town sat higher than the sea, and here and there, the long strand, glistening and bared by the tide, peeked 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 into my car and continued down the main street until I saw a small sign that said “Library,” underlined by an arrow pointing down a narrow lane no bigger than an alleyway.
It was little more than a stone cottage, with four rough walls, a slate roof, and two dark windows, but libraries were great for research. I rolled to a stop in a gravel space not big enough for more than three patrons and turned off the car.
Inside, it was smaller than my home office in Manhattan. And apartments in Manhattan were notoriously small, even when they cost two million dollars. A woman, maybe a few years older than I, hunched over a novel, and books that needed to be reshelved were piled on her desk. She sat up and smiled vacantly, still lost in her story, and I stretched out my hand in greeting.
“Hello. I know this is strange, but I thought maybe the library was a good place to start. My grandfather was born here in 1915. He said something about his father being a farmer. My grandfather went to America in the early thirties, and he never came back. I wanted to see”—I waved my hand helplessly toward the broad window that gave me a view of a little alleyway and not much else—“where he was from and maybe see where his parents are buried.”
“What was the family name?”
“Gallagher,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t hear the story of the woman who drowned in the lake again.
“It’s a common enough name. My own mother was a Gallagher. But she’s from Donegal.” She stood and made her way around her desk and the piles of books she clearly had no room for.
“We have a whole collection of books written by a woman named Gallagher.” She stopped in front of a shelf and straightened a stack. “They were written in the early twenties but professionally reprinted and donated to the library last spring. I’ve read them all. Delightful, really. All of them. She was ahead of her time.”
I smiled and nodded. Books by a woman with a common last name weren’t exactly what I was looking for, but I didn’t want to be rude.
“What townland?” she asked expectantly.
I stared at her blankly. “Townland?”
“The land is divided up into townlands, and each one has a name. There are roughly fifteen hundred townlands in County Leitrim. You said your great-grandfather was a farmer.” She smiled ruefully. “Everyone in rural Ireland was a farmer, lovey.”
I thought of the painfully small village I’d driven through, the cluster of homes, and the little main thoroughfare. “I don’t know. Isn’t there a cemetery? I thought I could just explore a bit. It’s a small county, isn’t it?”
It was her turn to stare at me blankly. “There are plots in every townland. If you don’t know the townland, you’ll never find the grave. And most of the older graves don’t have headstones. It required money to have a headstone, and nobody had money. They just used markers. The family knows who is who.”
“But . . . I’m family, and I have no idea,” I blurted, oddly emotional. Jet lag, near-death experiences, and needles in haystacks were catching up to me.
“I’ll call Maeve. She was the Killanummery parish secretary for almost fifty years,” she offered, her eyes widening at my distress. “Maybe there are some church records you could look through. If anyone knows something, it will be Maeve.” She picked up the phone and dialed from memory, her eyes flitting uncomfortably between me and the stack of books on her desk.
“Maeve, this is Deirdre at the library. The book you’ve been waitin’ for is available. No, not that one. The one about the bad-boy billionaire.” Deirdre was silent, nodding, even though the woman she was speaking to couldn’t know she was being agreed with. “That’s right. I peeked at it. You’ll like it.” Her eyes swung to me and away again. “Maeve, I’ve got a woman here. All the way from America. She says she has family from the area. I was wondering if there are parish records she could look at. She’s wantin’ to find where they’re buried.” She nodded again, sadly this time, and I guessed Maeve was telling her what she already knew.
“You could go to Ballinamore,” Deirdre said, moving her mouth from the receiver, as if Maeve had instructed her to tell me immediately. “There’s a genealogical center there. Maybe they can help. Are you stayin’ in Sligo?”
I nodded in surprise.
“There’s really nowhere to lodge around here, unless you’ve rented a room at the manor by the lake, but most people don’t even know it’s there. They don’t advertise,” Deirdre explained.
I shook my head, indicating I had not known either, and Deirdre reported this to Maeve.
“The family name is Gallagher.” She listened for a moment. “I’ll tell her.” She pulled the receiver away from her mouth again.
“Maeve wants you to bring her the book about the billionaire and have some tea with her. She says you can tell her about your family, and maybe she’ll think of something. She’s as old as the hills,” Deirdre whispered, muffling the receiver so Maeve wouldn’t hear her commentary. “But she remembers everything.”
The woman opened the door before I could knock. Her hair was so fine and wispy, it created a gray cloud around her head. Her glasses, rimmed in black and as thick as the palm of my hand, were wider than her face. She peered up at me through them with blinking blue eyes and pursed lips painted fuchsia.
“Maeve?” I realized suddenly I didn’t know her last name. “I’m so sorry. Deirdre didn’t tell me your full name. Can I call you Maeve?”
“I know you,” she said, her brow—already a topographic map of grooves and valleys—wrinkling even further.