ISABELLE WAS SITTING ON the stones of the patio, her back against the house, when a shaken Finn stormed outside and turned his head to find her there.
He crouched next to her, trying to calm down, still extremely upset. “Did you hear any of it?”
“All of it.” She made a sound like a crane falling out of the sky.
Late that night when he came to see her, he found her on her knees, her head pressed into the floor. “Isabelle,” he whispered, closing the door, his hand shaking.
With her back to him, she wiped her face before she rose to her feet and turned around. With his questioning arms he enveloped her, peering into her miserable face. “What’s the matter, Isa?”
“It’s nothing, my love,” she said with a forced smile, willing her voice not to crack. “It’s just my heartbreak making a little noise.”
“I’m going to fix it,” he said, gliding his hands up and down her hair, her back, her hips. “I told you I will, and I will.”
“You told me, you told me. Shh,” she said. “How are you here?”
“Where else should I be? My place is with you.”
“Then come lie down with me and stop making such a ruckus. All these words. You know what you need to do. Rub all the parts that are sore. Kiss all the parts that are tender. Then I will kiss all your parts that are sore. I will rub all your parts that are tender. And face to face we will fall asleep like lovers. Unless you are going back.”
“I’m not.”
“Then shh and come. Come, my love.”
They were barely finished, still in each other’s arms, when there was a timid knock on the door.
Another one, a little louder.
“Is it Junie?” Finn whispered.
“Even Junie doesn’t knock this shyly,” Isabelle whispered back.
A voice sounded. “Isabelle? Is Finn there? Isabelle?” It was Vanessa.
“Definitely not Junie,” Isabelle said.
“This is what happens when she thinks she is cured,” Finn said. “She starts roaming all over the property.”
“Well, go answer it!”
“She’s not calling for me!”
“Finn!”
“Ugh.”
He threw on his trousers. She threw on her dress and went to sit in a chair by the window. Finn opened the door.
“Finn?” Vanessa said, in a pale voice. “What are you doing? Aren’t you coming to bed?”
“No, Vanessa,” Finn said, his frame filling the doorway so Vanessa wouldn’t see the unmade bed behind him. “Go back inside the house.”
“Finn . . .”
He started to close the door.
“Please, can you just . . . just come outside and talk to me.”
“You’ve talked today already,” he said. “I think you’re finished with talking.”
“Please . . .”
“Go, Finn,” said Isabelle from the chair. “Go talk to your wife.”
Grabbing his shirt, an aggravated Finn followed Vanessa through the house into their bedroom.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she said. “I was honest with you, I told you how I felt, I told you what I wanted. I told you we could put the past behind us and start fresh. I was hoping you would take my olive branch and extend one of your own.”
“Vanessa, this is an unexpected turn of events for me,” said Finn. “I didn’t know how our discussion was going to go, but I must admit I didn’t think it would go like this. You’ve taken a different approach than I expected. But just because you said some words, Vanessa, doesn’t change how I feel about your behavior—toward me, toward our children, toward our life, and toward this house. It doesn’t change how you behaved toward me in Boston. You had your reasons, I accept that, but two thousand days of your indifference and cruelty is not erased just because you said today you forgive me. I don’t forgive you.”
“That’s why I said we could have a fresh start.”
“I would like nothing more than a fresh start,” Finn said. “But you and I have very different ideas about what that means.”
“We need to try together,” she said. “I’m willing to try.”
“Not me.”
“What about all the things I said to you?”
“Yes, yes, you brought out the big guns,” he said dismissively and impatiently. “First babies, then my faith, then my father. I got it. Heard you loud and clear. I’m thinking on it. I’m contemplating your words. I’ve had seven lousy years with you, and now I’m going to take my time to consider what you said. I promise it will be less than seven years. But in the meantime, I’m going to continue my life. The life I’ve been living since you abandoned your family—you know, that life.”
“I wasn’t well!”
“There’s always a reason to justify your bad behavior.”
“Don’t go. Stay and think on it.”
“No.”
“How often have you been—how often have you—”
“In this room? Not once since you left,” Finn said.
A speechless Vanessa fought to control herself.
“Does my family know? How could they not!”
“We don’t speak about it at the dinner table if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s why they’ve been so awkward with me.”
“Probably a thousand reasons for that.”
“I don’t care. What’s past is past,” she croaked, waving her hands in conciliation.
“It hasn’t passed. It’s not even the past. It is the eternal present.” Finn grabbed some clothes, a hat, a shirt.
“This isn’t right.”
“I agree. I suggest not wandering around knocking on any more doors.” He was about to leave when she spoke again.
“In a subconscious way I must have known,” she said brokenly. “I didn’t know it know it. But I knew. I just couldn’t face it. I hid it from myself. I turned away, retreated into my shell. I turned away because I knew I couldn’t change it.”
“Bullshit,” Finn said.
“I couldn’t do so many things myself, and she could do all of them,” Vanessa said. “I was helpless, but I loved you. I still do. I love you so much.”
“Wow, you’ll say anything, won’t you? First Tadhg, now love.”
“I want to save our marriage,” she said. “That’s all I want. It’s worth saving. It has value. But also—yes, to save it, I’ll say anything.”
He didn’t want to say it to her, but Finn had seen what real love looked like, and nothing Vanessa had shown him in the last ten years, and even now, looked like love to him. He left, but the following night, to avoid another scene, he and Isabelle slept in the loft in the barn. Finn didn’t think even the new and improved Vanessa would dare go to the barn at night, and he was right. They still heard her knocking on Isabelle’s door, calling out Finn’s name, and Isabelle’s. Then the knocking stopped. For a few minutes there was nothing. Then the shadow of Vanessa stumbled across the back patio, stood at the edge of the yard looking out onto the inky barn and the dark fields, turned around and slowly walked back into the house.
“I left my door unlocked,” Isabelle said, “so she could come in if she wanted and not wake the house with her cries.”
“Wise.”
“Was it? I don’t know. She saw my room.”
Finn knew: Vanessa saw the bed with the soft pillows and the pink-and-gray bedspread and the down quilt all in white. She saw the embroidered Ukrainian-style tablecloth and on it a vase with fresh pink peonies and amaryllis, two glasses, the decanter of raspberry wine, the summer dresses hanging on hooks on the walls like decorations, Finn’s second pair of boots in the corner, his belt, his suspenders, his linen shirts all cleaned and ironed hanging next to Isabelle’s dresses. She saw a bowl of lavender in water, the room smelling of florals and strong liquor, the walls painted with large purple blossoms and gray clamshells, the ivory silk robe Finn bought for Isabelle years ago hanging near the bed. She saw the place where Isabelle lived with Finn. It can’t have been easy.
But the next morning, Vanessa, giving no indication that she had seen anything to upset her, asked Finn if he had thought about their previous conversation.
“No, Vanessa,” Finn said. “But if I had known you’d be this cavalier about things, I wouldn’t have expended so much effort trying to hide it.”
“How well did you hide it if everyone knows? And I’m not cavalier,” Vanessa said. “I want you back. I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I know you need a little time. If you need me to be patient with you, then that’s what I’ll be. Anything—as long as you come back to me.”
Something wasn’t right with Isabelle. The following night, Finn pried and prodded her in the barn until she opened up to him.
“Are we bringing an irrational amount of misery to her?” Isabelle said at last. “She has not been good, for sure. But she doesn’t deserve this, does she?”
“Nobody deserves anything,” Finn said. “You didn’t deserve what you’ve been given.”
“Okay, but look what I’ve been given,” murmured Isabelle. They lay in the hay in the loft in the barn. She was in his arms. After a hard and heavy silence, she took a deep breath and spoke. “Finn, did I ever tell you about the Lake Full of Longing?”
“No, but I already don’t like the sound of it.”
“In Poland, near Lvov, there is a lake,” Isabelle said. “My mother told me and my brothers about it. Roman loved this story best because he was insane. Lvov is an ancient city where countless battles have been won and lost, heroes made and heroes felled. It’s a medieval town full of fables about knights and kings and unrescued damsels.”
“Did you say unrescued? I love you.” He kissed her face.
Her eyes were closed as she received his caress. “Near Lvov there is a lake which the Russians, who’ve been trying to make Lvov their own for centuries, called Ozero Toski. The Poles called it Jezioro Tesknoty. And we called it Ozero Tuhi. But the meaning is the same. The lake is supposed to have mystical powers. Legend has it that you swim out into the lake at night to heal your suffering, your wounds, your grief. You give the lake your fear and your burdens. You give the lake your sins. But the lake was deep and cold and had dangerous rip currents. People would swim out to heal and never come back.”
“I knew it. The worst lake in the world.”
“You’d think so.” She nuzzled his shoulder, patted his stomach. “Here’s where the story takes flight though. The people who didn’t die and managed to return to shore said their wounds indeed had been healed, both physical and eternal.”
“Eternal or internal?”
“Eternal, Finn. They were restored and mended. Their hearts were lighter, their stony griefs released. As lore of that spread, the lake became a pilgrimage. People traveled from all over to give the lake their suffering. But there were so many casualties that the Lvov government had to close it, put up a barbed-wire fence around it with signs telling people the lake had crocodiles in it and sharks and flesh-eating creatures.”
Finn squeezed her. “Let me guess—people being people, they climbed over the barbed wire and continued to drown en masse.”
“They did. The rising deaths only added to the lake’s power. With every death, people believed that another life had been healed. Every unfinished life was someone else’s answered prayer. We heard about this lake throughout my childhood, but after my father was murdered, my mother, usually the most practical of women, actually considered going to Lvov to cleanse herself of the hate and the pain.”
“She didn’t, I hope?”
“She didn’t,” said Isabelle, wrapping her arms around him, pressing her warm full breasts into him, trying to surround his hulking body with her soft sad body. “When she was in jail, days from being vanished, she told me that what bothered her most about the lake wasn’t that people would be dumb enough to swim in its deadly waters, hoping for a different outcome, but why anyone would create such a lake in the first place.”