Keira peered through the screen door, grateful that her mother’s stripped-down lifestyle didn’t prohibit the use of screens. The pesky mosquito could stay outside.
“Hello—it’s me, Mum. Keira.”
As if her mother had other children. As if she might have forgotten her only daughter’s name since chucking the outside world. Keira had last visited her mother several weeks ago but hadn’t stayed long. Then again, they hadn’t spent much time together in the past few years, never mind the past eighteen months when she’d first announced her intention to pursue this new commitment.
Her mother had always been religious, which Keira respected, but this, she thought as she swiped again at her mosquito—this isolated hermit’s life just wasn’t right.
“Keira!” her mother called, sounding cheerful. “Come in, come in. I’m here in the front room. Leave your shoes on the step, won’t you?”
Keira kicked off her hiking shoes and entered the kitchen—or what passed for one. It consisted of a few rustic cupboards and basic supplies that her mother had scavenged at yard sales for her austere life. Her priest had talked her into a gas-powered refrigerator. He was working on talking her into a gas-powered stove and basic plumbing—even just a single cold-water faucet—but she was resisting. Except for the coldest days, she said, she could manage to fetch her own water from the nearby spring.
Winning an argument with Eileen O’Reilly Sullivan had never been an easy task.
Keira crossed the rough pine-board floor into the cabin’s main living area. Her mother, dressed in a flowing top and elastic-waist pants, got up from a high stool at a big hunk of birch board set on trestles that served as her worktable. Her graying hair was blunt cut, reminding Keira of a nun, but although her mother had turned to a religious life, she’d taken no vows.
“It’s so good to see you, Keira.”
“You, too.” Keira meant it, but if she wanted to see her mother, she had to come out here—her mother wouldn’t come to her in Boston. “The place looks great. Nice and cozy.”
“It’s home.”
Her mother sat back on her work stool. Behind her, a picture window overlooked an evergreen-covered hillside that dropped down to a stream. Keira appreciated the view, but, as much as she needed solitude herself at times, she couldn’t imagine living out here.
A nearby hemlock swayed in a gust of wind, sending a warm breeze through the tiny cabin. Except for a wooden crucifix, the barn-board walls of the main room were unadorned. Besides the worktable and stool, the only other furnishings were an iron bed with a thin mattress, a rocking chair and a narrow chest of drawers. Not only was the small, efficient cast-iron woodstove the sole source of heat, it was also where her mother did any cooking. She chopped the wood for the stove herself.
The land on which the cabin was built was owned by a South Boston couple whose country home was through the woods, in the opposite direction of the path Keira had just used. She considered them complicit in her mother’s withdrawal from the world—from her own family. They’d let her choose the spot for her cabin and then stood back, neutral, until she’d finally moved in last summer.
A year out here, Keira thought. A year, and she looks as content as ever.
“It really is so good to see you, sweetheart,” her mother said quietly.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that.”
A large sheet of inexpensive sketch paper was spread out on her worktable. Before retreating to the woods, she’d owned an art supply store in the southern New Hampshire town where she’d moved as a young widow with a small daughter. Over the years, she’d become adept at calligraphy and the tricky art of gilding, supplementing her income by restoring gilt picture frames and mirrors and creating elaborate wedding and birth announcements. Now she was applying her skills to the almost-forgotten art of producing an illuminated manuscript. The same couple who’d let her build on their land had found someone willing to pay her to illustrate an original manuscript of select Bible passages. Other than requesting an Irish Celtic sensibility and choosing the passages, the client left her alone.
It was painstaking work—deliberate, skilled, imaginative. She had her supplies at arm’s reach. Brushes, pens, inks, paints, calligraphy nibs, gilding tips, a gilding cushion, polishing cloths and burnishers.
“You’re working on your own Book of Kells,” Keira said with a smile.
Her mother shook her head. “The Book of Kells is a masterpiece. It’s been described as the work of angels. I’m a mere human.”
Another wind gust shook the trees outside on the hill. Storms were brewing, a cold front about to move in and blow out the humidity that had settled over New England during the past week. Keira wanted to get back to her car before the rain started.
“Did you see the Book of Kells when you were in Ireland in college?”
“I did.” Her mother’s tone was distant, controlled. She shifted her gaze to the blank, pure white paper on her desk, as if envisioning the intricate, thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript. “I’ll never forget it. What I’m doing is quite different. Much simpler.”
“It’ll be wonderful.”
“Thank you. The Book of Kells consists mainly of the four Gospels, but I was asked to start with the fall of Adam and Eve.” Her mother’s eyes, a striking shade of cornflower blue, shone with sudden humor. “I haven’t settled on the right serpent.”
Keira noticed a series of small pencil sketches taped to the birch board. “Those are some pretty wild serpents. It doesn’t get to you, being up here all alone drawing pictures of bad-assed snakes and bolts of lightning?”
Her mother laughed. “No bolts of lightning, I’m afraid. Although…” She thought a moment. “I don’t know, Keira, you could be onto something. A bright, organic bolt of lightning in the Garden of Eden could work, don’t you think?”
Keira could feel the tension easing out of her. She’d moved to Boston in January after a brief stint in San Diego and had trekked up here on snowshoes, hoping just to find her mother alive and reasonably sane. But her mother had been warm and toasty, a pot of chili bubbling on her woodstove, content with her rigid routines of prayer and work. Keira had thought living closer would mean they’d see more of each other. It hadn’t. She could have stayed in San Diego or moved to Miami or Tahiti or Mozambique—or Ireland, she thought. The land of her ancestors.
The land of her father.
Maybe.
Her mother’s sociability didn’t last, and the humor in her eyes died almost immediately. A studied blankness—a sense of peace, she would no doubt say—brought a neutrality to her expression. She seemed to take a conscious step back from her engagement with the world. In this case, the world as represented by her daughter.
Keira tried not to be offended. “I came to say goodbye for a few weeks. I leave for Ireland tomorrow night for six weeks.”
“Six weeks? Isn’t that a long time?”
“I’m doing something different this trip.” Keira hesitated, then said, “I’m renting a cottage on the southwest coast. The Beara Peninsula.”
Her mother gazed out at her wooded hillside. A second screen door opened onto another rock step and a small yard where she’d planted a vegetable garden, fencing it off to keep out deer and who knew what other animals.
Finally, she let out a breath. “Always so restless.”
True enough, Keira thought. As a child, she’d roamed the woods with a sketch pad and colored pencils. In college, she’d snapped up every opportunity to go places—backpacking with friends out West, jumping on a lobster boat with a short-lived boyfriend, spending a summer in Paris on a shoestring. After