Summer Light: A Novel (49 page)

S
andcastles

On sale June 27, 2006

Prologue

In Ireland

I
t was the land of their ancestors, and Honor swore she could hear their voices crying in the wind. The storm had been building since morning, silver mist giving way to driving rain, gusts off the sea now blowing the hedges and trees almost horizontal. The stone walls that had seemed so magical when she’d first arrived now seemed dark and menacing.

From the plane yesterday morning, Honor had been awed by the green, by the emerald grass, and hedgerows, and trees. Her three daughters had gazed down, excited and hoping they could see their father’s sculpture from the sky. He had written them letters about Ireland, and about the West Cork farmhouse he had found for them to stay in, and how he’d built his latest work on the very edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. They had fought to open the letters when they came, and be the one to read them out loud, and sleep with them under their pillows.

“There it is!” Regis, fourteen, had cried out, pointing at a crumbling castle.

“No, it’s there…” twelve-year-old Agnes had said, crowding her sister to point out the window. Square green fields ran along the coast, each dotted with tiny white farm buildings. Stone towers and ruined castles seemed to crown every high hill.

“They all look like the pictures he sent,” Cecilia, just seven, had said. “It doesn’t matter which house it is, as long as he’s in it. Right, Mom?”

“Right, sweetheart,” Honor had said, sounding so much calmer than she’d felt.

“It’ll be just like home, Mom,” Agnes had said, forehead pressed to the plane’s window. “A beach, and stone walls…only now we’ll be on the other side of the Atlantic, instead of home in Black Hall. It’s like going across a mirror…”

“Look at all that green,” Cecilia had said.

“Just like our green fields of home,” Agnes had said, unconsciously echoing the lyrics of a song her aunt used to sing to her.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you see Daddy?” Regis had asked, turning to peer at Honor. There was such a challenge in her daughter’s face—almost as if she knew how troubled her mother felt.

“She’s going to hug and kiss him,” Agnes said. “Right, Mom?”

“That’s what I’m going to do, too!” Cece said.

“The first thing I’m going to do,” Regis said, “is ask him to show me his sculpture. It’s his biggest one yet, and it’s right at the edge of the highest cliff, and I want to climb up on top and see if I can see America!”

“You can’t see America across the Atlantic Ocean, can you, Mom?” Cece asked.

“I’ll be able to see it, I swear I will,” Regis said. “Dad said he could see it, so why wouldn’t I be able to?”

“Your father was speaking figuratively,” Honor said. “He meant he could see it in his mind, or his heart…the dream of America that our ancestors had when they left Ireland.”

“And Daddy’s still dreaming,” Cece said.

Cece had counted the days till this trip. Agnes prayed for his safety. And Regis followed in his footsteps. Although she didn’t want to be an artist, she did want to live life on the edge. Over the past year she had been delivered back to the Academy by the police twice—once for diving off the train bridge into Devil’s Hole, and once for climbing to the top of the lighthouse to hang the Irish flag.

Instead of being upset, John had gone straight to the lighthouse with his camera to take pictures before the Coast Guard could climb up to take the flag down. He had been touched by his daughter’s Irish pride, and by her way of making a statement—regardless of risk.

Almost like his sculptures; he called them “sandcastles,” which called to mind gentle beaches, families building fragile towers in the sand at the water’s edge. But John’s installations were sharp, kinetic, made of rock and fallen trees, dangerous to build.

Now, on this craggy headland in West Cork, the spiky top of his latest—the bare, unadorned branches of a tree that had fallen somewhere, hauled here by John—was visible over the next rise, at the edge of a cliff, ninety-foot granite walls that dropped straight into the churning sea.

Honor stood at the bedroom window of the farmhouse he’d rented, looking out. John came out of the shower to stand behind her, putting his arms around her and leaning into her. Their clothes lay in a heap beside the bed. Her sketchpad, abandoned yet again, sat on the desk. She had made a few drawings, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“What were you drawing before?” he asked, his lips against her ear. He sounded tentative, as if he wasn’t sure how she’d respond.

“Nothing,” she said. “You’re the artist in the family.”

Honor pressed against his body, wishing she could turn off her thoughts and give in again to the desire that overtook her every time she saw her husband. She wished he hadn’t asked about her drawing.

She gazed down at the small pile of moonstones—luminous, worn smooth by the waves at the foot of the cliff, a gift from John the minute she’d stepped off the plane—on the desk beside her sketchpad. She knew he’d meant them as a peace offering, but her heart was reluctant to accept it. She felt turned inside out, frayed from the stress of trying to keep up with him. He turned her toward him, pulled her body against his, and kissed her.

“The girls,” Honor said.

“They’re sleeping,” he whispered, gesturing toward their daughters’ room as he tried to pull her back to bed.

“I know,” Honor said. “They’re jet-lagged and exhausted from the excitement of being here, seeing you.”

“But what about you?” he asked, stroking her hair and kissing the side of her neck. He sounded so hopeful, as if he thought maybe this trip could stop what they both felt happening between them, stop what they had always had from slipping away forever. “You’re not tired?”

“Yes,” she said, kissing him. She was beyond tired; of wanting him to come home, of worrying that he’d get hurt or killed working on his installations alone, of wishing he’d understand how worn out she was by the demands of his art. At the same time, she was tired of being blocked. It was as if his intense inspiration had started killing the fire of her own. Even her drawings, such as they were, were of his soaring sculpture just over the next rise. She peered out the window, but the structure was now obscured by today’s wild storm.

He had taken them all to the cliff edge yesterday, when they’d first arrived. He’d shown them the ruins of an old castle, a lookout tower built a thousand years ago. Sheep grazed on the hillsides, impossibly steep, slanting down to the sea. The sheep roamed free, their curly white wool splashed with red or blue paint, identifying them for their owners. They grazed right at the base of John’s sculpture.

It affected Honor deeply—to see her husband’s work here in Ireland. They had dreamed of coming for so long—ever since that day twenty-five years ago when she, John, Bernie, and Tom had found the box in the stone wall. Honor knew that John had always felt a primal pull to be here, to try to connect with the timeless spirits of his family, as Bernie and Tom had done years earlier. In this green and ancient land, his own family history meshed powerfully with his artistic instincts, an epiphany in earth and stone.

His sculpture awed her, as his work often did—she found it inspiring, disturbing, stunning, rather than beautiful. She knew the physical effort it took him to drag the tree trunks and branches here to the cliff’s edge, to raise them up and balance them against the wind, to haul rocks into the pile—cutting his hands and forearms, bruising his knuckles. John had hands like a prize-fighter’s: scarred and swollen. Only, it had so often seemed to Honor, that the person he was most fighting was himself.

The sculpture rose up from the land like a castle: echoing the ruins just across the gap. It seemed to grow from the ground, as if it had been there forever, a witness to his family who had worked this land, farmed these fields, starved during the famine. He was descended from famine orphans, and as he and Honor and their daughters walked the property, she had to hold back tears to think of what their ancestors had gone through.

And what John experienced now. He was an artist, through and through. He channeled powers from far beyond his own experience—became one with the ghosts, and the bones, and the spirits that had suffered and died. That’s why he’d come to Ireland alone—to haunt the Cobh docks from which his family had emigrated, to drink in the pubs, and to build this monument to his Irish dead.

His sister Bernie—Sister Bernadette Ignatius—was probably the only person who really understood him. Honor loved him, but she didn’t get what drove him, and she was also a little scared of him. Not that he’d ever hurt her or the girls, but that he’d die in pursuit of his art. It wore her down, it did.

She’d felt exhausted yesterday, standing at the base of his huge, ambitious, soaring, reckless installation. How had the wind and the weight of his materials not carried him over the edge of the cliff? How had the storm-scoured branches, the bark stripped right off them, not fallen on him and crushed him? Alone on this headland, he would have never gotten help.

“You did this alone,” she’d said to him while the girls explored the headland. The sculpture rose above them—in silhouette it had what she had failed to notice before, a cross set at the top, to mirror not the castle ruins, but Bernie’s chapel across the sea.

“No,” he said. “I had some help.”

“Who? Did Tom fly over?”

“No, Tom’s too busy at the Academy,” John said. “This was a local guy, an Irishman I met…”

Something about the way he trailed off made Honor stop asking. Strange people were sometimes drawn to John because of his work. He unlocked the souls of all kinds of people—there was something about the soaring, spiritual, seeking nature of what he did that spoke to the hurt and troubled. She shivered at the way John looked now, his lips tight, as if there was a back-story to his assistant that she was better off not knowing.

“Have you taken the pictures yet?” Honor asked.

He shook his head—was that sorrow, or regret? He glanced around the headland, as if on guard against a threat.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her skin crawling.

He hesitated. She saw him peer at the sky, then at the sea, at low black clouds gathering along the horizon. And he decided to lie; regarding the weather, it was true in its own way, but it obscured his real concern, so Honor wouldn’t have to worry too.

“I haven’t gotten any decent shots yet,” he said. “The days have been too sunny, which is great, and makes me so glad that you and the girls got to see Ireland in the sun. But I need some shadows and rain, to get the atmosphere the piece needs.”

His work was a two-part process: he built sculptures from materials gathered entirely from nature. Then he photographed them, and let nature take the work apart again. The wind, or the sea, or a river, or gravity would destroy what he had done, but the photographs would last forever. Very few people actually saw his installations—Honor and the girls, Bernie and Tom were among the people who did. But the world—art lovers, environmentalists, and dreamers—knew the photographs of John Sullivan.

“Looks like you’re getting your wish,” she said, pointing at the dark clouds scudding along the horizon.

“Maybe,” he said, hugging her. “Then we can go home.”

It had struck her, almost bitterly, how tender he sounded. John was never in a hurry to get home; he made a life of his work, and his family had to fit in around his trips and installations. But she also felt some hope—he
wanted
to come home this time. She wasn’t begging him. She believed he knew how close they were to losing their marriage.

He had called the girls over yesterday, let them pet some of the sheep, showed them the stone walls, famine walls built during the 1840s by his ancestors, starving to death and worked to the bone. He pointed at the maps he’d brought from Connecticut, showed them how the walls corresponded with the ones built by his great-grandfather across the water, on the grounds of Star of the Sea. He told them that the cross on the top of his sculpture lined up perfectly with the one on the top of the Academy’s chapel.

Agnes had wanted to walk on the walls, and Regis had wanted to climb the sculpture, all the way to the cross. Cece had clung to her mother, afraid the wind might blow her off the cliff—even though the sun had been shining, brightening the green, making the blue sea gleam down below, as the wind, barely a whisper that morning, began to pick up.

Honor had pulled Cece into a quiet hollow, sheltered from the stiff wind, and pulled her sketchpad from her jacket pocket. Sitting there, hearing John and the older girls talking and laughing, she had sketched John’s sculpture. An artist herself, she had once been passionately inspired by John’s work—and he by hers. But lately she had just felt daunted. Sketching his sculpture on what felt like the edge of the world, holding her youngest, she remembered some of the joy art had brought her. As John’s work had gained power, she had lost track of herself. Maybe she could turn that around….

Today Ireland’s gentle green was gone, washed away by sheets of cold rain. The fog was gray and constant. Instead of reinforcing her bleak mood, it made her feel happy to be safe and cozy with her family—all together again. An east wind had whipped into a full gale, howling off the sea, blowing white caps into spume, churning up the dark bay. Honor felt as if they were on a peninsula at the end of forever.