The Lace Makers of Glenmara

by Heather Barbieri

  “Captain Finn’s Table.” He saluted her. “I’m serving a special dish for you tonight.”

  “You’re a terrible tease.”

  “Am I making you hungry?”

  “Yes.” She kissed him before putting on her coat.

  “Love them and leave them, eh?”

  “I’m only going for my evening walk. I’ll be back soon enough.”

  “Mind you are. The soup—and I—won’t wait.”

  She walked the cliff road as she did almost every evening, breathing in the salt of the sea, feeling its mist on her face. It’s come out well, hasn’t it? she thought. The lace growing more lovely each day—who knew what they’d make next? Denny giving Father Byrne what-for in the Gaelic Voice. (The priest would no doubt have a fiery reply that weekend at mass.) Finn home safe. The two of them would have another special evening together when she got home. She was wearing the lace. She’d learned that anything could happen with the lace.

  Seabirds quarreled over bits of cockles and clams, abandoned by diggers that afternoon, the tide higher now, the ocean keeping its secrets once more. Seals rode the silvered waves, heads bobbing, regarding her with limpid eyes. It wasn’t hard to imagine Cuculain’s horses galloping in the surf, or the merrows swimming in the shallows, the men bestial, rarely seen, the women achingly beautiful, hair festooned with shells. The birds joined in, swirling now, in a great spiral; they made it look easy, the gift of flight. If she spread her arms, she might soar with them toward the far horizon. She used to dream of doing so when she was a girl, when she wanted to get away, be part of something greater than herself.

  Not now. Her needs and wishes were simple. She was a fifty-five-year-old woman who wanted nothing more than to take an evening stroll and go home to her husband.

  The way twisted and turned as it climbed to the high ridge, no guardrails, no mileposts, just the road and the drop to the beach below. She wouldn’t go the entire length as she did some evenings when Finn was away. He was home now. He was waiting for her, making stew with mussels and clams from the docks, from the fish he’d caught in the sea, the sea that had returned him to her. In her mind’s eye, she saw him knocking about the kitchen, bumping his head against the copper pots hanging from the ceiling. She laughed at the thought, would have teased him if she were there—her tall, ungainly husband, in some ways still awkward as the teenager he’d once been.

  She glanced at her watch. She should head back soon. He was expecting her. He’d worry; he wasn’t used to waiting at home while she was away, the roles reversed. It was tempting to linger, so that he’d know what it was like, but the thought of him pacing the length of the room in anxiety stopped her. She’d go partway up the cliffs, then turn around at the pullout, just past the graffiti kids had painted on the rocks on the right side of the road. “Ronan was here.” And the little sign with the words “Panoramic View,” the arrow pointing. It wouldn’t take long. Lord knew, she needed the exercise. The climbing was good for the heart, that’s what the doctor said at her annual checkup. She felt her pulse quicken as she tackled the incline. Finn sometimes came along on her rambles when he was home. He could join her more often now. He said he wouldn’t put out to sea again. He’d promised.

  The sea hit the coast hard there, drowning out all sound but itself. “I knew you hadn’t forgotten me,” she said, thanking it again. Its voice had always given her solace. It did then, too.

  The waves crashed so fiercely that she didn’t hear the car approaching from behind as she stepped onto the road to avoid a pothole, the sunset on the water, blinding, brilliant, her feet leaving the ground, and she was flying at last, flying, though she was past feeling anything by then, past feeling the rush of air, the impact of her body against rock and sand, the waves caressing her skin, welcoming her home.

  Chapter 28

  A Soul of the Sea

  It was an accident, the Garda said, a terrible accident, a convergence of unforeseen events: the time of day, the glare on the water, the hairpin turn, a tourist unfamiliar with the road. “She didn’t feel a thing,” he assured Finn, as if the knowledge would lessen the pain. “She died instantly.”

  A shroud of quiet settled over the village, the clouds standing vigil overhead, mourning too, casting everything into shadow. One day passed, then another. The women couldn’t bring themselves to take up the lace. The minutes, the hours, ticked by in a fog of disbelief, until they found themselves in the candlelight procession, winding up the road to the McGreevys’ house, the shuffle of their footsteps on the path, the rhythmic sound of their breathing in time with the sigh of the wind in the reeds and grasses, the candles flickering in the darkness before being set in votives inside the room where the coffin rested, Colleen there, as if she’d just fallen asleep, dressed in a blue gown and velvet slippers, a rosary wound around her fingers, the women whispering that she didn’t look broken at all, that her skin had the glimmer of pearl, the scales of the sea creatures rising, that the braided kelp cord was her merrow’s bridle, placed there by an unknown hand. Her baptismal candle burning at one end, the mirrors turned to the walls, the room smelling of fresh flowers, flowers everywhere, the priest saying the decades of the rosary, them replying with the Prayer of Eternal Rest: Requiem aeternam done ei Domine; et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen. Colleen’s mother weeping in her wheelchair, because it was her right, the sobs sharpening until she keened, long and piercing, with the violence reserved for the death of a young child, but Colleen was her child, wasn’t she, the bonds of mother and daughter the hardest to sever. “Her father wanted to name her Niambh, after the god of the sea, but I gave her a good Irish name, didn’t I?” Colleen’s mother wailed. “A name of the land, thinking it would save her…” The women held her hands and prayed with her, took up her cry, their voices carrying through the open window and across the deserted fields to the place where the waves battered the rocks, the place where Colleen’s body lay that night, before they brought her home and washed her and brushed her hair and dressed her in her best clothes.

  Some stayed all night, the lace makers among them, watching over Colleen, drinking the ale and the tea, eating the cakes and sandwiches and salmon and soda bread, the priest too, wishing he hadn’t whispered those words the day Colleen left the church in a huff: “Fine,” he’d replied. “Let these be the last notes you sing.” He hadn’t meant for her voice to be silenced permanently, not like this. He wasn’t the sort to say he was sorry, to take anything back, but the others saw the regret on his face and let him lead them in prayer without protest. To stand against him then would have been cruel, and Colleen would not have wanted that, for though she had a temper, she was also the most forgiving of them all.

  They went to the chapel as the sun rose, spreading a golden light across the horizon, the larks and swallows darting across the lanes, the priest already there, wearing his black cope, greeting the coffin at the door, sprinkling it with holy water, intoning the De Profundis and the Miserere. They read from Thessalonians and John, took communion, said the Libera Me and the Kyrie, sang “In Paradisum” as they followed the body out of the church and to the cemetery, where their parents and grandparents and Bernie’s baby daughter and husband were buried, now Colleen, taken too soon, her sons carrying the coffin on their shoulders, her only daughter, Maeve, walking behind: May the angels lead you into paradise: may the martyrs receive you at your coming, and lead you into the holy city, Jerusalem. May the choir of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, who once was poor, may you have everlasting rest, their words hanging in the air like smoke.

  And after, they gathered at the house, in the garden, Rosheen too, finding Aileen at last, burying her face in her neck as she had as a child, eyes brimming with tears, voice a trembling whisper, “I heard about Auntie Moira, Mam, and that a village woman had been killed on the cliff road and I know you go walking there, and I thought it was you, Mam, I thought it was you.” Aileen kissing her forehead—“No, love. I’m here. I’m right here.
”

  Even William was there, playing the fiddle and singing, William who had known Colleen in the old days, accompanied her at the dances and in the pub when she sang in her glorious voice, the others sharing the stories, the memories, too:

  I remember how she swam to the island and no one could catch her; nothing could touch her, not even the cold.

  I remember she had the voice of an angel, bringing us closer to heaven each time she sang at mass.

  I remember she could beat any man at arm wrestling, any man at all. She wouldn’t take guff from anyone.

  I remember how she helped me when the twins were born and I thought I’d lose my mind.

  I remember how she taught me to make the lace. Her patience, her grace.

  I remember the color of her hair when the sun caught it just so.

  I remember how she could read the wind and the tides.

  I remember…

  Kate gazed up at the clouds, blinking back tears. No more deaths, please. There have been too many deaths. Only a few days before, there had been a party at the McGreevys’ house, welcoming Finn home—and another now to send Colleen on her way. How could this have happened?

  William touched her arm.

  “That was beautiful, what you were playing,” she said.

  “It was part of her repertoire when we were young.”

  “You must have known her well.”

  “It was a long time ago,” he said. “But I never forgot her. I came as soon as I heard.”

  “Finn looks so lost without her.”

  “They were kindred spirits. When you find a love like that, you shouldn’t let it go. It’s one of those things in life worth fighting for,” he paused. “I know. I know. You’re thinking here’s William, a man on his own, talking about commitment. Hindsight, my dear. Hindsight.”

  Kate wondered if he’d heard about her and Sullivan. She felt Sullivan’s eyes on her. He stood across the lawn with the men, with Padraig and Denny and Niall and the rest, neither of them able to bridge the distance. She noticed that Finn and Sullivan were deep in conversation as well, casting occasional looks in her direction.

  “Perhaps they’re having the same talk, eh?” William squeezed her hand before crossing the lawn and taking up the fiddle again. Finn joined him this time, singing the words to Colleen’s favorite tune, closing his eyes, and Kate knew that he was imagining her there beside him.

  The children played on the lawn, the teenagers resting their backs against the fence, Rosheen too, the strap of the bra Aileen had redesigned for her sliding down her shoulder. Kate joined the lace makers huddled a short distance away, the space Colleen once occupied next to Oona, always next to Oona, empty.

  Oona, who took it hardest of all. “It was me who was supposed to go. Not her. Never her. She was the strong one. She was—” She put her head on Bernie’s shoulder and sobbed. Bernie stroked her hair.

  “I can’t believe she’s gone,” Kate said.

  “Neither can I. I keep thinking she’s going to walk out the door any minute,” Aileen said, taking her place with the women once more.

  “I know. I know.” Moira squeezed her sister’s hand. She’d insisted on coming to the funeral against doctor’s orders—“How can I rest,” she’d asked him, “when our friend has died?”

  “She was truly a soul of the sea,” Oona said. “Just the other day, she told me the sea gave Finn back to her. And now it’s taken her instead.” The tears came again. “It named its price.”

  “Maybe it was embracing her in its own violent, inexplicable way.” Bernie blotted her eyes.

  “Maybe. I just wish it hadn’t taken her from us so soon,” Oona replied. “I’m not ready.”

  “None of us are,” Aileen said.

  “He’s coming,” Bernie said. They wiped their tears. They must not add to Finn’s grief. The stoop in his shoulders, the pain in his eyes, were almost more than they could bear.

  His daughter, Maeve, was on his arm. She’d flown from London the night before. “Colleen’s home now,” he said, swallowing hard, eyes red from his own private weeping, running water in the washroom so no one would hear. “That’s what she’d want us to know, hard as it is to let her go.”

  They nodded, dabbing their noses with tissues. If he could be strong, they would try to be too.

  He looked out toward the sea for a moment, the sea he’d sailed for years, hundreds of terns circling in unprecedented numbers, as if to see Colleen off. “You must start again,” he said finally, “with the lace.”

  “Yes,” Maeve said, Maeve who looked so much like her mother when she was a girl. “You must.”

  “How can we,” Oona asked, “now that she’s gone?”

  “No, she isn’t,” Finn said, joining each of their hands together in turn, until the women formed a circle once again. “She’s there in the very center of things. Don’t you see?”

  And indeed, at that moment, there was a brief shimmer in the space between them, a shimmer that could have been a trick of the light, a play of the sun off the church windows, or a part of her spirit, with them still.

  Chapter 29

  A Word, Please

  Two days later, Kate saw Sullivan coming up the walk, hands in his pockets, head down. She didn’t know what had alerted her to his approach, but something made her turn and look as she dried her hair with a towel, skin prickling from the cool air coming in the open window. She pulled on a sweater, wondered if there were time for her to leave out the back door, if he would see her hurrying over the curve of the hills rising behind the cottage, if he would follow her this time, if it mattered. She’d already spent hours trying to sort it out with no success.

  One moment, she told herself that it was simply that reality was setting in, as it had to, eventually. Better it happened now than later, when the pain would cut too deep. She’d only suffered a scratch. It hadn’t even broken the skin, had it? If he didn’t want to see her anymore, it was for the best. What could have come of it, really, if she’d stopped to ask herself, taken the time to contemplate, rather than letting down her guard? Being with him might have been a mistake, and if so, she would learn from it. Maybe one of these days she’d stop picking the wrong men. She’d stop letting such things matter so much.

  The possibility of escape beckoned: She could be out the door before he reached the threshold. She could take to the road again and be gone.

  The next, she considered all she’d be leaving behind:

  Bernie.

  And Oona, Moira, Denny, Niall, William, Aileen, yes, even her, the memory of Colleen.

  And Sullivan. Yes, Sullivan Deane.

  She looked at her things in the bag—in the three weeks she’d been there, she hadn’t moved them into the dresser. The arm of her hoodie dangled from the zip compartment, begging to be taken out and folded neatly. She wouldn’t do it, but she didn’t force it inside either.

  She listened for his knock, even though she felt shaky and unsure. Bernie’s voice, a low murmur, Sullivan’s reply in a deeper timbre. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. A pause. Footsteps coming upstairs. Not his, Bernie’s—she moved briskly, lightly. His would have been heavier. A tap on the door. “Kate? Kate, you have a visitor.” As if they both didn’t know who it was.

  He waited for her in the garden near the tulips, red petals spattered on the pavers as if there had been an explosion, when the only blast had come from the wind, the wind that seemed to stir everything up—the ghosts, the memories.

  He had his back to her. Her eyes lingered on the line of his shoulders, his spine. The sun cast his shadow toward her, as if he were the arm of a sundial and she the number, marking time. It changed again when the breeze dragged the clouds over the sun, extinguishing the light, the shadow play between them gone and the chill settling on them once again.

  “We need to talk.” He turned toward her, hands in his pockets, fingering loose change.

  “So now you’re ready? You weren’t when I stopped by the other
night.” She moved neither toward him nor away. She would stay where she was, keeping a margin of graveled earth between them.

  “I didn’t expect to see you there.”

  “That much was clear.”

  “You don’t understand,” he tried again, a note of impatience creeping into his voice. “Everything’s been happening so quickly. Us too.”

  “Yes.” That was true. She’d felt it herself.

  “Kate—” He made a futile gesture with the hands that had touched her just days before. “Do you want to walk? I feel like we’re stuck in one place, standing here like this.”

  “All right.”

  It would be better to have some privacy if they were to continue the discussion. She sensed Bernie hovering at the kitchen sink under the pretext of doing dishes, the window ajar to let in the air—and their conversation.

  “We’ll stay away from Greegan’s Face,” he said with a hint of the old teasing. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw you there.”

  “It must have been quite a view.” She smiled in spite of herself.

  “It was.”

  In the silence that fell between them, the land asserted itself again—the clatter of broken rock and shell on the path, the hum of bees in the field daisies, the cries of goshawks overhead.

  “It can’t be all fun and games, you know,” he said.

  “It doesn’t have to be—but we shouldn’t shut each other out when things get hard either,” she said.

  “I know.” He paused.

  “You can tell me anything. I thought you knew that.”

  He searched for the right words. “You see, last year, I lost someone very dear to me,” he began. “And I—”

  “Yes?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

  “I didn’t know if I could ever feel that way about someone again,” he said.