by Helen Cullen
* * *
As the boat carrying her siblings docked at the port, Nollaig was bursting through the front door, where Maeve was hanging up the telephone in the hallway. “Woah, woah!” she called as her daughter brushed past her and pounded up the stairs. Maeve ran after her and arrived just in time for the bedroom door to slam in her face. She knocked once, twice, and then gently inched the door open. Nollaig was scrubbing off her makeup with facial wipes from a plastic tub she squeezed between her knees.
“Honey, what is it? Did something happen?”
“No, of course not. Nothing ever happens to me.”
Maeve caught her daughter’s eye in the mirror and edged closer.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked, smoothing the hair back from her daughter’s face.
Nollaig shook her head. “I just want to have a lie down.”
“But it’s only seven o’clock.”
“Mum, I’m tired, okay? You get to go to bed whenever you want, so why not me?”
Maeve released her hands from her daughter and stepped back.
“Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be downstairs.”
She walked out of the room with all the grace that Nollaig had so desperately aspired to earlier.
“Mammy, I’m sorry!” Nollaig called after her.
Maeve paused, then swung the bedroom door back open.
“Darling, I don’t know what’s happened, but I could hazard a guess,” she said, watching Nollaig in the mirror. “All I will say to you is this—someone will come along who will never make you feel like this, who will only make you feel stronger, happier, alive in yourself. As soon as a boy makes you doubt yourself, or puts you down, or dismisses you, or does anything to you that makes you feel disrespected, then that is the same moment you walk away and refuse to give him any more of your time. It really is that simple.”
Nollaig turned around on her stool. “But, Mammy, he hasn’t done anything to me. That’s the problem. He doesn’t even see me.” She blew her nose in the wipe in her hand and dropped it on her dressing table.
“Well, thankfully, no one can force anyone else to love them,” Maeve said. “But the right person will see you, at the right time. And until then, you don’t surrender your ability to be happy to anyone. Okay? And if you can make that your philosophy now, you’ll save yourself so much pain, darling. I promise you.”
Maeve gave her daughter a hug that wasn’t met with the usual resistance.
“It’s easier said than done, Mammy,” Nollaig mumbled into her shoulder.
Maeve looked straight into her daughter’s eyes.
“Really? Does this feel easier to you?” she asked, handing her a handkerchief. “Now, I’ve been busy organizing boxes from the attic this afternoon, and have some photographs of your father and me that should cheer you up. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Maeve led her daughter by the hand down the stairs to where the contents of a battered rucksack were spread across the kitchen table.
Nollaig noticed how straight her mother sat and mirrored her posture.
“Are you sure I’ll meet someone, Mammy?” she asked as her mother opened a photo album with a blue velvet cover.
She rested her hand on Nollaig’s. “Honestly, no, I’m not,” she said. “How could anyone know such a thing?”
Nollaig slumped on her stool, but Maeve lifted her chin and ignored her squirming.
“You know what I am sure of, though?” she asked. Nollaig shook her head, still in her mother’s grip.
“I know that you won’t settle for anyone. And even if you did end up on your own, you would be completely fine. You are worth more than being defined by a relationship. Got it?”
Nollaig nodded. She was Maeve Moone’s daughter, after all, and she decided that counted for something.
Dillon stormed into the kitchen first, with Sive and Mossy trailing behind. Their row was temporarily forgotten as the album drew them like a magnet toward photos of the life their parents had lived before they were born:
Maeve drinking cider on a bench at the Dandelion Market in flares and a frilly blouse.
Maeve and Murtagh at a bonfire on Dollymount Stand where people sat playing guitars in the dunes.
Maeve with Edna O’Brien at a book signing in Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London.
A Polaroid of them on either side of Bob Geldof in Temple Bar.
Maeve with her theater group at Trinity College, all dressed in red polo necks and black dungarees.
Photos of when they were just lovers; before they were parents.
They looked like people their children would want to be friends with.
As beautiful as only strangers can be.
Sive slipped away to her bedroom and returned with a manila envelope of her own photographs. Laying them out side by side on the kitchen counter, Maeve stood beside her daughter and absorbed the images of the seals. “Tell me their story,” she said, and Sive began to explain her vision for the project: how people change to survive their environments, how love can trap you in a prison of your own making. And Maeve wondered where her daughter had learned these human truths.
It was after midnight when the mother and daughter followed the rest of the family to bed.
Sive was full of inspiration, with the new confidence in her work that Maeve had awarded her.
Maeve was acutely proud of her daughter’s ambition.
And when, two weeks later, they stood before Sive’s exhibition at the secondary school, it felt as if Sive had taken her first steps into the world as an artist.
With a little nudge from her mother, she saw what her purpose should be and she realized, with a deep sense of shame, how much Maeve had prepared her for this.
At last she saw Maeve as an inspiration, a creative woman with something to say, whose genius was so often hidden. She no longer saw her as just the mother who she’d longed to behave like all her friends’ mammies. She realized that whatever she had felt was missing in Maeve was made up for in ways that were much more important.
Instead of a burden, Maeve became a blessing. And though some days would come again when she found that hard to remember, she would never now unlearn that truth.
From a woman, a woman was born.
Inis Óg: December 2004
MAEVE WAITED ALONE for her family to return. Sitting on the damp back doorstep, her bare legs trembled beneath her white linen dress as she sipped whiskey from a mug Murtagh had made. In the distance, she could hear Áine O’Connor’s family cheering as they turned on Christmas lights, but Maeve’s own house was silent.
Her mind raged, spiraling to the edge of her sanity, before collapsing in upon itself once more. She stumbled back inside the house and recovered her balance against the kitchen sink.
Before her plan became cognizant, Maeve’s hand found the last remaining sea-green vase, of those Seamus O’Farrell had left them all those years before, and threw it with all her strength at the wall. It smashed into smithereens on the floor tiles. She wrapped a shawl around her and fled back into the night, walking over the broken pieces of vase in bare feet.
There was no moon in the sky as Maeve wound along the lane to the chapel on the hill.
Inside, she stood before the votive candles with their patient wicks, her hands shaking as she searched in vain for some matches to light one.
In the shadow of the crypt, she lay on the marble tiles and stared at a statue of the Virgin Mary that blurred before her eyes. The mother by which all Irish mothers were measured against, and condemned if found lacking.
It was there that Murtagh found her, her feet blue and eyes red, curled up into a tight little ball.
He shook her gently, and she quietly followed him, his hand holding hers inside the pocket of his duffel coat.
But they didn’t speak.
There were no new words to discuss old ways.
The silence lengthened between them.
At home, she crawled into bed in the same clothes, and Murtagh left her alone to prepare a bed for himself in the living room.
All evidence of this was gone by morning; the smell of baking bread wafted through the house, as usual.
Maeve didn’t come down for breakfast, and no one asked where she had been the evening before, as Gerry Ryan’s voice boomed out from the radio to fill the silence.
Sive stared at her father as he buttered a stack of biscuits to take to the studio with him for lunch.
She thought he looked older but convinced herself she was imagining it.
There was a loud bang from overhead, and it sent a charge through the kitchen.
When after a moment there was no further noise, they continued mechanically eating the soggy scrambled eggs that normally provoked their derision.
A strange heightened feeling had settled among them, like an unwanted stray.
A new vase was sitting in the middle of the table.
Inis Óg: September 2005
“I’LL BE HOME on the last ferry this evening, if not before, love,” Murtagh said.
Maeve was stretched across the living-room sofa surrounded by the weekend papers, two half-drunk cups of coffee on the carpet beside her, a bowl of red grapes resting on her belly.
She peered at Murtagh over the top of his own reading glasses and smiled to see he was wearing his old brown corduroy blazer; these days, it had been mostly usurped by Sive for its authentic seventies credibility, but he could still squeeze into it. Just about.
“Are you sure you don’t mind me staying here?” she asked. “I bet Aíne could find someone else to sit with her girls.”
Murtagh sat on the coffee table while he tied his shoelaces. “No, it’s okay,” he answered. “He says he only has a few hours, so it’s not worth causing her stress over it. I must say, though, I wish he’d given us a bit more notice.”
He shuffled together the newspapers and gave the armchair cushions a half-hearted plump, opened the window and shook the curtains, then collected up the cups to return them to the kitchen.
“Still, it will be lovely, though, won’t it?” she called after him. “I’m so curious to hear how much he’s changed. I can’t imagine Fionn looking older. How old is he now? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?”
“Something like that,” Murtagh shouted back as he performed a quick blitz on the kitchen, closing the lid on the bread bin and rinsing an empty milk bottle, spritzing the windowsill succulents and straightening the kitchen chairs. He draped Sive’s leather jacket and Maeve’s red silk scarf over his arm and hung them up before leaning over Maeve to kiss her goodbye on both cheeks.
“Bring me home something nice,” she said. “A surprise. And don’t forget to post the letters.”
He collected the pile of powder-blue envelopes from the mantelpiece and glanced at the addresses; she had written to Jeremy and her mother.
“What are you sending to Jer?” he asked.
“Some Rothko postcards I picked up that I thought he’d like. I said you sent your love.”
“These days, you seem to talk to him more than I do.”
He rested the envelopes on the ledge beneath the mirror in the hallway while he combed his beard and then immediately left without them.
On the walk to the ferry, Murtagh felt moisture in the air and scanned the sky overhead for the cumuliform clouds that signaled impending bad weather, but the glint of the light made it difficult to discern, and he shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and hurried on. The last man to board the boat, he was relieved to find himself alone on the upper deck. It was so hard to be an introvert on the island; the anonymity of the city was the only thing he’d truly missed from their life in Dublin. After all of this time, and no matter how much the island had become home, he still felt overexposed there when everyone he met knew his name and felt completely entitled to inquire about his business. As they tipped and bounced toward Galway, he felt his spirits lifting; the thought of browsing in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop, weaving among the market stalls on Shop Street with an eye out for something for Maeve, perhaps discovering a new green cardigan in Anthony Ryan’s drapers to replace the one that Mossy had shrunk in the washing machine, rejuvenated him. And then he had Fionn to look forward to.
Fionn had telephoned the night before while he and Maeve were immersed in preserving the last of their tomatoes in the Kilner jars that they never seemed to have enough of. Fionn was in Dublin for a wedding, he’d said, and had been struck with the idea of coming to Galway for the afternoon before he flew back to London. It was strange to hear his voice on the telephone. In the time since he’d left the island, throughout his travels, the three had exchanged dozens of letters and postcards, but Fionn had never been much of a telephone or email person, preferring the art of letter-writing to maintain his connection with the Moone family, and Maeve and Murtagh in particular.
Through the stories he told, the anecdotes from his travels, the words he used to express himself, he shared his whole life with them in beautiful imperfect handwriting. The sort that writes its way onto your heart.
Was the Fionn they knew from his letters the most authentic representation of him?
Or a carefully curated persona?
It made Murtagh sad to think of how the internet had robbed his children of the joy of a letter landing on the mat with your name written by the hand of someone who loves you. There and then he decided that he would try writing to them all one day, when he was ready to share some memories, maybe when the physical distance between them grew.
It was strange now to accept that so much time had passed since he had last seen Fionn; it was never meant to be that way. There had been so many attempts over the years to reunite, but one thing, or another, had always prevented it. And yet, it did not feel so long since they had last all sat together. Maybe that was the power of letters. The power of that summer.
It was starting to rain as he strode up from the pier, so he called into Connell’s cheesemongers to borrow an umbrella from Cathal there; he left with a chunk of Camembert wrapped in wax paper for Maeve and a branded umbrella declaring Connell’s to be Purveyors of Award-Winning Cheese and Charcuterie. Along Shop Street he strolled, untroubled by the puddles that formed quickly in the streets. It was autumn, his most beloved season, with the new beginnings of “Back to School” fever, always contagious, making it feel like a new year.
In Eyre Square he maneuvered around the construction work to stand before the Galway Hookers Fountain; it was his favorite installation of public art, and he admired once again the way the stylized steel sails seemed so perfectly to capture the spirit of the boat they were modeled upon. While the silver rain mingled with the spray from the water jets, he was mesmerized as his thoughts wandered to the conversation he would soon have with Fionn.
It would be easy to speak of the children, his work, the islanders Fionn had known, but what of Maeve? How much did she tell him in her letters?
How could he ever explain in a single afternoon how complex their lives were while appearing so simple?
How the previous year had been her worst yet.
All that he had avoided writing down—was Fionn able to read between the lines?
How the menopause seemed to have rattled her even more.
How the GP in Galway had prescribed Valium and vigorous exercise and shown her the door.
How she had refused to allow her parents to come for Christmas, and once again in spring.
How when she finally seemed to resurface, she was different this time. That a horrible resignation had settled upon her and her spark was barely reignited.
How it hurt him to see how much it hurt her to do things that once were so easy.
How slowly she had decluttered he
r life and responsibilities so the day’s expectations were easier to manage.
How she had promised him that things would never get so bad again as that past year.
And he wanted to believe her because she never made promises she couldn’t keep.
But it frightened him.
What deal had she struck that ensured she could keep that promise?
How could he confess to Fionn that he saw all of those things but pretended not to?
That he relied on the sheer force of his will to help her get better?
He became aware of a new silence in his ears and realized that the persistent beating of rain on his umbrella had stopped; he shook it, closed it with its little pink button, and it became a walking stick that beat out a steady rhythm on the flagstones as he made his way to the new Eyre Square Hotel, only a few weeks open. They had agreed to meet in the lobby bar, and as Murtagh crossed the square he could almost taste the hot whiskey he longed to order.
* * *
Back on the island, Maeve sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor. She dragged an old suitcase out from under the bed and removed five moleskin journals; one for each of the previous years. Inside the cover of each she had drawn a little table: in the column on the left a blue star and black circle: on the right, corresponding numbers.
2000: