The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  “One day when I was—I think I was seven—she just disappeared. By then I had figured out that she was a … spirit of some kind, because as I got older, she stayed the same age. We began to argue as we got closer and closer in age, the way sisters do. Then one day, when I came home from school, she was gone. Just gone. We’d had a silly fight that morning and, well, I never saw her again. I was devastated. It was like having a sister die.” She looked at me appealingly. “Do you know why she left?” she asked. “Do you know where she is?”

  I shook my head.

  “You can’t …talk to her?”

  “I don’t have that gift,” I admitted. “I’m not a medium. Once a spirit crosses over, they’re lost to me, too.”

  She nodded sadly. “But you can talk to Mr. Grady.”

  “Yes, because he’s still here. He says he’s sorry, by the way.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For not believing you. About Millie.”

  A fond, faraway look came over her face. “Oh, it’s not his fault. He was always a sweetheart.”

  “He still is,” I said.

  We quickly combed the shelves and boxes holding Esther’s books. Fifteen or twenty minutes after I’d left him sitting in the car, I stepped outside to inform Julian that I was nearly finished, but he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. With any luck, he was having a lovely ramble around the spacious grounds, forgetting he’d just decided I had a screw loose.

  As we descended the stairs from the attic, where we had just gone through the last of the boxes, Esther said, “I can picture it so clearly. The cover had children playing ring-around-the-rosy under an apple tree. And all around the tree were butterflies.” She smiled at the memory. “Josie must have it. Of the two of us, she was more of a reader. I was the one with Play-Doh and pastels.”

  “Why would he think you had it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I did love it.” She paused, lost in thought for a moment. “I think I reminded him of my mother—I have her hair and eyes.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “And he’s sure the deed is in there?”

  “He seems to think so.”

  “Funny place to put it. And why in the world would he have bought a cottage in Wales?”

  “I’m not sure.” I paused on the front porch, glancing around to see if Julian had returned. I saw him coming over a rise in the distance, slowly making his way toward the house.

  “I’ll call Josie,” Esther said.

  Better you than me, I thought, remembering the tantrum I’d witnessed last night.

  “That would be great,” I said. “Do you think there’s a chance she has it?”

  “Oh, sure. There’s a good chance. Of the three of us, she’s the most sentimental about … certain things.”

  I could believe this. I’d seen frightening evidence of her sentimental attachments.

  “Can I ask you one thing?” Esther said.

  “Sure.”

  “If I do find it, can I come with you? When you give it to Mr. Grady. I’d give anything in the world to talk to him again.”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” I said. “You won’t to able to … talk to him yourself.”

  “Oh I know. But I could just—”

  “He’ll be able to hear you, and I can tell you what he says.”

  Esther’s eyes immediately filled up. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and we embraced. She was shaking with emotion, but she quickly pulled herself together and smiled.

  “Tell him it wasn’t me who broke the sugar bowl,” she said. “It was Millie.”

  Dinner was …weird. Had Esther and I managed to turn up the deed, I might have been able to show it to Julian as some kind of proof. Not proof, certainly, that I could communicate with earthbound spirits, much less evidence that ghosts exist. But merely as a concrete object to lend veracity to my claim that I’d come here with a simple, specific goal: to pick up something for a friend.

  “We couldn’t find it,” I’d explained.

  “Ah,” Julian had said, concentrating on his driving. “That’s too bad.”

  “Before he died, he tucked it into a book of poems, and, well, the book has disappeared.” I immediately regretted using the world disappeared, which edged us uncomfortably close to the language of the supernatural. I’d intended to steer the conversation clear of anything to do with the realm of the mystical, but I tend to jump in to end awkward silences.

  “Not disappeared,” I went on self-consciously, drawing even more attention to the very territory I had hoped to avoid. “It’s probably at her sister’s. Esther’s sister’s.” Then, because Julian was showing no interest whatsoever in following my narrative, I sputtered on nervously, like a car running out of gas.

  “The woman who lives here. The artist.”

  “Yes. The egg sculptures. I saw one of them.”

  Phew! I thought, grateful for the prospect of another subject of conversation.

  “How were the grounds?” I asked. “They looked beautiful.”

  “Very nice.”

  It went on like this, in fits and awkward starts, until we were well into a bottle of wine and halfway through our steak Diane (Julian) and striped bass with succotash (me).

  “You never really told me why you don’t believe in a Book of Kildare,” I said.

  “You never really asked,” he answered, but not with this afternoon’s sarcasm. He poured me another glass of wine, then drained the bottle into his own goblet. He had a sip and sat back.

  “Of course I didn’t actually examine it,” he began.

  “Neither did James Wescott.”

  “No, right, that’s true.”

  “What do you think of him?” I asked.

  “Wescott? I’ve only worked with him a few times. What I know, I mainly know by reputation.”

  “Which is?”

  Julian shrugged. “Sharp fellow, the rich old widows adore him, good fund-raiser, but, overall, maybe a little disappointing.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “He’s missed some opportunities, misplayed his hand a couple of times. Lost out on three or four important acquisitions because he wasn’t very strategic. I mean, he’s basically competent and well liked, but he was kind of a wunderkind, and he hasn’t really lived up to the hype. He’s due to retire in the next few years, and there aren’t too many rubies in the crown.”

  I nodded. This made sense. Wescott had been smooth and handsome and charming, and he probably looked great in a tux, mingling with dukes and duchesses, but he’d been awfully quick to dismiss Finny and Sylvia’s theory.

  “Then he shouldn’t have been so dismissive,” I said. “Making up his mind so definitively, without even examining Finny’s book. If that’s how he acts all the time, it’s no wonder he misses opportunities.”

  Julian grinned and shook his head. “Well, in that case, I do think he was right. Look, I would love to believe that there could be a manuscript of that caliber floating around. There’s just very little evidence it ever existed. Just that one medieval cleric who claimed to have seen it, the same story cited over and over.”

  “Have you read the actual story?” I asked. “In the diary he wrote for Henry the Second.”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “There’s a new translation—”

  “Which you just happen to be familiar with?” He looked vaguely amused.

  “No; I came across it over the weekend, online. To tell you the truth, I’ve had my own doubts about Sylvia and her claims.”

  This seemed to surprise him. “Well, you’ve done a good job of hiding them.”

  “Just trying to keep an open mind.” This was a little dig, and I think he knew it. I smiled to soften the edge of the comment. “Besides, I love reading this stuff. It was hilarious. And beautiful.”

  “The writing?”

  “Yeah.” I took a bite of my bass before elaborating. It was salty and tender, and t
he corn in my succotash was as sweet as candy. “He was sent to accompany Henry’s son John on a trip to Ireland. He took it upon himself to write a diary for the king, describing all kinds of things he saw, people he met. Mini treatises on topography and resentful badgers and fish with golden teeth. Dozens of stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Oh, about a lion that was in love with a woman. A wolf that conversed with a priest. Deadly poisons in the turf underfoot and scheming animals and an island off the coast where if you left a dead body out in the air, it didn’t decompose.”

  “Appealing.”

  “And a stone with a hole in it, which refilled itself mysteriously every day with wine. Oh, and bugs! Stories about bugs, like the grasshoppers who sing better after their heads are chopped off, and the shepherds who ‘deprive them of their heads’—that was the exact phrase, deprive them of their heads—just to hear the beautiful harmonies they made as they expired.”

  Julian smiled, and said, “And this is the man you believe.”

  “I’m not saying I believe him. It’s just fascinating to read. Regarding the creation of the Book of Kildare, he believed it was a miracle. The story was that every night, an angel would come in a dream to the monk who was working on the book and show him a picture inscribed on a tablet. The angel would ask the monk, ‘Can you copy this?’ And every night the scribe would answer, ‘No, I can’t. It’s too beautiful and too complicated.’”

  I had a sip of my wine and continued. “And then the angel would say, ‘Well, tonight, you should pray to your patroness, Saint Brigid, and ask her to speak to Our Lord, ask Him if He’ll give you—”

  “More talent?” Julian was grinning.

  “Basically, yeah. And the next day, the monk would discover he could duplicate exactly the picture the angel had showed him in the dream. It went on like this, day after day, until the book was finished.”

  Julian didn’t speak right away, but at least he wasn’t giving me the stony stare.

  “I suppose you also believe in angels,” he finally said.

  I shrugged. Let him dig, if he really wanted to know.

  Surprisingly, he persisted. “Do you?”

  “Not the kind you see in the pictures,” I finally said. “Not the kind with wings and a halo.”

  “What kind, then?” he asked.

  I sighed and put down my fork. I really didn’t want to answer, just to endure another patronizing smirk. All of a sudden, I was tired of Julian’s sly insinuations, and fed up with working so hard to reestablish the easy rapport we’d shared before he got to know me a little better. Sure, he was cute and affable, and he could be charming and downright funny, but he could also be cutting and cold, assuming a stance of bemused superiority.

  “Well,” I finally said. “You certainly seem to have everything figured out.”

  He glanced up quickly. This he hadn’t been expecting.

  “Look,” I continued. “I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I don’t care what you believe or don’t believe. But I’m also not going to deny what I’ve been experiencing my whole life. If you can’t deal with it, that’s fine, but at least—”

  I was shocked to feel a thickness in my throat and tears beginning to gather behind my eyes. I went to finish my sentence, but my words felt tight.

  “At least …”

  Julian’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forgive me, please,

  I’m—”

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  “No, no, please. Oh God, Anza, I’m really so … Let’s have dessert. Coffee? Would you like a cappuccino? Let’s get you a cappuccino.”

  I let out a sigh, feeling the prickling of tears at the backs of my eyes. “Okay,” I whispered.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT WAS WELL past midnight when I tiptoed up the steps to our apartment. Julian and I had retreated to far safer turf during the three-hour drive home, chatting politely about books and research and the few people we knew in common, silently agreeing to pretend that the awkward flare-ups had never happened. I realized, as I unlocked the door and tiptoed inside, that I had no clear idea of how I felt about him. It was confusing, all that charm and wit being turned on me so suddenly. Was I blowing things out of proportion? Maybe, when the dust settled in a day or two or three or four, I would know.

  Nat was fast asleep on the foldout couch, and to be honest, I was a little relieved. I just wasn’t up for a late-night heart-to-heart.

  I switched on the bathroom light and surveyed the day’s damage. I was once again sick of my hair, and the scarf and the wind hadn’t helped. It occurred to me that Tilda probably had fabulous hair, colored and conditioned and snipped and shaped monthly by hairstylists in London. I wished I were small enough for a chic, short haircut or disciplined enough to grow out loose, sexy layers, but I was neither. A couple of days of frustrating hair would send me flying off to one salon or another, where someone wearing a style I would never, ever consider—and once, those earrings that gradually spread your earlobes into huge, gaping holes—would talk me into trying something “a little different,” something that required a PhD in products.

  The gullible gambles never lasted very long—I could never remember which product went on when—and a week or two later, bored with fussing around with goos and gels, I would catch a glimpse of myself in a store window and realize that I was once again stranded, hairwise, somewhere between Margaret Thatcher and Tipper Gore, circa 2000.

  I brushed my teeth and tiptoed in to check on Henry. Whereas I sleep like a stone, waking up in virtually the same position as that in which I fell asleep, Henry’s a thrasher. There’s not much point in a top sheet—it quickly gets squeezed into an accordion of wrinkles at his feet—and his comforter ends up on the floor more nights than not. Tonight was no exception, but the room was warm. A dewy film of sweat on his forehead suggested active, exciting dreams, and Henry drew instinctively toward me as I sat down on the side of his bed.

  He opened his eyes a little. “Mama,” he said, pulling closer, then drifted immediately back to sleep.

  I leaned down and kissed him, catching a hint of the warm, sweet perfume that hangs above the beds of sleeping little boys, at least mine. Henry didn’t stir, but something in me did. Who cared about hair, and whether it was fabulous and perfect every day? Who cared about Julian, with his smug, sarcastic attitude and those stupid, cute little wrinkles at the corners of his eyes? Who cared about Tilda getting primped and highlighted and Edith Wharton having the perfect gardens, or about all the other ways in which our improvised little life felt down-at-the-heels, or incomplete, or not quite what it could be with a little more effort.

  I already had everything. And I was home.

  Nat left at about eleven the next morning. I’d stopped by the bakery on my way home from dropping Henry at school and come home to find her in the shower, the foldout couch closed, the sheets and blankets piled neatly on one of the cushions.

  “You wanna know what I think?” she asked a little later, stirring sugar into her coffee.

  “Let me guess.”

  She smiled and peered into the box of pastries: two apple Danish, two cinnamon doughnuts, and a croissant the size of New Jersey. Nat thinks men are like melons: sized up too early, they can leave a lot to be desired, but allowed to ripen in their own good time, they’re another fruit entirely.

  I’m the opposite: I think you know most of what you need to know about a person in the first half hour. Thirty seconds: you’re mutually attracted, or not. Five minutes: enough to gauge the intellectual horsepower. Fifteen minutes: likely to be nice to waitresses? Kids? Dogs? Another fifteen minutes and you’ve got a pretty good idea of whether it’s worth taking a chance. Like that first night, when I said to Declan, “Can’t complain,” and he said, “Sure you can,” and I said, “Who would listen?” and he said, “I would.” In five minutes, I knew almost everything I needed to know.

  Almost. There was that … Kelly wrinkl
e. But I’m not talking about everything working out. I’m talking about the decision to give it a go.

  Nat took the croissant out of the box and cut it in half. “So, it was all fine until you got talking about—”

  “The ghost stuff, yeah,” I said.

  “Exactly,” concluded Nat.

  “Exactly what?”

  She put the croissant on her plate and cut it in half again. This is why she can have a wardrobe comprised of ten exquisite items. Her size never changes, because she doesn’t do things like eat croissants the size of dessert plates.

  “You forget that it’s … kind of weird, talking to ghosts,” she said. “And freaky for some people. I mean, not for you and me, because we’ve always—”

  “I know.”

  “So cut the guy some slack, all right? He put himself out there to ask you out, twice, so he obviously likes you and wants to spend time with you.”

  “Wanted.”

  Nat shrugged and had a bite of croissant. What she was saying was true, but the fact remained that I had revealed something pretty personal to Julian, an aspect of myself that I feel vulnerable talking about, and in return, he’d treated me like a smelly sock. And by the way, he was also wrong: ghosts do exist, whether he believes in them or not. I have nothing against the skeptical, but the polite thing would have been to act pleasant and open-minded and keep a lid on the cutting little jibes. But I guess they don’t teach manners at Oxford.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give him another chance.”

  “You will not. You say you will, but you won’t.”

  I smiled and reached for the half-croissant. Pastry in midair, I changed my mind and replaced it with an apple Danish. The doorbell rang as I was pouring us both more coffee.

  “Who could that be?” I asked Nat, who of course had no idea.

  It was a man from Winston Flowers, with an armful of what, from the looks of the bundle, I judged could only be a dozen roses.

  I was wrong. It was two dozen. Of the most gorgeous salmon-colored roses I had ever seen.

  The card read: “I was a beast.” It was signed “Julian.”