The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  “Mama!” he said, running his sleepy gaze over platter after platter of cupcakes, all lined up on the counter. “When did you make these?”

  “After you went to sleep.” I said.

  “They look great! Can I have one?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The cafeteria was already bustling when we got there. I glanced around a little nervously for Kelly and Dec, but they weren’t there yet. This was the only part of the morning I was dreading. I hoped that having so many people in our little group would normalize what was bound to be a kind of weird meeting between Declan and Dad, who had arrived by train on Monday night. I knew they’d shake hands and pretend to be glad to see each other and slip right into small talk about the Red Sox and the Reds, but I still wasn’t looking forward to the moment.

  Miss O. presided with her usual aplomb as children trooped in with their parents and loved ones. Most of the kids were already in costume—Minnie Mouse, a butterfly, Superman. I had not been allowed to see Henry’s finished costume; he’d wanted it to be a surprise. I glanced around to see if my nemesis, the pristine Julia Swensen, was in attendance. Sure enough, there she was in the back, wearing a killer pair of brown suede pumps and tapping away on her BlackBerry.

  Henry, who was coming with Ellie and Max—my backseat having been full of cupcakes—arrived not a moment too soon. Dad and Dec had greeted each other heartily, spoken for all of ninety seconds, and were now seated as far away from each other as possible, on the two opposite ends of the row of folding chairs we had reserved for the Henry contingent. Nat didn’t show. I should have called her to remind her; Henry had probably left out a crucial detail or two, like the date, time, or location of the great event. Ellie slid in beside me just as a trumpet processional began to blare out of a set of speakers.

  And in came the costumed letters, two by two: an Apple, with the aforementioned Butterfly; a Crayon, barely able to walk, beside a very short child doing the Queen Elizabeth wave, all decked out in what looked like a very expensive Dog costume. There was a fairy … no, an elf! With a fireman. And a little girl wearing a box decorated with wrapping paper; her head was sticking out of the top and in her hair was a large red bow. I guess she was a Gift.

  And there was Henry. A huge grin spread over my face. I glanced at Dad, who didn’t seem to know what to make of all this.

  “There’s Henry!” I said.

  “Where?” he asked.

  I pointed to the hammer and Dad laughed out loud. I reached over and took Ellie by the hand. She was beaming. She had done a fabulous job. The handle of the hammer looked loose and pliable, and the fabric resembled wood grain. And in the silver cloth-covered hammerhead were … eyeholes!

  The hammer strutted proudly to the end of our aisle. Completely ignoring the rest of us, he leaned right over Declan and Nell and yelled, “Hi, Pop!”

  My father waved and pointed to the front of the room. “Pay attention!” he said.

  The letters made their way to preassigned seats. Then they turned, stood, and sang a song about spelling, to the accompaniment—and I am not kidding—of a Broadway-style sound track blaring out of the speakers. This was wild! It was a musical revue! There were songs, and skits, and finally a strange and oddly sweet little wedding ceremony in which the queen promised never to leave the side of her umbrella, who wore an honest-to-goodness umbrella top affixed to a hat. Then they all stood and sang a little love song to spelling and reading, screeching with enthusiasm as they slipped and slid toward a fevered crescendo.

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  As for the cupcakes, Henry was right. We ran out.

  Dad stayed with Henry while I drove into town. I would normally have taken the T, but I just couldn’t imagine riding the Red Line with the Book of Kildare in my backpack. It scared me to death even to have it in my possession, but given our plans, this was unavoidable. Tad was given temporary custody of the book last night, after the police had photographed it. Tonight, after we let the monks have one last look, Sylvia was going to go right to work, creating calfskin folders to protect the detached plates. The manuscript could fall apart if we tried to disassemble it in order to reinsert the severed pages. It was just too old and fragile and we didn’t dare take the chance.

  As though they were aware of all the events that had recently transpired, the monks were waiting for us in the bindery when we switched on the light.

  “We have it,” I whispered. “The book.” I laid my backpack on the central table and carefully removed the manuscript.

  “Glory be to God!” said the abbot.

  “And all the pages,” Sylvia added. “We recovered everything! Every single piece.”

  “The blessings of God be upon you,” said the young monk.

  “Thank you,” I said. They were both staring at the manuscript on the bindery table and tears had come to their eyes.

  “I’d love to open it up for you,” I said, “but we probably shouldn’t touch the inside pages. The less we handle them, you know …” I glanced at Sylvia and shrugged. She appeared pained.

  “Of course, of course!” said the abbot.

  Sylvia let out a sigh, then opened one of the drawers in a nearby filing cabinet and pulled out a pair of white cotton gloves. She slipped them on. I immediately understood where she was going with this and quickly came to my senses. Forget the rules we had both learned at North Bennet Street. These poor, devoted ghosts deserved a long last look at the object they so cherished. Why, they clearly loved this manuscript as much as many of the ghosts I’ve worked with had loved their husbands and wives and children! I wouldn’t have denied any of those earthbound spirits the chance for one last experience with who or what had kept them tethered to this world. The monks deserved no less. I was a little ashamed of myself for not having realized this. I was glad that Sylvia had stepped in.

  For nearly half an hour, as she quietly flipped the pages, they whispered to each other and laughed at shared memories of the other monks who had worked on the book: Brother Alphonse, with his secret recipe for black encaustic gaul; Brother Marcus, who raised the geese prized for the sturdiness of their quills, attributing his success to his habit of serenading the geese nightly with a one-monk concert of lute music. When we came to the end of the book, Sylvia went to her briefcase and pulled out the individual plates. She laid them, too, out on the table.

  “That woman had fine taste,” the abbot said. “These were among the very best.”

  I stepped up to the table. The golds and greens and reds were unaccountably vivid, given the centuries that had passed since the monks’ pens and brushes had made contact with the parchment. I suddenly had an urge to ask them about the production of their inks and their methods for curing vellum and their preferences in the matter of pens—quills or iron nibs? But that wasn’t fair. This was not about me, this moment in time, it was about them. The abbot waited patiently while the young monk perused the last of the plates. When the young ghost was finished, he stepped back and looked to the abbot.

  There was silence in the room for several moments. I hadn’t really liked the old coot, but I suddenly felt sad. Looking at the younger monk, I felt tears pricking my eyes. He was Henry. He was a boy, really, no older than eighteen or nineteen. He had probably entered the monastery when he was twelve or thirteen, an age Henry would be reaching in the blink of an eye.

  It all went so fast; too fast! In no time at all, my son would be the age at which the young monk had died, and I would be forty, then fifty, the age I ascribed to the abbot. Death could cut either one of us down at any moment, slowly or quickly, and even if we both lived to a ripe old age, our years together on this planet were numbered. As were mine with Dad, and with Nona—even fewer in her case. I might be separated from a loved one tomorrow, or in a year, or in ten years. At some point, I would be separated from them all.

  The tunnel of light would exist for me, too, one day, and for everyone I cherished in this life. While I didn’t fear death, as
many people did, I prayed to God that when my time came, the white light would lead me to the people I loved and lead the people who loved me, to me.

  I let out a sigh and addressed the monks. “Are you ready to cross over now? I can help you, if you are.”

  “We’ve been ready, my dear, for a long, long time,” said the abbot. “But before we leave, let me thank you with one last blessing.”

  “All right,” I said. “I could use a blessing.”

  “Not as much as most,” said the abbot, and for the very first time, there was a twinkle in his eye.

  He closed his eyes and began to intone the words I passed on to Sylvia:

  Deep peace of the running waves to you.

  Deep peace of the flowing air to you.

  Deep peace of the smiling stars to you.

  Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.

  Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you.

  Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you.

  “Thank you,” I said, and then I closed my eyes and brought up an image of the white light. I kept my eyes closed as I asked them, “Can you see it? Can you see that door right there on the wall, the door with the light all around it, and the really bright light shining through it?”

  “Yes!” cried the younger monk. “I see it! I do!”

  “Glory be to God!” whispered the abbot.

  “Walk through it,” I said. “Walk right up to it and into the light.”

  The younger monk went first. He seemed apprehensive, so the abbot put his arm on the spirit’s shoulder and walked him up to the light. The monk drew in a breath, then sighed rhapsodically at sights he alone could see, deep, deep within the light. The abbot followed, turning to face me before disappearing forever. He raised his right hand to bless me with the sign of the cross.

  As the tears ran down my cheeks, my thoughts flew from Henry to Dad to Nona, to my mother, smiling through the years in that sepia photograph, smiling with Dad on the beach.

  I crossed myself. The abbot nodded, smiled, and stepped into the light.

  It would be nearly as hard, I suspected, for Sylvia to let go of the manuscript as it had been for the monks. It was the symbol of her connection with Finny.

  I would have offered to stay with her while she put together the calfskin binders, but I really had to get back: Dad and Henry were waiting at home.

  “Want me to call Sam?” I offered. “He’d probably be glad to come in.”

  She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’ll be fine.”

  I doubted she would be fine. She’d probably cry her way right through the job, but at least she had something concrete to work on. Maybe, as she sewed and glued her way through the creation of the individual binders, a job that would easily take her nine or ten hours, she would be able to come to terms with some of her feelings.

  I’d once heard it said that accident victims who receive modest injuries, like broken bones and lacerations, sometimes recovered more completely from the effects of their experiences than other trauma victims, whose wounds are purely emotional. As witnesses to their own physical healing, people perceive themselves—them, not just their broken arms and legs—to be moving toward health and wholeness.

  Maybe the creation of the binders would foster in Sylvia a sense of completion and closure, slowly allowing her to come to terms with the end of a precious chapter in her life.

  I hoped so.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  DAD AND I flew on Aer Lingus to Shannon.

  I’d tried really hard to convince Sylvia to accompany me, but she was positively phobic about flying. I suggested Valium. I suggested alcohol. I suggested she take one of those courses at the airport, where they try to get you over your fears. But she was adamant. She was not stepping foot on a plane. When I told this to Tad, who had already purchased the tickets, he said I could take anyone I wanted. The person I wanted was Dad.

  My father was excited, if slightly suspicious—a free trip to Ireland? What was the catch? Would we have to listen to pitches for time-shares? Were we guinea pigs of some sort, being hoodwinked with free airline tickets and hotel rooms? What were they going to ask us to do?

  “Nothing,” I said. “Or rather, nothing you won’t love.”

  He loved every minute of it, and so did I: the first-class flight, the hired car meeting us at the airport and taking us right to a beautiful B and B on Galway Bay. What he loved most of all, though, was the trip to Kylemore Abbey, up in Connemara, not far from where he was born.

  The Benedictine nuns of Kylemore Abbey had for years run one of Ireland’s loveliest private boarding schools for girls. The number of boarders has been dwindling in recent years, though, as have vocations to the monastic sisterhood, and the Benedictines had recently announced the regrettable decision to close the school. The board of directors of the order, deeply in need of money with which to care for the elderly members of their community, had been approached by an English real estate developer. The castle of the abbey and its historic gardens had caught his eye. He wanted to turn the place into a four-star conference center and hotel.

  That was when Tad stepped in, not only donating the Book of Kildare to the impoverished sisters, but making a sizeable commitment to establish at the abbey a study center dedicated to the preservation of monastic manuscripts.

  There would be more of these manuscripts coming, he wrote in the letter, which Dad and I delivered to the ecstatic old nuns. At this very moment, Tad was in the midst of a search for a fulltime director.

  The Kildare monastery no longer existed, Tad had explained to me. These gestures were as close as he could come to giving the book back to people from whom it was stolen, which he really believed his father would have wanted. But that wasn’t enough, Tad had explained. The sisters would only have to sell the manuscript in order to save the abbey and to support the ill and elderly of their order. If he was really going to help—and, I privately suspected, prove somehow to the watchful spirit of his father that he was generous and altruistic and worthy of being trusted—Tad would have to do more. More was what he intended to do.

  Dad stayed in Connemara while I flew Ryanair to Swansea, in Wales. I’d learned of Children’s Center, a shoestring operation in the toughest part of town, serving children in foster care, babies of the drug addicted, and quite a few orphans. I take the credit for this bit of Internet research, but Tad made the phone call. Could Children’s Center make use of a seaside cottage?

  The first time he phoned the director, she hung up on him. She was sure that someone was playing a sick trick. No, Tad insisted when he called back, it wasn’t a trick. The offer was genuine. If Children’s Center would like to have what Tad believed to be a cozy little cottage within sight of the water—for picnics, for a camp, for whatever they wanted to use it for—the place was theirs. He would have all the paperwork verified and get the deed into their hands within the month.

  The director broke down on the phone, he said. And Tad broke down telling me.

  I called the director of Children’s Center from a pay phone on the outskirts of town. No, I insisted, there was no need to organize a dinner or a ceremony or anything formal or official. I’d drop off the deed and be on my way. It was, I was sure, what Johnny and Maimie would have done.

  Before leaving town, I did one more thing I knew they would have done. I stopped by a rundown florist shop near the train station and purchased the prettiest assortment of flowers I could assemble. I took a walk through the village, found the quiet little churchyard within sight of the water, and laid the flowers on Gwennie’s grave.

  Back in Galway the following morning, I was sitting over an Irish breakfast with my father, trying not to gag as he tucked into a couple of thick slices of black pudding, sausage made of cow’s or pig’s blood, cooked with fillers until it congeals. It’s black as midnight, and in my opinion, just as scary.

  “How can you eat that, Daddy?” I squealed.

  He shook his head. His mouth was full. He swallowe
d, had a sip of tea, and said, “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said. “I know exactly what I’m missing.”

  He smiled, cleared his throat, and pushed his chair back from the table.

  “I’ve been thinking of staying a while, Suzy-Q,” he said, startling me with a nickname I hadn’t heard in years.

  “What? Staying here?”

  He nodded. “Just for a … visit. Maybe a couple of weeks.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “It’s good to be home,” he said. “I didn’t know how I’d feel, but honest to God, it’s great. I could stay with the boys for a bit.”

  “The boys” were his two brothers, Martin and Joe. They were both married and in their sixties.

  “I’m sure we can change your ticket,” I said. “We can call the airline as soon as we’re done.”

  I sighed and reached for his hand. My father looked happy. This was a good idea; it had been years since he’d spent any amount of time with his brothers and cousins. Maybe, just maybe, there would be a girl he used to know way back when.

  “You’d be welcome to stay yourself,” he said, though I’m sure he realized it was out of the question.

  I smiled at him and shook my head.

  I had someone to get home to.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The amazing love I get from my husband, Ted, and our daughters, Amber and Tara, makes my work so enjoyable. I cannot thank them enough.

  To Jennifer Gates, my literary agent with Zachary Schuster Harmsworth, for your great book sense and friendship, and to Lane Zachary for all of your support. I am so grateful to both of you for introducing me to Maureen Foley—how ingenious of you to know we could work together so well.