Imogen laughs. “There sure are,” she agrees, apparently unfazed by their quiet bleating. “They belong to the ag kids, they’re all named after Beatles.” She steps back, smiling at the rest of my traveling party. “Come on in, guys.”
Imogen has gained weight in a way that makes her look like a fifties pinup girl or a Botticelli angel, all milk-pale skin and jet-black bangs; she’s barefoot in a long floral sundress, a million silver bracelets up one arm. She introduces herself to Ian and Sadie with a grown-up confidence, then holds her arms out to Gabe. “Gabriel,” she says, mock formal. “Always a pleasure.”
“Imogen,” Gabe echoes, grinning wry and rueful. “Likewise.”
The inside of Imogen’s cottage reminds me of the set of some whimsical, madcap romantic comedy, only ugly. It has low ceilings and exposed wooden beams and a rust-colored kitchen that hasn’t seen any updates since the seventies at the latest; there’s a teeny sitting room with an ash-filled fireplace, a faded rag rug covering the sagging hardwood floor. “I’m going to put you guys on the pullout, but I can’t make any promises about how comfortable it is,” she tells Gabe and Sadie, nodding at a flowered love seat that looks as though perhaps it was rescued from a nursing home sometime before any of us were born. “I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s great,” Sadie promises. “Thanks so much for having us, really.”
Imogen laughs. “Let’s see if you’re still saying that once you’ve been here a couple of days,” she warns. “The convent isn’t exactly the kind of tourist attraction that draws people from miles around.”
We shuffle down the dim, narrow hallway that leads to the pair of bedrooms at the back, Sadie peeling off into the tiny bathroom. “When you flush the toilet, there’s always this moment you think you clogged it, but don’t worry,” Imogen instructs. “Just keep holding the handle down and eventually it’ll work.” She grimaces as the door shuts, lowers her voice. “I mean, like. Most of the time.”
She leads us into a bedroom that smells strongly of cedar and is outfitted with a pressboard bureau, an antique student’s desk, and a gruesome painting of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “My roommate just went home to Alberta,” she explains, gesturing for Ian and me to drop our stuff on the narrow twin bed. “She was losing her shit about missing you, though, Mols—she’s like your mom’s biggest, creepiest fan. She brought all her books here in her suitcase to keep her from getting homesick.”
“I didn’t know your mom was an author,” Sadie says, coming back out into the hallway. “That’s so cool.” Then, to Imogen: “You were right about the toilet, by the way.” Back to me: “Has she written anything I’d know?”
“Um,” I begin, purposely not looking over at Gabe. “Well—”
“Hey, did I tell you I bought wine and cheese like a damn adult?” Imogen interrupts loudly. “Come on, it’s in the kitchen. We’re going to have to drink the wine out of mugs with pictures of Saint Peter’s Basilica on them, but that’s okay.” As soon as Sadie’s back is turned she mouths sorry, and I shake my head; after all, it’s not like I’ve never had to explain my way out of that particular situation before. It’s an awkward occupational hazard of having your mom write a thinly disguised, hugely bestselling novel about your teenage love life.
I’d been dating Patrick for a little over a year when things started to go sour between us; we’d been best friends since we were little, but navigating an actual relationship was messier and more complicated than either one of us was necessarily prepared for. I never meant for anything to happen with Gabe. When it did, just once in the spring of my sophomore year, I blurted the whole thing out to my mom in a fit of guilt and panic; my mom, blocked and past deadline and four years out from the last successful book she’d published, closed the door of her office and committed it to paper.
It might not have needed to be such a disaster. After all, it’s an author’s job to make things up, to spin stories like spiderwebs right out of the air. But Diana Barlow’s literary comeback arrived with a slew of publicity, including a spread in People magazine in which she confessed to filching from reality—namely, her daughter’s relationship with two brothers from down the road.
That was when all hell broke loose.
Gabe was off at college in Indiana by then, so he ducked the worst of the blowback. Patrick dumped me so fast it all but bruised my tailbone, and their little sister, Julia, made it her mission to turn my life into a waking nightmare: enter boarding school in Arizona and the never-ending stream of Netflix documentaries. It wasn’t until last summer that I braved the trip back home to Star Lake—and, true to form, wound up making all the same mistakes one more time.
But: that was then, I remind myself, following Ian down the hallway a full year later and clear on the other side of the world. I move through space more gently now. I’m careful about where I step.
Imogen opens the bottle of wine with impressive ease and digs a fat block of cheese out of the pint-size refrigerator, plunking it on a chipped flowered plate and handing me a knife. “So, what I didn’t get is crackers,” she says sheepishly. “Sorry, dudes.”
Ian shakes his head. “I’m off carbs anyway,” he says, and I grin. He’s tickled by this place, I can tell, like it’s straight out of one of the Roald Dahl books he devoured when he was in elementary school. I half expect there to be Twits living under the stairs.
“So explain this fellowship to me?” Gabe asks as we settle ourselves in the living room, Sadie and him on the love seat and Ian folded into a rocking chair that looks like it’s constructed entirely of matchsticks. I lean against the sooty fireplace, ankles crossed in front of me. “I didn’t think rural Ireland was, like, a hotbed of feminist art.”
“Well, that just shows how little you know about the art world, my friend,” Imogen says snootily, sitting down beside me and tucking her arm in mine. Then she laughs. “Nah. It was really just this one artist. She was a nun at the convent here who made all these Mary-centered paintings in the twelfth century. Really wild ones, too: Mary punching the devil in the face, Mary preaching in front of a big crowd of believers, Mary doing miracles. Women weren’t supposed to be doing any kind of art back then—especially not nuns, and especially not, like, this supposedly heretical stuff, so she signed them with a man’s name.”
“What happened to her?” I ask.
Imogen shrugs. “Eventually she got found out and they burned her as a witch.” She raises her wine mug, lips twisting ruefully. “Patriarchy!”
I snort. “I love you.”
“And I you,” Imogen says. “Anyway, the church sold the property to some hippie university in Vermont in the eighties to use as a study-abroad site—it’s mostly botany and agriculture majors on account of the garden and the animals and whatnot, but they also have three women artists come here every summer to, like, do the old art thing.” She shrugs. “It’s the randomest, I know.”
“Random, but amazing,” I remind her, nudging her in the side with a gentle elbow. “Like a hundred other artists applied,” I tell Gabe.