Free The Cottage at Glass Beach by Heather Barbieri Page A

children’s lives these days, if you ask me. Too many schedules to keep.”
    It was hard for Nora to overcome her tendency to hover, her instinct to protect the girls heightened by what had happened in Boston. But perhaps Maire was right. The sooner the girls put some distance between themselves and the complications at home, by whatever means the island offered, the better.
    Nora accompanied Maire to the garden shed at Cliff House and put on her aunt’s spare beekeeper’s outfit. She felt like an astronaut, the grassed meadow surrounding the hives at the edge of Maire’s property a new frontier. At first her steps were ungainly, tentative, the suit cumbersome, the netted hat too, a pith helmet, really, with a mesh veil. Bees circled, seemingly curious about the visitors in their midst. They alighted on her gloved hands and shoulders and scaled her arms, antennae twitching, gossamer wings fluttering, exploring the peaks and valleys of the fabric.
    Maire walked ahead of her, steps easy, measured, as if she were leading a procession. She opened and closed boxes, wafting smoke as she went to calm the bees. They didn’t seem to mind the intrusion.
    â€œHail to the queen,” Maire said. “She rules the hive well. See how the others follow her every move. They’re Italian honeybees. I chose them because they’re reputed to have the best dispositions. It rained the day I was supposed to put the bees in, so we had to wait. A keeper told me to put them in a cool, dry place until the weather cleared, so I sprayed them with sugar water and brought them into the house with me.”
    â€œIn the house?” Nora asked. She couldn’t imagine doing that.
    â€œPolly just about had a fit when she saw them, until she realized they wouldn’t do her any harm. In the end, they weren’t bad tenants at all. I missed them after they moved out, though I think they’re happier here, in their own place. Each hive has twelve thousand bees. Kingdoms unto themselves, I suppose you could say. Close your eyes. They beat their wings at two hundred and fifty cycles per second. That creates the humming sound. It’s astonishing, isn’t it, the complexity of life?”
    Nora did as Maire instructed. The melodic hum filled her senses with a song of purpose and beauty. Moving among the colony, like swimming in the ocean, gave her a serenity, a oneness with nature, that seemed, however fleeting, a form of benediction.
    â€œLike this.” Maire showed her how to waft smoke over the boxes. Nora paused, the smoker dangling from her hands like a hypnotist’s watch, swinging back and forth, the smoke rising upward in a twisting column.
    â€œI know we haven’t been acquainted very long,” Maire said, “not in real time, but I want you to know you can depend on me.”
    Depend on her, as she hadn’t been able to depend on her mother. Or Malcolm.
    â€œI’ve been drifting these past few months,” Nora admitted. “It’s not like me. I don’t like the way it feels.”
    Maire thought for a moment. “Perhaps not so much drifting as gathering yourself,” she said. “We each have our own paths to walk. One isn’t necessarily better than another. They jig and jag and turn back on themselves. They have dead ends and breathtaking vistas too, if we stop and look.”
    â€œYes.” There was, after all, Maire, standing before her, who she might never have seen again but for the letter. There were the girls, those challenging, precious bundles of humanity, the best things to have come out of her marriage. And her growing knowledge of herself, what she wanted, what inspired her. These things had come from that path, difficult as it had been. There was this island, this land, and the ways in which it offered sustenance. The ocean. The garden. The fields.
    â€œAfter all, you have to understand where you’ve been before you can begin to move