Land of Dreams: A Novel Read Free

now was a simple life that would enable my boys to flourish and me to create meaningful art.
    Fire Island was the perfect place for me to hide away, physically and socially, from my hectic life. We were a small community of artists and eccentrics burrowing our simple wooden summerhouses into the dunes. Cherry Grove was the most settled of the Fire Island communities: a tiny village huddled around the dock, with a post office, a hotel and little else. I had bought my tumbledown house and plot for very little and had renovated it more or less myself. My first husband, John, whose death in Ireland had precipitated my move to America, had been a skilled carpenter—and I knew how to cut wood and handle a hammer as well as any man. The village had built up over the years into a network of wooden buildings. Most of us preferred simple two-story houses behind the sand dunes that ran on either side of this long, narrow strip of barrier island off the Long Island coast. Although we were less than two hours from the city, Fire Island had the remote air of a forgotten land.
    During the summer our beaches were busy with holiday makers, although the crowd who came here was almost entirely bohemian, mostly artists and writers. We creative types prided ourselves on always finding the most beautiful and interesting places to inhabit. Cherry Grove was also a hub of social activity for homosexuals and lesbians. The bohemian lifestyle provided sanctuary for people who could no longer endure the convention of hiding their preferences. Fire Island allowed them to live an alternative lifestyle—at least during the summer months and weekends. My nearest neighbor was a wealthy socialite who lived here with her much younger female lover during July, August and September each year. Her husband was content to have his wife do as she pleased during her summer vacation, as long as she maintained her loyalty to him in front of their peers, so for the majority of the year they attended functions and smiled for the press cameras and nobody was any the wiser. There was a code of secrecy and a respect for privacy on Fire Island that made it, for me, the perfect place to live. So even though we were, in many ways, a small close-knit village, nobody asked any questions and there was none of the interfering, cloying neighborliness that I was so familiar with from my rural Irish background.
    As I had done before, I stepped off my Manhattan carousel in July and settled into my summer routine of happy solitude on Fire Island. My September deadline came and went; I wanted it to last a bit longer.
    I had been stockpiling all summer and had arranged everything I needed to hole up here for the winter: enough food and fuel, books and art supplies to keep us happy through to the spring. I did not want to have to go back onto the mainland in search of something as banal as string!
    Against the silence of my studio I suddenly heard a strange noise and, when I turned around, I nearly jumped out of my skin. A huge stag was scraping his horns along the rusted metal side of my studio doors. Behind him was a deer and a baby fawn tucked into her side, its tan ears too large for its delicate, pretty face. The stag lifted his huge head and the three of them stood for a moment and regarded me expectantly. They were a perfect family: father, mother and their child. Although the animals on the island were generally tame, it still wasn’t a good idea to shoo away a stag. I knew if I just ignored them they would go of their own volition, but I was anxious to get into the house and search for the string. If it were the deer and fawn alone, I happily would have walked past them—but the stag was a different story. As a male, he commanded respect. I was not in the habit of giving respect to males, especially not strutting stags trespassing on my space.
    The mother and her fawn were gazing at me and I became irritated by their calm stare. I was in a hurry.
    “Shoo!” I said, not very