The Lightkeeper's Daughter (10 page)

It pained the children, she thought, that they had to face her as they rowed away. They were still watching one another when they made their first landfall, on the island across the lagoon. Then Squid called out, “Goodbye, Mom!” And they climbed up, and into the trees.

Hannah walked alone back to the lighthouse. Murray was on his hands and knees at the wailing wall, cutting with a pair of scissors at the blades of grass against the stones, the ones he couldn’t reach with the mower. He said, “Are they off?”

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, Murray, do you think they’re old enough for this?”

“It’s past time,” he said.

But it was the longest day of their lives, followed by the longest night. Neither of them slept, and in the morning they both hurried to chores that would take them as high from the ground as possible. Murray lit off for the tower, to clean the glass and oil the hinges on the door, he said. But he didn’t explain how such simple things could keep him occupied for hours. Hannah got out the ladder and climbed to the roof of the big house. The eaves troughs didn’t really need cleaning; Murray had done it not long before, picking out every bit of leaf and grain of shingle before they tainted the drinking water or clogged the pipes leading to the cistern. Then, on their separate perches, she and Murray watched through the morning, though the rain started then, heavy and soaking.

Murray went into the cupola, where he could fiddle with the wiring and wipe the windows and keep himself dry as he worried. But Hannah huddled in the rain, sheltered only by the chimney, like a huge bedraggled stork. She didn’t move until the children came up the boardwalk in their yellow coats that flared out from their hips to their knees. The two of them looked like bright-colored bells, their legs for clappers. How proud they were.

They burst through the door just as Hannah came down the stairs in fresh, dry clothes, as Murray appeared from the tower.

“We’re back!” shouted Squid. “We’ve named every island.”

“Were you worried?” asked Alastair.

“Not at all,” said Murray.

Hannah shook her head. “Why should we worry? You’re almost grown up, the two of you now.”

“You didn’t even worry,” says Squid. She’s scraping at the sand with a stick. “We were gone all night, and you didn’t even worry.”

Hannah sees no point in telling her now. She’s sure that Squid wouldn’t believe her anyway.

They sit in silence. Squid draws spirals and squares in the sand. Tatiana stares at the forest, and Hannah holds her, trying to remember how it was to hold Squid. Then she laughs, because Squid never stayed still to be held.

“What’s so funny?” asks Squid.

“Nothing.”

“Well, it’s true,” says Squid. “We could have drowned, and you didn’t even worry.”

Hannah sighs. “No, Squid, we
never
worried.”

“Maybe you should have,” she says.

Hannah strokes Tatiana’s pigtails, the hair as dark as Alastair’s. If it weren’t combed and bound like this it would probably fly apart in the same way, into a clown’s mad tangles.

She closes her eyes, suddenly almost in tears. It was Alastair who liked to be held, to be touched and comforted. She bends down her head and rests her cheek on Tatiana’s hair.

But the child only squirms, reaching again toward the forest. And a moment later Hannah hears the sound of the tractor purring through the trees. Tatiana tears herself loose and runs to meet Murray as he trots across the sand.

“Hello, Tatty!” he shouts.

He has brought a paper filter for a second pot of coffee. He lays it neatly on the log, and Tat is right there, helping him to smooth it flat, patting with her little hands. “What a helper you are,” he says.

Tatiana glows.

“Let’s find those jingle shells.”

They go off together, across the sand that’s heating now, as the sun streams over the trees. They walk, then run, then suddenly drop to the ground, beside a tide pool by the rocks.

“Look at them together,” says Hannah. “I haven’t seen him run like that in years. She’s good for him, Squid.”

Squid is building up the fire, blinking in the twirls of smoke.

Hannah says, “Why did you wait so long to bring her home?”

“It isn’t home,” says Squid.

“Well, whatever it is.”

Squid breathes little gasps through the smoke. She shifts sideways, from her knees to her hip. “I was sort of scared,” she says.

“Scared? Of your father?”

“No,” says Squid. “Not really.”

“Of me, then.”

“No.” Squid waves the smoke away. “The island.”

“You were scared of the island?”

“Yes. Sort of. I thought it would—I don’t know—take her over, Mom. I was scared she’d
remember
things.”

“Like what?”

“Just things.” She adjusts the sticks she’s put on the fire. “What if she knew where the boardwalk went and where the auklets live? What if she came out on the beach and said, ‘I remember all this’?”

“Why would she?” asks Hannah.

Squid shrugs.

“It sounds a bit silly,” says Hannah.

“I can see that
now
. I didn’t think so then.”

Hannah stares along the beach, at Murray and Tat lying on the sand. She imagines that he’s lecturing on all the little animals, and she wishes she could hear him. “So why did you come back now?” she asks. But she wonders:
Why,
of all times, in the autumn?

“I had to,” says Squid. “I had to see it once more while I can.”

Hannah’s heart leaps. A hundred fears run through her mind in a moment. “What do you mean?” she says, turning to face her daughter. “What do you mean, while you
can
?”

“I’m going away,” says Squid. “
We’re
going away, me and Tat.” She steps around the fire and sits at Hannah’s side. “Mom, I met this guy, this really neat guy, and we’re going to live in Australia.”

“Forever?”

“For three or four years,” says Squid. “But by then . . .”

“We’ll be gone,” says Hannah. It’s not even three years. She knows within ten the number of days until Murray turns sixty-five. And then, she imagines, the Coast Guard will have to come with crowbars to pry him from the island, tearing him loose like a mussel, breaking his byssus at last.

“Don’t tell Dad,” says Squid.

Hannah scarcely hears her. “Why didn’t you bring him, this really neat guy?”

“Mom, don’t.”

“But why?”

“He left two weeks ago,” says Squid. “He’s already in Australia.”

“Oh, Squid.” Hannah sighs. “I should have known it would be something like this. I should have known you were bringing bad news.”

“Gee,
thanks,
” says Squid. “
I
don’t think it’s bad news.
I
think . . .”

She doesn’t finish. Down the beach, by the shelf of rocks, Murray is springing to his feet. He moves as quickly as a flea; one instant he’s squatting by the tide pool with Tatiana, and the next he’s upright, hands at his hips. He takes a step backward, then another. Then he wheels around and runs straight toward them.

Squid leaps up, scattering sand. Then Murray stops where he is. He glances back at Tatiana, then calls to Squid and Hannah. “You’ll have to see this.” He beckons frantically. “You won’t believe what she’s done.”

chapter ten

IT’S NOT A BIG TIDE POOL. IT’S SMALLER THAN a child’s wading toy. In its shallow water Hannah sees a sculpin dart from weed to rock, a shore crab glide the other way. The bottom of the pool is covered with small, empty shells, more thickly toward the end where Tatiana holds her hands below the surface.

Murray puts a palm on Tat’s shoulder; one of her pigtails brushes his wrist. He bends down until his face is level with hers. He says, “Show them, Tatty.”

She doesn’t move. Her hands are cupped together, fattened by refractions.

“Come on, Tatty. Open your hands. Do it for Grandpa.”

Murray’s fingers flex. “Come on, Tat. Please?”

And slowly, like a clamshell, Tatiana’s hands fall open.

Hannah has never before seen these animals that are gathered in the creases between Tatiana’s fingers, among the ridges that line her small, bent palms. They’re tiny things with oversized arms, with claws like a crab’s and thin, tapering bodies almost in coils. They don’t move; they shelter there.

Squid says, “What are those?”

“Look,” says Murray.

Hannah can see it now. But it seems impossible. They’re so fragile. All those empty shells in the pool. “Hermit crabs?” she asks.

“Yes,” sighs Murray.

And Squid’s face turns as pale as the sand. “See, Mom,” she says. “It’s starting.”

“Shhh,” says Hannah.

No shells of their own, these little crabs have been living in the cases of dead periwinkles. The sprinkle of empty shells was their armor, their homes. But here they have cast them off, and crawled—so naked and vulnerable— into the safety of Tat’s small hands.

“It was just one at first,” says Murray. “And then a second, a third. They climbed up over her fingers, over her wrists. They all came, through the water and across the sand.”

And she holds them like jewels.

To Hannah it’s almost like magic. It’s something that Alastair might have done.

He would lie for hours, absolutely still, with a bit of gristle in his fingers. He would be a rock, like a piece of the island, unmindful of the rain or the wind, just for the chance to feed a gull.

And then he would describe in the greatest detail, with the emotion of a preacher, the touch of this wild animal.

“Its feathers were layered,” he said one day. He stood in the kitchen, his legs shaking with excitement, crossed close together. “There was a line of white and a line of black and each one was just perfect.” His fingers twitched in tiny gestures. “Just perfect, perfect feathers.”

When he was twelve, he went after the auklets. He sat for nine straight hours by the mouth of a burrow before Murray brought him away. “Alastair,” he said. “Maybe they don’t want to be seen.”

“Maybe not,” said Alastair. “But I think I want what
I
want more than they do.”

For three days he sat there, from the moment his chores were finished until just after dawn.

“I think Alastair’s gone off the deep end,” said Squid. She wouldn’t have the patience for that. She’d have to be staked to the ground to stay in one place for nine hours straight.

But on Alastair’s fourth day at the burrow, the bird came out. And it wasn’t the one he’d expected.

“I saw the baby. It was tipsy and fat,” he said in his preachy voice. “It blinked at the sun; it didn’t know what it was—what daylight was. I saw it take its very first look at the world. I was the first thing it saw.”

“Did it die of shock?” asked Squid.

By the time he reached his teens, Alastair had read every biology text in the house. He craved more, ordering pamphlets and thin little volumes with staggering titles. For Hannah, it was proof the boy should be in school. But Murray outmaneuvered her, and brought the subject up himself.

“You know,” he said one morning, “school would be a disappointment for Alastair now. The lad would far outpace any teacher; why, he’d be driven round the bend.”

“I just wish he had someone to share with,” said Hannah. “That’s the sad part. He’s so much alone with all that he knows.”

Murray’s face crumpled.

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t mean you. I meant children. Others his age.”

“No,” said Murray. “Och, you’re right. He knows more than me by half.”

Murray did his best to catch up. He settled down at night with a stack of pamphlets at his elbow. He nodded off to sleep like that, until the alarm clock woke him at three in the morning, in time to do the weathers.

By then, the four of them overfilled the rowboat. They crowded into it like circus clowns into a silly car, and they brought the gunwales nearly to the water. But still they went drifting over reefs and sand. And through the glass floor they saw a marvelous thing. A nudibranch, one of the giants carried in from the open sea. It was like an orange flame burning through the water, a rippling of tendrils and stalks.

Squid rubbed their breaths from the glass. “Which end is the head?” she asked.

Murray launched into one of his lectures. “The nudibranch,” he said. “A snail without a shell. A free spirit wandering wherever the currents take him. He carries no weapons, no armor. He drenches himself in a strong perfume that protects him like a magic potion.”

“But where’s his head?” asked Squid. “Does he breathe, or what?”

Murray had no answer. He shook his head.

“Those tentacles are called cerata.” It was Alastair talking. “The animal breathes through those. That darker part in the center is a crude liver. There can be vast differences between the nudibranchs, even among the solids. MacFarland says the Hermissenda is a voracious killer of other nudibranchs. It slaughters its own kind with the cruelty of a shark.”

Squid stared at him. “Huh?” she said.

Alastair blushed horribly.

And poor Murray. His little whimsical lecture sounded pathetic compared to the teachings of Alastair. He said, “I didn’t know that. A killer nudibranch?”

Alastair didn’t answer. He seemed embarrassed that he knew more than his father.

“You have to let them go,” says Murray. He’s talking to Tat, about the hermit crabs. But it jolts Hannah back to before.

She told him the same thing. The children, she said, were like balloons in a bottle; if he didn’t let them out they could only grow so big, and no bigger.

“I’m doing the best for them I can,” he said. “I’m teaching them to think for themselves, to believe in the things they believe. If that’s not good enough, then one day they’ll tell me so.”

“But they won’t,” said Hannah. “They love you too much for that. Doesn’t the eagle have to
push
the babies out of her nest?”

“Och,” he said. “You don’t know about eagles.”

He hurt her with his quiet anger. She said, “But I know about children. And you have to let them go.”

“They’ll die in your hands,” says Murray. “They need their freedom, Tat. You’ll have to let them go.”

Tat doesn’t move. She’s studying the poor, naked crabs with the same detached interest that she showed for Murray’s toys.

The sun comes over her shoulder, dazzling on her hands. The rising tide laps at the far edge of the pool, and ripples run across it.

“Come on,” says Murray. “Put them down, Tatty, and we’ll find some jingle shells.”

She turns her head toward him. “Jingle shells,” she says.

“Yes. That’s right.” Murray puts his big, pink hands into the water. He holds Tat’s wrist, and the crabs—frightened—go fleeing. They tumble from her palms like the urchins—so long ago—that had tumbled over the bottom of the sea. They twist and fall, wriggling down to the sand. They race toward the scattered shells, each to its own, and carry them off to the safety of the weeds, to the shelter of the stones.

Hannah looks up, and Squid is gone. She’s back at the fire, scattering the sticks, kicking them across the sand. Hannah stands by the pool for a moment, watching Murray and Tat go off along the curve of beach, one so big and one so small. Now and then they crouch, and dabble in the sand. Hannah wishes she could join them, but she goes to Squid instead. She starts packing away the breakfast things.

Squid is scooping sand on the coals, smothering the last of the flames. The smell is hot and bitter. “I’m leaving on the next boat,” she says.

“That’s a month from now, and you know it,” says Hannah.

“Well, maybe one will come sooner.” Squid stamps over the mound of sand. “As soon as one comes, I’m going.”

“You’ll break your father’s heart,” says Hannah.

“Well, he broke mine.”

“Squid!”

“He did. He killed Alastair. And I’m not going to let him get Tat.”

“What a terrible thing to say. You make him sound like Bluebeard.”

Squid’s laugh is almost cruel. She keeps bustling around, gathering the aluminum foil that had wrapped the potatoes. She finds Tatiana’s Barbie doll and sits it upright on the sand. She never looks at Hannah. “It’s already inside her.”

“The island?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how could it not be? It’s all you ever knew,” says Hannah. “You’ve probably told her everything about it.”

“Maybe Dad’s right. She
has
come home.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t want it to
be
her home.” Squid crushes the foil into a ball and jams it in the bucket. “If she stays any longer something awful will happen. I know it will.”

The sun is hot, the sand baking in its whiteness. Hannah is tired of arguing. “Fine,” she says. “But you’ll have to tell Murray you’re leaving. You’ll have to tell him about Australia.”

“I will.”

“Today,” says Hannah. “It isn’t fair to let him think he’s got a grandchild now, only to whisk her away forever.”

“It’s his own fault,” she says.

“Oh, grow up, Squid!”

“Well, it is, Mom. You saw what he did to Alastair.”

He drowned. Hannah has told herself over and over that it might have been an accident. She has tried to make herself believe that, in the end, no one could save him. He went out on a sea of rolling black hills, under a sky that was bright with stars. He went out past the rocks and out past the reefs, paddling on with his back to the light. He paddled so far that no one would hear him if, in his drowning, he shouted for help.

From the bridge she saw the kayak. It was such a bright red in the morning, rocking on the waves with a bubble of air, and a slap, as the cockpit went in and out of the water. It was a thin, red smear, like bright-painted lips on the waves. But she could see from the bridge that it was upside down. And she knew right away; Alastair was gone.

Squid was with her. They had walked together to the tower, slowly there and slowly back. She remembers how they paused at the middle of the bridge, over the highest part of the gulf, and put their weight on the railing. Through her elbows and her shoulders, she could feel the wood shake as the swells boomed through the gully below them.

The tide was ebbing and the starfish clung to the rock like orange asterisks. The water rose over them and poured away, draining through the barnacles with the sizzling sound of fat in a frying pan. She watched the waves roll in and thought, again, how they were eating at the island, each one taking a tiny particle that reduced Murray’s world by an atom. Then Squid clutched her arm. “Mom,” she said. “Look.”

The kayak rocked on each crest and turned as it slid to each trough. It came toward them and veered away, borne by the ebb past the gray rocks at the tower, drawn down the passage where the sand, in the sun, looked like gold in the water. It bumped against the concrete steps, lifting on a swell that dropped away to leave one end stranded on the concrete. It rocked far on its side and then, lifted again, went along on its way toward the beach at the end.

She called for Murray. She shrieked his name. Squid shouted too, and they frightened the gulls that swirled up from the surf, taking their cries in a high, winding circle.

Murray came with a wrench in his hand. He came at a run, over the grass, a look of terrible fear on his face. He paused at the cliffs, and he panicked. He ran down the steps, down the chipped-away stairs to the sea. And at the bottom he kept running, up to his knees and his thighs, up to his waist, and the swell rose over his shoulders. He swam out to the kayak and groped underneath it. He rolled it upright and threw himself across the cockpit. On his waist and his elbows, the water pouring from him in silvery rivers, he looked frantically around him. Then he put back his head and shouted one word into that great emptiness of the sea and the islands.

“Alastair!” he shouted.

And the surf boomed on the rocks, eating at a world that had shrunk on an instant to nothing.

“Alastair wouldn’t have been happy anywhere,” says Hannah. “If he had got everything he wanted, he
still
wouldn’t have been happy.”

At last Squid looks at her. “You don’t know the things he told me.”

“No.” And she doesn’t
want
to know.

“I tried to help him, Mom.” Squid sits down on a log. She puts her hands to her face. “I did everything I could, and it just turned rotten in the end. I did the wrong things, I think.”

“We all felt like that.” She stands as close as she dares to her daughter. “We should have seen it coming.”

At thirteen he was a dreamy, distant child. He asked for a flute for Christmas, but not for a music book. “I don’t want a book,” he said. “I want to play from my heart, not from a splatter of dots on a page.”

He blew across the mouthpiece and pressed the keys. Tootling, Murray called it. Alastair made bird sounds, whale sounds; he didn’t make music.

He started going off by himself, often in the kayak. Even Squid didn’t know where he went, and she hated him for that.

“I could kill him,” she said. “He makes me so mad.”

Hannah told her, “He’s going through a phase.” She said, “He needs some privacy.”

And Squid asked: “What if he paddles away? What if he just keeps going and never comes back? The stupid moron, he’ll be down in Vancouver before he knows he’s away.”

“He won’t leave you,” said Hannah. “One day, I’m sure, the two of you will live as neighbors somewhere in the city.”

That was the way she saw it. Alastair would tear himself from the island. Squid would follow a few months later. It would be impossible for them to live more than an hour apart.