The Lightkeeper's Daughter (2 page)

Tatiana stands up, fiddling with her purse, straightening the Barbie doll inside. Her little fingers work clumsily; her face is set in a serious frown.

Squid stands above her, waiting until the child looks up. “Ready?” she asks, and Tatiana nods. Squid leads her by the hand, over the anchor chain and round the windlass, down to the gap in the rail that’s fenced with sagging chains.

The men busy themselves with the boat and the lighthouse supplies. A circle of gulls wheels overhead, but Squid watches only the island, seeing the rocks go by, and then the concrete steps that climb from the sea. Stained black at the bottom, thick with weeds and dangling kelp, they rise to a sun-baked whiteness, turning once to reach the platform at the top, where her father is pushing out the derrick. In his wide-legged shorts and flame of red hair he looks oddly out of place, and just seeing him makes Squid want to laugh and cry at the same time, to run toward him and run away.

She holds on to Tatiana. “You stay with me,” she says.

Tatiana is staring at the water. She’s reaching down between the chains, her arm stretching out, her fingers spread open. Squid tightens her grip and peers over the side. A strand of kelp, broken loose, is drifting past the ship. “That’s only seaweed,” she says.

“Coming,” whispers Tatiana.

“Who?”

“Hear him,” she says.

“Who?” asks Squid again. Then Tatiana’s whole weight is suddenly in her hand. The child gropes toward the water, struggling to get closer, to climb between the two chains. Her little red shirt stretches in Squid’s fist.

“Tat!”

And up from the sea comes the whale. It’s enormous and dark, wrapped in a cascade of white. Water pours from its mouth, from plates of baleen, down ribbons of flesh that are mottled and brown. And still the whale rises, arching above them, an eye and a throat and a long curving fin that is studded with barnacles all down its length.

Its breath comes in a cloud, in a rain smelling of old rotting fish. Its eye swivels round, and the whale seems to hang there, higher by half than the height of the deck. Then, with impossible slowness, it rolls onto its back and crashes into the sea.

“Holy smokes,” says Squid, in a whisper.

For a long time, nobody moves. The Coast Guard crew stand at their winches, at their ropes and controls. The sea ripples and swirls, and the screaming gulls swoop. And Tatiana, with her eyes closed, trembles all over.

Hannah sees the humpback coming through the shallows, a huge black shadow on the silver and the gold. She sees Tatiana fling herself against the chain, and then the sea erupts and the whale breaches, blotting out the girl. Its flippers are long and slender, vast as wings. They curl and twist as the whale rolls sideways and plunges down.

A wave rolls out and breaks against the cliff. It surges on the little sandy beach, climbs two—then three—of the concrete steps. The humpback spouts farther down the channel, and again at the shallow bar toward the sea. Then it is gone, and the gulls go with it, dipping down each time it rises, feeding in its wake. And everything is silent; everyone is still as stone.

Murray is gazing down with tears in his eyes. Hannah sees him crying and looks away; she can imagine what he’s thinking. There hasn’t been a whale in the shallow waters of the channel since Alastair died.

“Miraculous,” he says.

That one word carries her back twenty years, to her first autumn on the island. She remembers how she and Murray sat on the platform at the tower’s top, watching the humpbacks swimming. They swam in a sea of blood at the setting of the sun, surfacing together, breathing together, their spouts joining in a single cloud.

“Humpbacks sing,” said Murray. “Did you know that?”

She shook her head.

“Each year one of them starts a song. Then others pick it up; they lengthen it and change it.” He spoke softly—he always did—looking out to sea and not at her. “By the middle of summer they all know the song. They sing in a chorus over hundreds of miles.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. She could feel him breathing, and she tried to do what the whales were doing, and time her breath to his.

“No one knew,” said Murray. “Until the war. Then someone put a microphone in the water, hoping to hear submarines. They heard this singing instead. And they didn’t know what the hell it was.”

She pressed herself against him. She was shivering, but he didn’t notice.

“I don’t understand it,” he said.

“The song?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Och, we’ll never understand that. I mean how men could kill them.”

“No,” she said.

He sighed. “They’re wonderful things, whales are. They’re miraculous.”

chapter two

THE SUPPLIES ARE UNLOADED AND FERRIED to shore. Boxes of groceries, barrels of fuel, library books and cans of white paint, they’re all winched up the bluff and onto the landing. Murray makes pyramids from the boxes, and perfect columns from the paint cans.

He shouts down from his platform, “Is that the lot of it then?” And a voice calls back, “Just the girls left, Mr. McCrae.”

He insists that the Coast Guard calls him that. Even Hannah called him that the first time, when he ran before her—absolutely naked—and came back with his shirt buttoned in all the wrong holes. “I’m Hannah,” she said, and held out her hand. “I’m Mr. McCrae,” he told her. She thought it was a bit of old world dignity, but now she knows he’s claiming title to his island. It pleases him to see a man in uniform subservient. If he’d thought of it, she imagines, he would have told them all, “My name is Lord McCrae.”

“We’d better get down there, Murray,” she says.

“Yes,” he tells her. “I’ll be along. I just have to put the winch away.”

This morning his fussiness annoys her. She would like to leave him there, but can’t. The boat will bring Squid to the concrete stairs, and she won’t go down alone. She hates those stairs that fall right down the cliff and into the water, vanishing in a murk of green and blue. Squid, as a child, would sit there with her feet in the swell, chattering on and on about how much she would like to walk right to the bottom, to hold her breath and go down, to stroll among the starfish and the crabs. But Hannah stays clear of the stairs, and won’t go near the place after dark. It scares her to think what might come walking up them from the sea: a drowned boy, bloated and white, squelching in the algae.

“Murray,” she says.

“Coming.” He swings the derrick into place. He lowers the hook, snaps it to its loop of rope, then pulls it tight. He sets the controls exactly in the middle, then tests each one three times. “Right,” he says. “Right. Let’s go.” And he stoops to turn a cardboard box an inch to the left, in line with another below it.

There’s no railing on the steps. Hannah walks down the middle, right behind Murray, and they stop at the landing and wait side by side. For some reason it takes three men to bring Squid to shore. They stand as straight as admirals, each one in a pale blue shirt, in dark and ironed trousers. The bowman grabs for a hold with a metal-tipped boat hook, and it clangs and rasps over the concrete. The boat washes up against the steps, tilts, and washes back.

“Careful,” shouts Hannah. The steps are slick at the bottom, the concrete chipped at the corners by the battering of logs. She fears that Squid will slide right off them, dragging Tatiana behind her. She clings to Murray—to solid, fearless Murray.

Squid is beautiful—all rosy and tanned. The men in the boat hover around her as she lifts Tatiana across to the steps. They lean with her, reaching out as the water licks at her shoes, and finally their hands fall away as she comes hurrying up to the landing. She lifts her head and looks up, and in her eyes Hannah sees disappointment. It flashes there for only an instant before it’s hidden by a smile. But Hannah sees it, and she isn’t surprised.

Murray is sixty-two now, getting fat where he never was before. His legs are chubby and pink. The sun and the wind have worn him smooth, but they have chiseled away at Hannah, carving deep lines in her face. She and Murray must look older than they should.

It’s an awkward moment when they all stand together, though Hannah fears that it’s hardest on Murray. Squid is so changed, so much a woman, that she isn’t the least like his daughter. She steps toward him only to balk back. And then nobody moves, until
everyone
moves, and they tangle like trees in a gale before they all step away, breathing heavily.

Squid reaches behind her and drags out Tatiana. She thrusts the child forward. “Say hello,” she says, “to your grandma and your grandpa.”

Murray squats down, his pink legs bulging. “Hello, Tatiana,” he says.

The child turns crimson, and thrusts her fingers into her mouth.

“We saw the whale,” says Murray. “Did he give you a fright, the big beastie?”

Tatiana sits down. She swings her red purse into her lap, and unfastens the top.

“What’s that you’ve got there?” asks Murray.

Squid says, like a song, “That’s her Barbie doll there.”

Murray reaches for it, but Tatiana pulls it away. “Well,” he says. “That’s sure a nice Barney doll.” And he stands, embarrassed and bewildered.

Below them, the boat backs off from the steps. The men stare up. They call out to Squid; only to her. “Good luck,” says one. “See you in a month,” says another. And Hannah catches the look Squid gives them, a smile that’s almost a grimace.

“A month?” says Murray.

“Yes, I’ll stay the month,” says Squid.

“And no more than that?”

“Let’s not talk about that now.” She stoops, takes Tatiana’s hand, and starts up the steps.

“They’re slippery,” says Hannah. “And there’s no railing to hold.” Her heart is in her mouth; if the child were to slip she’d crack open her skull. “Go slowly, for heaven’s sake.”

Squid looks back, laughing in a way that Hannah finds annoying. For such a beautiful girl, Squid has an ugly laugh.

Murray goes slowly, boosting himself up each concrete step by pressing his hands on his thighs. Once he would have sprinted, carrying Squid in one arm and Alastair in the other, twirling at the top, balancing right at the edge. The children would have squealed with delight as he all but dangled them over the brink. Hannah, coming behind him, is glad those days are over.

But Squid is impatient. “I’m going to run ahead,” she says. “I want to show Tat my old room.”

Then she’s gone, pulling Tatiana by the hand. She skips up the steps and vanishes on the level ground.

Murray bends forward and hurries a bit. Hannah sees the look in his eyes and knows what he’s thinking. He’s worried about his grass seed; the ground is nearly bare at the top of the steps. No matter what he tells them, everyone walks on the lawn. So he boosts himself up a step, up another, before he slows again.

“Och,” he says. “I can’t keep up.”

Hannah wants to march up the steps and tell Squid to go back. They might all have walked together, she thinks. But Murray’s looking pained, and she doesn’t want to leave him. She’d like to comfort him, but isn’t sure what to say. She could tell him that reunions are hard, that everything will be just fine as soon as Squid settles in.

But she isn’t sure that it’s true.

On posts and pillars, nailed to the trunks of trees, Murray’s whirligigs flutter and jerk in gusts of wind as Squid hurries by. A wooden lady throws her weight against a pump and then rests on the handle; two little men rock lazily with a bucksaw between them; a lion tamer holds his whip high over two golden lions faded to yellow.

There was a time when Squid lay for hours watching these things. Horses ran in an endless race. Sailboats tacked for miles and miles on a squeaky, rusted pivot. Alastair was beside her when they imagined themselves at the controls of the little airplane, cranking the propeller and flapping the wings, flying off to places they had never seen.

She almost drags Tatiana behind her, past the lightkeeper’s house and on down a pathway of gravel and shells, past the sundial, past the flat wooden horse galloping into the wind.

There are only two houses on Lizzie Island. The second is smaller, so glaringly white that the gleam of the flower box shimmers on the wall like northern lights. It was built for a junior keeper, but there never was one who lasted more than a week on the island. In Squid’s early childhood they came like a parade—lonely young men who could never match Murray’s high standards. They would come on one boat and be off on the next, often without unpacking their bags. Then the house sat empty, until Alastair first—and Squid a year later—celebrated turning twelve by moving down the path to the house they called Gomorrah.

“I love that name,” said Alastair. He said it loudly, like a battle cry. “Gomorrah!” he shouted again. “It’s where the patriarchs settled when they needed more room. It was a place of their own by themselves.”

He was a genius, poor Alastair. He was always reading, forever with a book in his hand. He could talk about kings and queens as though he’d known them, about history as if he’d seen it. And everything he read he remembered. “You’ve got so much in your head,” Squid told him once, “that it keeps leaking out of your mouth.”

The sign is still there, nailed over the door, that terrible name written in black on a bit of pale wood. He painted it the day he moved in, his head bent so close to the wood that his hand kept bumping his nose.

“I’m myopic,” he told her. “Probably I’ll be blind before I’m thirty.”

He had only just got his glasses, after years of squinting at everything. Murray had always said he didn’t need them. “McCraes have never worn spectacles.” That was what Murray said. “The sea, the sun, the air: It’s better than any doctor.”

Squid sighs and opens the door. The knob works so well that she knows at once that her father keeps it oiled. She steps into a big front room that hasn’t changed in a single way. Her yellow raincoat is hanging on its hook, Alastair’s beside it. Their boots stand underneath. Their chairs are pulled up to a table covered with books in neat stacks, with the shells that Squid had been lacing together into a necklace meant for her mother.

“That was Alastair’s chair,” says Squid. “The one under the lamp.” She lets go of Tatiana’s hand, and closes the door behind her. “He got the best chair, and the best room, because he was here first.”

The year they spent apart was the worst of any for Squid. Although they were together almost as much as before, from morning to dark, she felt lonely and—separate. Every night, she marked off another day on the calendar, and went to bed crying.

“The pair of you are like Siamese twins,” Murray told her. “Joined together in every way but time.” He sat on her bed, facing the wall, and told her, “You’ve no idea how short a year is. Why, it’s just a drop in a bucket.”

But it seemed forever. And then, on her birthday, Alastair came to carry her things. They made four trips, back and forth like ants, downstairs and up, one with a table and one with a chair, then each with a box, each with another, each with a bundle of clothes. Alastair made tea and, clinking his cup against hers, said, “Welcome to Gomorrah.” And when they finished, he put his nose almost in the cup to look at the patterns that the leaves had left.

He said, “Yours looks like a dancer. It’s happy and laughing. Well, that fits,” he said. “And see, mine is a kayak.”

“Oh, you’re just seeing what you want to see,” said Squid.

“I guess so,” he said, and laughed. “But look. My kayak’s upside down.”

He was fourteen when he died, a year and a day older than Squid. The sound of his flute came through the trees that November night, and she went from her bed to her window, as though she might see the notes that he played flitting through the darkness. She could hear the surf— there was a swell heaving against the island, though not a breath of wind to drive it—and she thought of him out there in his kayak, alone in the night as he so often was. She imagined his paddles flashing green with phosphorescence, and she closed her eyes and listened.

It was a strange music of whistles and shrieks—not songs at all; he never played songs. On a night that was eerily calm, the sound of his flute was a howling of wind.

It was whale music. He played with the whales, or
for
the whales; Squid even then wasn’t sure. Yet Alastair thought he
talked
with the whales, that he understood the language in their songs. And he played, then listened, and wrote down in a battered, water-stained book the things he heard in this singing of whales.

That night he played without stopping. That night the humpbacks vanished, fattened for the long swim to Hawaii. Alastair’s strange, warbling song was cheerful and fast, then dismally sad. And Squid, her fingers on the window glass, thought that at last she understood. He was telling his own story in the way of the whales, and she heard him speak of laughter and sadness and dreams.

In the morning they found his kayak drifting in the channel north of the lighthouse. It was upside down, turning in the tide, coming in from the sea through the tangle of rocks. It spun past an island, past a reef, in through the gap to the little lagoon, where the sun turned the water to diamonds.

The house now seems empty and cold. But for Squid, the voices are as much a part of it as the worn spots on the arms of the chairs, as the scraped-away paint on the floor by the steps. Everywhere she looks, she hears them. She sees herself sprawled on the seat of the big dormer window, Alastair standing beside her.

“I’m starting to see how it works,” he said. He was talking about whales. “They don’t use words so much. It’s ideas. Like pictures in sound. Sometimes they talk and I see what they’re saying. I
see
it, Squid.” He put his hands over his sad, weak eyes. “I see water with the sunshine in it, bits of plankton floating. I see whales all around me, as though I’m one of them. Traveling. Squid, I’ve seen salmon all shiny and bright. I’ve seen icebergs. And, listen: I saw
me.
”

“You’ve lost it,” she said.

“It’s true.” He took down his hands, and she saw how his eyes were turning cloudy and white. “They were passing below me, singing away, and I saw myself—the kayak—this shimmering thing against the light on the surface. I was moving the paddle, and I saw that too.”

“Sure. Whatever.” Squid stared out the window, north across the little islets, into a gray of clouds. She heard the curious sound of Alastair being frustrated. He breathed through his nose, with a whine and a rasp.

He said, “You know the noise a fax machine makes?”

“We don’t have one,” said Squid.

“But you’ve
heard
them. On the radio. Whistles and beeps; a pattern of sound that a computer turns into pictures. If you could under
stand
it, you wouldn’t
need
the computer; you could see it yourself.”