The Lightkeeper's Daughter (3 page)

She said, “So get a computer.”

“I’m
trying to
!” he said. His voice was full of anguish. “I’ve been telling him that. I need computers and spectrographs and sound editors. If I had that, I could do it. We could
talk
to the whales.”

Tatiana is staring at her. She’s biting her lip, holding her doll in front of her chest.

“Oh, Tat,” says Squid. The puzzlement on the child’s face makes her laugh. “It’s all right, baby. I’m just thinking. I’m just remembering.” It seems to her now that she must have been
talking
as well; she has found herself standing in the arc of the window, in the place Alastair had stood before, in that last year of his life.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s look upstairs.”

Tatiana follows, starting off with a jerk and staying at a distance, as though tied to her mother by a bit of string. She bumps up the stairs, two feet on each step, clinging to the rail.

At the top is a landing, a door on each side. Alastair, choosing first, took the room to the west, with a small window looking over the forest. The other room is larger, and the windows bigger, facing east toward the tower. Squid thought she had got the better room, until darkness came on her first day in Gomorrah, and the glare came in through the window. It lit the room in a pulse of light, and again five seconds later. It flashed through the curtains so brightly that she didn’t sleep at all for three nights. Then the fog came in, and she heard her father go out from the house next door to start up the horn. And the blast from it shook the glass in the panes; it shook in her teeth and her jaw. But the fog muted the light, and Squid fell asleep in a moment. She was used to the sound of the horn.

“Here is where I lived,” says Squid, opening the next door.

This room, too, is just the same. The bureau drawers poke out at different lengths, bubbling bits of clothing. There’s a sweater on the floor and a parka on a chair, and everywhere there’s muddle. Only the bed is different, the blankets and sheets torn from the mattress, the pillows scrunched against the headboard.

Suddenly, in the doorway, Squid sees herself fleeing from here, running in her nightgown, screaming down the stairs. She pulls the door shut and pulls it again; it rattles and bangs on its hinges.

Murray catches his breath at the top of the steps. He gazes down at his fresh-seeded grass, at the trails of footprints across a patch of loam. Then he sighs, and sorts out two mismatched suitcases from the neat stacks that he’s made at the winch.

“Leave them,” says Hannah. “Squid will get them. Squid and me.”

“Best do it now,” he says. He rubs his hands, then tries to take both the bags at once. He grunts at the weight of them. “Good lord. If I start off now, I might just get them up to the house and back before the boat comes to fetch her again.”

Hannah smiles. He won’t leave them here; she knows that. She takes one herself, and it saddens her a bit to see that Murray doesn’t protest. He goes off at a terrible slant, balancing the weight of his bag with his arm thrust absurdly from his side, his shorts sagging down. She carries the other in front of her, both hands on the straps, taking awkward little steps as the suitcase thumps at her knees. And still he leads her along the path, though a shortcut on the grass would halve the distance to the small house.

They pass the whirligigs without looking, the big house without stopping. In Hannah’s mind they’re a pair of mules, plodding along without thinking. Her eyes are cast down at the path, watching Murray’s heels. Only once does she glance up, to judge the distance left to go.

The small house was empty when she came to the island. It stayed that way for thirteen years, except for the few days at a time when the junior keepers came, nervous as suitors. One of them left in tears. Murray called them dogs. “Lazy, incompetent dogs.” All twelve of them were just the same. And then Alastair moved into the house, Squid a year later.

Now it’s empty again, a monument to the ruined lives of Lizzie Island. When she follows Murray up the wooden stairs, across the porch to the doorway, it’s the first time she’s been so close to the house since that nightmarish autumn and the death of her child.

Even now she won’t go more than a step through the door. She doesn’t close it behind her; she’ll never do that. She puts down her suitcase and stays right there, in the sun and the sound of the birds.

It’s not the same for Murray. But she knows that Murray visits here. If he comes into the big house through the kitchen door, and goes straight to the sink to splash his face with water, she knows he’s been to see Alastair’s room.

The floorboards creak upstairs. Murray’s head turns to follow the sound. And down through the ceiling comes Squid’s voice, high with excitement.

“He kept a lamp here on the sill,” she says. “A storm lantern. Poor Alastair.” She laughs. “He hoped that one night the main light would burn out in the tower, and his lantern would save a whole ship from wrecking on the rocks.” Her voice fades away. “I don’t know what happened to that lantern.”

Hannah knows. The old brass lamp sits ready at the window of her own bedroom. Murray keeps the wick trimmed and the glass polished, the bowl full of good, fresh oil. Many times she’s wondered why. “It’s tradition” was all that Murray ever told her.

Now he blushes.

“And look, Tat. Oh, look!” says Squid. “Here’s his flute. He was so good with his flute. Everything he did he was good at.”

“That’s it,” says Murray. He heads for the stairs. “I don’t want them fiddling with that.”

Squid is still talking. “He could play such amazing things. He played for the whales.”

Murray holds on to the newel post. Leaning forward, he bellows up the stairs. “Squid!”

“We’ll look later.” A door closes and Squid comes bounding down the steps. Tatiana, behind her, totters along with the doll in her fist.

Murray says, “Elizabeth.”

Even Hannah is surprised. Squid looks at her father the same way she always did when he used her real name. But now she’s close to his own height on level ground, and fairly towers over him from two steps up. She flicks her hair from her shoulder.

He says, “I know you think you’ve a right to do this, but I’ll ask you to respect his things. I don’t want anything moved.”

She squints and frowns. “Why?” she asks.

“Because I’m asking you.” Murray scratches his hair. “For the love of mercy, I don’t think it’s so much to ask.”

“But why?”

Hannah’s annoyed by the little upturning lilt in the voice, by the way Squid blinks and tilts her head like a bird.

“Why, Dad?” Squid asks again.

Murray doesn’t blink. “Because,” he says, “that’s the one thing we have left of him. You can understand that, can’t you?”

“Well, gee, that’s funny,” says Squid. “He never let you in there when he was alive. Did he?” Then she pushes past her father, squeezing by with her breasts crushed against his arm, and flounces past Hannah to the porch.

Murray turns to watch her, his face as red as a warning light.

“You see?” Squid looks at Hannah as she passes. “We’d better stick together, Mom. It’s the men against the girls.”

Hannah hasn’t forgotten. It’s the way it always was. “Men against the girls,” Murray would say, and they faced one another across a badminton net, a cribbage board, a line drawn in the sand for tug-of-war. Men against the girls, and they all laughed and shouted as the men, inevitably, beat the girls hollow again.

But Squid never complained. Hannah wouldn’t have understood if she had. They were a happy family then. Murray and Alastair were as much friends as they were father and son. Squid and Hannah were the same.

The men against the girls was just the way it was, and Hannah never knew it bothered anyone until the day Squid left the island. There were only three of them on Lizzie then. They stood on the boardwalk as the helicopter settled on the pad, sagging on its wheels like a tired bee. The wind lashed at them in a flurry of twigs and sand. It stung their faces and made them turn toward the forest.

Squid was crying.

The engine roared; the rotors thrashed at the air. They had to shout to hear each other.

“Better go!” said Murray.

Hannah told him: “You’re coming.”

“I can’t.” He hunched up his shoulders. “The light—”

“A replacement!” she shouted. “He could be here tomorrow.”

He puckered his face against a hail of grit that swirled around them. He shook his head.

They had talked about it; they were all to go when the time came. Squid knew nothing of the city, of hospitals. She wanted her father along.

“Dad!” she cried.

“Sorry.” He ducked his head. He put a hand on Hannah’s shoulder, a hand on Squid’s, and he pushed them toward that machine on the pad. The pilots were staring out through tinted glass, helmets on their heads. The side door was open, and a crewman beckoned in the downdraft.

Murray pushed harder. “Go!” he said. “Good luck!”

They ran out, Hannah and Squid. They ducked under the rotors, though the blades hammered round far above their heads. They threw their little bags inside and clambered up. Then the door swung shut, and the wind stopped on the instant, but inside the machine it was loud as thunder.

They were strapped into seats. The motor whined and the rotors chopped faster and faster. Then they tilted and rose backward into the sky. They pivoted past the trees, and Murray stepped out onto the pad. He leaned back his head and watched them go. And the pad, the forest, the whole island, twirled around him.

Squid was frightened. She sat in her seat stiff and pale, white like a pillar of salt. She had started all this, and it couldn’t be stopped. And they flew off to face the ending alone.

She tapped at Hannah’s shoulder. “Well, Mom,” she said. “Now it’s the
world
against the girls.”

Hannah feels sorry for Murray. He’s watching her like a lost little boy. Such hopes he had for this. The planning he did, for his daughter’s return.

Squid stalks out onto the porch. She snaps open her purse, then lights a cigarette. She breathes out the smoke with a tremendous sigh.

“She smokes?” says Murray, deliberately quiet. Then he smiles sadly. “Och, it must be hard on her, coming home like this.”

Behind him, Tatiana is trapped on the stairs. She can’t get by him, this big block of a man. She tries to scoot between his legs, but there isn’t room. She can’t climb to the rail. So she reaches out her doll and—ever so softly— touches its hand on the back of his leg. He smiles at her, and her face brightens.

Murray bends down. He picks her up with his hands under her arms. She’s frightened by that, and drops the doll in her hurry to grab on to something.

Murray turns and puts her gently down. “There you go,” he says. “There’s the wee Tatty, safe on the floor.”

She’ll bolt, thinks Hannah. She’ll go screaming through the door. But she doesn’t. She stands right where Murray put her, her head tilted back so far that she almost topples over. She’s grinning, or sort of grinning.

“And here’s your dolly.” He collects it from the floor and puts it in her hands. “There’s your Barney doll.”

She clutches it to her chest as a toddler would, shoulders thrust forward as she wriggles in excitement. Murray stares at Hannah over the child’s head. “Can’t she talk?” he asks.

Squid snorts. “Of course she can.” She drops her cigarette on the porch and grinds it out on the fresh paint. “She doesn’t, that’s all. She never talks to people she doesn’t know.”

Tatiana holds up her hands toward Murray. He lifts her again, and she buries her face in the curve of his neck.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I think it’s time to see the new sandbox. You want to play in the sand, little Tat?”

She nods against his neck. “Hmm?” asks Murray.

“Forget it, Dad,” says Squid.

But Murray’s so stubborn. “What do you say? Would you like to do that?”

“Play me sandbox,” says Tatiana.

And Squid looks nearly terrified.

chapter three

THEY FOLLOW THE PATHS, MURRAY IN FRONT, his boots leaving scuffs in the gravel. Hannah, behind him, sees the way the child fits in his arm, and she’s struck for a moment with a powerful nostalgia.

She sees him carrying Squid down the same path, toward the white bulk of the tower. It’s an image of absolute clarity, a picture from eons ago. It’s so strong that it scares her. To go back to that part of her life, to live it all again, is a horror in her mind. She holds on to that child who’s now a woman. She puts her arm tight around Squid’s waist.

There’s not a hint of fat, no need at all for a belt to keep the jeans in place. She slips a finger in through an empty loop and feels the denim moving stiffly in her hand. “I’m glad you’ve come,” she says.

Squid sighs. “I wish Dad would say that.”

“You know he never would,” she says. “But he’s happy too.” And then she adds, “He told me so,” a foolish lie.

“Sure.” Squid drags her feet, stepping sideways just enough to nudge Hannah’s hand from her hip. “He’s on at me already. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. It’s like I never left.”

Hannah nods. She wants to say, “Oh, just grow up!” But she daren’t do that.

“I bet he blames me for what happened,” says Squid. “I bet he thinks I killed Alastair.”

“Oh, nonsense.”

“But it was him, wasn’t it? It was all Dad’s fault what happened.”

Hannah doesn’t answer. Really, she thinks that’s true.

Even Squid is delighted with the sandbox. She drops to her knees and plays with the toys, pushing the wooden
Darby
close against the lighthouse.

“Dad, this is great,” says Squid. “It really is.”

Murray sets Tatiana onto the sand, on her feet, with her little hand cupped over his wrist. “Go on,” he says. “It’s all for you, Tatiana.”

He smiles at her, then backs away, and she reaches for him with both her hands.

“She wants you to stay,” says Hannah.

“Och,” he says. “I can’t do that. There’s supplies to put away, the weathers to do. You know how it is.”

Hannah and Squid look at each other. “Work first, play after!” they shout in unison.

Murray grins. And for a moment it seems everything is just the way it used to be. Tatiana busies herself with the wooden ferry. She drives the cars down the ramp, then sits her doll on the empty deck. It rides atop the boat like a giantess.

“That’s good, Tat,” says Murray. “You give your Barney doll a ride.” Then he stands and tugs his belt. “Right,” he says. “I’m off then.”

“Don’t hurry,” says Hannah. “And, Murray, don’t carry too much at a time.”

He answers with a wave of his hand, already on his way toward the tractor. Squid leans back, a look of fondness on her face, and Hannah sighs to see it. It has always surprised her how Squid can leap from one emotion to another, with the same ease that took her bounding down the beach along tangled piles of logs.

“I thought I’d die if he said that once more,” says Squid. “Hasn’t he ever heard of a Barbie doll?”

“How could he?” says Hannah. “You never had one. You never had a doll in your life.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t want one.” She shrugs. “I guess he was scared I would kill it.” Then she rocks forward and makes a big show of getting to her feet. “Oh,” she says, “I feel so old sometimes. Come on, Mom. I’ll help you with the weathers.”

“And what about Tatiana?”

“What about her?” she says. “When I was that age I was rowing a boat by myself.”

It’s an exaggeration, but not that much of one. “Independence,” Murray liked to say. “The best thing you can do for a child is, really, nothing at all.” He said it a lot, Hannah remembers now.

Squid takes one more minute at the sandbox. She parks the tiny wooden cars neatly at the edge. “Stay here,” she tells Tatiana. “I won’t be long, okay?”

Hannah walks half a step in front, along the path and over the trestle. It dips down from each end to the middle, but even there it’s thirty feet above the shards and crags of rock, the water torn to froth. But on winter days, with a southeaster blowing sixty knots, the surf rages wild, booming in the gap. Whole logs pinwheel on the waves and hammer at the wooden bridge, and no one—not even Murray—ventures from island to tower across it.

Squid slows at the middle, but doesn’t stop. She says, “Mom, remember when—”

“I’ll never forget,” says Hannah.

Squid laughs, and hurries to come alongside.

Once, when Squid was young, Hannah found her dangling from the center of the bridge, hanging like a bat from her knees. She had a comb wrapped in tissue paper, and was humming through it. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Hannah hauled her off. “Why on earth were you doing that?” she asked. “Because,” said Squid, all of six years old, “Alastair said it couldn’t be done.”

Squid is still smiling as they trudge up the end of the bridge. She veers to her left toward the screen, the slatted white box of weather instruments.

“Don’t bother with that,” says Hannah.

“Why not? You have to do climats.”

“Just twice a day now,” says Hannah. “No one cares about humidities.”

“Since when?” Squid’s fingers hover at the latch.

“A while,” says Hannah. “Oh, your father was angry. He said we might as well cut a hole in the front of that box and let the birds makes houses inside.”

“I’ll bet he did the climats anyway,” says Squid.

Hannah laughs. It’s true. Murray stuck to his old routine until the Coast Guard men got rude. Then he told her, “Why don’t they shut us down and cast us both in bronze? We’re nothing but ornaments as it is.”

In the whitewashed room at the tower’s base, the scanner’s on, voices chattering. Green Island is reporting northeast winds of twenty knots. Squid nods toward the speaker. “That doesn’t sound like Mawson.”

“It’s not,” says Hannah. She opens the barometer box and squints at the level. “Mawson left two years ago.”

“He left?”

“Shhh!” Hannah always fumbles with the tables, the writing now so tiny.

“Sorry,” says Squid, with a little grimace. She watches as Hannah adjusts the reading for temperature and elevation. The moment the box is shut she says, “I thought they’d be there forever.”

“Well, so did he, I suppose,” says Hannah.

“But
she
didn’t think that way.”

“No.” She peers at the dial and writes the levels down: only ten knots now, but gusting still. The swell roars outside.

“Three-foot moderate,” says Squid.

“I’ll make it four.” Hannah was always more cautious than Squid.

It’s Triple Island’s turn now on the circuit. Squid gives a little twinge at the gap that Hannah hardly catches anymore; Lucy and Lawyer have been missing from the reports for two years, both automated, their familiar voices lost forever, as though the islands themselves vanished in some tidal catastrophe. At times, Hannah thinks of the lights as folks in a rest home; one day another one’s gone, and the others wonder who’ll be the next.

“Who’s at Triple?” asks Squid. “Anyone new?”

“No, he’s still there,” says Hannah, knowing it’s Corrigan she’s asking about. Squid used to stay after the weathers to chat with him on the ALAN circuit, the party line for keepers. They giggled and laughed, gushing fictional endearments just because they knew everyone was listening up and down the coast. It amuses Hannah to think there are still people on the lights who won’t speak to Corrigan, shocked as they are by a romance between a middle-aged man and a girl not a third his age.

Now it’s Lizzie’s turn. Squid takes the handset from its cradle. She pushes the button, and talks.

“Who’s that?” Her voice is unfamiliar at Coast Guard radio.

“It’s Squid,” she says. “Squid McCrae.”

A babble of voices squawks from the speaker. She knows them all, old friends she recognizes only like a blind person—only by sound. Friends she sat up with on nights of screaming wind, when waves battered at tower walls and the spray—thick as snow—set automatic horns howling like lost souls. She sat with them on nights crackling with electrical storms, on days when tidal waves were zooming toward the islands at six hundred miles an hour. And on clear nights, too; on perfect nights, just to hear another voice in this huge and lonely blackness of the ocean.

All the voices come at once, bubbling with happiness and questions. Squid talks for a while, then abruptly passes the handset to Hannah. She jams it toward her, a sentence half finished, her lip quivering and her eyes blinking madly. And Hannah reads out the weathers over the sound of her daughter sobbing in the corner.

When she hangs up, she fiddles unnecessarily with the pencil and the book. Squid sniffles and gasps as the speaker drones on, through Bonilla and Langara and on to the south. And after the last one has reported, the circuit buzzes with this latest and exciting gossip. A voice new to the lights, not thinking who might hear, asks, “Wasn’t she pregnant? Wasn’t that the girl who went crazy?”

Squid lets out a stifled little cry. Then bolts through the door.

Hannah knows it’s a silly fear. But for some weird reason she expects to find her daughter dangling head down from the bridge. And the truth, she sees, is nearly as bad.

Squid is folded up on a smooth shelf of rock, one of her childhood places, a stony love seat on a clifftop. She’s got a handful of pebbles, and she’s flinging them one by one into the sea. She says, accusingly, “What did you tell them?”

“Nothing,” says Hannah. “You know I was with you. I—”

“Then what did
he
tell them?” A pebble hurtles down.

“Squid, that isn’t fair.” Just looking at that shelf of rock gives Hannah a feeling of spinning. “Your father wouldn’t say a word. And you know that better than anybody.”

Squid brushes the rest of her pebbles from her palm. They skitter down the rock face, leaping from the stone. In her silence she acknowledges that it’s true about Murray. He would never talk about problems, or pains.

“It’s only gossip,” says Hannah. “You’ve seen how it works. The rumors spread
because
we kept it to ourselves.”

“Well, my ears are still burning,” says Squid. She shifts to the end of the hollowed seat, making room for her mother. But Hannah can’t possibly join her, though it’s only one step down from the grass. She sits instead at the top, as close as she dares to the edge.

“Mom?” says Squid. “Does Dad think I’m staying a long time?”

“He hopes you will. It’s what he dreams about, that we’re all together.”

“All of us?”

“Yes. Alastair too.”

Squid draws her legs up on the shelf. Hannah shivers; if she rolls sideways, she’s gone. “Mom, does he dream that Alastair’s still alive?”

Hannah has wondered that. She has seen him asleep in his chair, the old windup alarm ticking beside him, set to wake him for the weathers. She’s seen, when he’s sleeping, a smile on his face like none she’s seen in years when he’s awake. Sometimes he says his name, Alastair’s name, and she never wakes him then. It would be too sad to see his face if he came awake thinking it was Alastair nudging his shoulder.

“Mom?” says Squid. “Do you ever wonder where Alastair is?”

“Sometimes,” says Hannah. “Yes, sometimes I do.”

“I see him in a library,” says Squid. “A big quiet room full of dusty books, every book that was ever written. He just sits and reads. And he doesn’t have to squint to see them.”

“That’s nice,” says Hannah. “He’d be so happy there.”

The
Darby
is going slowly down the channel as Hannah walks back with her daughter. The water lifts at its bow and curls back in a ripple. The smoke from the funnel thickens into swirls of brown and black.

Squid is watching it leave. By the way she slows as she walks, the way her head turns, Hannah wonders if she’s wishing she were on it.

The whistle blows and they each raise a hand, the smallest of gestures. Hannah lets her scarf dangle down, swinging at her ankles.

Squid says, “I’m worried about Tat.”

“Oh, you’re doing all right,” says Hannah. “She’s a bit shy, that’s all.”

She feels she’s spoken too quickly and somehow annoyed her daughter. Squid rolls her eyes. “That’s not what I mean,” she says.

“Then tell me.”

It’s almost there, an answer on her lips. But Squid simply stops on the path. “Oh my God,” she says.

Hannah can’t see what Squid has seen. Her eyes aren’t as clear as they used to be.

“What is it?” she asks. “Squid, what’s the matter?”

“A bird,” says Squid. “A crow.” She hurries along, and Hannah trots to keep up.

It’s not a crow, but a raven. It’s enormous—nearly half of Tatiana’s size—its feathers unruly and ragged. It’s perched on Murray’s toy lighthouse, just a foot from her. But she seems oblivious to it, busy with the wooden cars and the chunky little ferry. If the bird stretched its wings it could touch her.

“Tatiana!” shouts Squid. But only the raven looks up. It twists on the top of the lighthouse with a sharp clatter of talons. And then, with no hurry at all, it spreads its wings and rises, with a melodic croak and a whistle of feathers, up to the roof and on to the sky.

The sand is pitted with tracks, with ruts and scraped-away hollows, as though a dozen birds had scuffed among the wooden boats. Hannah stares at the patterns of crosses and diamonds as Squid, kneeling down, starts to scrape them away. She does it almost frantically, and the grains rise up through her fingers; they flow past her hand to make wide sweeping fans. And Tatiana keeps playing, until Murray comes up, and she turns to look at him with a grin on her face.

“Hello, Tatty,” he says. And then surely he sees the tracks that are left, for his head jerks back with surprise. “So.” He smiles at Hannah. “We’ve another one like that.”

She was thinking the same thing, remembering how the wild birds flocked around Alastair. They filled the trees, ravens next to gulls, cormorants with crows. They spaced themselves along the branches to hear the music that he played. And this raven from the sandbox might have joined them then. They live a human lifetime, Hannah knows. He might have been on Lizzie when Murray came to live here.

“It’s not the same,” says Squid. Her hand rubs at the sand so hard that it squeaks. “One raven, that was all. It was picking for shells and fleas.”