The Lightkeeper's Daughter (5 page)

“Maybe you should teach her how to really swim,” Hannah said. But Murray saw no point in that.

“You might as well let her do what she wants,” he said. “It’s what she’ll do at any rate.”

Murray opens the legs of the Barbie like a pair of scissors. He sits it in the sand, its arms reaching stiffly forward. To Hannah, it looks like a ridiculous shrunken woman asking to be picked up. Murray stoops again, and folds its arms to its sides.

“She looks like you,” he says. “Don’t you think? A little bit?”

Hannah knows right away he’s not comparing her to the Barbie doll. He’s talking about Tatiana. This is his way; he analyzes conversations.

“Squid seems angry with me,” he says. “I don’t know why.” Then again he bends the doll, stretching it flat in the sand. Finally he’s satisfied, and he stands up. “Why is that, Hannah?”

She touches his arm. “I think her plans aren’t working out.”

“What plans are those, then?”

Hannah doesn’t know; she can only guess. “I think she’s having troubles with Tatiana.” The child is like a moon snail, sealed up in a hard and shuffling shell. Hannah can’t imagine Tatiana having friends. She can’t see her lasting a single day in any sort of school. “I think that Squid might want our help.”

“A first time for everything,” says Murray. But he dwells on this, too, as they walk toward the big house. The sun has moved behind the tower; a shadowy finger lies stretched on the grass. In a few hours the beacon will be stronger than the sun, and the top of the shadow, the lantern, will flicker in the flashing of the light.

“Och, I still don’t see it,” says Murray. “If she wants our help why doesn’t she ask?”

“Maybe she’s waiting to be told.”

“And who’ll do that, then?” Murray grimaces. “Who’ll take the first poke at the tiger?”

“Oh, Murray.”

“Och, I suppose she’s only upset. She comes home and everything’s changed.”

Changed?
Hannah nearly laughs.
What can change?
she wants to ask, but doesn’t. The island never will; Murray never will. As far as Squid could possibly know, not a single thing has changed.

She lays her scarf across her shoulders and sways against Murray as they walk along. He’s still thinking, still brooding, but he surprises her with what he asks next.

“Do you ever wonder,” he says, “if the old keeper had any children?”

Murray didn’t tell her that first day that the old keeper had hanged himself. For eight days or more his body dangled from the tower, swaying in autumn winds with a bit of rope around his neck. The sun rose on him and set again; it rose and set as he twirled slowly round in a big old oil-skin coat as black as death. And she’d sat there with Murray in the very same place.

It was Squid who saw the keeper first. She was only five years old. On a night of electrical storms, she looked up and saw him there. “There’s a man on the tower,” she said, matter-of-fact, and Murray went terribly pale.

And then Hannah saw him too, on a misty, sultry morning. He stood staring out to sea, and then he turned to look at her. And he vanished in a swirl of fog.

“So you’re one of those,” said Murray.

“One of what?” she asked.

“A ghost seer. Not everyone sees ghosts, you know.”

Murray doesn’t walk with her all the way to the house. He veers off instead toward his favorite place. He’ll change the oil in the number three engine, the one that never runs. Then he’ll sit for a while in the warm, diesely rumble of the powerhouse. Hannah thinks of it as his little womb, a place for him to think.

He leaves her by the steps. The wind is easing off, the sea is dropping. She can still hear the surf, if she listens, but it’s less of a roar now. By nightfall, the wind sock will sag from its pole like a flaccid old condom. The gulls will settle in the channel like rows of net floats. The auklets will come hurtling home.

Hannah stands alone. In a month at most the winds will shift to the south. Then the gray whales will pass the island on their southward way to Mexico. The humpbacks will go off on their journey to Hawaii, and the birds will pass in the thousands. The Undertaker will come, and Hannah will be off on her way.

She can’t stand it anymore, winter on the island. Days eight hours long, endless nights crammed with Murray into a brooding, shrunken world. The storms, one after another. The rain. And worse, her fear of the snow.

It’s a secret that she’ll keep from Squid: She hasn’t spent a winter on the island for three years. Since her daughter fled, Hannah hasn’t lived on Lizzie for more than five months at a stretch. She comes and goes—like an auklet, she thinks—struggling blindly to find a home. But if this is what Murray meant by everything changing, it’s the first time he’s ever said a word about it.

chapter four

ALASTAIR’S ROOM SMELLS CLEAN AND fresh. It’s dusted and polished and perfect. His books are set precisely on the shelves, every one as straight as a soldier. The afghan, with its weird Maltese patterns that change from shapes into people and back into shapes, might be a drum skin stretched on his bed. But along one wall are cockeyed, twisted shelves, nearly the only thing in the world that he made for himself.

It isn’t a sad place, as Squid had thought it might be. Really, it feels no different than it ever did, as though Alastair—at any moment—might come suddenly up the stairs and find her here again.

“Why don’t you just give up?” he asked her, the last time.

He startled her that day. She felt her heart leap, her shoulders tighten, and she almost screamed, but didn’t. She kept her back toward him as he went to sit in the window seat, beside the closet door.

“I told you,” he said. “It’s not in the closet.”

“I didn’t look in your closet,” she said, trying to sound affronted.

“Then how did this piece of paper fall off the top of the door?”

He reached down from his chair and picked up a tiny piece of folded yellow paper. The light from the window glared on his glasses. It made them opaque, as pale as his skin, as though underneath he had no eyes at all.

“You’re nuts,” she said. “You know that, Alastair? You’re crazy as a bug.”

He laughed. It was the last time she ever heard him laugh. He said, “Now where would I put it? What a problem that is. What a knotty little problem.”

He looked like a professor, like a mad scientist, his head bulging above the glasses, the hair that he never combed all clotted into spikes and wads.

He said, “You can look as long as you want, Squid. But it will be doomsday when you find it.”

She sits on the bed and touches the things on the shelf, but so gently that they don’t even move from their places. She stares at the map that he made as a child, reading the silly names they’d invented together.

He did everything so seriously. He learned from his father the importance of work, the sense of duty above everything else. Even as children, it seems to Squid, they worked like slaves at the lightkeeping tasks, the endless chores of painting and rust chipping, of weeding and planting, that had to be finished to Murray’s exactness before he would spare a moment or two for anything like pleasure.

“Work first, play after.” That was the rule they lived by. And it made Alastair what he was; it doomed him to a lonely, frustrated life.

She takes the map in her hands. It has been folded and unfolded many times. Its edges are brittle where the salt water soaked it and dried. Some of the writing is smudged.

It was raining that day.

They stood at the edge of the water, the boat on the beach and all their belongings beside it. Murray had brought a load of things down with the tractor.

“Just remember,” he said. “There’s nothing there that can hurt you. There’s no beasties or monsters. You’ll see nothing at night you don’t see in the day.”

“Oh, yes we will,” said Alastair. He was eight years old; his birthday had passed just a month before. He didn’t wear glasses yet, but he squinted a lot. “The auklets aren’t there in the daytime, Dad. The rock beetles only come out in the night.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” said Murray. “Don’t be scared just because it’s dark.”

“I won’t!” cried Squid. She remembers now the way she said it, the way Murray smiled when she put her hand against her hip. “I’ve got this!” she said, and touched the knife in its leather pouch. “And if anything comes after us I’ll slash it into bits!”

“Good girl!” said Murray. “And you’ve got your life jackets too?”

Alastair nodded.

“Then I’ll be off,” said Murray.

“Dad,” Alastair called after him. “You won’t be worried, will you?”

“Of course not,” he said. “You’re on your own, the pair of you. The best thing a parent can do for a child is—”

“Really, nothing at all!” cried Alastair and Squid together.

Murray beamed. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, and went off on the tractor.

They loaded the boat with all their gear. They filled it so full they had to wait for the tide to come in and float it off the beach. Alastair sat ready at the oars, sweeping them over the sand now and then as the water filled in around them. “Get out and push,” he said.

There was nothing she wouldn’t do for Alastair.

She turns from the bed at the sound of squeaking floors. Tatiana is there, her thumb in her mouth, a finger crooked over her nose.

“Hey,” says Squid. “I thought you were sleeping.”

The child stares at her with huge, wondering eyes.

“Lonely?” No answer. “You want to sleep in here? You want to lie down beside Mom?”

Squid pats the afghan, but Tatiana comes only as far as Alastair’s mat. She plops to the floor on the braided rope, falling backward with her knees stiff. Her thumb pops from her mouth like a cork, but she puts it back, blinks at Squid, then settles down on her side.

“There you go. I used to lie there myself sometimes.” Squid goes back to the map, holding it nearly flat, staring at the drawings Alastair made—the landforms—as though by turning them sideways she might see the islands rising from the paper sea.

The big one sprawls across the middle, every curve of beach precisely drawn. The outer islands are just the same, but only on the sides that face the big one. At the time, they were moons, with just one face familiar, and all the rest a mystery. The backs of them, on the map, are sketched in faint and cautious lines.

He climbed the tower to draw it. Of course she went with him, to pass him the pencils and eraser as he commanded, to call out the bearings from the handheld compass that he couldn’t quite read when it was right before his eyes. They drew a world with the tower right at the center.

“When we finish this,” said Alastair, “we’ll go exploring, and we’ll discover the islands. We’ll name them, every one.”

“Why don’t we name them from here?” she asked.

“You have to land on them to name them,” he said. “That’s the way it works.”

“Then why do we need a map?” she said.

“So we know where we’re going.”

It didn’t make sense to her. Only Alastair could understand. He had the map held down on a clipboard that he leaned against the railing. His tongue came out from his mouth as he drew.

“Take a bearing,” he said, “on that island there.”

“Which one?”

He pointed. “That one, Squid.”

“You mean North Island?”

“Oh, Jiminy, Squid,” he said, sounding just like Murray. “It’s not called North Island. Not until we get there.”

He drew every bit of land that he could see, with lovely squiggles for the shore. And the farther he got from the tower, the more his lines grew faint, until they faded away into nothing. He drew great slashes at the edges. “Reefs,” he wrote to the north. At the south, “Here there be rocks.”

“You mean here there
are
rocks,” she said.

He told her, “You wouldn’t understand.”

And the next day they set off, in Murray’s glass-bottomed boat. They hoisted a broomstick and flew a flag that Alastair made, a little red cross on a square of white. He said, “We’ll plant that flag and claim all the land for ourselves.”

It seems so silly now, though at the time it was such an adventure. A
mission,
Alastair called it. “You can be captain,” he said, and wasn’t she proud of that? Until he told her, “
I’ll
be the admiral, and the navigator.”

Tatiana’s not quite asleep, but nearly. Her eyes open and close as she watches her mother. She’s small and fragile, and Squid can’t imagine letting her go wandering off alone in a boat, without a thought for her safety.

But Hannah didn’t even bother to see them away.

They went alone, like Columbus did, proud at the time of their independence. But now it seems sad to Squid. She wonders sometimes if she was ever truly loved.

She smiles at her daughter. “Okay, Tatiana?”

The map is covered with names. Most of them are ridiculous, written in all sizes of letters. “BlAck sKulL ISLaNd.” “BiG RocK rOCk.” “CaMPfIre PoinT.” Squid is embarrassed to see them now, in her own pathetic writing. Only one of the names ever came into use; the little rocky island with its group of huddled cedar trees, the place that would become Alastair’s refuge, was called Almost Nothing Atoll.

Squid lays the paper back on the bed. She looks up at the shelves crowded with books, along the bent and twisted ones, down to the bureau with a microscope on top, searching for a strip of red.

Alastair started his notebook that day. He used it to record the times they arrived on each island, the interesting things they found. It was only later that he used it for a journal. And then he was so secret about it that she didn’t even know he was doing it until weeks before his death.

“What are you writing?” she asked, surprising him at his desk.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Let me see.”

He was so sad then. He was skinny and pale. He folded himself over top of the book, shielding it with his arms and his chest. “It’s private,” he said.

“You let me look before.” She walked up and stood beside him. “You showed it to me all the time.”

“That was years ago,” he said. His glasses slid from his nose and hit with a thud on the desk. They stood on their lenses, rocking softly, magnifying ovals of the wood.

“Come on,” she said. “Please, Alastair?”

His eyes were puffy and pale, so strange that she realized she hadn’t seen him once without his glasses in at least a year or more. There was a huge bright welt across his nose. “Leave me alone,” he said.

“Are you writing about me?”

His whole face turned as red as the welt. “I write about
things,
” he said. “About stuff.”

“I want to see.”

She tried to force her arms under his. He fought against her. He pushed her away and slammed the book shut. He leaned his elbows on it, his pointed spikes of elbows. And then he collapsed; he started to cry. “It’s private,” he said again. “Let me have
something
on this island that’s just my own.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Please promise me that.”

“I promise,” she said.

Still, he didn’t trust her. He hid the book, and it took her nearly half an hour to find it, tucked where it was behind the others on the shelf, standing up against the back of the bookcase. She took it to her own room and sat with her shoulders against the closed door. And she went first to the last thing he’d written.

I’m drowning. Can’t breathe, can’t surface, can’t escape. Dad just
WILL NOT LISTEN!!!! Mom can’t persuade him and won’t
even try anymore. Thank God for Squid. It would be HELL here
if it wasn’t for Squid. I’m afraid to tell her that I think I’m

The page ended there, and she didn’t turn it. She closed the book, feeling dirty and ashamed. She felt just the way she had the time Murray found her sunbathing naked on the back porch of Gomorrah, feet together, arms spread wide across the hot red paint. She touched the book to her forehead; she rapped it on her brow.

But the book had a power. It called to her like a siren to a sailor, tempting her with all its secrets. She felt that she would not be able to set it down; it would cling like tar to her fingers. Or if she could, it would only leap again into her hands. She couldn’t possibly
not
find out what Alastair was too frightened to tell her.

I think I’m going blind.

I think I’m going insane.

She cracked open the book; her finger still marked the right place. She wanted to see that one sentence and no other. No matter what it said, she would not read any more.

Alastair’s letters slanted backward. They leapt over the page with no thought for the lines. They shouted at her, full of rage and frustration.

I’m afraid to tell her that I think I’m

She plucked at the edge of the page, peeling back the corner. And suddenly she hurled the book away. It hit the wall and fluttered down like a wounded bird. It crumpled on the floor, upright with the pages fanned toward her. And she sat, and she stared at the thing; she couldn’t betray him that way.

In her whole life she’d met no more than fifty people. But no one on earth could have a greater sense of righteousness than Alastair. “I have a rule,” he’d told her. “Don’t do something if there’s a single person—anywhere— that you don’t want to know what you’re doing.”

She collected the book, and she put it back where she found it. She was sitting downstairs when Alastair came in from the rain. He hung up his slicker. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. And then, hoping to make him smile, “Really, nothing at all.”

He never smiled anymore. He frowned at her as he took off his glasses and wiped the rain from the lenses. He went upstairs. And a moment later he was back, storming down the steps, waving the book in his hand.

“You read it!” he said. “I asked you and asked you, and you went in and read it.”

“I didn’t,” she said.

“You did!” He was whining. He trembled like a whirligig man. “I put a hair between the pages. And now it’s gone. And there’s no one on this whole stupid island who would do this except for you.”

“You put a hair in there?” she said. “You’re a nut, Alastair.”

“Don’t turn it onto me,” he said. “You went through my room, and you found the book and you read it.”

“I can’t believe it.” She shook her head. Inside, she felt awful, like an apple rotted below the skin. She looked at the ceiling and sighed. “He put a hair between the pages. What sort of a mind would think of that?”

Alastair breathed through his nose, a whistle and rasp. His hair stood up in tufts, and water dripped from the bony point of his chin. He sort of shrank inside himself, like a fan folding closed. “How could you do this?” he asked. “I trusted you, Squid.”

“You did not,” she said with a laugh. “You hid it away at the back of the shelves. And anyway . . .” She stood up. “I
didn’t
read it, so you don’t have to torture yourself. I found it, but I couldn’t read it.”