The Lightkeeper's Daughter (6 page)

He didn’t believe her, not fully. And she knew there was nothing more to say. She went out in the rain, and Alastair went back to his room. He turned the radio on and set the volume as high as he could. They only got the one station, the public broadcasting, and the house shook with the sound of opera. The deep voice of a tenor vibrated in the windows and the walls as Alastair, with a hammering and a screeching of nails, hid his book in a new place, one she would never find in all the hours that she looked.

Night after night she lay awake, reliving that moment when she fumbled through the shelves and found his book behind the others. She was haunted by his secret, but couldn’t ask him what it was. And she wasn’t fully sure that she didn’t already know it.

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

In her imaginings, a parade of nightmares passed before her.

I think I’m going to run away.

I think I’m going to murder them.

I think I’m going to kill myself.

Even now, more than four years later, Squid regrets what she did. She’s sorry that she ever looked at the diary, but she’s more sorry that she didn’t read what her brother had written. She can’t help thinking that she might have saved him if she had.

Oh, she tried to get it out of him. She asked him, “Alastair, dear. Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

“Like what?” he said. “What sort of thing?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. They were painting—on the house or tower, she can’t remember which. Whatever it was, she was dangling in a bosun’s chair as Alastair peered down from the top; he liked heights even less than his mother. Whatever it was, it was red or white, the only colors they ever saw inside a can of paint, and it was one of the last jobs they ever did together.

“Well, give me a clue,” he said.

“Anything.” She skittered sideways with her feet. She loved to hang in the bosun’s chair. “You know. Stuff. Anything you’d like to say.”

“Not really,” he said. “Nothing you don’t already know.”

She pushed herself out and bounced back to the wall. Her shadow bounded beside her, meeting at her feet.

“Don’t do that,” said Alastair. “You’re making me dizzy.”

She did it all the harder. Her legs for springs, she shot herself back and forth, out so far that she twirled around before swinging in again. She felt the air rush against her back, then against her chest, against her bare legs, brown as hemlocks in their sawed-off denim shorts. The rocks and sky and grass went spinning past, and she laughed at the freedom she felt. But Alastair was horrified. “I can’t watch,” he said. “Oh, Jiminy, Squid. You’re scaring me sick up here.”

She pushed with her feet. She spun in the air. And she saw Murray below her, his head tilted up, his hands on his hips.

“Are you daft?” he shouted. “Stop that, before you break your damned neck.”

She hit the wall with one foot and bounced off at an angle. Her back slammed against the wall.

“I’ve got hooligans for children,” said Murray. “Alastair, I’m ashamed of you. Jiminy! Is your head full of sand?”

Squid stared at him, down between her legs. “It wasn’t Alastair,” she said. “Don’t shout at Alastair.”

“And why not?” he said. He crossed his arms. “You put the reins on the head of a horse, not on its arse.”

And he wandered away. She saw the sun glinting in his hair as he shook his head again and again.

“You see?” said Alastair. “
Now
do you see what I mean?”

“What?” she asked.

“Why I feel like I’m drowning?”

Tatiana never closes her eyes when she sleeps. There’s always a crack at the bottom, wider than the lashes, where the white shows through. Squid has sometimes seen the eyes moving, rapidly back and forth. She finds it a little spooky.

The child is using a hand for a pillow, her body curved along the whorls of the rope mat. Squid moves beside her; she slips her finger into Tatiana’s fist. It pleases her to think that Alastair would like this, to see the girl asleep on his treasured creation.

It’s soft rope, almost woolly, that once worked a fishing net in Dixon Entrance. Alastair found it cast up on the beach after a northerly gale, fifty fathoms of it nearly, tangled round the rocks and in among the driftwood. It took him two days to work it free, patiently pulling the whole length clear of every snag. He dragged it home in a long and twisting line, all his weight leaning forward to keep it moving on the boardwalk. He came back as proud as a hunter, as though pulling a monstrous snake that he’d slain.

“I’m going to make a mat,” he said, and set to the job with that infuriating patience, puzzling out a sense from a terrible snare of half-closed loops and the intricate patterns of his knot. “It’s basically a Turk’s head,” he told her, pushing up his glasses.

She said, “It looks like a ball of giant lint.”

“Well, now it might,” he said. “But when it’s finished it’ll be all flattened out.”

She runs her fingers along the strands. They go over and under, around and around; she has no idea where he started, no idea where he stopped.

What a knotty little problem.

“Tat!” she says, jumping up. “Tat, wake up!” she shouts.

Tatiana, startled from her sleep, struggles on the mat. Squid hauls her up, laughing, and turns in a circle with the child in her arms. “Oh, Tat, you found it,” she says, and sets her on the floor again. “You found it. You showed me right where it is.”

She grabs the edge of the mat. The rope bunches in her fist. She lifts and shakes, and a shower of grit and sand goes tumbling down. The mat is heavy, and the edges fold under themselves as she drags it aside. Strands of the rope stretch and pop, and an oval of pale, dull floor appears, where the head of one nail stands like a stud, catching a long white thread.

Squid lets the mat fall with a whoosh of air. She stamps her heel on the bare patch of floor, on one board and then another, on a third and a fourth, until one of them chatters under her foot. She drops to her knees. She pries it up, her red-painted nails scratching at the wood. It lifts and falls back, then lifts again, and flips onto the floor with a smack. She hunches forward and peers into the space. There’s not the one book she’d imagined, but eight. They disappear into the hole as far as her fingers can reach, all identical, bindings of red tape on dark blue covers. Tatiana crawls quietly beside her and stops at the edge of the hole.

“Listen,” says Squid. “This is a secret, okay? We won’t tell anyone about it. Not your grandpa. Not anyone.”

Tatiana shakes her head.

“It’s our little secret, just yours and mine.”

She lifts four books at once. The edges are sticky with spiderwebs, the pages a deep yellow down at the bottom, nearly white at the top. They have a curious odor of dryness and age.

She puts them down at the edge of the oval left by the mat. She starts to put the floorboard back in place. But again the books have a power, and she leaves the hole gaping as she takes up one of the diaries.

February 10.
The
Darby
came. It brought books. Southward’s
Grazing in Terrestrial and Marine Environments
. Elton’s
The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
. No sign of
Ecological Monographs
. Dad said it might come next week on
the
Sikorsky.
I think he forgot to ask for it.

Elton is fascinating. I think now that limpets are like herds
of buffalo. They just wander along grazing all day. I think they
have a sense of where they want to go and they seem to know
the best places. I saw them come across the empty shell of a
dead one and they seemed to gather round it and nudge at it.
Dad says they were probably eating algae off the shell but I
think they maybe know what death is and were trying to recognize an individual that used to travel with them.

February 11.
I tried to get Squid interested in limpets but she
only laughed and went away. There’s something wrong with my
eyes. Things get blurry and out of focus, and my glasses don’t
seem to help. Dad says not to worry. He says I’m just a bit tired.

Squid flips through the pages, forward and back.

February 12.
Dear God, please don’t let me go blind. I know I
don’t pray very much and I don’t think of you at Christmas but
I’m frightened, God, and if you can do this I’ll believe in you
then. Please, please fix my eyes and let me look at all the wonderful things you made. I beg you for this please, God. Amen.

February 14.
Squid seems restless. She’s surly and snappy but
I don’t know why. She threw a paintbrush at me and called me
a freak. Paint in my hair.

She remembers that day. They were painting a fuel tank, and he kept moving the paint out of her reach, shifting the pail, leaving white rings interlocked in a line down the pad. They were talking about ravens. All that morning the birds had been soaring along the cliff, riding a wind that rose up the rock and carried them high in an instant. Wings held open, they did barrel rolls and loops.

“They’re showing off,” said Alastair. “They’re trying to see which one’s the best.”

“Yeah, because the best one gets the girl,” she said. “All they’re doing is mating.”

“No, it isn’t that.” He moved the pot and dipped his brush. He squinted as he painted.

“Sure,” she said. “They can’t conk each other on the head, so they fly around a bit.”

She gazed at the sky. The ravens moved as fast as darts, soaring on the rising wind. “I wish I could do that,” she said. “What a waste that only birds can fly.”

“Just paint,” he said. “Okay?”

“Don’t you think it’s a waste, Alastair?”

“No,” he said, with a sigh. “Now let’s get this done.”

“But they’re just machines. Little flying machines. They don’t think about it. They just do it; they’re birds.”

She reached for the pail, but it was gone again. Alastair was staring at her. He said, “Do you mean that?”

“Yes, Alastair dear. They’re birds. They really are.”

“But you said they don’t think. What do you mean they don’t think?”

“What’s to think about if you’re a bird?” She watched him dip his brush again and spread another swath over paint that was already thick and sparkling white. The tank was painted every spring and every fall, according to Murray’s schedule. “You fly, you eat, you poop a lot.”

“Oh no,” he said. “No. You fly up as high as you can, just to see what things look like from there. You go hurtling down and you think, I’ll loop the loop when I get to the bottom. I’ll do a roll and a spin, and I’ll do it better than anyone else. You figure out where the clams are and how to break the shells. And when the sun goes down you think about tomorrow and all the things you’ll do in the morning.”

She laughed. “You sound like Dad.”

“Paint!” he told her.

“Yes,
sir
!” she said. “Forget the dumb birds.”

“They’re not dumb,” he said. “Ravens are smart. They’ve got the same IQ as a dog.”

“As if you would know,” she snorted.

“I do know.” He slapped his brush against the steel. “I’ve read it in books. Lots of books.”

“How many were written by birds?”

“That’s stupid,” he said.

“
You’re
stupid.” She turned to face him. “Your head’s full of all these weird ideas, and when you get off this island what’s going to happen then? Everyone’s going to think you’re a freak.”

He turned his head as though she’d slapped him. His cheek was crimson, his pointed chin poking at his shirt.

“And you know what?” she cried. “You already are. You’re a freak, Alastair.”

He didn’t look up; he didn’t speak. He dabbed at the tank, and the paint dribbled down like tears.

“You’ve never kissed a girl; you’ve never ridden in an elevator. You’ve never played a baseball game and never watched TV. And in all your life you’ve never been more than thirty miles from home.”

He answered in a childish voice. “What you say is what you are,” he said. And she hit him with the brush.

She threw it hard; it went spinning from her hand. It spun in a blur, the red of the handle and the white of the bristles, flinging drops of paint. It smacked on the back of Alastair’s head and ricocheted onto the grass. And still he didn’t look up. He flinched when it hit him, then went on painting. There was a streak of white in his hair, a spray of white across the green of lawn.

Squid turned and sprinted off. She ran across the grass, past the whirligigs, past Gomorrah, down through the forest on the humps of the boardwalk. And she slowed to a walk when the futility struck her; she could only run in a circle and get back where she’d started.

It was true. She
was
a freak. They were all freaks, every one. But what difference would it make, so long as they stayed together? They
had
to stay together, but Alastair was desperate to be gone.

chapter five

IN THE KITCHEN OF THE BIG HOUSE, HANNAH unpacks the boxes as Murray brings them in. She is fondling the fresh crisp lettuce, gloating over tomatoes. It’s been nearly a month since she held a banana, and she squeezes one gently. She holds it like a mustache below her nose to smell the smell of bananas.

The back door opens again. Murray kicks off his shoes on the porch, then barges backward into the kitchen. He’s bent by the weight of a box, turning to set it on the table.

“Go slowly,” says Hannah. He’s puffing. “Ask Squid to give you a hand.”

“I can do it,” he says. “Nothing I haven’t done a thousand times before.”

He puts down the box and he leans his weight on the table.

“At least sit for a minute,” she says. “Have a cup of tea.”

He shakes his head. “The wee one hasn’t eaten.”

“There’s plenty here,” she says, but already Murray’s on

There are steaks and pork chops, a roast of lamb. They’re wrapped in brown paper stained with blood. She lifts them out and stacks them on her arm. She takes them to the freezer, down a trail that’s worn in the white linoleum.

At the bottom of the box she finds a tin that’s flat and heavy. Without a thought, just by habit, she takes a chair to push the tin to the back of the highest shelf, behind the oven cleaner and ammonia. Then, leaning across the gap, her hand braced on the cupboard door, it occurs to Hannah that she hasn’t done this in years, though once she did it every month. And she climbs down from the chair still holding the tin.

When Murray comes in she’s clicking her fingernail against the narrow key soldered to its back.

“This is the end of it,” says Murray. With his hip he pushes the door shut. He lets his box slide to the table. “Eggs in here. Mind you don’t break them.”

“Murray?” she says. “What possessed you to buy oysters?”

He stares at the tin, at the chair, at the cleaning cupboard with its door hanging open. “Oh,” he says. “I don’t know.”

“I started to hide them,” she says. “I was thinking— Murray, you haven’t bought oysters in years.”

They were Squid’s favorite food; she could go through a tin in a minute, picking the oysters out with her fingers, slurping the juice until it dribbled down her chin. Every Christmas there was a tin of oysters in her stocking.

Then Murray, in his daily lectures on biology, chose mussels as his subject. They grew on the steep-sided shore to the south, in clusters on the reefs. He tore a big one free and said, “Gather round.” He always said “Gather round” to start it off. Squid was six or seven.

Hannah, Squid, and Alastair sat on rocks as sharp as nails. “This is the byssus,” said Murray, spreading with his fingers the cottony threads that held the mussel to its rock. “It’s spun by a gland in the animal’s foot. He lashes himself in place, like Ulysses to his mast.”

He turned the shell in his hand. It was a California mussel, nearly eight inches long. He pointed out the scars along the shell, like patches of white on its deep purple back. “This fellow,” he said, “has had some sort of an accident. He might have been whacked by a log.” The scars were deep, and Murray picked at the grooves with his nails. “The poor brute almost bought it there. Must have got the fright of his life.”

“How old is he?” asked Alastair.

“Hard to say.” Murray bounced the mussel in his palm. “He’s an old-timer, all right. They grow like weeds in the beginning; more than three inches the first year. But then they slow down, and this one’s lived on the island maybe as long as I have.”

“Wow!” said Squid.

“He’s terribly strong,” said Murray. “Stronger than any of us. Just try to pull him open.” He made everyone have a try. Alastair grunted and frowned. Squid rapped it on the rock, and a chip of shell flew off. Then Murray pulled out his clasp knife and shoved it through the hinge.

“Sorry, old man,” he said to the mussel. There was a tearing sound as he pried it open.

“He’s screaming!” shouted Alastair.

“No, no,” said Murray. “That’s only his hinge you’re hearing.” He held the opened mussel, and the children leaned over him, one on each side. At their feet, the swell surged at the rock.

“Why’s he so orange?” said Alastair.

They had all seen the insides of mussels before. But Hannah, too, was always surprised by the lurid color, a ghastly orange bright as boiled yams. She had never thought to wonder why the mussel looked like that.

“It’s just the way he is,” said Murray. “Colorful, flamboyant.” He poked at the flesh with the tip of his knife. “It sets him apart from the oysters and the clams. He’s the man-about-town of the shellfish family.”

“Is he related to oysters?” asked Alastair.

Murray nodded. “Like brothers.”

“But oysters aren’t orange,” said Alastair.

“No. They’re too sedate for that,” said Murray. “An oyster wouldn’t dare to be orange. He has a shell as thick as armor, but he likes his water deep, where the waves won’t knock him about. That’s typical for the shellfish to be timid like that. The whole lot of them are utterly harmless, locked up in their shells all their lives. Oysters especially so. They’re not nearly as outgoing as a snail.”

Alastair poked at the orange goo. “Where’s his brain, Dad?”

“He has no brain,” said Murray. “No heart or lungs. He breathes water through his gills, and most of him’s a stomach. Like the oyster, he’s a simple, stay-at-home sort of creature, happy to munch away all day on microscopic plants and animals.” He poked harder at the mussel, burying the knifepoint inside it. “No pearl in this one. Not that it would be worth anything if there was. And of course we won’t eat him. Tell me why not.”

“Red tide!” shouted Squid.

Murray grinned. “Right you are. If our friend here has been eating the wrong sort of things he could be loaded with poisons. So we’ll just put him back on the rock.”

He set the mussel gently on top of the others.

“Will he lash himself down?” asked Alastair.

“I’m afraid not,” said Murray. “He’s a goner now, rest his soul.” He closed his knife and slipped it into his pocket, twisting his hip up from the stone. He rubbed his hands together. “Well, any questions?”

There never were at question time.

“Then, there being none, we’ll break into teams for a wrestling game. Men against the girls.”

The memory is vivid to Hannah. She can still hear Squid’s happy shout. She can feel the wind in her hair, and the rock under her feet as she stood for the run to the beach. She can smell the sunburned skin above her lip and feel the glare from the sea in her eyes.

But Alastair stayed where he was, hunched and small, beside the clutch of mussels.

“Come on!” said Murray. “You’ll let down the team.”

Alastair looked up at him, like a worried little gnome. “We shouldn’t eat oysters,” he said. “It isn’t right.”

Squid laughed. “It isn’t right,” she mocked, grinning with the sunlight bright in her hair.

“Shhh!” said Murray. He knelt beside Alastair. “It’s the natural process,” he said. “The oyster eats plankton; something eats the oyster; something else eats that. This mussel here, he’s not a waste. When the tide comes in, some sea star will wander along and think himself very lucky not to have to jack him open.”

“But he’s harmless,” said Alastair. “He lives in his shell and never comes out.” He touched the flesh one more time. Already it was drying to a hard, dead thing. “He’s all dark and nearly black on the outside. And inside he’s so soft and pretty. It isn’t right to kill him.”

He was describing himself; Hannah can see that now. He was describing just the way he would be in a few more years, a dark and brooding child, so tender inside. And suddenly that day, he burst into tears.

“Why are you crying?” asked Squid.

“ ‘And all the little Oysters stood and waited in a row’!”

In the kitchen of the big house, Hannah smiles at the memory. Then Murray, seeing her, says, “You look so sad, Hannah.”

She sniffs. She wipes her cheeks, and it surprises her to find them wet. “He quoted from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter.’ Remember that?”

And Murray laughs. It’s not his old laugh, so deep and loud that it almost hurt to hear it. He
chuckles,
as though he doesn’t want—or mean—to laugh.

“Poor Alastair,” he says. “He never ate another oyster after that.”

She wants to tell Murray now that she saw him. That the island has not one ghost, but two. In the single flash of light, as he stood on the lawn staring in, Alastair looked healthy and full-blooded and strong. He wasn’t wearing glasses.

She puts the oysters on the counter, but it bothers her to have them there. She tucks the tin sideways behind the rack of dishes, aware that Murray’s watching.

“Do you ever think that he’s near?” she asks. “Do you ever have a sense that he’s close?”

“Not so much anymore,” says Murray. He starts to collect the empty boxes, pushing one inside another. “At first I did. I’d be walking down the trail and I’d think he’d come and walk behind me. I heard him laughing once. I thought I saw him get up from a rock—och, a hundred yards away—and hurry off along the sand.” The boxes squeak as he pushes them down. “I think there were a couple of times when I went up to his room. Did you know that?”

“No,” she says. It was many times more than a couple.

“I always had the feeling he was there. That he’d been there just a moment before. But it’s gone now, that sense of that. He’s cleared off, I think.”

He bends at the knees and picks up the stack of boxes. “Anything else for burning?” he asks.

Hannah shakes her head.

He goes out to the porch and puts on his shoes. He reaches back to close the door. “I made them work too much,” he says. “I should have taken more time for play.” Then the door clicks shut, and he cocks his head at her through the square of glass. He gathers his boxes and goes thumping down the steps, peering round the cardboard.

He, too, is like the mussel, she thinks. He’s rooted to his island; his byssus is just as strong. To tear him loose would kill him.

She watches him head along the path, and thinks it’s sad that he has to pass the wailing wall just now, and again, with every load of boxes. Painting that little row of stones was Alastair’s first job. He was two years old, and he cried himself along the row, but Murray kept him at it until every stone was painted.

Sure enough, Murray stops there for a moment, and Hannah pities him for that. He’s being too hard on himself. There was lots of time for play.

Hannah puts a colander full of cherries in the sink. She turns on the tap, and a moment later, the pump switches on in the basement, humming below her feet. The water flows up from the cistern, pouring over her hands.

It never took more than three hours to do the work around the station. In winter it seldom took one. And then, apart from the weathers—a ten-minute job every three hours—the days were theirs to spend as they would.

They shed their coveralls and painting caps, their gardening gloves and work boots.

“Tools,” said Murray. And they went and hung them on their pegs, matching each one to the proper silhouette from the dozens that Murray had drawn on nearly every wall.

They put on bright-colored clothes of red and yellow and pink. Even Murray sometimes dared to wear an ocher-colored shirt. And then they ran; they flew. They pounded down the boardwalk, leaning at the bends, Murray in the lead, then Squid, then Alastair, spinning and leaping— squawking—flying across the island like a flock of parrots. Over the muskeg and into the forest, past the squirrels’ middens and the aeries of the eagles, plucking up feathers and ferns and running on, falling—at the end—onto the sand, dropping lemming-like into a laughing, squirming heap.

They lived at the beach, by the sea. Murray unslung Hannah’s kayak from the basement rafters, painted it red, and carried it down to the beach. He built a rowboat from the plywood of his packing crates, and set a thick pane of glass into the bottom. And they drifted all around the little lagoon, out through the gap to the channel, down to the point where the ocean swells burst in a rage on the rocks.

Hannah turns off the water. She shakes the cherries, gladdened somehow by their splash of brightness.

Those were the happiest days of her life, in that funny little boat, with the black stenciled message Handle With Care showing through Murray’s white paint like a shadow. She loved to stare through the glass as the beach dropped away, as the water got deeper and darker. And then a rock would glide past, or a strand of kelp, and suddenly the bottom would zoom up toward her, gaudy with starfish and anemones.

One day, as they floated at low tide over an always-drowned reef, Murray threw out a stone for an anchor. And they huddled round the pane of glass like Gypsies at a crystal ball. There were urchins below them, like a shelf full of pincushions.

“The urchin,” said Murray, beginning a lecture. “Another animal that starts life as a wanderer and settles down when he’s older. Some of them sit so long in one place that they wear hollows in the rock.”

“They look like porcupines,” said Squid, who had never seen a porcupine.

“Indeed they do,” said Murray. “The urchin protects himself with a fistful of swords, but it’s all for show; he never attacks another creature. If the ground was softer he’d turn his swords to plowshares and dig himself a pit. And if something comes after him, he won’t try to poke it. Most likely, he’ll run away, racing on his swords.”

They saw that too, a few days later. Through the glass of the boat, they saw the urchins hurtling along in an awful slow motion, climbing over one another, dropping from boulders and cliffs. They looked like panicked, stampeding cattle.

“Starfish coming,” said Murray. And sure enough, behind them came a big, lumbering sea star, a bogeyman crawling along. “They’re actually related. Close as cousins. But there’s no love lost there.”

The urchins’ spines waved and shook. They reached forward; they pushed from behind, and the urchins went tumbling along.

“Poor things,” said Alastair. “What will happen if the starfish catches them?”

“He’ll eat them, stupid,” said Squid. She leaned over the glass. “I’d like to see that. I wish he’d hurry, the stupid star.”