The Lightkeeper's Daughter (8 page)

Squid sits on the floor and stares at the words that Alastair wrote.

chapter seven

COULD YOU GO FIND SQUID?” ASKS HANNAH. “She’s at the small house, I think.”

“At the small house?” says Murray. “On delivery day?”

It would have been unthinkable once. She and Alastair, as children, would hover in the kitchen as Murray brought the boxes in. They would marvel at the cherries as though they’d never seen such a thing. They would sit backward on the chairs or perch on the table or the countertop, peering in the boxes, shouting out, “Bananas!” Or, “Crumpets!” Murray always ordered crumpets. Or, “Oh, yuck, asparagus!”

“We should have waited,” says Murray. “Tatiana’s just the age to appreciate delivery day.” He’s holding his shoes again, fingers curled in the heels. “We’ll make a McCrae of her yet.”

“She’s already a McCrae,” says Hannah.

“Not really.” He closes the door as he speaks, to let himself have the last word. “She’s only half a McCrae, I’m

Hannah stares at the door, through its window at Murray retreating. She wants to ask: What about me? What about Alastair and Squid? Aren’t we
all
only half McCraes? But she knows what he means. Tatiana’s father was an Outsider.

His name was Erik. “Erik with a
k,
” said Squid at the time. He came to the island by kayak, all alone, just as Hannah had come years and years before. He camped on the beach where she had camped. He, too, was startled by the auklets.

But Hannah didn’t see him, and Murray didn’t see him.

“He had a beard and long hair,” said Squid. “He looked like a Viking.” He paddled a boat that rose up at the bow, in a curve like the neck of a swan. He made a fire in a scraped-out pit in the sand, and he lay on his back, reading poems by Keats. This is what Squid told them had happened.

“He read me a poem,” she said. “It was beautiful, like it was just for me. He read me a poem, and he told me how pretty I was.”

He had a tent with flags on the poles. He read her a poem and then . . .

Hannah doesn’t want to think of this. She busies herself with the big sacks of lentils and rice, tearing them open, setting out the storage jars. But she can’t stop herself from seeing the things she’s seen a hundred times. Squid, a child, taking off her clothes, laying them in the sand. Erik watching in the firelight, helping with the buttons.

“No!” says Hannah, aloud. The rice swirls out of the bag and into the jar, mounding against the glass.

Squid was so young. A beautiful girl—yes, maybe a woman—but only thirteen. She made jewelry out of pretty shells. She liked to go barefoot at the edge of the water. She liked to weave daisies into chains.

It was Murray’s fault, what happened. Hannah might have started it, but Murray never stopped it. She had warned him that something awful lay waiting. She had known it ever since Alastair was ten, and the giggling sounds had come out of the forest.

She was on the south side of the island, where the trees went right to the rocks, and the rocks right to the water. She heard Squid and Alastair playing among the hemlock trees. She had to climb over lichen-spotted boulders to see what they were up to.

Otters lived there. They dug dens out of the earth at the roots of the trees. Some of the holes were enormous.

Hannah used branches to pull herself up. She stepped from the rocks to the dirt. And she stopped when she saw what the children were doing.

They were upside down. Alastair had his head in an otter den; Squid had hers in another. They were holding themselves on their elbows less than a yard apart. Squid’s dress had fallen around her, and her stomach was bare— and her chest—so smooth and pale. Her legs kicked from white panties, her red shoes flailing. Alastair’s feet groped like tentacles, like stalks of blue in his overalls.

Suddenly, from the ground, burst another chorus of muffled giggles. Then Alastair’s foot touched Squid’s, and she trapped it between her ankles.

Hannah rushed forward. She pried the children apart, pulling on Alastair’s foot, pushing on Squid’s. She knocked them down, and their heads popped out of the dens. Their faces were flushed; they stared up at her. Alastair had caught his ear on a bit of root, and he rubbed it with his hand.

She said, “What are you doing? What on earth are you doing?”

“Nothing,” said Squid, in her cheery voice, chirpy as a songbird. “We were playing barnacles.”

“Well, stop it,” said Hannah. “Squid, pull your dress down. Just look at you both!” There were twigs in their hair, old and blackened leaves wedged in their collars and cuffs.

Alastair kept rubbing his ear. “We were only playing,” he said.

Squid grinned. “He was trying to put his penis in my house.”

“Stand up,” Hannah told them. “Both of you.”

They got up. They stood there, adjusting their clothes, and something in Hannah’s voice or her look must have scared them.

“We were only playing,” said Alastair again.

“Then you just play on the beach,” she said. “And not another word from either of you.”

Hannah tilts the bag to stop the flow of rice. A few grains skitter over the top of the jar, and she collects them with her fingers and pops them into her mouth. She moves down the table and starts on a second jar.

She never told Murray what the children had been doing at the otter dens. But a week later she woke at midnight in a bed that seemed empty without Murray. And thinking about it, she couldn’t fall asleep again. She put a coat over her nightgown, rubber thongs on her feet, and stepped out through the door, down the steps into an ocean of stars.

The sea was utterly calm. There was no wind and no swell, and the water lapped at the shore as soft as cat tongues. The Milky Way was a shimmering bracelet of diamonds that girdled the sky and looped right around through the sea. Every star was mirrored on the water. And the beacon turned round and round, a huge propeller of light with blades that paled against them.

Her thongs slapped on the concrete. It must have been the dew; it was all she could guess. But something had brought the frogs up to the lawn, onto the path. And they crouched down as she passed, or went crawling away in slow-stretching bounds, as though the moisture held them like glue.

She crossed the bridge and climbed the slope, and found Murray sitting at the base of the tower. He was staring off to the southeast, toward Triple Island far away, a faint and tiny version of the beacon right above them.

“Fog’s coming,” he said, hearing her thongs. “Green Island’s obscured already.”

She nestled beside him, arranging the coat across her knees. Murray seemed so peaceful and calm, so contented, that she shivered as she planned what to say.

Everything comes to an end, she would tell him. She would give him one more year on Lizzie Island, and then they would move to the city. It is time that the children go to a real school, she would say. They should have friends their own age. It’s not right, she would say, to raise them in isolation, with no idea of a world outside. She was going to say, “In captivity.”

She coughed; she started to speak. But Murray reached out and put a hand on her knee. He said, “Hannah, I think we’re about the luckiest people in the world.”

“Oh?” she said.

“Why, sure we are.” His fingers squeezed, and he smiled. “Och, we’ve no money in the bank. We’re dirt poor if you think about it. But we’ve got all this.” He lifted his hand and made a small, shy gesture. “We’ve got two healthy children and a paradise to live in, free of crowds and smoke and noise.”

It wasn’t exactly true. There had been one day, several years before, when electricians came to rewire the light. To do it, they had to shut down the generators. Hannah was outside when they pulled the switch. It was sunny and calm, a wonderful day. Then suddenly there was silence. There was total, absolute silence. For the very first time she heard
nothing.
No machines or generators, no fans or radio noise. And it was eerie, even scary. She was actually frightened at first.

But at the same time, what Murray had said was true. He’d listed the things she liked best about Lizzie.

He put his hand back on her knee. He rubbed it, as he might rub at the head of a dog. “And what does it matter,” he said, “what goes on in Russia or Cuba or Korea or anywhere else? What scrap of difference does it make whether you know or don’t know which group of people is killing which other group of people?” He glanced toward her. “It matters not a whit.”

She said, “No man is an island.”

Instantly, the mood changed. Murray stopped talking, and she felt the silence; it closed round them like a fog. A fish, or maybe a seal, splashed below the tower. Murray turned his head and looked off toward Barren Island, its prick of light flashing far away, a fallen star among the thousands.

She nudged him with her elbow. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

He said, “You don’t agree with me.”

“Oh, but I do,” she said. “I love it here.”

“But this is the end,” he said. “Or the beginning of the end. Children start growing, a mother starts talking of schools and friendships. And the next thing you know, another lightkeeper moves to town. It’s always the wives. One day they start thinking, and the next they start packing.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. But he was pretty close to the target.

He said, “I’ve seen it happen twenty times or more.”

She couldn’t deny it was what she’d been thinking. But neither would she admit it.

“Well, I’ll grant you this,” said Murray. “You’ve outlasted most of them, Hannah. Most of them are gone in two or three years.”

“I love you, Murray,” she told him.

“Well, it won’t happen here.” His accent was thicker, stronger. “I’ll not be moved from here, Hannah. Not by hell or high water. I watched my father go coughing into the coal mines for eight years. I saw a toilet bowl full of black spittle. And when they buried him, when they threw down the first bits of earth, the sound they made—I thought it was him coughing.”

“Murray,” she said.

“My brother’s still in the mines. He always will be. He was trapped by a cave-in when he was just seventeen.”

Finally he stopped. He must have thought that if he said one more word, she would know that he was crying.

She wanted to hold him, but knew he wouldn’t let her. She said, “I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”

And then he did cry. “There’s nothing bloody else I can do!” he said, and jumped to his feet.

She said, “Murray. Don’t leave me like this.”

“Och, I’m not leaving you,” he said. “The fog’s coming in.”

She could still see Triple Island. Even the little light at Barren. But when she looked up, the Milky Way was shrouded in a feathery veil. The beacon whirled ghostly arms. She got up too; she couldn’t sit there with the foghorn going.

The tower door was open, spilling yellow light across the blackness. Murray was bent over the motor, turning the crank. It started, and gray smoke spat from the exhaust hole beside her. The compressor rattled, building pressure.

Murray studied his gauges. “All right, Hannah,” he said. “You might as well go.”

She didn’t know right then if he meant for her to go from the tower, or go from the island. She set off back to the trestle, her thongs whapping against her soles. And just as she crossed the gap, she heard the first blast of the horn, a deep and mournful bellow of sound that she felt as well as heard. It rattled in her jaw and rattled in her head; it shook inside her ears. Three seconds later she heard it a second time, and again after three seconds more. There’d be forty-eight seconds of silence, and another three blasts. And so it would go, hour after hour, until someone shut off the motor.

At the house, the front window rattled with the sound. In the kitchen, the dishes quivered in their rack; the spoons and forks shivered in their nests. Hannah went up the stairs.

The children were asleep in their bunks, Alastair above and Squid below. Before winter had come, Murray would put up a wall and carve the room in two, giving them each a tiny space. He would do it at her insistence. But that night, as they always had, they slept in their bunks. And when the horn blew, their eyelids twitched; but they didn’t come awake. Only on the first foggy night of the summer would the horn keep them from sleeping.

Hannah tops off the second jar and puts down the bag. It’s half-empty, swollen at the bottom, flaccid at the top. She reels the jar around on its rim, settling the rice with a rumbling sound.

Murray never came back to bed that night, and not because of the fog. Falling at night, in the middle of summer, it would still be there at noon. She heard his footsteps on the path and, looking out, watched him pass toward the boardwalk. Then she lay awake till dawn, wondering if Murray was right, if it really was the beginning of the end. She thought she’d set them all rushing to a downfall, as though she’d pushed them into the currents of a quickening river.

There wasn’t another word spoken about sex until Squid, nearly thirteen, came to the kitchen of the big house. She was crying, and that was unusual for Squid. “There’s something wrong with me,” she said. “I think I’m busted up inside.”

Squid hauled up her skirt. Her white underpants were clotted with red. She held up the skirt for only a moment, then dropped it again. “Oh, Mom,” she said. “Am I dying?”

“No, Squid,” said Hannah. “Oh, sweetheart.” She took her daughter into the bathroom. She locked them up, and Squid sat on the furry cover of the toilet seat to learn what Hannah called, uncomfortably, “the ways of the world.”

The talk, as short as it was, left Hannah exhausted.

chapter eight

December 1
.
I’d hate for anyone to know this, but I’m lonely by myself. Sometimes I hear them laughing in the big house and I wish I could be there. I see the lights on in all the windows and it makes Gomorrah seem dark and lonely. It’s so empty that I talk to myself. I keep hoping that Dad will come over, but he never does.

What if he gave me Gomorrah to get me out of the way?
Maybe they all voted on it. Maybe they said, “We have to get
rid of Alastair. It would be so much nicer without Alastair
here.”

Winter’s so long. It’s cold and gray and dreary, and it just
goes on and on forever. Christmas will come and what if they
don’t ask me over? I’d hate to spend Christmas alone.

I can hardly wait for Squid’s birthday. It will be okay when
Squid’s over here. But what if she decides not to come?

She looks up at the sound of someone walking on the path. She feels her heart give a sudden, hard beat as the footsteps rise to the porch. Four books lie open around her; she has been moving forward and backward through Alastair’s life. She gathers them quickly, slamming them closed and stuffing them in the hole. She slides the floorboards into place. But they don’t quite fit. They meet in the middle, making a tent down their length. Then someone knocks on the door.

It’s Murray, she knows, his old knock echoing through time, that little rap-a-tap-tap. She presses at the boards, but still they won’t move. Murray knocks again.

She rips out the boards and slides one over top of the other. Alastair’s old, bent nails rasp on the floor. They leave silver scratches in the varnish. She looks for Tatiana, and is surprised to see that her daughter isn’t there.

The door opens downstairs. A draft of air rushes past her. The boards thunk into place and she drags the rug over top; it doesn’t quite match the faded oval that it covered so neatly before.

“Squid?” He calls to her. He comes into the living room, directly below. “Squid, are you here?”

He knows where she is; she’s sure he knows. Already, he’s walking toward the stairs.

“I’m coming down,” she says.

He’s waiting at the bottom, just as he was the last time, staring up toward her. Squid feels a prickle at her neck, a tensing of her muscles. She’ll tell him she has a right to do what she wants, that the house was hers as much as his, that she was Alastair’s only friend.

“Look,” says Murray, and she gathers her breath.

“Shhh,” he says. He reaches up the banister, his fingers in the air. He smiles and shows her with a nod—with a gesture—that Tatiana is sleeping in the armchair, on her back across the cushion with her legs jutting stiffly up the back.

“Out like a light,” he says, with a tenderness she’s forgotten. He takes her hand, and she remembers that; his fingers are thick and hard and cold. “You used to sleep like that,” he tells her. “Like a dog, like a puppy, however you flung yourself down. She must have learned it from you.”

“She’s never seen me sleep like that,” says Squid.

“Och, I meant it well.” He turns around; his smile is gone. “Your mother’s made a little supper. When you’ve got the Tatty ready, you can come and eat.”

“I think I’ll leave her, Dad,” she says. “It’s better that she sleeps.”

“She has to eat,” says Murray.

“I’ll bring her something.”

“I think—” He stops. “Och, I suppose you know best. I’ve done my duty; I’ve passed on the message.”

They go together down the path, past the whirligigs and flower beds. Just beyond Gomorrah there’s a horse with wings. It’s painted red and white.

“That one was your favorite,” says Murray. “Remember what you used to call him?”

“Yes,” says Squid.

“Old Glory. You used to lie here on the grass and watch him flap his wings. You pretended that you rode him.”

They’ve stopped below the horse. It surprises her now, with its outlandish colors, its odd-shaped head that looks more like a pig’s than a horse’s.

“You said you were the only one who could ride him. Even I couldn’t do that. Old Glory would throw me off, you said.”

“I remember, Dad,” she says.

“Do you remember that you used to feed him?”

“No,” she says.

“You’d pluck some grass and hold it up. You’d say, ‘Come on, Old Glory, here’s a bit of hay.’ ” Murray laughs. “You were so serious about it.”

“Oh, yeah,” says Squid. It’s funny she’d forgotten. She can see herself now, standing by the pole, reaching up along it with the grass stems in her fist.

She was absolutely sure the horse could come down if it wanted. “Come on, Old Glory,” she’d said. “Just come down and eat.”

And didn’t it do it once? Didn’t it flutter from the pole and pluck the grass away? She can remember the touch of its wooden mouth, the way the lips curled back to show big, yellow teeth that she’d never seen before.

“It made you furious that he never came to eat.”

She wants to say, “But once he did.” And that was why—because once he did and then not ever again—that she got so mad at Glory.

Squid leans toward the horse. She can barely see the joint that holds one wing together.

“You bashed him with a stick,” says Murray. “I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ You said, ‘I winged him. He wouldn’t eat, so I winged the stupid thing.’ ”

“You hit me for that,” she says. She can still feel the slap, the fingers—so cold and hard—digging into her arm. She dropped the stick and ran away. She hid behind Gomorrah, though it wasn’t called Gomorrah yet, and hauled up the sleeve of her shirt. There were big red marks on her arm, a handprint on her ribs.

“No,” says Murray. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Och, I never, ever hit you.” He looks at her sadly. “I made mistakes, but I never raised a hand to either of you.”

“Dad! You did,” she says. “You hit Alastair for looking too close at his books.”

He doesn’t deny it; he just keeps looking at her. “Is this why you’ve come home, Elizabeth?” he asks. “To dwell on the past and make it worse than it was?”

“Dad!”

“Do you know how many times my father hit
me
?”

“Who cares?” she says. “Alastair was going blind, and you hit him.”

“Och, he wasn’t going blind. And I certainly didn’t hit him.”

Murray shakes his head. He shakes it quickly, sighing as he does it. Then he scratches his hair and goes on his way. And Squid follows behind him.

She was there; she saw it happen. She heard the smack of her father’s palm against Alastair’s head. It pushed his nose down in the book, and knocked the book from his hand. Then Alastair, without a word, reached down and picked up the book again.

“Hold it away!” said Murray. “Don’t bury yourself in the pages.”

“It’s the only way I can see,” said Alastair.

“Then turn on a light. Do you want to go blind?”

“The light doesn’t help,” said Alastair. He was blinking, staring down at the pages. “The writing’s all blurry.”

“No wonder,” said Murray. “Hold it away, boy. Hold it down on your lap.” He thrust out his thick, coppery arm and pushed the book down on Alastair’s knee. “There. Read it now.”

Alastair swallowed. As the book went down his head went up, pale and frightened. “I can’t,” he said.

“Try!”

“Dad, it hurts my eyes,” said Alastair.

Murray knew the truth then; there was resignation in his eyes. Again, he reached out. He closed the book. He took it up and put it on the table, and his thumb riffled the edge of the pages. Then he held on to Alastair, his arm around the boy’s thin shoulders, and he pulled his son against him.

“It will be all right,” he said. “Everything will be just fine.”

A week later they were on the helicopter, Alastair and Squid and Hannah. They rose from the island and flew to the east, over Melville Island and Chatham Sound, out past the edge of the only world that Squid had ever seen. They flew across Digby Island and over the harbor, and the city spread out below them.

It was smaller than Squid had imagined. She had hoped there would be skyscrapers and great deep canyons they would fly through, past people staring from the windows. Lights of all colors. Masses of cars. Long, silver trains crawling on elevated tracks, stretching round the corners like strings of linked sausage. She had hoped to find a clamor of sirens and bells and horns.

“It’s boring,” she said, disdainfully. “It’s just a boring little city.”

But the houses amazed her. They were clumped together, side by side and back to front, house after house after house, like barnacles on a rock, except they stood in tidy rows.

“How can people live like that?” she asked.

They rode in a taxi. The meter impressed her. And the speed! Never in her life had she gone faster over the ground than Murray’s little tractor could take her. They sat in the back, three in a row, and she could hear the telephone poles go whumping past the window. And the tires hummed, but that was all the sound there was.

And the city smelled of rotten eggs. But no one seemed to notice.

“It’s the pulp mill,” said Alastair. “I guess you get used to it.”

He came away with glasses that made his eyes look huge. Hannah warned her: “Don’t laugh when you see him.” And she didn’t even want to laugh; she felt like crying.

“I look like a goof,” he said. “Don’t I?”

“They make you look smart,” she said.

“A smart goof.” He laughed. “But look, Squid. I can see.” He held his hand two inches from his nose, his palm toward his face. “I can see my fingerprints. They look so neat. I’ve never seen my fingerprints before.”

They were thick and clunky glasses. They were wider than his head, and she could stand behind him and see them jutting out beyond his ears. And sometimes—from behind him—she could see his eyes reflected in the lenses.

“Can you see behind you?” she asked.

“Oh, yes!” he said, and showed her. “See? If I turn my head I can.”

They were only gone a week; they couldn’t wait to get back, and so they went on the chopper. Alastair on one side, Squid on the other, they watched like explorers for the first sight of their land. Alastair won.

“There it is!” he shouted. “Hello, Lizzie Island.” He turned around, and his grin was almost as wide as his glasses. “It looks so beautiful,” he said.