The Lightkeeper's Daughter

by Iain Lawrence

  chapter fourteen

  HANNAH MAKES HER WAY DOWN THE boardwalk. Only the tops of the trees feel the wind, and a thin shower of needles falls at her feet. They’re brown and ocher, covering the planks. She can hear the needles falling as they slither through the leaves.

  She’s nearly at the meadow when Murray’s voice booms out, up ahead, “Ready or not!” and Tatiana’s little feet patter along the boardwalk.

  There’s a flash of crimson clothes, and Tatiana bursts around the corner far ahead. She’s running in her clumsy way, looking back, watching for Murray behind her.

  “Here I come,” shouts Murray, and Tatiana leaps from the boardwalk, into the huckleberries and the broad green leaves of the skunk cabbage.

  Hannah smiles. The game was always a favorite, with Squid most of all, though not so much with Alastair. He was good at the hiding, but hopeless at the seeking.

  The boardwalk shakes as Murray comes running. “You better be hiding!” he shouts.

  She can hear Tatiana: a rustle of leaves; a giggle. With her eyes, she follows the sound. And she gasps.

  It’s the shoes that startle Hannah.

  Squid was found right here, just yards from where Tatiana huddles in the moss. It was Alastair who found her, on that cold morning too late for autumn and too early for winter.

  He came running to the big house. He came all winded, scratched on his face by branches and thorns.

  “It’s Squid,” he said. “It’s Squid, and she’s dying.”

  Hannah was putting up jars of huckleberry jam. The one in her hand fell to the floor, smashing into a pool of red juice and shining glass, splattering the counters and the walls. She raced from the house, and Murray came from the generator shed, sprinting right over the lawn. They followed Alastair back to the forest, back down the boardwalk to this little hollow.

  Squid was lying on her side, sprawled on a bed of thick, yellow moss. The vomit that dribbled from her mouth and oozed through the ground was just that same color.

  “I saw her shoes,” said Alastair. “I was on the boardwalk. It was all I could see, the red of her shoes.”

  They were a shocking color, a lurid crimson brighter than anything natural. They looked obscene, splayed out on the moss.

  Murray jumped down from the boardwalk. He grabbed Squid’s shoulders and rolled her over, onto her back. Her head flopped sideways, her tongue poking out past her lips, her eyes—not quite closed—showing moons of white. Murray put his cheek to her mouth, his fingers to her neck. “She’s breathing,” he said. “Her pulse is slow, but she’s breathing.”

  Underneath her were little bundles—leaves and mushrooms and roots—bound with strands of orange and lavender wool. Hannah recognized some, but not all. There were things in those bundles that Squid had been taught never to touch.

  Murray said, “She’s been eating this stuff?”

  Alastair saw the pattern; Alastair had studied the plants. “They’re abortifacients,” he said. Then, “Oh, Jiminy, Dad! She’s pregnant.”

  Murray didn’t even flinch. “Let’s hope she still is.”

  He carried her up to the house, to the big house and not Gomorrah. Her hands and her feet flopped down, swinging as he carried her.

  “Where, oh where can you be?” chants Murray now, appearing round a bend in the boardwalk. He stops there, looking into the forest. “I’m getting closer, Tatiana. Is that a wee person I can see?”

  Tatiana giggles, and Murray turns toward the sound. “Oh, Hannah!” he says. And he blushes.

  Hannah stares at him as he comes up to her side. She shows him with a tilt of her head where Tatiana has hidden herself. “Come out of there, Tat,” she says.

  There’s a look of disappointment on the child’s face, her little game destroyed. Slowly, she stands up.

  “Do you see where she’s come to?” asks Hannah.

  It dawns slowly on Murray. Then he says, “The child couldn’t know. You didn’t have to spoil her fun, Hannah.”

  “Well, I’m certainly sorry.”

  Murray frowns. “Och, what’s the matter?” he asks.

  She can’t explain. The island has cold spots of horror. There are some she won’t visit and others she seeks, from time to time, for a strange pleasure in the melancholy that they give her. The meadow is one of the worst, and it doesn’t seem proper to have it used for a game, to fill it with laughter and shouting.

  “I came to find you,” she says. “You were gone for so long, but I see you’re all right.”

  “We’re fine,” says Murray. “Playing hide-and-seek.” He turns to Tatiana. “Come on, Tatty. We’ll both have to find a hiding place now. It looks like your grandma is it.”

  Murray can be infectious, spreading pleasure like germs. Hannah, reluctant at first, joins in the game. She stands with her hands on her eyes, counting slowly to a hundred. Then, “Here I come!” she shouts. And now she’s running, feeling the wind, seeing the bushes blur past, and she’s laughing.

  The sky is dark with clouds when Hannah comes out from the forest, a step ahead of Murray. Bands of purple and black rolling high above the island. She watches them, and is halfway to the big house before she sees that Squid is there, sitting on the steps, looking lonely and forgotten.

  For a moment, Hannah feels pity for her daughter. But she sees that Squid has raided Murray’s treasured stock of cider and sits with a bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

  “We’ve had great fun,” says Murray, trudging toward her with Tatiana at his side. The gravel crunches under his feet. “You missed a fine game of hide-and-go-seek.”

  “I could hear you,” says Squid. “You’re happy here, aren’t you, Tat?”

  Tatiana nods vigorously. Her red clothes, her sweet grin, make her look like an elf.

  Squid smokes, then drinks. She holds up the bottle. “You don’t mind, do you, Dad?”

  “Not at all.” Nothing can spoil his mood.

  “Tat, you go play,” says Squid. “Go and look at Old Glory, okay?”

  Tatiana presses herself against Murray. She tugs on his trousers, gazing up. “Play me sandbox?” she asks.

  Murray is absolutely thrilled.

  “No,” says Squid. She empties her bottle and drops the cigarette inside. She swirls it around, and smoke comes up through the mouth. “Dad, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  Hannah nearly gasps. Squid is standing up, putting her bottle down on the steps, on a little round stain that it has left on the wood.

  “Can’t it wait?” asks Murray.

  Squid shakes her head. “Go on, Tatiana. Go and look at Old Glory or something while I talk to your grandpa.”

  It seems she means to tell Murray right now that she’s leaving as soon as she can, in a month at the most, that she’s taking little Tat to Australia and won’t ever be back to the island.

  And Hannah won’t let her do that. “Yes, it can wait,” she says quickly. “It’s going to rain very soon, so you two go and play in the sandbox, then we’ll all have hot chocolate. We’ll all have a talk.”

  “But, Mom—” says Squid.

  “It’s fine.”

  Squid thumps herself back on the steps, her arms crossed. Murray shrugs, then wanders off with Tatiana.

  “Mom, why did you stop me?” asks Squid.

  “Come inside,” says Hannah, starting up the steps.

  This is where they brought her, through this door as she lay like a sack in Murray’s arms, those red shoes dangling. He put her on the sofa, and he looked a hundred years old.

  Squid lay unconscious for only an hour, cocooned in a yellow blanket. Then she woke, and she groaned. She threw up in a bucket that Hannah had soaked with ammonia.

  “How do you feel?” asked Murray. He hadn’t moved from her side. He had wetted her forehead with water and held her hand in his.

  “I feel okay,” said Squid. “But this ammonia’s making me sick.”

  Alastair, too, had stayed with her, in a chair at the foot of the sofa.
He had cried all the time, wringing his hands. But now he smiled, and patted her shoes.

  Squid looked up half-dazedly at the faces hovering round her.

  “Well, you’re back in Kansas now,” said Murray.

  “What?” she said. Squid had never seen The Wizard of Oz.

  “You gave us a fright,” he said. “You gave us a terrible scare.”

  She reached under the blanket, feeling at her stomach, down to her legs.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” said Murray. “You’re as whole as whole can be.”

  She was up on her feet that evening. She went back to Gomorrah, and Murray waited a day before he faced her with his inquisition. He paced as she sat in a chair.

  “You’re pregnant,” he said suddenly. “Or you think you are.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Now, don’t deny it, Squid.”

  He thought of himself as Perry Mason, or Hercule Poirot, perhaps. A cunning sort of person. He paced back and forth in front of the floor lamp, and his shadow loomed across her.

  “You were trying to get rid of a baby,” he said. Then, “Didn’t you think?” he cried. “You could have killed yourself.” He pulled at his hair. “Tell me what you did.”

  “I gathered the plants,” said Squid. “I spent days collecting—”

  “Och! How did you get a baby?”

  She told them about Erik. It was the first they’d heard of him. She described his kayak with its elegant prow, his tent and the flags on the poles. She said, “Alastair met him. Alastair saw us together.”

  “And where’s Alastair?” asked Murray.

  “I don’t know!” she said.

  Hannah leads her daughter through to the kitchen. She gets the milk from the fridge, a pan from the cupboard. Murray’s as fussy about hot chocolate as he is about anything. It has to be made the old-fashioned way, from cocoa powder and sugar, with the tiniest bit of ground coffee.

  Squid doesn’t offer to help. She leans on the counter, looking out through the window toward Murray’s sandbox.

  Hannah puts the pan on the stove and sees that her hands are shaking.

  “Well?” says Squid.

  Hannah takes a deep breath. “This isn’t right, what you’re doing,” she says. “You can’t just turn around and leave forever.”

  Squid doesn’t answer. A look as dark as the coming storm passes over her face. From outside comes Tat’s shrill voice, laughing with excitement.

  “It isn’t fair,” says Hannah. “What about Tatiana?”

  “Oh, you don’t care about Tat. You’re just thinking of Dad,” says Squid. “And yourself. You just want what you want.”

  “That isn’t true. You don’t even know what I want.” Hannah pours milk into the pan, letting it slosh up the sides. “Can’t you see the difference in your own daughter? Can’t you see how happy she is?”

  “So was Alastair once.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Squid. I’m not asking you to keep her here for fourteen years.” Hannah is nearly shouting, nearly crying. “Just a month, that’s all. The month you promised.” She turns on the burner and stirs the milk with a wooden spoon. “And then you can decide what’s next.”

  “I already know what’s next. We’ve got visas and tickets—”

  “Then what harm will it do to stay for a month?”

  Squid stares out the window, blinking quickly. She touches her eyes with her fingers. “What happened to the men against the girls?” she asks.

  Hannah can’t keep from smiling. “No one’s ganging up on you, Squid. Your father doesn’t know what I’m telling you.”

  Squid sobs. “Well, neither do I.”

  Hannah leaves the stove and holds her daughter. She holds her as hard as she can, and then Squid’s arms wrap round her waist, and they lean against each other. “I just don’t want to lose you again,” Hannah says.

  They stand like that until the smell of burning milk wafts from the pan and pries them apart. Hannah kisses Squid’s forehead, then smiles. She empties the pan and starts all over again.

  “I can’t stay,” says Squid. “Even if I wanted to. I see Dad with Tatiana, and all I can think about is Alastair.”

  “Alastair loved your dad.”

  “But he said some awful things about him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Mom, you don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me this, then,” says Hannah. “What did the two of you talk about just before he died? What did he say in the small house?”

  “The same things he always did.” Squid is helping now. She’s measuring coffee into the grinder, and the beans are ticking against the metal. “He talked about leaving the island. How Dad—and you—wouldn’t let him.”

  Hannah stirs the milk, staring at the swirls that follow her wooden spoon round and round the pan. “Did he tell you he was going to kill himself?” And the effort it takes to ask that question leaves her nearly breathless.

  “No, Mom,” says Squid. “That’s the only thing he never told me.”

  The storm comes with a quick, heavy shower of rain. Huge drops splash across the lawn. The wind sock stiffens, and turns. The clouds close in, walling the island with darkness.

  Through the evening the lightkeeper’s family sits in the front room of the big house, hearing the sea and the wind. The bell rings once, and then twice, and rain slams on the roof, gushing through the pipes and into the cistern with an eerie wail. But the eaves still overflow, cascading past the window. The lawn is a lake.

  Squid says, “I’d forgotten it could be like this.”

  “Och, it’s nothing,” says Murray. He’s on the sofa with Tat at his side. “Wait for December. The nights so long there’s hardly a day between them. Waves like houses. Storms never stopping.”

  A seagull is carried across the lawn like a windblown umbrella. The surf is louder, bashing at the island. The whirligigs rattle like old bicycles. And Squid lifts her head at the sound.

  “Did you know,” she asks, “that Alastair was scared of the whirligigs?”

  “Och, he wasn’t,” snorts Murray.

  “It’s true.” Squid nods. “The night the Cape Caution sank, Old Glory fell off his pole. And just after the Odd Fellow sank, one of the windmilling birds did the same thing. Alastair said it must be an omen. He said if a whirligig falls, a boat is surely doomed.”

  “Hmm,” says Murray. “I didn’t know that.”

  Squid sighs. “I guess he only told me.”

  “Och, he was a poor soul. Always fretting about somebody else.”

  The talk brings a gloom to the big house. Murray puts his arm around Tat. Half-asleep, she wriggles down against him. There are the wind and the rain and the gurgle of water, and Squid is close to tears.

  “This is awful,” she says. “What do you do in the middle of winter? How can you stand it like this?”

  “Life goes on,” says Murray. “But I’ll tell you . . .”

  Hannah feels the hairs stir on the back of her neck. She wants to fling out some words, changing the subject.

  “It gets pretty lonely sometimes,” he says. “With your mother away and all.”

  So now Squid knows. Hannah can see it in her eyes, the way a slot machine jingles and blinks as the numbers roll round. She can feel her making connections, shaping a picture from the pieces she’s learned.

  And then she says, in her singsong way, “I didn’t know you did that, Mom.”

  “Oh, yes,” says Murray. “I batch it in the winters now.” He’s not complaining; he even smiles fondly at Hannah. “I suppose you gave your mother a taste for the city life, Squid.”

  The helicopter came for Squid in April. It came in a hurry, slanted down at the nose, roaring over the island with its belly nearly touching the trees.

  That morning, before dawn, Hannah had been jolted from a nightmare by the sound of her daughter screaming. She had heard doors slamming as Squid fled from Gomorrah, then another long shriek from outside. She had h
ardly thrown off the covers before Squid came flying up the stairs and into the room, holding her stomach, shouting, “My baby!” There was blood in a bright patch on her nightgown, and in smears along her fingers. Murray, in blue pajamas, had dashed off to the radio.

  They were waiting on the pad when the helicopter came. Hannah believed they would all get in, that they would fly together to Rupert, straight to the hospital. Whatever happened to Squid’s baby, she thought, it would be the end of Lizzie. They would find a house on a hill, looking east to the mountains, and none of them would ever come back to the island. Murray would attend to their things.

  But only the girls went away. They flew to a world that Squid barely knew. Hannah found a room and Squid had her baby. It was the happiest, most normal baby Hannah had ever seen, and for the first time in a decade she said a prayer of thanksgiving.

  Squid started at school, in a special class with other young mothers. She filled her life so full of friends and new things and little Tatiana that there wasn’t room for Hannah. When the baby was three months old, Squid said, “Mom, you should go back to the island.”

  “Yes,” said Hannah.

  They were driving each other crazy.

  Squid is sitting in the old rocking chair where Murray held her as a baby. She sits and watches him as he plays with Tatiana, looking neither happy nor sad. Hannah can’t imagine what she’s thinking. Does she feel at home at all?

  The island was never the same for Hannah after that stay in Prince Rupert. She came back in September, just as summer was ending. The house felt like a bunker, herself and Murray sealed inside it. He carried on just as before, reading about the plants and the animals as though he was still catching up to Alastair, but Hannah couldn’t bear the silence and the loneliness. By Halloween she was back in Prince Rupert, only to find that Squid had gone south to Vancouver and vanished into the city.

  It was heartbreaking. Alastair was gone forever, and it seemed that Squid was too. “She’s been lured into crime,” said Murray, but Hannah imagined things worse than that. Then the last boat of the year brought a letter from Squid, such a cheery letter that she couldn’t have thought anyone had worried about her. She had finished school and found a job that paid nearly as much as Murray earned. After that one, her letters came sporadically, sometimes two or three at once, sometimes none for months at a time. But she never called on the ALAN circuit. And she never asked for anything.