The Lightkeeper's Daughter

by Iain Lawrence

  Hannah smiles at her now. What a beautiful girl she is, but still such a child. Slumped in the chair, lazily rocking herself, she seems to have no worries or fears. She has become exactly what Hannah always thought she would: a strong and independent person.

  On the sofa, Murray and Tat thread jingle shells on a bit of string. Murray does the threading; Tat only jingles. She’s happy with the sound they make.

  “Whale,” she says.

  “No, no.” Murray shakes the string of thin white plates. “Jingle shells.” And Tat says too: “Jingle shells.”

  “Good girl,” praises Murray.

  “Whale.”

  “Och,” he says.

  But she’s adamant. She stands up on her chair and shouts the word. She points at the window and shouts it again.

  Hannah says, “I think she’s trying to tell you something.”

  “Och, I can see that,” says Murray. “What I don’t understand is what. Or why.”

  “And there’s no use in trying to figure it out,” says Squid. She stretches her legs, rocking forward until her heels are on the carpet. “We should have our talk now, Mom.”

  “Oh, let’s leave it for later,” says Hannah. Too much has changed now that her secret is out.

  “Then I guess I’ll go to the small house,” says Squid.

  Squid is proven right: the storm is hard, but short. By morning it has passed, and the gulls wheel and dip above the lagoon. Something has excited them. Their cries are shrill and piercing.

  As though she’s been brought back to the schedule of her childhood, Squid comes to the door very early. She has Tatiana with her, and she’s ready to leave the girl and go. “I’ll just walk down and see what the birds are doing,” says Squid. But Murray won’t allow it.

  “You know the rules,” he says. “Work first, play after.” Then he looks at Tatiana. “But, och, there’s nothing needing doing today.”

  When they set off for the beach, Murray in the lead, it’s hard for Hannah not to linger far behind. Four people, going in pairs, is too much like the old days, as though Tatiana has taken the place of Alastair. They go at her pace, and it’s Tat—instead of him—who notices how the cobwebs glisten, how the ferns droop sodden leaves. It’s a long, nostalgic walk for Hannah. And at the end, at the beach, they gather in a quiet knot where the boardwalk leaves the forest. They can only gawk at what they see.

  The whale, the humpback, is stranded in the sand.

  It’s enormous, and more than that. There’s not a word to say how huge it is. Twice as high as Murray, longer than the big house, it’s stretched along the height of beach with its head nearly touching the logs. The flukes lie flat, the flippers spread like scalloped wings. In the massive head the eye seems tiny. It swivels round toward them.

  Murray is the first to run across the beach. Crows and ravens rise from the whale like hordes of flies. The gulls circle, and the air is filled with a scream and a clamor of birds.

  Squid holds Tat in place. The child is staring down the beach; already she’s in tears. “Oh, Tat,” says Hannah. She feels the same; she feels just the same as that.

  She steps to the sand. Along the beach is a line of kelp and wood and small, dead crabs. It’s a ragged, jumbled line where sand fleas hop through steaming piles of green and brown. It marks the reach of the sea at the storm’s high tide, and it crosses under the whale far behind its flippers. Half the humpback’s length lies on a part of the beach that was never touched by the sea. It drove itself ashore; it almost crawled toward the trees.

  But, incredibly, Murray stands at the nose and tries to push it back. He digs in his feet and puts his shoulder to the whale, to a knob of leathery skin. He looks so tiny there, so helpless. And soon he gives it up.

  “Why?” he says. “Hannah, why?”

  She has no answer. She holds her hand against the whale and in her fingers and her palm she feels a tremor deep inside it. The whale is breathing, but not with spouts and tremendous blasts of air. The skin at the blowholes flutters like the lips of a snoring man. The breaths are long, and faint, and weak. All its weight is resting on its lungs.

  Hannah rubs her hand in circles. He—surely it’s a he—feels cold to her. Along the edges of the flippers grow barnacles the size of her fist. His mouth is long, curving at the end. Above it, on the sloping jaw, are lovely sculpted grooves. And higher still, the dark, round eye is open. The pupil turns toward her. She can see a knowledge in it, a resignation of its death.

  The flipper ripples on the sand. And from inside the whale comes a long and dreadful groan. The eye pivots away.

  Tatiana is coming. Squid has to hurry to keep up, her hand on the child’s collar.

  “Let her go,” shouts Hannah. “Let her go.”

  “It will crush her!” says Squid.

  “No. He won’t do that.”

  And Squid hangs back as Tatiana races splay-legged up the beach in a rattle of her jingle shells.

  She throws herself at the whale. She hits it full length, with a sickly thud, like the sound of bread dough punched by a fist. She spreads her arms and tries to hug it, this vast, enormous thing. The flipper moves again, scraping up the sand. The huge flukes rise and, sagging, fall in place.

  And Murray asks, sadly, “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” says Hannah. “Who could answer that?”

  “Alastair could,” says Squid. She stands with her hands in the pockets of her jeans, her legs crossed in a clumsy way. “They don’t want to drown.” She shrugs. “That’s what he said. It scares them to think of drowning.”

  Murray walks away from the whale. He steps back to the logs. “How do you know this?” he asks.

  “We talked about it. It’s what he wrote in his book.” She glances up the height of the whale, her head tipping back. “He wrote down what they were saying. He wrote down their songs in his book.”

  Murray’s too sad to be angry. But he has to raise his voice to be heard at all. The birds are screaming more loudly as the whale is slowly dying. “Are you reading this book?” he says.

  “He gave it to me once.” Squid uncrosses her legs and kneels in the sand. “He asked me to read it, to see what I thought. He asked me if he was going crazy.”

  “Where is it?” asks Murray. “No. Fetch it here. Squid, run and fetch it.”

  chapter fifteen

  October 3. They’re back! I turned on the hydrophone, sure there would be nothing but static again, but heard the humpbacks instead. I don’t know where they’ve been, and I’m pretty sure they’ll be leaving for the winter in a couple of weeks or so. There’s something in the song that sounds like goodbye. I think I understand them now, and I want to go with them. I want to be with them always.

  I sat on Almost Nothing Atoll this afternoon and read everything I’ve written. Either I’m right or I’m not, I don’t know which. But if I’m not I must be crazy.

  October 5. I tried to talk to Dad again, but he thinks what I’m doing is nonsense. He said, “Let’s assume you’re right, and whales have a language. What makes you think you could understand it? If you heard a lot of Chinamen talking, would you know what they were saying?”

  Maybe he’s right. But I think I deserve a chance to find out. I told him—AGAIN—I need computers and spectrographs. He said, “Alastair, everything you need is under your nose. It’s in your books, boy. Go back to your books.” I told him it’s NOT in the books. No one has ever listened the way that I have.

  October 6. The work never stops. I do my chores and then go off by myself. I don’t know how long I can last.

  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 falling in love.

  Squid looks up from the book. So that was it, the thing that has haunted her for so long. Alastair was in love with her.

  She shakes her hea
d. “That’s it?” she asks herself. “That’s the terrible thing?” She nearly laughs, until an image of him comes into her mind, so serious and worried, sunlight making his glasses white and his eyes invisible. Why was he afraid to tell her that?

  She’s horrible to me sometimes. If she hated me she couldn’t act much worse. But she’s the only one who cares, and I can see it every time she looks at me. I think she’s maybe in love with me too, but doesn’t want me to know it, and that’s why she acts mean. I think she would like us to go away together.

  She looks at the book, and past it. The floorboards are open, the mat pulled askew. She looks at his desk, at his table, at his funny and slanted shelves. They’re all full of Alastair’s treasures; everything he owned is here.

  The useless book holder that she made him is high on the opposite wall. The dozens of necklaces that she tied with her shells are heaped inside a wooden box printed with Japanese characters, itself a salvage from the beach. His favorite shirt is folded on the back of a chair; his shoes, side by side, are underneath. On the dresser is his flute. It’s as though he never left or, having left, now comes home to Gomorrah.

  Why was he frightened to tell her that he loved her? Did he think she would only mock him?

  Mr. Stick-in-the-mud. She hears her voice; she sees herself dancing around him. You’re nuts; you’re crazy as a bug.

  He was right: She couldn’t have acted any worse. She never listened to the things he told her.

  Squid sighs, then flips forward through the pages.

  October 15. There was a guy on the beach today. I saw Squid with him and felt all sick inside. Squid didn’t want me around. She said, “Why don’t you go and talk to the whales?” They laughed as I walked away. Squid said, “It’s true. My brother talks to the whales.” It’s a funny thing. The guy looks a bit like me. Maybe that’s why Squid likes him so much.

  He looked nothing like Alastair. He was tall and tanned, with eyes like bits of sunlit sea. He was older than her by ten years or more, and he made her feel grown up; he made her feel beautiful.

  He asked her name, and when she told him Squid, he laughed and said no, that couldn’t be right. “It’s Elizabeth,” she told him, then, blushing. But he said even that wasn’t pretty enough. He said, “I’ll call you Sabrina—Neptune’s daughter.”

  He made a spear from a stick, then waded out and caught a crab. It was a little red rock crab, and it squirmed on the point of the spear as he held it up. He grinned and grunted, a Viking’s cry.

  Over a crackling fire he cooked the crab. He served it to her on a clamshell, then wiped the juices that dribbled on her chin. When the sun went down, they lay in the sand and stared at the stars. He took her hand to lead her into his tent.

  She stayed with him until it was nearly dawn. And then, barefoot—with her shoes in her hand—she ran up through the forest and along the boardwalk. At the center of the island, near the dark banks of the middens, Alastair was waiting. He grabbed her arm as she passed a stump, and she nearly screamed from the fright she got.

  He looked wild, like a hermit of the woods. “Get lost,” she said, and shook his arm away.

  He grabbed her again. “You stayed all night,” he said.

  “So what?”

  “You kissed him.”

  “So what?” she said again. And then, like a child, “You spied on me!”

  “What else did you do?”

  She pulled away a second time, surprised by the strength in Alastair’s arms. She marched along the boardwalk, but he hurried past and blocked her way.

  “Come on,” he said. “What did you do?”

  “It’s none of your business,” she said. “You stupid freak; why were you watching?”

  “Are you leaving with him?” His face was only inches from hers, his glasses gleaming like owls’ eyes in the dawn. “Are you? Is he taking you away?”

  “Maybe,” she said, just to taunt him.

  “Squid!” he shouted. And then he collapsed. He fell down at her feet, crying with heartbroken sobs.

  She was too angry to comfort him, to tell him she wasn’t going away. Erik would be leaving by himself as soon as the tide came in. She had told him, “I’ll come and say goodbye,” but he hadn’t wanted that; he didn’t like to say goodbyes.

  “You can’t leave,” said Alastair, sobbing. “You just can’t.”

  “I can do whatever I want,” she told him.

  “Oh, Squid,” he said. “Please.” He held on to her ankles. His forehead touched the top of her foot. “You don’t even know him. He was just telling you things. Whatever he thought you would like. He’s just a jerk, Squid. He’s just a stupid jerk.” He sniffed and cried. “And Sabrina wasn’t Neptune’s daughter.”

  She laughed then. She knelt down and put an arm on her brother’s shoulders. She could feel his bones shaking. “Hey, quit it,” she said, softly.

  “Do you love him?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I guess so.”

  “Do you love him more than me?”

  “Oh, Alastair,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  He still wouldn’t look at her. He huddled on the boardwalk, in the gray of the new morning, with his hands drawn in to cover his face. His glasses had fallen onto the planks.

  “Oh, Alastair,” she said again, but tenderly now. “I’d do anything for you. I’d do anything to make you happy.” She hugged him with all her strength. “Anything.”

  October 17. The natives are getting restless.

  The book is empty after that. It’s the last thing that Alastair wrote. In little more than a month, he was dead.

  Squid closes the floorboards. She drags the mat into place. She tucks the book under her arm and tramps down the stairs. On the lawn, she walks faster; on the boardwalk, she sprints. She’s racing her thoughts, trying to outrun them.

  It’s the same way she went years ago, a month after Erik left, when Alastair was still alive. She carried plants then, small bundles tied with wool. She remembers the taste of them, the fear of knowing that something was wrong when the forest started leaping and spinning around her, when the sky turned white, then red, and finally black.

  And suddenly Murray was mopping her face. Alastair was holding her feet. They were both angry, but Alastair most of all. Late that night, in Gomorrah, he whistled like a steam train through his nostrils as she lay on the sofa with a blanket pulled up to her shoulders.

  “What if you’d died?” he said, looking down. “Didn’t you think about that?”

  “None of that stuff could kill me,” she said.

  “It almost did.”

  “But it didn’t.” She kicked the blanket into a wad at her feet. “It didn’t even kill the baby.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Because nothing came out, of course.”

  “Oh, Jiminy!” he said. “Squid, you’re so stupid.”

  He took his hydrophone down from the shelf. He pressed the transducer onto her stomach, on top of her blouse, then put on the earphones and squinted with the effort of listening. “I can’t hear anything,” he said.

  “Don’t expect it to sing,” she told him.

  “Shhh!” He moved the transducer back and forth. “I don’t think there’s anything there. I don’t think there ever was.”

  “Well, I can feel it,” she said. “Mr. Genius. I can’t explain it, but I know it’s there.”

  He tossed the hydrophone down in a tangle. He dropped into the chair by the window and looked out at the darkness through his own reflection. A black-headed wren came and stood on the sill, but Alastair didn’t even seem to notice it.

  Squid stared at him, at the side of his face, and she saw how frightened he was. “Alastair, don’t worry,” she said. “It’s going to work out.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “Erik’s coming back. He promised he would. He told me, ‘I’ll come with the geese.’ ”

  Alastair snorted.<
br />
  “It’s true,” she said. “He’ll come back and I’ll say, ‘Look! You’re a dad.’ And he’ll be happy, you see. Nothing will matter to Erik.”

  The wren hopped down from the sill. Alastair didn’t move.

  “So what’s to worry about?” asked Squid.

  “He’ll take you away. Won’t he?”

  “We didn’t talk about that,” said Squid.

  “But he will.”

  “I don’t know,” she snapped. “Maybe he’ll stay on the island and Dad will build us a house. You can go to college, maybe, and when you come back you can be the keeper when Dad retires. Okay? Whatever you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Alastair.

  “Then what do you want?” she asked, angered by his gloom.

  “Who cares?” he asked. “I’ll never get what I want. Are you so stupid that you can’t see that?”

  “Don’t call me stupid,” she said.

  “Stupid, stupid.”

  “Oh, get out,” she said. “Go on, Alastair. Go play with the whales, or whatever you do. I’m sick of looking at you.”

  He blinked at her, then started to cry, but she didn’t take her words back. He got up from his chair, found his coat and his flute, and stood for a moment at the door.

  She didn’t bother to look at him. “I hope Erik does take me away,” she said. “I hate being stuck here with you.”

  It was the last thing she ever said to him. He opened the door, walked out to the porch, and she never saw him again.

  Murray hasn’t moved from the log when Squid arrives, breathless, back at the beach. His elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, he looks the same as he did the day Alastair died. Squid opens the book and hands it to him.