Hannah keeps walking, dragging her fingers on the whale’s skin, past the nose and down the side. “He’s breathing so hard,” she says. “He shudders when he breathes.”
The whale is slowly sinking into the beach. He’s spreading across it, flattening out. Little Tatiana is huddled right against him, in the curve where the flipper joins the body. It seems almost as though the whale is holding her, and she leans her minuscule weight on the towering wall of the humpback. Her ear and her hands are pressed against the wall of flesh.
“Singing,” she says. “Listen, Mom. Singing inside.”
Squid puts her ear to the whale. The sound, to her, is only a rumble and a wheeze. It’s the beating of a failing heart and the gasp of crushed lungs; the squirting of blood down shriveling veins. It’s the sound of dying, and it scares her.
“Singing,” says Tat.
“That’s right,” says Squid. “He’s telling a story.”
Murray stands by the head of the whale. He looks like a preacher, the book for a Bible. In a slow voice, deep as the oceans, he reads aloud what Alastair has written.
“From the land I came. On the land
the creator made me.
And there I will return when
one day
I am wearied. And at peace.”
chapter sixteen
HANNAH STANDS BEHIND MURRAY. SHE looks over his shoulder, down at the book. The page that he’s reading is mottled with seawater stains. In places the letters are smudged by a spatter of drops that might have been spindrift or rain.
She finds it strange to think of her son writing this. He was always so tidy and neat, but the words are a scrawl, as though he’d been furiously setting them down, trying to keep up with the whales.
In effervescence the calves are born
in a phosphorescent sea
Squid is watching Tatiana more closely than she ever has. She doesn’t seem happy with the place her daughter has chosen, a crease between the sand and thirty tons of whale. But Tat’s peculiar face is free of all worries; it’s an expression almost of rapture.
And Murray reads aloud, in a voice that’s an echo of Alastair’s.
“The Orcas come, the killing whales
burning through the sea
with meteor tails of glowing green
in a blackness without sun.
And I see when it is over
when the dying is nearly done
when the blood as dark as winter
chokes my baleen plates,
That the darkness is my own.”
“He’s singing,” says Tat again. She puts her hands on the whale’s scalloped flipper. Her necklace of jingle shells rattles on her chest. And from her mouth, like a whisper, come the whale sounds, the whistles and groans. But they’re faint now, and faltering.
“Hear me sing of this
how I bore my child along
my dying and bleeding child.
On my back I carried her and let her
breathe the air.
And when she died I carried her
my back to serve as land
until her flesh in rotting strips brought
sharks
with tearing teeth.
And only then I let her go. I let her fall away
and rolled with aching flukes to watch
her spiral to a grave
Oh, God. Don’t let me drown.”
Murray has read only a little part of what goes on for pages, but he closes the book, holds it for a moment, then passes it back to Squid. He looks up and blows a long breath toward the sky and the circling birds. He closes his eyes, breathes in and out again, then stands beside the whale, stroking it softly. Hannah stands with him until the humpback dies with a rasping of air, and Tat’s little song fades off into nothing.
The enormous eyes don’t close; Hannah doesn’t know if they can. But they lose their depth, their wildness and their light. It goes from them like the snuffing of a candle.
In silence, they start up toward the house. Murray will call someone. A boat—or a chopper—will come, and the men will bring chain saws.
On Squid’s first day, Hannah held on to her arm. Now she does it again, slowing her down on the boardwalk. This time, Squid does not pull away.
“Mom,” she says, “I’m leaving the island today. When the boat comes, I’m taking Tat. I’m going home, Mom.”
The choice of her words has a poignancy for Hannah. Never again will Squid talk of Lizzie as home.
“I might come back,” says Squid. “I don’t know. But I have to go home. There are too many ghosts on the island.”
Hannah squeezes her arm. “Now you know how I feel.”
Every year it’s the same. She tells herself it’s the rain and the darkness, the weary forever of winter. But she flies from the island when the snow starts to fall. She’s afraid to see the ground covered in white, afraid she’ll find tracks in the morning when the footsteps go by in the night. When the voices cry out from the past.
Not always is it Alastair. Again and again she wakes in her bed, hearing doors banging open and Squid shrieking, “Mom!” And she bolts up in her bed, sure that Squid will come flying into the room. She’ll be six months pregnant, her nightgown stained with blood.
“Mom?” asks Squid. “On the night that Alastair died, did you hear him playing his flute?”
“Yes.” Hannah still hears the flute when the nights are crisp and wintery. But that night the music was different; it was weeping with sadness.
“He had it with him,” says Squid. “But it’s back. It’s up in his room.”
“Murray found it.” Hannah bumps against Squid where the boardwalk turns through the trees. She looks back, and sees how the birds are falling from the sky, settling down by the corpse of the whale. “He went everywhere,” she says. “Round and round the island, out to every reef and rock. He rowed the little boat and looked down through the glass, and—Squid—the look on his face when he passed over forests of kelp . . .” Hannah shivers. “The flute was lying on the beach. Half buried in the sand.”
It was only a week after Alastair died. Murray brought it up to the house as she worked in the kitchen. He couldn’t resist playing it. He tootled some notes as he passed by the window. For that moment—that instant— she forgot that Alastair was dead. And the joy she felt, as she looked out to see him—before she saw Murray instead . . . Well, she hadn’t felt that happy even one more time in all the years gone by.
“He was playing on the beach that night,” she says to Squid. “I think he went to the place that he liked best as a boy. It’s funny how it all goes in circles. That was probably the place where I landed my kayak; maybe the place where Erik brought his.”
Suddenly, Squid is sniffling.
“What’s wrong?” asks Hannah.
“It was silly,” says Squid. “I saw his flute and started to think that maybe he wasn’t really dead. That he’d just gone away like he always did. That he was living on the island somewhere. On the island or the atoll.”
“I used to think that too,” says Hannah. She thought it all the time. Her first winter off the island, she felt wrong to go. She was abandoning her son, she thought.
They’re deeper in the forest now, higher on the island. The trees whisper in a wind. And Hannah hears its voice. She starts, and her hand tightens under her daughter’s arm. But Squid keeps walking. The wind talks only to Hannah.
They pass the ribbons marking Murray’s house of fancy, the one he’ll never build. There’s another turn in the boardwalk, and the ending comes into view, like a tunnel mouth to a world of green and sunlight. In minutes they’ll be home.
“Squid?” says Hannah.
“Hmm?”
“Do you think I’m awful for leaving your father alone in the winter?”
“No,” says Squid.
“And Alastair? Do you think he’d be angry?”
Squid walks along, holding the notebook against her chest. “Not angry,
” she says at last. “He’d be disappointed, maybe. He wanted us all to be happy. He wanted everyone to be happy and safe.”
Hannah nods to herself. She’s known that all along.
“I hurt him so much,” says Squid. “I didn’t know that before, how much I hurt him. I just destroyed him in the end.”
“Don’t say that,” says Hannah.
“But I did, Mom. He wrote it all in his books, everything I said, and—”
“I mean it,” says Hannah. “This is water under the bridge. You did everything you could for him.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” says Squid, almost whining. “He wrote about that. He wrote about you. He wrote about—”
Hannah pulls the book from Squid’s hands. “I don’t want to know what he wrote about.”
“Why not?”
“Because it won’t bring him back, will it? It can’t help him, but it might hurt me, so it wouldn’t do anyone any good.” Hannah holds the book firmly, not even tempted to open it. “I’m frightened of it, Squid.”
“The others aren’t so bad,” says Squid.
“There’s others?”
Squid nods. “Eight books in all. He hid them in his floor.”
“Show me,” says Hannah.
“I thought you didn’t—”
“I don’t.” Hannah grabs her daughter’s arm and pulls her along. “I want to get rid of them, Squid. I want them out of there before Murray thinks of looking for them.”
chapter seventeen
SQUID GLANCES UP AS SHE COMES OUT from the forest. The tower is sparkling white in the sun, the sky above it blue and clear. Murray’s lawns glisten with moisture, and Lizzie Island seems somehow fresh. Somehow new. Squid smiles, feeling happy—though she doesn’t know why—for the first time since she arrived on the Darby. She breathes the smell of sea and grass and trees, then starts forward again, looking down at the boardwalk and the planks that flash past her feet.
Then she steps down onto gravel, the boardwalk ending where the lawn begins, and she links her arm through her mom’s. Now that she knows she’s leaving, she wishes she could stay. For a tiny fraction of a moment, she wishes that with all her heart.
Murray comes up from behind as they walk the last few yards to the small house. Squid steps off to the left, and her mom to the right, and Murray trots between them, breathing hard, with little Tatiana riding on his shoulders. Her dark hair is blowing back from her face, and she grins down at her mother. But she doesn’t let go of Murray.
“The weathers,” he says as he passes, his boots crunching in the gravel. “I nearly forgot the weathers again.” On he goes, along the paths, toward the sunshine and the tower. “Tatty’s going to help,” he calls back, between breaths that come in puffs.
Squid remembers being carried like that. She remembers the smell of her father’s clothes, always clean no matter what oily business he’d been up to. She remembers the feeling of being carried so high, and so safely. It makes her sad to see how much more slowly her father runs now.
At the small house she starts up the steps. Suddenly her mother is behind her instead of beside her, and she looks down from the porch. “Are you sure you want to see this?”
“Yes,” says Hannah. She’s staring at the sign above the door, Alastair’s handwritten Gomorrah. “I think I can go in there now,” she says.
They don’t linger in the living room. They go straight to the upper floor, then turn to the right into Alastair’s room. Squid, in her hurry, left the mat pulled aside, the floorboards open. The dark spines of Alastair’s books stand up in a line in the hole.
“There’s so many,” says Hannah. She gets to her knees and lifts out the first one. “Oh, dear,” she says. “Do you think this is right, to get rid of them?”
“I don’t know,” says Squid.
“Are they that bad? Did they make you cry?”
“Yes,” says Squid. “Sometimes I laughed, but mostly I cried.”
“Then help me.” Hannah pulls out the books three at a time. “There’s too many to burn. We’ll have to dig a hole and bury them.”
“You could leave them where they are.”
“No,” says Hannah. “You found them; so will Murray. Or the next keeper, or the one after that. I just want to lay all this to rest.”
“Okay,” says Squid. She arranges the books in a pile, and when the last one’s out her mother reaches deep in the floor, her fingers scratching at the wood. A spiderweb breaks loose with a tiny shredding sound.
“There’s nothing else,” says Hannah. “Now hurry. Your father won’t take very long with the weathers.”
They close the floorboards, then slide the mat into place. They carry the books down the stairs and out from Gomorrah. Hunched over, half running, they scurry round the small house and into the forest. At a patch of clear ground, in a ring of hemlock trees, they drop to the ground and dig with their hands, through the moss and the loam. They scrape out a hollow just deep enough for Alastair’s books, and lay them down on the black soil.
For Squid it’s like a funeral, like the service they never had for her brother. The sound of the surf is in the distance; there are birds singing in the trees. Visions of Alastair flicker through her mind—his face, his voice, his laughter. She is carried through years before she finds herself back in the forest.
Across the scar they’ve made in the moss, her mother is hunched over the broken ground. Her hands, stained black from the earth, are spread flat across the notebooks. “He wrote everything in these?” she asks. “About me and Murray and you?”
“Yes.”
“And Erik? Did he write about Erik?”
“Yes, Mom. A bit.”
“Just the way you told me? How Erik came in his kayak, and how you made him think mermaids were real? All of that’s here?”
“Some of it.”
“But all of it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Mom, don’t,” says Squid. She doesn’t want to start on this, examining each little part of what happened. She’s afraid that one question will lead to another, and there are things she will never talk about to anybody. “Erik was real; he was here. I don’t want to think about the stuff that happened after.”
“All right,” says Hannah. There are streaks of mud, like black tears, on her face, but she looks happier. “I’ve imagined so many horrors. Oh, Squid, I’m so sorry for everything.”
They hug across the hole, their cheeks touching, their foreheads on each other’s shoulders. They lean together, breathing together, until neither can move without both of them collapsing into the hole. Slowly, they topple sideways onto the moss, giggling with their arms entangled.
Squid pushes herself up. But Hannah just lies there, sprawled on the ground, still laughing as she stares at the sky. She sweeps her arms around and makes a pillow from her hands. “I think something’s finished,” she says. “Something’s over. I feel good again, Squid.”
“Me too. I’m glad I came back.” Squid scoops dirt from the moss and casts it over the books. She starts with big, double handfuls and makes a mound over Alastair’s things, then pats it down and starts again, until she’s scraping with her fingers for the last bits of black on the green. The moss goes on top, and her mother helps her then, folding the shredded pieces back in their places again.
When they finish, the ground looks bruised. When they stand, their clothes are covered with bits of moss, their skin with stains of dirt. “We can’t let Murray see us like this,” says Hannah. So instead of going back they go forward, through the forest and down to the sea. They wash their hands and faces, catching the waves that tumble toward them, surging up the rocks. They each pick the moss from the other’s clothes, then walk side by side to the big house.
Murray has finished the weathers. He’s at his endless task of clearing debris from the lawn and the paths. He’s using his garden rake with its long steel fingers to sweep along the wailing wall. And he’s put Tatiana to work. She snatches up the leaves and twigs a
s he drags them out, and she squashes them into a tidy little pile.
Squid watches them as she walks closer. There’s a sparrow on the lawn a yard away, a junco close behind it. A Steller’s jay, with its cheeky little topknot, hops along the stones. Murray twists his rake along the little wall, and Tatiana pounces on the leaves.
“That’s seven now,” says Murray.
“Then ten?” asks Tat, looking up.
“No, no. We’ve got eight and nine to go before we get to ten.”
Tatiana sighs. “Och, it’s a big number.”
Squid laughs. Murray looks up and sees her there with Hannah.
“What’s going on?” says Squid.
Murray turns his rake upside down and puts the end of the handle on the path. “Every ten sweeps, we take what we have and throw it over the cliff,” he says. “That’s Tat’s favorite part, isn’t it, Tatty?”
She nods, still gathering leaves. Then she leans closer to the stones, grimaces, and shrieks, “Look! Oh, Grandpa, look!”
Murray puts down his rake and kneels beside her. Tatiana’s finger is shaking so much that it’s hard to tell where she’s pointing. But Murray squints and bobs his head. “Och,” he says. “That’s just a spider. Has she never seen a spider, Squid?”
“I don’t point them out,” says Squid.
“Well, you should.” Murray opens his arms. “Gather round.”
They close around him, just as they did years before, Squid at his side and Hannah at his back, little Tatiana in Alastair’s place close in front of him.
“He’s a clever little fellow,” Murray says. “A fisherman, born and bred. See his net, anchored there and there and there? He fishes the sky, not the sea.”
Squid leans closer, her hand on her father’s shoulder.
“He started out as just a wee thing,” says Murray. “Scores of baby spiders could sit on your fingertip, Tat.”
Tatiana holds her finger inches from her eyes.
“Then, one day, he floats away. He goes soaring off on a bit of thread, wherever the winds might blow him. And as soon as he’s down he goes to work, casting his net from a twig or a stone or a blade of grass. No one’s ever taught him how to do it, but he knows. This miracle is inside him, in his wee speck of a brain. He sets out his anchors, then weaves his net, and there he sits, as patient as Job. No skulking through the forest for this fellow, he lets his dinner come to him. But he’s no layabout, either. Just watch.”
The Lightkeeper's Daughter Page 18
