These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  “Not really. I was attracted by the solitude. Both vocations share one luxury. Time.”

  “Time for… ?”

  “Oh, for thinking, reading.”

  He paused, looked warmly at Cathryn, then back to Isobel. “Time to take note of small, seemingly inconsequential things.”

  Jack picked up a simple panne velvet cap Isobel had just finished. He lightly touched the bunting feathers at its brim.

  “Have you ever, for instance, had an entire afternoon with time enough to sit and watch a bird build its nest?”

  Seeing Jack’s earnest gestures, listening to him describe his afternoon of observing one bird, she realized he was not what she’d imagined. But then, what traits did define the sort of man who would steal another’s wife? A ruthless plotter? Someone desperate? As his conversation drifted to the landscape, the outdoors, and the botanical studies he’d made of the region, she realized the man before her was neither. His eyes were light with vulnerability, and in his shyness he preferred the company of birds and plants. “Plants?”

  “A passion of mine.”

  He glanced up at Cathryn and smiled. “One of them. This area is a paradise for the amateur botanist.”

  “And you are… ?”

  “An amateur? In most things, yes.”

  He spoke of his finds in the field, even pulled out a pencil to sketch a rare species of fern he’d happened upon. In describing the setting, the light on that day as he went along his woodland trek, Jack Reese was somehow able to make the discovery of a flowerless plant sound romantic.

  Isobel wondered if he would speak as effusively of Cathryn if she were to ask about their love affair. She would like to have gotten him alone, but just as she was thinking it, Cathryn came up behind his chair and laid her hands lightly on his shoulders, glancing nervously at her watch in the same motion. Jack beamed.

  “I’ll take you both to see those ferns if you like. They’re growing out by the old Finnish farmsteads on the west shore.”

  Isobel swallowed, looking to the floorboards beneath her feet.

  Cathryn coughed softly. “Jack, perhaps an outing isn’t a good idea.”

  Jack turned around and looked squarely at Cathryn. “Of course. I’m sorry, I just… ”

  For a moment all three concentrated on points away from each other. Jack bent to straighten the laces on his high leather boots, while Cathryn examined some line of interest on her palm.

  Isobel filled the silence by telling a joke that her daughter, Louisa, had told the night before.

  “… and then the first stitch said to the second stitch, ‘Suture self!’”

  When Jack broke into infectious laughter, Cathryn smiled. His smooth face creased, the corners of his mouth punctuated by precise dimples, white teeth shining even and square.

  If it were only desire that drove Cathryn toward Jack, Isobel thought, she might better understand. When Jack touched her arm, she had even thought, No wonder Cathryn must have him. But at the moment the two seemed unaware of anything so mundane as the physical. As Cathryn’s hand fluttered forward to push back a curl fallen over Jack’s brow, Isobel saw the look pass between them. Need? Had Jack found his calling in her? Was Cathryn’s troubled soul the one he would save?

  She peered at his clear, guileless eyes and wondered, Will he be able?

  When he moved to go, Jack took Isobel’s hand but had difficulty meeting her gaze. “I’m sorry we had to meet in such awkward circumstances.”

  “I understand,” Isobel replied, though more in response to her own thought than his apology. “I understand now.”

  She realized she was still grasping his hand. “I’ll do what I can to help.”

  When Cathryn kissed her cheek in thanks, Isobel turned to her.

  “Just don’t ask me to lie.”

  But Isobel knew if they asked her, she would.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Reader’s Digest left on Isobel’s bedside table was still unwrapped.

  “Aren’t you up to reading?”

  Dr. Hertz nodded to indicate the magazine.

  “Oh yes. I think I am. I like to read. I was thinking just this morning I would like to have a novel.”

  “What kind of novel? A mystery?”

  He winked. “A romance?”

  He was every bit as handsome as Jack, maybe even more so, with his jaw looking as though it were borrowed from some statue. But the doctor’s manner was too easy, he seemed glib and world-weary. One of the things that had endeared Jack to her was his almost boyish innocence. His inexperience with disdain. The uncrushable hope.

  She sighed. “No, no. A real book, maybe some short stories. Maybe Joyce.”

  She looked up at him and mused. “I never did finish reading Joyce. I meant to do that, read all of his work. I just don’t know where the time went.”

  She poked a sharp finger into the hard flesh of the doctor’s forearm. “You think I’ll live long enough to finish Joyce?”

  He laughed, feigning ignorance, “I’m just your doctor. I don’t know any Joyce.”

  “Right.”

  Isobel looked distant. “Maybe I’ll try Proust. He used to read Proust aloud to Cathryn while I sat guard in the boat.”

  “He?”

  “The man you look like.”

  She smiled and tapped her forehead. “I’ve remembered his name. Jack Reese.”

  “And he is… ?”

  “He’s the man who disappeared in Cypress.”

  “Cyprus? So, we’re back to that.”

  “Yes, Cypress, the town I lived in then. That’s where the tailor shop was, that was where I made Cathryn’s hats.”

  “Cyprus is a town?’ Isobel was tiring. “Yes, Cypress, Minnesota. It’s also a lake. A very large lake. You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  Dr. Hertz frowned at the temperature readout on the monitor. “D.C.”

  He had been due at the desk five minutes earlier. “So, a man named Jack who looks like me disappeared in some lake up north?”

  “You mean you look like him. Yes… well, no. No one ever found them… ”

  “Them?”

  “Jack and Cathryn.”

  “So, two people have disappeared now?”

  Isobel scowled. “Not now, for heaven’s sake. Years and years ago. A lifetime.”

  The pager at the doctor’s belt beeped and he tipped it out to read the neon digits flashing at the tiny window. He absentmindedly patted Isobel’s hand. “I want to hear this, but I have to go. Promise me you’ll keep that thought.”

  When Isobel looked up he was gone.

  Keep that thought. As if it were one. With her false teeth and her working hand, Isobel managed to tear open the wrapper of the Reader’s Digest. She squinted at the table of contents. Everyone else had been testing her, perhaps it was time to test herself, see what damage had been done to her mind. She pawed forward to the serial article, “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” smiling at the title’s ironic clumsiness. She felt for her bifocals, aimed their shaking stems at her temples, and managed to settle them. The small print blurred, and she felt a flash of despair.

  My eyes. Now my eyes too.

  She turned on the bedside light and held the book close, nearly touching the page to her nose. The words she could make out were familiar: augury, recalcitrant, sonorous, lugubrious.

  She scanned down the page to a word she did not recognize. Isobel rolled the awkward syllables on her tongue and again read its definition. The magazine fluttered slowly to her chest.

  Strange how you know of something all your life and find only at the end there has been a better word for it all along. The syllables bumped pleasantly against her dentures as she read aloud, “Tintinnabulation: The sound of the pealing of bells.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  ~ ~ ~

  In May, Isobel Howard turned thirty-six years old. She woke early to find the sun not yet risen and the house perfectly quiet. She lay motionless next to
her husband, the deep silence revealing a jewel within her cache of memory. She had only to reach up and wrap her hands around the glad weight of it.

  Had it been there all this time?

  She’d been very young, only four or five, and had just been bounced from the back of a careening toboggan full of schoolchildren. Lying on her back on a slope of blue snow in bitter twilight, she squinted through her pain at the dry crystals pirouetting in the dissolving glint of day. The toboggan slid out of sight and downward over a horizon that could have been the end of the earth. The air had been knocked from her small chest, and the pain tore as she waited for breath to return.

  She knew instinctively not to move, and after a moment found that when she did stay still, the sting lessened.

  As the pain slowly ebbed, Isobel marveled at the stunning silence. She was suddenly aware of herself from all angles, feeling every fiber of her body, the smallness of her limbs, the soft shell of her skin, the solidity and bloodpumping wonder of it. The perfection.

  If she had been left, forgotten there, surely she would have been content to lie on her snowy bed for the night. Perhaps forever.

  Unmoving, with no breath to cloud her view, she took in the entire curve of a sky streaked with lavender and indigo shouldering in from the east. She was buoyed between snow and sky, weightless, held up by an earth that was turning for her and with her. She was a part of all that surrounded her, yet at the same time distinct. Acute.

  For an indelible moment she knew a plain serenity.

  After what had seemed like an hour — but could only have been a moment or two — the squealing of rubbersoled snow boots approached, and the distant shout, “There she is!” came to her as if through a sheet of ice. The earth throbbed beneath her, and a metal boot buckle jangled near her temple. The shadow of a figure bent low to obscure her vista. Gritty snow kicked up from a boot sprayed her cheek, and she shook her head, blinking her way back to the world.

  The sky, the air, the snow, and her breath — back now and pouring freely from her nostrils like dragon’s steam — were reduced to molecules along with the brief seconds of the already falling-away moment. Time compressed itself into a crystalline trinket, lodging on the highest shelf of Isobel’s memory.

  A treasure. Kept there for her.

  As she lay next to Victor, her thoughts shifted to her own children, and she wondered if they experienced such instances, if they had stored similar moments of their own. It occurred to her that if they did, they would have no language to tell her, as she had possessed no language at age five to describe her fleeting but unforgettable sensation of awe and belonging. Of her three children, she supposed Thomas would be the one, with his guileless face and his hunger for awe, so like Victor in his belief that all things were for him. Thomas was an open well, his mouth always wide with laughter, pulling in the affections of all, even dogs and strangers.

  Yes, certainly Thomas. Louisa tentatively considered everything in her path, even gifts. Henry was somewhere else altogether, his serious mind obscured by some vapor floating just above the rest of the family. Isobel shook her head in wonderment for the hundredth time over the vast differences among her children.

  She swung her feet to the floor, padded to the window, and listened, waiting for some noise from outside to drift in and breach this new silence. What would it be this time? A delivery van, the wind, distant trains, first birds of the day? She looked out over the trees of the angled yard. Just beyond the vegetable garden and the narrow creek was a dense barrier of woods. Past the woods, several alleys of cheap houses sat apart, neatly sequestered from the rest of Cypress by the geography of a ridge, a cliff of weedy clay. Built for Finnish families, the shacks listed on the outcropping of terraced soil. This area had been dubbed Finn Row, and children were warned to stay away by parents wary of the Finns’ socialist leanings, their strange-smelling food, and communal bathing. Most of their houses were shingled in raw cedar softened by weather to a pale driftwood colour. A few had been painted the childish sharp blue of the Finnish flag, and these structures were strewn chockablock like gems over the grey landscape. Darkened by the hour, they were mislaid chunks of lapis lazuli, the name of the stone as difficult on Isobel’s tongue as the names on the mailboxes in front of those houses, the vowel-laden surnames of Aukee, Heikkala, Tuumi. Tribes of stony immigrants who made the same thin wage mining alongside the Welsh, spending their days bent together underground among conflicting accents and the shatter of hydraulic hammers. They emerged from the shafts each night to split off into distinct lines, Welsh veering off to their boardinghouses and dinners of pasties and dark beer, and Finns to their tidy shacks and broad-faced wives cooking potatoes and fish. While the Welsh slept, the Finns rallied in furtive meetings to voice distrust for mine management, clergy, or non-Finns, and to read manifestos of questionable doctrines. They sat naked on the wooden benches of their saunas, drinking a liquor distilled from fetid chokecherries, and sometimes deep in the night Isobel could hear them singing, liquid, foreign melodies curling upward on smoke and steam rising from cinder-brick chimneys.

  Beyond the cluster of these houses was another buffer of trees, then the steep drop to the grid of town, where buttery light from streetlamps began to flicker away as the sky lightened. The small park and its wind-battered band shell near the public beach defined the edge of town, and spreading from all points beyond was the immense stain of Lake Cypress.

  Closing her eyes, Isobel pressed her forehead to the cool windowpane. Her long silence was finally broken by a faint whistle floating over the Mesabi ridge. The iron mine’s first shift. Five a.m. Soon the crushers would roar.

  Seven days a week, twelve hours a day, the machines pummeled great hunks of ore into rubble small enough to be loaded into railcars headed to the smelters in far towns.

  The constant pounding was a pulse reaching all of Cypress. Some days, with the wrong wind, the noise bit into Isobel’s ears; on a good day it was a mere pulse, faint and monotonous as repeated whispers.

  Victor stirred slightly and pulled the blanket to his ear. He rolled onto his stomach with a sigh. She should dress. There was a basket of hemming she’d brought from the shop; she could finish that and have lunch boxes packed before the children were up, when she would cook breakfast.

  Suddenly remembering the date, she sat again on the edge of the bed. May seventeenth, her birthday. The memory of her moment on the snow-covered hill had been a gift.

  The crocheted coverlet had slid from the bed to the floor, and as she leaned down to retrieve it her eyes traveled along the darkened objects in the room — the burled maple bureau, the hooked rug, the wooden valet standing in the corner with Victor’s coat draped over it to make a third, comical figure in the room. Faint light glinted off the convex glass of two oval portraits, Isobel’s parents: her father, handsome in spite of his sternness, and her mother, looming and sunken-eyed, her black dress straining over a dowager’s hump so prominent even the photographer’s sympathetic angle could not obscure it. She was sixty-five and looked eighty, spent from stillbirths and embraced bitterness. Isobel turned to the dresser and caught her own reflection in the mirror.

  For the first time in years, she prayed, not so much asking as insisting, “God, don’t let me die without more moments of that calm.”

  She murmured to the walls, “That’s all I want.”

  She laid her hand on Victor’s warm back and began to lean into him. She could wake him. They could make love now, and afterward he could say how sorry he was. She’d been waiting. How long now? Months. She had purposely denied him, and he had not sought her out in the way he used to, never tried to impose on her feigned sleep. He didn’t seem to want her. She suddenly sat up.

  She’d had his babies, seen them through poverty, worked with him in the shop. When she stood next to him now she felt she was an extension, a fixture no longer seen or heard but relied upon just the same. He was conscious of her in the way he was conscious of his own arm. She couldn’t re
member the last time he’d told her a joke, coaxed her out of the house for a walk, tried to please her in some small way. He could have rolled to his side just this minute, laid his hand on her hip, and whispered something airy.

  She wondered, for the first time in years, if he might have someone else, some other ear to whisper to.

  She quickly pushed the thought aside before it could settle against her ribs.

  Rising heavily, tired now as if she hadn’t slept, she padded to the bathroom, past the rooms of her sleeping children. She ticked off a mental list of the chores ahead, quickly forgetting any notion of her birthday.

  After dinner, when Louisa was in the kitchen, supposedly scraping dinner plates and putting away uneaten food, Isobel heard a muffled giggling and a sudden, tinny crash from behind the dining room door. She rolled her eyes and began to rise from the table, but Victor motioned her to sit back down. “Drink your coffee, Iz.”

  Henry shot out of his chair and snapped off the overhead light.

  Isobel sighed. “What on earth?”

  Louisa backed out of the swinging kitchen door, weighted with the cake. Victor hopped to her side and attempted to relight a candle that had fallen sideways into the icing.

  “Ta da!”

  The effort was placed in front of Isobel. A sloping, three-layered affair, lemon icing massed on one side of the platter like a sugared glacier.

  Isobel put her hands to her cheeks in mock astonishment. “Oh, so that’s why all the flour was on the kitchen floor!”

  Victor nudged her knee, frowning. She looked at him. “It was a joke, Victor.”

  Louisa looked down. “I worked very hard to make that cake.”

  Isobel was about to say something blunt to Victor, but caught herself as her gaze swept round the table. Her children’s faces were halved in shadow and candlelight.

  “Well, it’s lovely.”

  Henry would be taller than Victor soon. Isobel noted how much prettier Louisa was when she smiled. Thomas leaned forward on sturdy fists, the luster in his eye aimed at the candles.

  “Just lovely.”