These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  He sat heavily and dug his elbows into his knees. He looked almost ill. “Mother… ”

  She tried to reach for him. “What is it?”

  He wouldn’t look at her, but took a deep breath and began again. “Mother.”

  “What? Has something happened?”

  “No.”

  He hung his head. “Yes.”

  She saw he was holding the curled photo of Cathryn and Jack. “I thought it was you.”

  She waited. “I thought it was you who had the affair.”

  She blinked, weighed the information. Waited. He laid the photo away. “That winter, after Dad bought the island… you seemed so angry at him. Then, when we came back in August everything was such a mystery. Everybody whispering, weird gossip in town. Louisa acting strange. You and Dad both going away to Michigan. I was too young to grasp any of it. It was before Dad died that I found out some man had disappeared, maybe even died near Cypress four years before, during the time he was having an affair with a woman—a married woman.”

  “And?”

  “And all this time I’ve thought… ”

  “It was me?”

  Isobel’s mouth fell. She looked to Thomas’s face to see if it was a joke. After a beat she saw it was not. “Why didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you ask me back then?”

  “Why?”

  He spoke into the bowl woven by his fingers.

  “It didn’t seem to matter after Dad died… ”

  “And?”

  “And I was only ten. How would I have even brought such a subject up?”

  Thomas knit and unknit his fingers.

  “Oh, Thomas.”

  He turned away, but not before she could see the shame on his face. It was a long time before he spoke again.

  “We always knew that fire tower was haunted.”

  Isobel’s voice wavered. “We? Who’s we?”

  “All of us kids. Town kids. The older ones used to dare each other to climb it. Louisa always knew something, but she never talked. Couldn’t get her to. All we knew was that a man had died up there.”

  Thomas leaned in. “Was it Jack?”

  Isobel didn’t answer. She was watching her son’s hands, the folding and unfolding of them. After a moment they went limp and hung between his knees. When she looked up he was crying.

  There was nothing to offer.

  After a while he wiped his face and put on his jacket. He had to get out.

  ~ ~ ~

  Isobel took Louisa to the Vermilion Hotel for Sunday dinner. Afterward she walked with the girl along the south shore, past the supper club, and onto a shaded lane where they might escape the heat.

  “Louisa.”

  She started twice, clearing her throat. “Louisa,… ”

  The girl was dragging a pattern into the road behind her with a forked branch. “I know what we’re gonna talk about.”

  “You do?”

  “Yup. We’re gonna talk about love and marriage and stuff.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Love… ”

  “Cathryn says love can save souls.”

  Isobel frowned. “Save souls?”

  “From sadness, you know, like when you’re crying and sad and can’t make it stop.”

  “What else did Cathryn say?”

  “That she has to fix the mess she’s in.”

  They walked in silence, Louisa pressing her stick into the dusty road.

  “It’s not bad to love someone, is it, Momma?”

  “No, not bad exactly, but it’s not so good to love a man who isn’t your husband.”

  “Everybody knows that. But why is it wrong?”

  “For a lot of reasons. It’s more complicated than just being wrong.”

  “Is it bad for Auntie Cathryn to love you?”

  Isobel stopped walking. Louisa made zags in the dirt with the stick. “Because she says she does. She says that because she loves you, maybe it’s better if she’s not your friend anymore.”

  Isobel wrote a note and Louisa bicycled out to Granite Point to deliver it. She wanted to see Cathryn, wanted to meet Jack. She wrote that Cathryn should bring him into the shop the next day.

  Cathryn did bring Jack, and he spoke of saving souls, and Isobel looked into his oddly innocent eyes and saw him for what he was… ulnerable boy walking through life in the shell of a man.

  The very day after that meeting in the darkened shop, Cathryn asked for her help.

  “Just a few afternoons, Izzy.”

  Her eyes were wild. “Just a few hours here and there. To watch for Liam. To watch out for his car.”

  Isobel knew she wasn’t thinking clearly, hadn’t had time, really, but the next day she packed her basket with some handwork and a book of Chekhov stories. She walked home, and after feeding Louisa lunch, she started up the Ford and tacked through the back roads to the dock near Granite Point.

  Jack met her on the road.

  He directed her to a spot behind an abandoned fishing shack, a place to park where the car wouldn’t be seen by anyone passing. “I’ll meet you on the dock.”

  She parked and stepped down from the running board into powdery earth and fought her way through stiff blond reeds taller than herself, moving through beige curtains to the lakeshore.

  On the dock Jack gave her a carved wooden bird whistle on a length of leather whip, looking uneasy as he looped it over her head.

  “Just in case.”

  Isobel gave it a few practice toots. “So, I just watch for the car? Should there be a certain signal?”

  Jack shifted. Deception seemed a new and uncomfortable posture for him. “No, I think not. If you see Mr. Malley’s car, please just blow as loudly as you can.”

  He pointed to the flimsy-looking canoe nudging itself against the dock.

  “Ladies first.”

  She almost laughed. “You’re joking. In a boat?”

  Jack looked puzzled. “Well, yes, in a boat.”

  “Can’t I just sit on the shore? Or how about here, at the end of the dock?”

  “There’s no vantage point. The middle of the bay is really the only place you can see down the road.”

  She squinted out over the water. “You’re sure?”

  “You’re afraid, aren’t you?”

  The deepness of his voice reminded Isobel of shade. “A little.”

  It was as much as she would admit. “Of water?”

  He bit his lip. “Jack, I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t know. Listen, don’t worry about it.”

  His tone was an apology. “Cath and I will figure some other way.”

  “Wait. How deep is it?”

  “Here? Only a few feet. See? There’s the bottom.”

  “I’ll do it. Really. I can do it.”

  He looked her in the eye. “You’re sure?”

  After Jack helped her onto the cane seat of the canoe, he climbed in behind and knelt between the ribs of the boat. His arms circled her as he showed her how to hold the paddle. He wrapped her fingers around the handle, shifted her other hand down the polished length of the paddle. He began a dipping motion, graceful arcs, one side, then the other.

  “Okay, now you try. I’ll keep holding on, but I want you to do the work.”

  She did not think of the water. She would think of other things. He was close enough that his chest was just brushing her back. For a moment she imagined leaning against him. Her back would touch his chest, the rumble of his voice would vibrate over each word. She suddenly shook herself and leaned forward.

  “There, you’re doing great. See how simple it is?”

  They paddled a few circles, then made their way back to the dock, where Jack climbed out. He stood and smiled broadly. Isobel began to smile back but saw his eye trained over her shoulder. She turned to see Cathryn waving from the far shore.

  After he pushed the canoe and Isobel away from the dock, he got into his own boat and began to row toward Cathryn. When she turned to watch him the canoe suddenly tipped low.
The floor of her stomach fell and she cast her weight too quickly to the opposite side. The gunwale dipped nearly to the water. She yelled, dropped the paddle, and froze. Jack turned in alarm. “Isobel?”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, Jack. I can’t do it.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “Momma?”

  No one had called her Momma since Louisa. She opened her eyes to Thomas standing by her bed. His sweater was folded over a chair and his shoulder bag hung on the door. His posture was slack, and she had the impression he’d been standing there for some time.

  She struggled up and drank some water. She slipped in her dentures, waving away his help, but she let him straighten her pillows. When she was settled she looked up. “Good morning.”

  She knew her voice was clipped, but she couldn’t control it.

  He didn’t speak but took her hand and folded something smooth into it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Shale.”

  Shale. Had she seen it somewhere before? She waited. “Do you mind if I sit?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “All I can say is I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what, for thinking? For assuming?”

  He touched her hand, the stone. “This was Dad’s.”

  He cleared his throat. “A stone from the island. I was with him when he found it. He spotted it on the beach. I remember when he reached for it; out of thousands, this one caught his eye. He picked it up and said, ‘Tommy, this will be my lucky stone. Look here, when you turn it to the light it’s the colour of your mother’s eyes.’”

  She touched the sheen of it, felt her scalp tighten.

  Thomas sat. “After he… the day he died, I remember someone brought you home, and it was Louisa who took me outside and told me he was dead. You were asleep then — they’d given you something, I think. I went to the shop after they took his body away. It was there, in his coat pocket. His coat was hung in the back hall, just like it was any regular day. I knew it would be there. I was going to throw it into the Marko Dam. I figured it hadn’t been too lucky for him after all.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. When I got to the bridge I couldn’t do it. I kept it. I’ve carried it with me since.”

  “Oh.”

  Isobel fought the tremble in her hand. “See how smooth it is. It’s like glass.”

  Thomas smiled. “It used to be bigger, but see, it’s all worn away.”

  She looked up at him, her mouth twisted somewhere between grin and grimace. “Like me, then.”

  “It’s yours now.”

  Thomas stayed through the afternoon, ordering lunch in from a restaurant down the street. Isobel made eating motions, plucked at her tray. Afterward he went out and brought back iced coffees from the café next door.

  He crossed his legs and propped a pillow behind his back.

  “So, when did you become their lookout?”

  Isobel bit the inside of her cheek and rolled to her side. “I always preferred the title of sentinel. It seemed less furtive somehow.”

  She wiped a hand across her dry lips. Thomas uncapped a tube of Chap Stick and placed it in her palm. Catching his eye was like glancing into a tunnel opening onto other times, the clear gaze of his youth shining through. Her green-eyed boy.

  She managed to apply the Chap Stick with minimal jerking.

  “When? Only toward the end, really. It was only a few times, all told.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Isobel lay awake. She tried one of Cathryn’s novels, but the words and snatches of description thinned before her eyes, comprehension falling away altogether as she reread the same passages. She walked the halls and sat for a long time on Louisa’s bed, watching her slender chest rise and fall. When the children were tiny she watched over their sleep in amazement. Breath, so miraculous in its simplicity, need only pause in the chest of an infant for a few seconds to precisely fix a mother’s hell. Losing a child had been one of her greatest terrors, but she was a mother and so not unique in that fear. Night unfolded its fears in many ways. Isobel scoffed at odd creaks or the idea of creeping strangers or anything else that might be scripted into a horror movie; nothing compared to the break in the rhythm of breath.

  So much of night she loved. She embraced the darkness, yearned for the softness of midsummer nights in the way she’d begun to crave rain over the stale weeks of summer. Her real fears crept in with the dawn and seemed to draw strength in the light of day. The sun glared upon her failures — what she hadn’t done right, what she hadn’t said right, her own failure to define right.

  There was a list of fears. Water was just the beginning.

  Cathryn had said once, “I think I would like to be a fish, or a dove, to swim or fly. No! A flying fish would be best — then I could move through the water or air as I chose.”

  Isobel smiled against the words just behind her teeth but they edged their way out. “I’d fancy myself a wolf.”

  She knew even as Cathryn turned that her lovely brow would be sharp. “A wolf! Izzy, why ever would you choose to be a wolf?”

  She shrugged, regretting the gesture as her shoulders rose. “Oh, so I could run, I suppose, through the woods. To run over moss under that spotty light coming down between the leaves.”

  She did not say, Because they fear nothing.

  She knew that even standing by Cathryn was immoral, she knew well enough that what Jack and Cathryn were doing was wrong.

  But she could hardly condemn them. She envied and pitied them, saw that the very depth and strength of their bond rendered them helpless. They seemed caught in a web she could not contemplate for very long or she would become trapped herself. But wasn’t she already? Was their risk worth what she’d seen?

  What had she seen?

  Only Jack’s and Cathryn’s faces when they looked at each other, the ache of love, the collapse of wills.

  Isobel envied Cathryn’s bravery but in the end was perplexed by its irony. For all Cathryn’s despair — those days when blackness visited her and she struggled to find some clear way through her shadowed mind — she stood unbowed by her misery like some heroine in a performed tragedy. Isobel had thought the doomed would be silent and expectant, but Cathryn trilled and smiled and shifted her shoulders in her beautiful clothes and kept her character in motion. Only in the odd glimpse — when Isobel caught her friend’s rare, momentarily unfocused stare — did she slowly come to recognize an anguish that went beyond language.

  Isobel went back to the raft of her empty bed, and when she finally fell asleep she dreamed of Victor. He was with her, had climbed in over the side of a boat, saying, Look at us, Iz, look at us. She didn’t understand.

  She woke crying, reaching.

  She knew the chasm between herself and Victor needed mending; the fear between them was one only she could overcome. He had not changed, but she had. Had rolled from his side to embrace fear.

  He’d bought the island for them, excited as a boy. Never something he meant to do behind her back. It was a gift. It was his adventure and she’d been invited along. But she’d refused, had ruined it, denied him that pleasure because she was too stubborn to admit a weakness and tell him just how afraid she was. For their marriage, of water. Of life.

  In the weak light of morning the path opened before her.

  She went back to Granite Point. She climbed into the canoe and sat, testing. She plunged her hands into water. She held onto the edge of the dock and rocked the canoe to get the feel of it under her. She strapped on the lumpy canvas life vest and imagined the worst. She tightened the straps until she was certain it could not come off. The life vest would keep her afloat.

  The first few afternoons in the canoe were terrifying. Isobel held tightly to the sides and clutched the leather lace holding the whistle around her neck. The canoe was wide enough and watertight, but she still felt lurches of fear when it shifted under her or rolled in the black water. Paddling to and from the middle of the bay, she bit her lip and counted her
strokes. On a calm day the trip took twentyfive dips of her paddle, on windy afternoons she counted forty or forty-five. Having achieved a fair view of the road, she dropped the makeshift anchor made of an old sash weight. She found that if she moved from the high cane seat to settle among the ribs of the floor, the canoe seemed more stable. After several days she was comfortable enough to hold a book on her knees, and, rocking along with the rhythm of the boat, she learned to shift her weight to compensate for swells.

  Years later, Isobel realized the habit she had of propping herself between pillows when she prepared to read must have been acquired in that canoe.

  As her unease faded she began to take note of her surroundings.

  The bay between the road and Cathryn’s cottage was called Ingress Cove for its access into the Maze. The surrounding cliffs rose straight up from the water. Much of the bay was like a room, its walls papered with textured lichens, chalky to the touch and coloured only on the side facing out, as if they had only enough reserves to cheer their facades, while their backsides imitated the exact shade of the stone they lived on, a dour grey.

  She thought of Cathryn, her face brilliant and warm one moment, then turning silently, shifting without warning toward some inner gloaming.

  After waving Jack and Cathryn off, she would open an umbrella and prop its handle through a tear in the cane seat. Every hour in the canoe was a battle against afternoon sun. With the lake reflection, brilliant heat came at her from every direction. She adjusted the umbrella and tucked her legs into the shade. She couldn’t remember another such summer, the milky sky domelike above, its bright haze rarely broken. The sun had dried up the mosquito population so that dragonflies, deprived of their usual prey, hovered over the lake in opalescent battalions, desperate for the occasional gnat.

  Louisa argued she was old enough to stay in the shop alone on the afternoons Isobel went to Granite Point. Isobel made the girl promise not to touch the sewing machine or the cutters and reluctantly left her daughter to work on her drawings or sew new pieces for her growing collection of doll clothes. She tacked a sign to the door reading Call for Appointment, and Louisa understood she was not to open the door.

  On those afternoons, Isobel took up her post in the bay and watched for Jack to arrive at Cathryn’s cottage. Sometimes he rowed over to say hello and they would talk awhile, but he could not hide his anxiousness to get to Cathryn, and Isobel would hesitantly shoo him off after a few minutes.