These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

A moan from the foghorn drifted in, its solemn tone drowned under their laughter.

  Her time in the canoe often seemed to have no beginning and no end. The heat overtook Isobel by midafternoon so she would have to steer the canoe to the shade of the cliff wall. The life jacket absorbed and stored heat so that sweat ran continuously between her breasts. She felt safer in the shade, and in the cool pause she noted the stunted ferns curving outward from horizontal cracks of stone, vivid in contrast.

  There was only sun and water, and of course the stone. Nearly every foot of the shoreline was defined by it — the sloped hump rising to separate Cathryn’s cottage from the water, the cliffs casting Isobel’s shade, and beyond the point, the jagged teeth flanking the entrance to the Maze.

  Jack’s cabin was nearly a mile beyond, his small island set deep into the corridor, past the point where the cautious dared.

  Isobel went as far as the cabin once, invited to paddle over for a picnic on a rare day Jack and Cathryn spent on his island.

  Jack had given her a compass and warned that once into the Maze, she should aim straight west and avoid veering into the many channels to the north. On the map the Maze looked like an elongated torso with writhing limbs, its watery arms narrowed into thin hands with thinner fingers, and those channels tapered to curl back on themselves like a Chinaman’s fingernails. Many passages were no wider than a canoe, and as many dead-ended at cliffs or widened to feather out once again into bogs or low tamarack forests.

  “This map isn’t accurate,” Jack warned. “There are whole sections of the north half that were never surveyed.”

  Isobel set her shoulders and paddled into the Maze on a course taking her through the widest arm. After a quarter mile the air shifted. Cedars grew outward from the banks like shepherds’ crooks reaching to the open sky above. The banks were dark, ragged with moss draping just over the black water. As she paddled farther in she felt herself placed in a different time. It was cooler, and somehow the air seemed old, as if left behind from a previous age.

  She negotiated the winding corridor, estuaries opening to the north like many open doorways. At their entrances, the water churned in gentle eddies as if beckoning her to enter. The rest of the world seemed to recede with every dip of her paddle. Isobel found this condensed atmosphere strangely soothing, was reminded of an empty cathedral. The corridor of water beneath her seemed less menacing, more benevolent, as if it might be the way to some haven. The silence of the Maze gave Isobel pause, and she let the canoe drift through this dense quiet, listening for some underlayment of sounds — of birds, or of foliage ruffled by breeze — but the pall was established, endorsed by muffling banks of ferns, guarded by sentries of ancient cedar.

  Reluctantly, she resumed paddling, dipping gently so as not to disturb the cloak of silence. Rounding the last curve, where according to the map there should have been a bay, she felt a tug of panic. Instead of a bay, a low, raggededged island all but took up the space. As she looked down to check the map a third time, something shifted at the corner of her eye. The island in front of her had moved.

  Moved? A trick of the light. Isobel sank her paddle into the mud bottom to still the canoe’s movement. To make sure she was seeing right, she lined up the trees on the island with those on the shoreline with her index finger, watched them meet up, shift, line up again. The island drifted as if pulled by an invisible cable.

  She had heard of floating islands, but had no idea they could be large enough to host trees. Carefully paddling around it, she hoped it wouldn’t shift and trap her. She held back an image of the lapstrake hull of the canoe splintering around her knees. She paddled faster. Once around, she found herself freed into a large bay.

  She could see Jack’s cabin in the distance and noted with some relief that his tiny island was weighted by a shoal of sand and a solid bank of stone.

  Her journey had taken a full hour but had seemed brief. Her shoulders knotted as the wide bay opened up, reflecting too much sky. There was the unlikely presence of a cabin, a dock, humans.

  Cathryn saw her approaching and rose from her bench. Isobel had a sudden, inexplicable desire to turn back, or remain floating, but the boat slid under her toward shore, and Jack reached out to catch the tip of it, swinging it in one motion so it paralleled the pulpy dock.

  She looked skeptically at Cathryn. “Is this safe?”

  Cathryn blinked. “Liam’s gone to Duluth for the day, Isobel.”

  “I know that.”

  She pressed a finger into the spongy black wood of the dock. “I mean is it safe to step on this thing?”

  While Cathryn prepared lunch, Jack showed Isobel his one-room cabin. Its logs were aged a deep treacle. A soapstone sink anchored the tiny kitchen. A run of small screened windows opened over a narrow counter bowing under the weight of stacked food tins and a pie safe. Open shelves held a disparate family of plates, assorted jelly jars, and mismatched porcelain cups. Iron skillets hung from rusted hooks over a blue enamel cookstove. A bookcase crammed with volumes separated the kitchen from the small living area, which held a table just large enough to eat at and two leather chairs flanking a narrow stone hearth. The ceiling light, a copper hooded lantern, sprouted ringlets of amber flypaper thick with corpses. The place wasn’t dirty, exactly, but was imbued with an overall darkness that made it seem so.

  Near the side door, an alcove held a bed behind a halfpulled curtain. Isobel stopped and stared at the space just above the iron bedstead where a dried palm frond was held in place by a hand-hewn crucifix. The bed beneath was covered by an intricate field of frayed flowers, an old pink lattice quilt, appliquéd with roses and vining stems thin as tissue, petals opening at burst seams to breathe out cotton batting.

  The mattress sagged in the middle, deep as a hammock, and Isobel nearly laughed, shaking her head. Cathryn sleeping here?

  When she met Jack’s eye, he blushed and quickly pointed the way to the screened porch. He offered her a chair near a low table. The table was covered with botany books and glass jars of plants, their roots floating free beneath them. Handmade shelves lined the wall, with at least a hundred more plant specimens in jelly glasses.

  “Some of them come from the bogs, like these pitcher plants.”

  He pulled one from its jar. Isobel cradled it and peered at the red, veined interior. She looked up at Jack.

  “Why, it’s like a heart. Like a human heart opened up.”

  She put it back, carefully coiling its long root into the jar.

  Jack showed her stacks of pressboard with dried, flattened specimens of anemones, spring cress, gentian, and dogbane, all glued into place and meticulously labeled.

  “Most forest plants bloom white. A few have blue and rose tones, some yellow, like this lady’s slipper, but at least eighty percent of woodland flowers are white or nearly white. They need light to produce color, just like anything else. You’ll rarely see a bright flower in the shade of a forest.”

  Isobel did not look at the next board of flattened flowers. “Jack, what will you do?”

  “Do?”

  “You and Cathryn. What will you do?”

  Jack carefully set down the boards. “I’m not sure. I’ve asked her to marry me.”

  “But she’s already married, Jack. And Liam Malley is a Catholic. Irish Catholic. You don’t honestly think he’d agree to a divorce?”

  “Cathryn thinks he might.”

  “Cathryn isn’t thinking, Jack. You know that as well as I.”

  Isobel trembled with frustration. “Even if you could marry her. Then what? You couldn’t stay here in this cabin, or even in Cypress. My God, Jack, how much longer do you believe this can go on?”

  He looked through the screen to where Cathryn was setting food and glasses on the outdoor table. “I don’t know.”

  “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

  “If Malley lays a hand on her, I’ll kill him.”

  “That’s not what I meant. But Jack, something is bound to happen.”
r />   “Lunch!”

  They turned to see Cathryn standing just beyond the door, hands on her hips, a tea towel dangling from one slender fist. The fabric of her summer dress was tissue thin against the sun, revealing slight shoulders, the ridge of hip, reedy waist. She’d shed weight. Her face had tanned, and her eyes, all the lighter for it, had taken on an odd detachment that Isobel recognized but could not place.

  Isobel angrily stabbed at the corner of her eye with a knuckle. “You’ll both have to make some decisions. Soon.”

  Cathryn’s hands fell. Isobel nodded, sure now where she’d seen the look, the posture. A newspaper photograph of a migrant, the hopeless gaze of a woman confronting despair.

  Isobel was silent for much of the picnic. Cathryn served slivered melon, cold asparagus, salmon salad, and cress sandwiches with crusts meticulously cut away. Isobel sensed Jack’s awkwardness with the dainty bits of food. It was an incongruous meal given the setting.

  They ate under a white pine on a table Jack had salvaged from an abandoned fishing shack. A tobacco tin filled with bird-on-the-wing decorated the table, and their chairs were rounds of a fallen log Jack had sawn into rough stools. The faint smell of fish bled through the ironed linen cloth Cathryn had brought from her cottage.

  Jack and Cathryn fussed over her, grinning at each other each time they offered Isobel another spear of asparagus, lemonade laced with ginger, a bowl of raspberries.

  After they ate, Jack led them to his boat and ferried them through an estuary into the tamarack bog. They took off their shoes and, stepping from the bow, instantly sank calf-deep into the sponge of wet moss. Each step was an act of faith on the land shifting under them. Isobel stayed close to the lacy stands of tamarack, hoping she’d be less likely to break through with a web of roots beneath. Ahead, Jack and Cathryn picked green cranberries and pelted them at each other.

  Isobel hung back and watched.

  They were playing at being a couple, playing at being carefree. The meal had been more theater. She couldn’t help wondering if it had been performed for her benefit or their own. She might be the doll at their tea party. There was no reality here. Isobel made her way back to the boat to wait.

  Lunch churned in her stomach as she paddled back through the Maze, past Cathryn’s cottage and beyond the point, over the stretch of open water to the dock. She pulled the canoe up in one motion and carelessly dropped it. Her arms were aching. When she stood and looked back to the ingress at the mouth of the Maze, she knew what a great distance she had come but barely remembered the journey. For the first time she’d forgotten to be afraid for herself.

  ~ ~ ~

  The tones of the hospital altered after sunset, the corridors cleared of daytime bustle to give way to lesser noises — the thrumming of distant machinery, the constant rumble of the power plant in the basement. From midnight to the start of morning shift the muted sounds were amplified — the elevator’s ping, the ticking tires of gurneys. The nurses’ laughter, and even sometimes their whispers, came clearly to her, as if over water. These night sounds were comforting to Isobel. She tried to stay awake as long as she could, reluctant to abandon the hush and quiet predictability of night.

  A white torso bent over her. The nurse handed her two tablets and a cup of warm water.

  “Miz Howard?”

  “What are these for?”

  “Your temp’s up. A hundred-one.”

  Isobel took the tablets and dutifully swallowed. She did feel hot, almost as if she’d been out in the sun for an afternoon.

  The nurse’s head was in shadow, faceless as she took the empty cup from Isobel’s hand. Behind the white hip Isobel saw Thomas slumped in his chair, his jacket around him like a shawl.

  “Oh dear. He’ll be a plank in the morning. Will you wake him up and send him home?”

  “Sure, hon. Want your reading light turned off?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ~ ~ ~

  She asked Cathryn if she was ever afraid God would punish her for her sin. “My sin?”

  “Your infidelity.”

  “My infidelity. Mine. It has nothing to do with God. If anyone, it’s Liam I’ll have to answer to.”

  “But what about the church?”

  “Izzy.”

  Cathryn huffed as she stood up. “You’re too intelligent a woman for that. Don’t go righteous on me. Besides, Jack feels guilty enough for both of us.”

  Isobel turned away, feeling insulted.

  After a moment Cathryn gently pulled her back by the shoulder. “Listen, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting where I am.”

  “Where you are? You blame geography? I suppose women in Chicago cheat on their husbands every day.”

  Cathryn crossed her arms. “Some. More than you’d think, probably.”

  She looked Isobel in the eye. “In a different time I suppose I’d be exiled or beaten. Something. If I were in India my husband could burn me alive. Here I’ll only be ostracized — doesn’t sound so bad, really.”

  “And how do you think Liam will take it?”

  “I’ve no idea. I suppose I’ll have to tell him first.”

  “Yes. The first thing is to tell Liam. When, Cathryn?”

  “When the right time comes.”

  “Do you really think there’s a right time for this sort of thing? What’s wrong with now?”

  Cathryn looked down. “Everything.”

  If someone had asked her only a month before if she believed Cathryn would go to hell she would have said yes. Now she wasn’t so sure she believed in the God who condemned souls after spreading temptation before them like a banquet. That God was man’s creation, she decided. She couldn’t have imagined any decent woman being unfaithful. Men, of course, strayed all the time. It was their nature.

  Just after Thomas was born, when she was still nursing him, Victor traveled to Duluth on several overnight trips, always returning in a better mood than when he’d left. Her heaviness seemed more than physical as the months wore on, and she came to resent his trips. In his absences flashes of slim, sophisticated girls interrupted her daily chores. One evening after he’d returned, he found her in their bedroom, rummaging through his coat pockets. She blanched, slowly freeing her hand before facing him.

  He stood unmoving in the doorway, blinking at her pale stare.

  “Whatever it is you’re looking for, you won’t find it, Iz.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  “It means what it means.”

  He turned and went down the stairs.

  Had he strayed? She didn’t know. She wondered how well she knew her own husband. If he had been unfaithful she wouldn’t want to hear of it now, would never want to have it spoken of. She herself couldn’t take a lover and still sleep next to Victor in a charade of duplicity. It would be too confusing.

  Cathryn was a good woman. Isobel knew she was. Sex, the sin end of it, was just an accessory of Cathryn and Jack’s love. She could not believe the love itself was a sin. Nor could she believe Cathryn would have decided I will sin now. Her falling in love could not have been a thing she had sought or even chosen; rather it was a thing that had begun and she had not stopped its beginning. Her choice, then? Or had she allowed a fate to choose her?

  What woman would choose a life so off-course, so imbalanced as Cathryn’s was this day?

  Her hand trailed languid figure eights in the water while Jack and Cathryn made love in the cottage. In her years married to Victor, she had never thought of another man with desire. She’d been momentarily unbalanced by Jack’s frailties, even envious of Cathryn’s possession of Jack. She’d fought having feelings toward him, but now she knew it was the ownership of Jack’s somber heart she envied. A possession she’d never felt with Victor. That was as much as she was willing to admit. When she was near Jack now she wanted to turn away, not look at his serious eyes, not notice how thin he’d become. She looked away from the ruin he and Cathryn had made of love. Of sex.

  In those first years with Victor,
the two of them would race home from the shop at lunchtime to make love. Sometimes they stayed in the shop, flipping the Closed sign on the door and filling those hours with quiet sounds — the echo of shades hastily drawn, the soft falling of garments creased with haste. Chords of sighs and whispers.

  When Isobel was feeling wanton, she would whisper into Victor’s ear, “Thank you for your patronage.”

  Or he might slip behind her to wrap his hands over hers, gently prying until her fingers released the scissors, the pencil, or the cloth, whatever task was taking her hands.

  Victor always looked into her eyes after undressing her. As he moved over her, in her, she often felt she was climbing toward something, reaching, and that he was reaching too for a similar thing. She felt a crush of love for him during these moments. When she felt her muscles move with their own purpose, the harmony of colours always returned to her. She and Victor were conspirators, united not only in flesh, but in something larger, some lovely collusion she could not name. At the first signs of Victor’s immediacy… arsh breath, his soft groan — something within her would swell and form itself into a wave of hues. Wild hands reached to crumple yards of fabric, to grab at a counter, to clutch the armrests of a chair; she would fall into the shades and tones, her fingertips and knuckles grown white in their grasping.

  Once, during their lovemaking, she had rolled onto a yardstick and the impression of inches and the name of a hardware store were neatly embossed onto the plane of her shoulder blade, legible for hours.

  Peering over Victor’s back as he moved in her, she had watched an amber chunk fall from the ceiling to land on his spine and tumble its length before it sailed over his hip. She had whispered, The sky is falling.

  She buried her face at orgasm, pressing her mouth to Victor’s flesh, not wanting her sounds to be heard by anyone but him. With her eyes closed she pictured her breath as soft billows of purple, indigo, scarlet, colours matching the rhythms within them.

  But that closeness had faded. Colours diluted. After Thomas was born, her fears of pregnancy twisted lovemaking into a mechanical duty, something the children might hear from their rooms, something she acquiesced in as seldom as possible without rousing some sulk from Victor.