These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  A cruel reversal of nature had turned her third birth into the longest and bloodiest. She thought she and the baby would die in labour, and in those desperate last hours she blamed Victor should their children be left motherless. When Thomas was finally born, she looked into the baby’s eyes and knew he would be her last. Had it been only selfpreservation that made her avoid intimacy? In the last months she had actively denied Victor, avoided love. After he bought the island she didn’t know how to show her displeasure except to withhold the one thing she owned that was of value to him. She knew now how wrong she’d been, that in denying him she had harmed them both.

  Leaning against the gunwale, watching her still-youthful reflection in the mirror of Lake Cypress, Isobel smiled. Perhaps it wasn’t too late. Once he came back, she would be herself again. Her old self. She would discuss contraceptives with Cathryn; she would defy the Catholic Church. She would buy a lock for their bedroom door and reclaim her desires. She would travel to his island.

  When Isobel opened a volume of Teasdale Cathryn had lent her, a folded sheet of onionskin stationery fell out. Was she meant to find it?

  Dearest Jack,

  A poverty of words. How can I respond to your letters? You are indelible, branded on me for life. You know that.

  If it were only you and I, alone! That’s the thought I cling to, what keeps me aloft, that somehow, in a lottery of fate where we are winners, the world will dissolve and leave only us. A dream. But this is real and there are lives around us that will change — we are afflicting lives and fates of others. You must realize that wherever we go we will carry the weight of

  It ended there. She dropped the letter to her lap. Since Cathryn exhibited no guilt or remorse over the consequences of her affair, Isobel had assumed that she hadn’t suffered any. The letter indicated otherwise. Isobel knew she was one of the people Cathryn mentioned whose lives would be afflicted. Afflicted. A harsh word, dramatic. But then Cathryn was dramatic. Once she had used a Latin term when describing the force behind a person’s actions, modus operandi. If Cathryn had one, Isobel knew, it would be distinctly labeled drama.

  Isobel imagined Cathryn beginning the letter at her bedroom table, her pen trailing to leave the last line unfinished when she heard the purr of Liam’s car through the woods. She would blush, quickly tuck the letter between poems, and hide the book. Feeling her cheeks, she would head down the staircase to greet and smile and make dinner for her husband as if he were the light of her life.

  Isobel shook away the scene.

  Who’s being dramatic now?

  The day after Isobel found the letter, Cathryn and Jack rowed into the Maze to visit his cabin. As afternoon shifted to evening Isobel drummed the seat of the canoe, peering often across the water. She should have been home to see to Louisa. She had no watch but could tell from the slant of the sun it was certainly past five o’clock. She laid her book aside and waited. What was she supposed to do? She realized they’d had no real plan in case Liam did come by. She felt like an idiot, and was suddenly angry with Jack. Even if she did blow her whistle now, they’d never hear her.

  After another half hour, she pulled up the anchor and paddled closer to the entrance of the Maze, cupping an ear for sounds of their approach.

  Had they fallen asleep? Isobel glanced repeatedly up to the road, sure Liam’s car would roar into view any minute. She paddled in and looked down the channel. Nothing. She fished the whistle out of her blouse. Perhaps she should use it.

  Just as she thought she might, she heard the creaking of oars and splashing, as if the boat was unbalanced. Jack’s voice carried over the still water.

  “Cathryn, please try to stop. Try.”

  Cathryn was sobbing. When they pulled into view Isobel could see her slumped and rocking in her seat.

  “It’ll be all right, Cathryn.”

  Jack let go of his oar to reach out and brush a tear from her cheek. She jerked roughly away.

  Isobel knew he was struggling to manage his tone. “Everything will be fine. We’ll figure it out.”

  As their boat slid past the canoe, Cathryn dropped her face into her hands, would not acknowledge Isobel. But Jack looked at her, just long enough for Isobel to see the weariness, complete in the deep lines around his mouth.

  The paddle in her hand felt like lead as she made her way slowly back to the dock. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Cathryn smile.

  Weeks before. The air in the shop had been still and warm through the morning. Louisa hung by the door, making as though to open it, but then retreating, listening to something at the window with anxious concentration.

  “Why don’t you go out, Louisa?”

  “I’m waiting for it to stop.”

  Isobel looked up. “For what to stop?”

  “The electricity.”

  Cathryn swiveled on her stool. “What electricity?”

  “Can’t you hear it? The buzzing in the wires. It’s everywhere.”

  “Buzzing? Wires? Oh sweetheart, that’s not electricity!

  It’s only the —”

  Both women chimed: “Cicaydas.”

  “Cicahdas.”

  Isobel raised an eyebrow, her face deadpan as she began to sing in her terrible voice. “You say cicayda, and I say cicahda.”

  Cathryn slid from her stool into an impromptu tap. “You say potayta and I say potahta.”

  They sang. “Cicayda, cicahda, potayta, potahta… ” Cathryn’s dance degenerated, her feet pounding vaudeville parody onto the floorboards, elbows flapping. They dissolved in laughter, singing. “Let’s call the whole thing off!”

  Isobel waited while Jack dropped Cathryn off at the ledge below her cottage. He pulled up to the dock, and climbing from his boat gave Isobel an unconvincing smile. She laid a hand on his arm.

  “Jack, is she all right?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

  “Should I go to her?”

  He looked up blankly. “I don’t think you can help her.

  I’m not even sure I can.”

  She saw the tear form and she reached up. For the moment his jaw rested in her hand she felt its faint tremor. He looked to the cottage and spoke over the water.

  “We’re all a little lost, I suppose.”

  Isobel woke too early, agitated and not knowing why. Her pillow was damp from sweat, the room close. The curtains hung slack against the sills. She sighed. If the heat kept up she’d move herself and Louisa down to sleep in the living room.

  She plodded to the kitchen and turned on the tap. After several minutes the water was still running cool. Descending the cellar stairs, she felt the water tank to discover it was cold. She shouted for Victor to come down and relight the flame, too frightened to try doing it herself. When she was seven, a small gas explosion in her father’s bakery had badly burned a young helper whose scarred face loomed whenever she whiffed a trace of gas. She went to the foot of the stairs and called again, tapping the banister for several moments before realizing that Victor wasn’t home. She felt suddenly foolish and a little helpless. He was far away, across miles of water. Somehow, during the night, she had lost months.

  She slapped the iron tank and sighed. “Fine. We’ll do without.”

  She turned off the iron crank that fed the gas line and climbed the stairs. In a large kettle she warmed water on the stove and called for Louisa to dress and come down. They hauled the kettle out to the garden along with a glass pitcher and a narrow brown bottle of shampoo that Cathryn had given her.

  Louisa stripped off her summer blouse and stood over the old copper boiler while her mother poured water over her head.

  It wasn’t seven, yet the shifting bits of sunlight through the canopy of maple were mean rays. Light played over Louisa’s thin shoulders and neck, and as Isobel massaged suds into the girl’s scalp she looked at her daughter’s halfclad body. Her chest was smooth as a boy’s, and Isobel felt a pang of regret knowing it wouldn’t be long before she would become a young wo
man. Grow away from her, independent.

  Louisa turned her head to peer at her mother through a soapy curtain of blond. “It smells nice, don’t it, Momma?”

  “Doesn’t.”

  “Well, I think it does!”

  “I meant you should say doesn’t it, not don’t it.”

  “Well, doesn’t it smell nice?”

  “Yes, it smells very pretty.”

  Isobel read the label aloud.

  “Jasmine Spice. For gloss and sheen.”

  “Sounds pretty too. Momma, can I wash your hair?”

  Sunlight suspended itself in a drop of water as it trickled down Louisa’s spine and was absorbed into the waistband of the girl’s shorts.

  “Sure.”

  After wrapping a towel around Louisa’s head turbanstyle, Isobel heated more water, found a stool, and slipped out of her own blouse to lean over the basin in her brassiere.

  Louisa poured a jug of warm water over her mother’s head and massaged in the shampoo. Her touch, to Isobel’s surprise, was not childlike. She’d expected soft meandering pats, but the girl applied firm strokes intent on their task.

  Isobel began to drift under the rhythm Louisa rubbed into her scalp. She watched the girl’s square feet shift, hop, and cross over each other as she worked. When she stood still, tiny violets poked up between the girl’s splayed toes.

  Isobel had lately found herself assigning bits of poetry to what she saw or felt, if only to see what she could recall or recite. Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet. / Under sleep, where all waters meet. She couldn’t remember the poet.

  Tepid water washed over her, hove down her neck, poured into her eyes, threatened to flood her nose. Under sleep, where all waters meet. The dream that had left her tossing and restless during the night rushed back to Isobel and she sat up suddenly, knocking the pitcher against Louisa, drenching her, water washing over the girl’s feet and into the grass.

  “Momma!”

  Water. So much water. The canoe nearly capsizing. She’d daydreamed, forgotten her post. Had forgotten to watch the lake, the road, the sky.

  Where were Jack and Cathryn? She scanned the shore. No one. The cottage was boarded up as if for winter. There was a sailboat off toward the big bay, too far to tell if it was Jack’s. She clumsily paddled out to look around the point. She took a breath and headed in, pushing along the Maze with increasingly difficult strokes. Clear water beneath the canoe churned to muck.

  Jack’s cabin was gone, had grown stone legs and retreated. To where? Wherever was too far. Too far to paddle, point after point to navigate. She scanned the north corridors yawning toward her, eddies singing, Come in, Isobel.

  The tamarack bog? The wind caught hard at the bow and the canoe slipped backward. Every hard stroke only managed to keep the boat stationary. Rain began to fall, first in threads, then in great cutting sheets. She would never find the bog in such rain. Waves set the canoe to pitching, and Isobel moaned when water splashed in over her legs. Rain dammed in the brim of her hat suddenly ran in a gush down her back, a sinister caress. The paddle frosted with heavy mud. She threw it from her and let the canoe drift.

  To shiver and drift, lost. For hours.

  The canoe bumped against the side of the dock. How? Isobel looked up to see Liam’s Buick skid around the corner, mud flying from its tires like brown birds, suspended a moment in air before crashing to the dock. Isobel grabbed for her whistle, but couldn’t find it. Struggled out of the canoe. Groped at her soaking dress. Taillights of the car receded, red eyes of a night animal racing backward. Isobel clawed up the rough boards. Five pale buttons cascaded to the water as she tore the whistle from her dress. She held it to her lips and blew. No sound came out. Of course no sound came out.

  ~ ~ ~

  Isobel tried to fill her lungs again, wheezing. Nothing came. No air at all. Her face felt hot, slick. She turned from the dock to face the road and suddenly there was Jack. He placed something over her mouth and she was free to breathe. Relief.

  Where have you been I was so worried.

  He had done something to her hand. Isobel saw the tip of her middle finger clamped and taped into a glowing thimble. An invention? Isobel smiled and tried to lift her hand. Wonderful, lit from the inside. Trim work will be so much easier with this. As she pulled her hand closer to her face she saw the thimble was connected to a wire. She frowned and looked to Jack to explain. She couldn’t sew with a wire dangling like that.

  He took her hand and held it up. “Just a thermometer, see?”

  He tapped the glowing red light and grinned.

  Isobel tried to pull away.

  Where is Cathryn? Her words made useless steam in the plastic gravy boat over her face. She pulled it away from her mouth.

  “Where is she?”

  The man frowned. “Who?”

  “Where were you that day? Where was your boat?”

  “Isobel, where are you?”

  “I’m on my way home to get dry. What are you doing here?”

  The doctor sighed, his eyes darting to the blinking monitor above Isobel’s head. She followed his eye. “It’s Dr. Hertz, Isobel. Joel. Do you remember me?”

  She scanned the room. This is not my house. When she tried to speak, words stumbled over bare gums and fell back into her throat.

  The man took her shoulders and gently leaned her forward. He laid his hand over her bare back and put the stethoscope over a breast. “Breathe.”

  The man’s touch was trained, careful. She obeyed, breathed as she was told, and afterward was gently laid back into her soft pillows. A bed.

  She felt the rattle of pebbles burning in her chest. “Why am I so hot?”

  “Because you have pneumonia.”

  “No wonder, out in the rain like that.”

  “You haven’t been out, Isobel. You’ve been here. It’s weeks now. You had a stroke, now you’re ill. You’ve been here all this time.”

  Isobel touched the stethoscope. In its shining circle of metal she caught a small but clear reflection of herself. She took a sudden, difficult breath, which caught and seared. He adjusted something on the oxygen mask and placed it over her mouth again. Her words were muted, far away even to herself. “Yes, all this time, of course. Pneumonia… of course.”

  Isobel knuckled away a trickle of perspiration pooled at the elastic strap crossing her cheek. Pneumonia. The body drowning itself.

  “We’ll have you better soon. Up and walking.”

  “Walking? I don’t want to walk, I want to go home.”

  Isobel knew as she spoke that the doctor would misunderstand. She didn’t want to go to her apartment, she wanted to go home. To see Victor again, sauntering around a corner with a ridiculous paper flower. To sit in a rocking canoe, shielding her eyes from the sun to glimpse lovers strolling on a shore, bending to reach for the same stone. To settle on her work stool and choose something lovely for a brim. To be back in her old garden, washing Louisa’s hair under the shade of trees long fallen. To rest.

  They gave her a drug to make her sleep, and when she woke her throat burned, but she felt like talking. Thomas’s eyes said, No, Mother, don’t, you need to rest.

  But when she began he scraped his chair along the floor to settle closer to the bed. When it was his turn finally to speak, it was almost as if he were thinking aloud. “What could you have been thinking, sitting in that canoe those afternoons?”

  Isobel could feel the weight of each word pressing out. “I thought I was doing something noble, but not just for Jack and Cathryn. For the first time I thought about things that mattered in my own life, sorting out what your father meant to me, what kind of mother I was.”

  Thomas had to crouch forward to make out what she said through the plastic mask, her words echoing in vapor. “I couldn’t believe I let Victor take you out there to that island, barely a roof over your heads. You were hardly out of diapers.”

  “I was almost six.”

  Thomas was whispering
now. “It was the best summer of my life.”

  “It was selfish of me, not to have gone.”

  “Selfish? That’s silly. Besides, we were growing up.”

  “And away. That was the difficult part. You all seemed so independent of me. I wondered if I’d done all I could. So much of it was automatic, you know, most of motherhood is. All instinct and worry. Rocking and feeding and watching. Holding on until you were strong enough to climb out of my lap, and then… ”

  “Then?”

  “Then you were gone. It seemed as soon as you were born you were moving away. It never occurred to me to follow any of you or hold you back. You were good children, bright. Well mannered enough to be let loose in civil company, as your father said.”

  Thomas laughed.

  Isobel sighed. “It’s terrible and wonderful to love children so much.”

  “Ah.”

  Thomas nodded. “Louisa.”

  Isobel looked at him. “Yes, Louisa. Louisa and you. I knew from birth, something in your eyes.”

  There was a long pause before Thomas said anything. He looked down. “I suppose I did know that once.”

  “My two stars… poor Henry, I should’ve loved him more.”

  A yellow stain of evening pulsed into the room, glinting off the surfaces of the bed, the walker, and the porta-potty in the corner.

  “Mother, I hardly remember him.”

  “But you didn’t know him for very long, did you?”

  Thomas picked up her hand. “It must be unbearable to lose a child.”

  “It’s amazing. What you can bear.”

  Then someone else held her hand. She turned to see Louisa’s profile, her Mona Lisa smile trained on the ceiling. Moonlight spilled into the narrow space between mother and daughter.

  Isobel felt she should give something in return for the visit, but she had so little to offer. She wasn’t surprised at seeing Louisa, but she felt unprepared. She couldn’t think of a way to apologize for having lived when Louisa hadn’t.