These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  “Yes.”

  “Well, when I was there, I did some digging.”

  “Digging?”

  “Research, I mean.”

  Isobel took in a breath. “That’s nice.”

  Thomas dropped his chin, laid the envelope on the bed, and weighted it there with her hand. Isobel blinked at him, suddenly missing the barrier of the tent; she even thought of asking Thomas to have them bring it back. She looked suspiciously down at his offering and remembered him quizzing her about Cathryn’s full name, her age. Research?

  “Thomas.”

  Isobel looked down, her hand pressed woodenly onto the envelope. “What have you done?”

  “I found out. I know what happened to Jack and Cathryn.”

  “You what?”

  Thomas grinned. “It’s all in there, your mystery, all these years of wondering.”

  He eased the envelope away and turned it over. In bold font were two names: Jack Alan Reese — Cathryn Leigh (Malley).

  With an effort Isobel reached out to touch the names, to run a yellowed nail along the block letters. As her hand turned, her wedding ring slid over her knuckle and rolled onto the blanket.

  They stared at the ring for a moment before Thomas picked it up. “Here, let me help you put it back on.”

  Isobel shook her head. “No, that’s all right. I don’t think so.”

  She examined the knot of her knuckle, the crepe and gristle. “It will only fall off again.”

  “But… ”

  “It’s not as though I was born wearing it. Just put it in the hatbox in my closet, would you?”

  Thomas held the gold band. It was molded to the shape of Isobel’s finger, not round, not perfect, a more human shape, thin as foil in places where decades of repeated movements had worn the gold away. The ring was still warm.

  He held it gently so as not to bend it further. He tied the ring to the frayed cord of her photo album and as it fell to the cracked leather the last of its heat rose from the metal. He laid her sweater over the album and closed the lid on the hatbox. Its covering had faded, and the edge had worn so the cardboard showing through was coffee-coloured fuzz. The embossed silhouette was worn as well, but the outer edges were distinct. Thomas examined the profile and looked over at his mother.

  It was her, still, unmistakable. The face had changed, as faces do, jowls develop, noses lengthen, hair thins. But the strength of the silhouette on the box still belonged to his mother, still unrelenting.

  He pointed at the envelope, his voice less sure. “Aren’t you surprised?”

  She smiled. “You must’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

  He knew when he was being humored. He sat on the bed. Her narrow form made only a slight ridge under the blanket. He felt suddenly angry at himself for wasting a day tracking down the fates of strangers when he could’ve been spending the time with her.

  She nodded at the envelope. “I suppose you spent a lot of money.”

  “Nah, it wasn’t too bad. Want me to open it for you?”

  “No, not yet. Can you just sit here awhile? I’m so tired.”

  She tilted her head slightly to receive the kiss he stamped on her forehead. She held his fingers. The other limp hand tapped out a dull rhythm on the manila.

  It’s all in there.

  As if any such thing could be contained by an envelope! There could be no scenario, no fate within of simple ink pressed to paper, which Isobel had not already assigned a vision to, had not already imagined.

  Sixty years had produced a loaded archive of possibilities. Isobel could walk down a phantom aisle and glimpse the scenes, each plumped and shaded with the minute detail of years of conjecture. Some possibilities were waking and deliberate, while others had come in dreams. For months after Jack and Cathryn disappeared she’d dreamed of them almost nightly, but only one dream stayed with her, followed her into her later years.

  Pulling her canoe up onto a shaded rock ledge, Isobel takes a compass from her pocket, though she knows this is the place without looking at the needle. She sheds her skirt, blouse, and layers of underthings until she is naked. Sits on the stone ledge until it burns her thighs. She stands in the terrible heat; it is as if all the days of one summer have been simmered down to a single afternoon. She has paddled many arms of the Maze, portaged over bogland to this place, and her thirst is vicious. She climbs the cliff face, her white torso glowing in the shaft of July sun. It is an effortless climb. Knowing nothing of the depth of the water beneath her, she dives with blind faith into the channel. The dive is precise and quiet, the water achingly cold. Concentric rings form after her small feet disappear into the black sheet.

  She forces herself deep, kicking. Six feet, then ten, surely she must be near the bottom. Deeper, and her ears sing with the pressure. Just as she knows she has failed — that she must arc to ascend, to save herself — she sees them.

  Perfectly preserved in the icy waters, the bones of Jack and Cathryn lie entwined on a ledge, as casually as if they’d tumbled back into bed some lazy Sunday. The colours of Cathryn’s Chinese silk wrapper are still vibrant, the seams intact. The tail of a lake trout turning near Jack’s temple creates just enough stir to cloud the pale bone with silt. They embrace undisturbed. Safe in the tomb of Lake Cypress. Safe.

  Her timing is exquisite. There is only a fraction of an hour each day — minutes, to be precise — when the sun is straight overhead and can penetrate the channel depths. The portion of the ledge where Jack and Cathryn lie is lit for only several seconds of those minutes. No one else could ever find them. Ever would.

  The sight is hers for only those fleeting seconds. Hers alone, a tangle of ivory bones anchored to a block of granite. Even as she kicks upward — aware of her own danger now, and panicking toward the sunlight — she knows this is already a memory, and perhaps an unreliable one. As she rises she is disquieted by the irony of silk outlasting flesh. Her lungs will explode.

  But they don’t. She breaks the surface, choking on her own breath and heaving in great drafts of air sour with mildew. She remembers then that she cannot swim, thrashes, slips under, thrashes again, reaching the rock to embrace its slick haven just in time.

  Isobel knows this to be one of her more romantic visions of Jack and Cathryn, a drama born of love, one which spares them any of the mundane existences they might have lived had they fled and tried to hew out a life together. She knows they could have as easily faded into a more realistic scenario, but these waking dreams are bitten with practicality.

  She has pictured them seaside, somewhere on the West Coast. Places she only knows of through television documentaries or picture books — gull-populated islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the bitter coast of British Columbia. On some wind-bruised beach far from the Midwest, Jack has fashioned a cottage, weather-battered and sagging by now. He and Cathryn are companions to dunes, reedy grasses, relentless surf. Perhaps she paints seascapes at her easel near the windows, while Jack is off performing some menial task, mending nets, repairing engines of trawlers, or working in a cannery. Jack is a dogged and reliable employee, if sometimes slow to reply when he is addressed, never having become accustomed to the lie of his assumed name. John or Jake or Mike.

  Mornings are spent combing their stretch of beach to see what the tides have offered up: a crate of ruined electric toasters; a case of fan belts; cleats and bits of sails torn from passing sloops; a squat yellow vase; a heavily worn leather dog collar thick with slime. More often they find garbage, and Cathryn walks along with an open canvas sack while Jack stabs refuse with a stick he has attached a nail to. He impales chip bags, six-pack rings, bottle caps. The detritus of human functions accumulates in the sack; condoms, diapers, tampon applicators. Some days there is so much plastic their haul of garbage will barely burn.

  Cathryn has days of grey silence even Jack cannot penetrate, her illness compounded by age, the distant weight of Liam’s death. Does she even know of it? The local villagers consider Jack and Cathryn as they wo
uld any other aging couple, noting their infrequent forays into town — to buy groceries or lightbulbs or watercolour paper — with genuine indifference.

  Perhaps they obtained false papers and emigrated. To France, or Italy, where Cathryn might flourish but Jack would not. He cannot grasp the language; their Parisian neighborhood is filthy. The presence of prostitutes in Rome depresses him. They try a village in Portugal, but Cathryn contracts a parasite or some strain of hepatitis. Her health at stake, they move on. They might have returned to live in some odd state, perhaps Alabama. Isobel does not know why that particular state came into her head, perhaps because it was one of the least likely places she could imagine for Cathryn, who would have abhorred the weather, the lazy drawl of the natives, the abysmal food. She has imagined them in a row house or an apartment, where they would have begun again with high hopes. After a few years, the drama at Granite Point would have faded like a coloured photograph, freeing them to move through the world like any ordinary couple, time chiseling a space for problems suffered in any normal union. It could be that the very things that drew them one to the other — Jack’s sensitivity, Cathryn’s dark frailties — eventually weakened them and frayed the bond. Jack easily overwhelmed by Cathryn’s neediness. With no one strong enough to take care of the both of them, they might have drifted into separate despairs, one of them going out one day to buy sherbet or cigarettes, instead wandering to the depot to book a oneway coach ticket to wherever the next train was bound.

  One of them would have died before the other, but Isobel has tried not to think of which. She realizes how few of her scenarios picture the couple anything but united, even in death.

  But she has tried to imagine them apart. Jack alone, or Cathryn. Teaching art or French at a private school, perhaps in New England. Moody and known to the girls for being erratic in her grading and prone to favoritism. An elegant character who walks the campus on moonlit spring nights reciting dead poets. More tired than usual at the close of each dusty August and never sure why.

  The body’s memory.

  There were other images Isobel pushed away altogether. The flashes that would sometimes come at night, as she lay alone.

  She made herself consider possibilities that she was previously unwilling to accept, possibilities that might await her in the envelope Thomas was so eager to offer.

  Perhaps Cathryn had succeeded at the grisly chore she’d attempted times before. Found another razor to drain herself with. A horrified landlady or one of her students finding her, slipping backward on the tile floor, weak moon lighting Cathryn’s pale face, the dark pool at her lovely throat growing.

  Together? Two rigid corpses in a wood.

  Blood seeps through the makeshift shrouds Liam has fashioned from a one-man tent, or perhaps the lattice quilt from Jack’s cabin. With his camp shovel he battles roots and stones at the base of a white pine, his task hampered by darkness, his vision clouded by tears. His brogue gone suddenly heavy, as it does when he’s exhausted, he speaks to Jack’s body. “Bastard. Bloody bastard,” he demands, “why’d you make me do it, man? Why?”

  He hacks at the stony soil until finally two graves gape up at him. Deep enough that they will not be disturbed by animals. Found. Jack’s body rolled in, propelled by Liam’s boot and landing with a thud. Cathryn laid tenderly, as if only put down to sleep. More shoveling. Covering the ground with pine needles and gathered brush.

  His task finished, he moves onward, overland, not sure where he’s going, until he finds himself at the base of a fire tower just before dawn.

  No. Not that one. Hardly likely.

  Their fates, which are by now their histories — Isobel knows she has outlived them — might have been better, and these scenes creep through her armor of cynicism. They could have settled in New York on a tree-lined street in a sunny walk-up, or in the green haven of Brooklyn, perhaps on a quiet lake upstate. They could have as easily had a beloved retriever, a knowledgeable doctor to help Cathryn through her dark days, a small sailboat for Sundays on the bay. Perhaps Cathryn sold her watercolours in a gallery and had a few artist friends. Jack with a job he didn’t mind, whistling homeward to calm suppers on their porch or the occasional dinner party peopled with sculptors and weavers. A garden with yellow tea roses. They would have grown a little plump with the French recipes Cathryn was always trying out. Spending their evenings quietly with the Times book review, Cathryn with a lap of embroidery, Jack carving willow whistles. Sometimes reading aloud to each other, their words occasionally punctuated by the shift and pop of logs on the hearth.

  Perhaps in those quiet evenings they remembered Isobel.

  Unkempt graves side by side on a hill of cedar, false names etched on twin headstones.

  But over the years she kept coming back to the same image — lovers under a lake — perhaps because of the vividness of her recurring dream.

  The prelude to the dream: They sit in Jack’s boat at dusk, Cathryn wearing her beautiful silk robe. An open vial of some botanical potion passes from his mouth to hers. A bitter cocktail he has extracted from purple nightshade or hemlock. Lengths of rope around their waists, tied to the same heavy stone so they will not be separated. A hand ax ready to punch a hole in the bottom of the boat.

  A final kiss, long and dreamlike, as the poison begins its end. A respite under the water, together. Peace. The kind you get once or twice in a good life. The peace of a small girl lying in twilight under the curve of a winter sky.

  ~ ~ ~

  Thomas cannot move his hand from the envelope, has not been able to for some time. His mother has told him of her dream of lovers at rest in a bed deep under a wavering surface. He is astonished at the detail, the haunting accuracy.

  How?

  Would she be surprised at what eerie knowledge she holds?

  He has advanced degrees, has read and learned and traveled, has paid attention, has run a company. He can perform intricate card tricks, knows statistics, can forecast economic trends, track a deer, identify any constellation in both hemispheres, is proficient in Latin, can order in French. Can do countless other things; has a thousand other small knowledges.

  He looks over at the woman he has known and loved and sometimes not loved for almost seventy years, and realizes he knows nothing.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ~ ~ ~

  Isobel’s eyes closed to a veil of sleep. She had fought to stay awake, to run through more possibilities. By all, she could no more be certain of the fates of Jack and Cathryn than she could know what to expect when the splashing within her own chest would cease.

  ~ ~ ~

  Her own chest. When Victor tapped her collarbone she woke up in a bed of life vests lining the ribs of the rowboat. Victor had gathered stones into a ring on the sand and had built a fire of driftwood and birch bark. She had dreamed, but the memory of it was already ribboning away; dreams eluded her as they finished, just as the woodsmoke curled skyward. Clouds had lowered the sky while she slept and the air had cooled.

  Victor had rowed her to this island from his own. Somewhere along the way she had dreamed in the cradle of the boat.

  She could hear happiness, laughter pealing over the water. She sat up to hear her children hooting and shouting across the broad channel as they chased one another through the underbrush. A game of hide-and-seek? Looking back toward the source of the voices, she thought she recognized the view of the island. The same angle as in the snapshot.

  “It must have been taken from this shore. That picture. The one you brought home with the deed.”

  He glanced over the water. “Yes, I think so.”

  “It’s a fine little island. We’ll have to name it someday.”

  Victor helped her out of the boat. “Let’s name it now, while we can see it whole.”

  They sat on a log with their knees touching, and as they thought of different names Isobel wrote them in the sand with a stick.

  “Tailor’s Island?”

  Victor shook his head and took the
stick from her hand. “How about Milliner’s Island?”

  She swatted sand flies and rubbed the name away. They passed the stick between them in turns.

  Summer Island. Giant’s Foot (for the shale formation at the shore). Sanctuary. Berry. None seemed fitting.

  Victor slapped at his neck. “Mosquito Island?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to name it after someone, a person?

  Your friend maybe?”

  She began to write Cathryn’s name in the sand, but the stick in her hand went still at the lip of the C. Isobel smiled. “Thank you, Victor, but no.”

  It was her third and last visit to the island. Each summer since Cathryn and Jack, she and Louisa were ferried out on the mail boat and stayed for a week over the Fourth of July holiday.

  Isobel felt sudden taps of rain on her neck. The beach dimpled before her, drops pocking the C. Victor rushed to turn the rowboat over.

  They moved into the cover of trees, Isobel looking back once over the water, straining to hear the voices of her children.

  “Do you think they’ll have enough sense to go into the cabin?”

  Victor took her hand, laughing. “Does it matter?”

  They hurried through the woods looking for shelter and stopped in a copse of birch as the sky opened. Victor shielded her with his jacket. Leaves shuddered around them, and he shouted to be heard over the thrumming. “C’mon! There’s a fishing shack on the other side.”

  They skidded on the slick path. Isobel was out of breath by the time they reached the far end of the island. The shack turned out to be only a lean-to with a mud floor, but it sheltered them. They waited, watching curtains of rain cover one island, then another. For an hour sheets swept across the lake, grey gauze waving over the shores. Chill ripples scarred the lake surface.

  The storm moved slowly, shifting west and away from them. When it was over, the sun broke through to gild the thick mist rising from the lake.