The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read online

  “No, Squid,” said Hannah. “Oh, sweetheart.” She took her daughter into the bathroom. She locked them up, and Squid sat on the furry cover of the toilet seat to learn what Hannah called, uncomfortably, “the ways of the world.”

  The talk, as short as it was, left Hannah exhausted.

  chapter eight

  December 1. I’d hate for anyone to know this, but I’m lonely by myself. Sometimes I hear them laughing in the big house and I wish I could be there. I see the lights on in all the windows and it makes Gomorrah seem dark and lonely. It’s so empty that I talk to myself. I keep hoping that Dad will come over, but he never does.

  What if he gave me Gomorrah to get me out of the way? Maybe they all voted on it. Maybe they said, “We have to get rid of Alastair. It would be so much nicer without Alastair here.”

  Winter’s so long. It’s cold and gray and dreary, and it just goes on and on forever. Christmas will come and what if they don’t ask me over? I’d hate to spend Christmas alone.

  I can hardly wait for Squid’s birthday. It will be okay when Squid’s over here. But what if she decides not to come?

  She looks up at the sound of someone walking on the path. She feels her heart give a sudden, hard beat as the footsteps rise to the porch. Four books lie open around her; she has been moving forward and backward through Alastair’s life. She gathers them quickly, slamming them closed and stuffing them in the hole. She slides the floorboards into place. But they don’t quite fit. They meet in the middle, making a tent down their length. Then someone knocks on the door.

  It’s Murray, she knows, his old knock echoing through time, that little rap-a-tap-tap. She presses at the boards, but still they won’t move. Murray knocks again.

  She rips out the boards and slides one over top of the other. Alastair’s old, bent nails rasp on the floor. They leave silver scratches in the varnish. She looks for Tatiana, and is surprised to see that her daughter isn’t there.

  The door opens downstairs. A draft of air rushes past her. The boards thunk into place and she drags the rug over top; it doesn’t quite match the faded oval that it covered so neatly before.

  “Squid?” He calls to her. He comes into the living room, directly below. “Squid, are you here?”

  He knows where she is; she’s sure he knows. Already, he’s walking toward the stairs.

  “I’m coming down,” she says.

  He’s waiting at the bottom, just as he was the last time, staring up toward her. Squid feels a prickle at her neck, a tensing of her muscles. She’ll tell him she has a right to do what she wants, that the house was hers as much as his, that she was Alastair’s only friend.

  “Look,” says Murray, and she gathers her breath.

  “Shhh,” he says. He reaches up the banister, his fingers in the air. He smiles and shows her with a nod—with a gesture—that Tatiana is sleeping in the armchair, on her back across the cushion with her legs jutting stiffly up the back.

  “Out like a light,” he says, with a tenderness she’s forgotten. He takes her hand, and she remembers that; his fingers are thick and hard and cold. “You used to sleep like that,” he tells her. “Like a dog, like a puppy, however you flung yourself down. She must have learned it from you.”

  “She’s never seen me sleep like that,” says Squid.

  “Och, I meant it well.” He turns around; his smile is gone. “Your mother’s made a little supper. When you’ve got the Tatty ready, you can come and eat.”

  “I think I’ll leave her, Dad,” she says. “It’s better that she sleeps.”

  “She has to eat,” says Murray.

  “I’ll bring her something.”

  “I think—” He stops. “Och, I suppose you know best. I’ve done my duty; I’ve passed on the message.”

  They go together down the path, past the whirligigs and flower beds. Just beyond Gomorrah there’s a horse with wings. It’s painted red and white.

  “That one was your favorite,” says Murray. “Remember what you used to call him?”

  “Yes,” says Squid.

  “Old Glory. You used to lie here on the grass and watch him flap his wings. You pretended that you rode him.”

  They’ve stopped below the horse. It surprises her now, with its outlandish colors, its odd-shaped head that looks more like a pig’s than a horse’s.

  “You said you were the only one who could ride him. Even I couldn’t do that. Old Glory would throw me off, you said.”

  “I remember, Dad,” she says.

  “Do you remember that you used to feed him?”

  “No,” she says.

  “You’d pluck some grass and hold it up. You’d say, ‘Come on, Old Glory, here’s a bit of hay.’ ” Murray laughs. “You were so serious about it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Squid. It’s funny she’d forgotten. She can see herself now, standing by the pole, reaching up along it with the grass stems in her fist.

  She was absolutely sure the horse could come down if it wanted. “Come on, Old Glory,” she’d said. “Just come down and eat.”

  And didn’t it do it once? Didn’t it flutter from the pole and pluck the grass away? She can remember the touch of its wooden mouth, the way the lips curled back to show big, yellow teeth that she’d never seen before.

  “It made you furious that he never came to eat.”

  She wants to say, “But once he did.” And that was why—because once he did and then not ever again—that she got so mad at Glory.

  Squid leans toward the horse. She can barely see the joint that holds one wing together.

  “You bashed him with a stick,” says Murray. “I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ You said, ‘I winged him. He wouldn’t eat, so I winged the stupid thing.’ ”

  “You hit me for that,” she says. She can still feel the slap, the fingers—so cold and hard—digging into her arm. She dropped the stick and ran away. She hid behind Gomorrah, though it wasn’t called Gomorrah yet, and hauled up the sleeve of her shirt. There were big red marks on her arm, a handprint on her ribs.

  “No,” says Murray. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Och, I never, ever hit you.” He looks at her sadly. “I made mistakes, but I never raised a hand to either of you.”

  “Dad! You did,” she says. “You hit Alastair for looking too close at his books.”

  He doesn’t deny it; he just keeps looking at her. “Is this why you’ve come home, Elizabeth?” he asks. “To dwell on the past and make it worse than it was?”

  “Dad!”

  “Do you know how many times my father hit me?”

  “Who cares?” she says. “Alastair was going blind, and you hit him.”

  “Och, he wasn’t going blind. And I certainly didn’t hit him.”

  Murray shakes his head. He shakes it quickly, sighing as he does it. Then he scratches his hair and goes on his way. And Squid follows behind him.

  She was there; she saw it happen. She heard the smack of her father’s palm against Alastair’s head. It pushed his nose down in the book, and knocked the book from his hand. Then Alastair, without a word, reached down and picked up the book again.

  “Hold it away!” said Murray. “Don’t bury yourself in the pages.”

  “It’s the only way I can see,” said Alastair.

  “Then turn on a light. Do you want to go blind?”

  “The light doesn’t help,” said Alastair. He was blinking, staring down at the pages. “The writing’s all blurry.”

  “No wonder,” said Murray. “Hold it away, boy. Hold it down on your lap.” He thrust out his thick, coppery arm and pushed the book down on Alastair’s knee. “There. Read it now.”

  Alastair swallowed. As the book went down his head went up, pale and frightened. “I can’t,” he said.

  “Try!”

  “Dad, it hurts my eyes,” said Alastair.

  Murray knew the truth then; there was resignation in his eyes. Again, he reached out. He close
d the book. He took it up and put it on the table, and his thumb riffled the edge of the pages. Then he held on to Alastair, his arm around the boy’s thin shoulders, and he pulled his son against him.

  “It will be all right,” he said. “Everything will be just fine.”

  A week later they were on the helicopter, Alastair and Squid and Hannah. They rose from the island and flew to the east, over Melville Island and Chatham Sound, out past the edge of the only world that Squid had ever seen. They flew across Digby Island and over the harbor, and the city spread out below them.

  It was smaller than Squid had imagined. She had hoped there would be skyscrapers and great deep canyons they would fly through, past people staring from the windows. Lights of all colors. Masses of cars. Long, silver trains crawling on elevated tracks, stretching round the corners like strings of linked sausage. She had hoped to find a clamor of sirens and bells and horns.

  “It’s boring,” she said, disdainfully. “It’s just a boring little city.”

  But the houses amazed her. They were clumped together, side by side and back to front, house after house after house, like barnacles on a rock, except they stood in tidy rows.

  “How can people live like that?” she asked.

  They rode in a taxi. The meter impressed her. And the speed! Never in her life had she gone faster over the ground than Murray’s little tractor could take her. They sat in the back, three in a row, and she could hear the telephone poles go whumping past the window. And the tires hummed, but that was all the sound there was.

  And the city smelled of rotten eggs. But no one seemed to notice.

  “It’s the pulp mill,” said Alastair. “I guess you get used to it.”

  He came away with glasses that made his eyes look huge. Hannah warned her: “Don’t laugh when you see him.” And she didn’t even want to laugh; she felt like crying.

  “I look like a goof,” he said. “Don’t I?”

  “They make you look smart,” she said.

  “A smart goof.” He laughed. “But look, Squid. I can see.” He held his hand two inches from his nose, his palm toward his face. “I can see my fingerprints. They look so neat. I’ve never seen my fingerprints before.”

  They were thick and clunky glasses. They were wider than his head, and she could stand behind him and see them jutting out beyond his ears. And sometimes—from behind him—she could see his eyes reflected in the lenses.

  “Can you see behind you?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes!” he said, and showed her. “See? If I turn my head I can.”

  They were only gone a week; they couldn’t wait to get back, and so they went on the chopper. Alastair on one side, Squid on the other, they watched like explorers for the first sight of their land. Alastair won.

  “There it is!” he shouted. “Hello, Lizzie Island.” He turned around, and his grin was almost as wide as his glasses. “It looks so beautiful,” he said.

  chapter nine

  HANNAH CARRIES A PLATTER OUT TO THE porch, a selection of all the fresh foods, a pile of cherries in the middle. She puts it down on the table, an old cable spool that Murray dragged from the beach years ago. She looks up and sees him coming, with Squid several paces behind. She’s surprised not to see Tatiana.

  Murray climbs up the steps and goes right past her, into the house. He whispers as he passes: “For heaven’s sakes don’t ask where the wee one is.”

  Hannah frowns. What happened in the little house? she wonders. But Squid isn’t any help. She waits till her father has gone inside, then sits on the steps, facing the evening sun.

  “Hungry?” asks Hannah, touching the platter.

  Squid shakes her head.

  “But you haven’t eaten. And Tatiana—”

  “She’s sleeping.” Squid straightens her legs and lies back on her elbows, fitting herself to the steps. Her fingernails are bright red, her stomach—where it shows below her blouse—as smooth and white as ivory. “Why’s Dad so angry?” she asks.

  “He’s not.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Hannah closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to be put in the middle of whatever’s going on between Murray and their daughter.

  “I’m trying to be nice,” says Squid. “I’m doing the best that I can.” She sighs mightily. “Nothing’s ever good enough for Dad,” she says.

  The door creaks as Murray pushes it open. He’s put on his slippers, fuzzy plaids of red and black. They’re four years old, but he’s still self-conscious when he wears them, thinking their colors too loud and garish. If he heard what Squid was saying, he doesn’t let on. He just stands in the doorway, rocking on his feet.

  There’s a bell hanging there, a big bronze bell with a beautiful knotted lanyard dangling from the clapper. Once that bell hung on the bow of a ship, but it’s been on Lizzie so long that even Murray doesn’t know the story behind it. He reaches out and runs his fingers over the weaving on the lanyard.

  “Come sit with us,” says Hannah.

  He closes his fist round the lanyard, as though he has to hold on to something.

  “Please.” Hannah offers again her platter of food, hoping Murray will close the distance between himself and Squid. But no sooner does he shuffle toward them—with a sigh and an “Och” and “I’ve only got a moment”—than Squid gets up, and stretches.

  “I’m sort of wrung out,” she says, and starts down the steps in a slow and languorous way. “I think I’ll call it a night.”

  It’s not yet eight o’clock. No one has touched the wonderful food. “I was going to make supper,” says Hannah. “One of your favorites, Squid.”

  “Mom, I said—”

  “Canned salmon on toast. Sockeye.”

  “Whoosh!” Squid presses her hand to her stomach. “I’d never sleep with that.” She takes another slow-swinging step. “I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Murray’s staring after her. Then he hangs his head and stares at his slippers.

  “We love you, Squid,” says Hannah.

  It felt just this way after that night at the foghorn, when Murray cried to see his world collapsing. They passed through the rooms and the doorways like guests in a grand hotel. They had short, polite conversations.

  As far as Squid was concerned, nothing had changed. She went out to her tire swing behind the house and shouted for someone to push her. But Alastair was the sensitive one, and he knew that something was wrong. He asked Hannah: “Are you and Dad having a fight?”

  “No,” she said. “We had an argument. A discussion.”

  “About leaving the island?”

  “That was part of it, yes.” She had no idea how he knew.

  “I don’t think we should go,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’d be so sad if we left.”

  Once a month the Darby came. Or the Alex Mac, or the Bartlet. They brought the groceries and the diesel fuel. They came loaded with Murray’s books, bringing boxes of books as they never had before. There were books on herbs and kangaroos and dinosaurs, on ancient Greece and superstitions. There were travel books from around the world, and even one on photography, though no one owned a camera. Only one thing was missing: any mention of sex.

  It seemed to Hannah that Murray had dwelt—in his dogged way—on the business of school and development, and this was his compromise. If correspondence school wasn’t enough for the children, they could learn anything else by reading a book.

  “Gateways to learning,” said Murray, pompously, she thought. As he took each book from the box, he set it onto one of the four stacks he was making: one for each McCrae. Hannah looked at the titles and saw how he was building Alastair and Squid, and even herself, into the people he thought they should be. Alastair would learn how things worked; he would be a great thinker, a philosopher of nature. Squid would be a tinkerer, able to change the things she didn’t like, to adapt the world to herself. Hannah looked through her own little pile and saw herself as frivolous, w
ith a narrow range of interests. Murray would know a little bit about everything.

  “Here’s a good one,” he said. “The Swiss Family Robinson. It’s about people like us.”

  He held it in his hand, waving it over the table like a sorcerer, trying to decide which pile to put it on. To her surprise, it went to Hannah’s.

  They read it aloud in the evenings, and all of them were horrified, but none so much as Murray. He must have hoped that it would hold a message for Hannah, how a family—shipwrecked on a strange shore—could build a paradise from nothing.

  But the Robinsons spent their days slaughtering everything they saw. “They’re killing the whales now!” cried Squid. “How can they do that?”

  Murray put the book away. He tucked it on a shelf among his tomes on ancient art. But Hannah took it down again and plugged right through to the end. She was disappointed; the Robinsons turned out to be sane and normal.

  “What are you thinking?” asks Murray now. He’s staring down the path toward the small house.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just remembering things.”

  “Bad things or good things?”

  She smiles up at him. “There haven’t been many bad things,” she says.

  “I dread the morning,” he tells her. “It’s like waiting for a storm.”

  But the new day brings a cheerfulness, a sense of friendship like a relic from the older, happier days of long ago. Squid shows up soon after seven, and Tatiana—barely awake, looking absurdly young in pigtailed hair, dressed again in red from head to toe—almost glues herself to Murray.

  Squid wants breakfast on the beach.

  “Over a fire,” she says. “Eggs and bacon and potatoes. The way we used to do it all the time.”

  Her memory has fooled her. They only had breakfast on the beach when Murray declared a holiday, and he seldom did that. But it’s risking this new mood to point that out.

  “Sure,” says Hannah. “It’s been a long time.”

  Murray is delighted. “You sit here,” he says. “I’ll get everything ready.”

  He brings out buckets and boxes, then loads them onto the tractor, lashing them down with a web of bungee cords stretched in every direction. The kettle at the top sloshes water from its spout.