The Lightkeeper's Daughter Page 11

  Squid keeps Tatiana with her, sitting at the edge of the steps. But it’s like trying to hold a kitten; the child struggles and squirms to keep her eyes on Murray. When he disappears around the corner of the house, she breaks free and dashes after him.

  “She’s sure glommed on to Dad,” says Squid.

  Hannah isn’t sure if it’s sadness or amusement in her voice. She can’t see Squid’s face. “You were the same way whenever you met someone new,” she says. “You followed them around just like that.”

  “Who did I ever meet?” asks Squid.

  “Oh, come on,” says Hannah. “You met technicians, junior keepers . . .” But it’s true there weren’t very many, and she has to think of others. “The Coast Guard, I guess. And Santa Claus. Oh, and kayakers.” Then she stops, almost biting her lip.

  “Yeah, I remember,” says Squid.

  Then Murray comes back down the path, wheeling his wagon behind him. Tatiana is right on his heels, trotting along in her funny walk, one hand on the towbar as though she’s the one doing the pulling. Her voice is as shrill and bright as a bird’s call. “Look, Mom! I’m helping.”

  “That’s good, Tat,” says Squid.

  Murray hitches the wagon to the tractor. He asks, “Who wants to ride in the cartie?”

  Nobody answers, and that seems to break his heart. He must have said the same thing a thousand times, thinks Hannah, and always Squid would shout, “I do! Oh, I do!” She would leap right from the ground, bouncing like a spring across the grass.

  It was too wild for Alastair, too dangerous for anyone but Squid. She loved to stand up in that rickety thing, rocketing down the boardwalk. It was a chariot and she was Ben Hur, and she shouted “Faster!” and “Faster, Dad!” as Hannah held her breath.

  But now nobody answers. “Anyone for the cartie?” asks Murray. “Would the Tatty like to ride in the wagon?”

  The child gazes up at him, then nods like a jack-in-the-box. She’s grinning her wide, funny grin.

  “I knew you would!” Murray whisks her up and stands her in the cart. “Hang on,” he says. “You hold on to the bar at the front, and if I’m going too fast you just shout ‘Whoa!’ And don’t be scared, wee Tat.”

  “Dad, please go slow,” says Squid.

  “Och, who’s telling me this?” asks Murray. But he’s smiling now, and Tatiana grips the bar as he starts the tractor. It clunks into gear. Tat jolts back, her arms going stiff, as Murray sets off down the path.

  She seems to enjoy it, but it’s hard for Hannah to tell. From the forest ahead, Tat lets out a cry, and Hannah says, “Something’s gone wrong.”

  “That was a happy shout, I think,” says Squid.

  But they catch up to Murray, who’s parked the tractor and is hurrying back. He snatches something from the boardwalk.

  “She dropped her Barney doll,” he says, holding it up, then dashes off again.

  It takes more than half an hour to walk the boardwalk’s length this morning. Squid stops at the places she remembers: at the midden; at the eagles’ nest; at the look-out spot above the high north shore where tattered bits of plastic ribbon have turned from red to pink. And with every step Hannah dreads coming to the meadow. But they pass that little splash of green and yellow without stopping, without a comment from either of them. It was in the meadow that Squid was found unconscious, nearly dead.

  Now and then they nudge together, then come apart and veer across the boardwalk, in and out of spots of light filtered through the trees.

  Murray has the tractor unloaded before they get to the beach. He has spread out the plates and the cutlery down a weathered old log. He’s building a fire in a hollow scraped from the sand. Tatiana is watching him intently.

  “How’s it going?” says Squid.

  “Great.” Murray takes a bone-dry pine bough and breaks it into twigs. “We’re having a terrific conversation here.” He arranges the twigs precisely on his moss.

  Squid walks around behind Tatiana. She cocks her head. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes.” He pokes Tat with a twig. “We’re going for a swim.”

  Tat’s eyes wrinkle. Her mouth stretches. “Going for a swim,” she says.

  “It might be too cold for swimming.” Squid sits down on the log and pulls Tat back toward her, between her opened legs.

  “And you know what else, Tatty?” Murray leans close to her. “Shells!” he says, slowly, bug-eyed.

  Tat giggles. “Shells.”

  “Right you are.” He’s stacking twigs like teepee poles. “We’ll find some periwinkles maybe. Some limpets and some jingle shells. We’ll make a pretty necklace.”

  Murray puts a match to the fire. Out of the moss come gray genies. They bow and stretch, then sink back into orange flames. And onto the crackling twigs go bigger sticks, then driftwood and bark. The smell’s like incense to Hannah, wonderfully strong.

  “More wood,” says Murray. But when he starts up, Squid says, “I’ll get it, Dad.”

  He’s clearly surprised. “All right,” he says. “Thank you.”

  It’s a lovely, lazy meal that lasts until 9:20, when Murray suddenly remembers the weathers. He gets up, and Tatiana reaches after him, blubbering on the instant.

  “Och,” he says. “I’ll be right back. In the shake of a lamb’s tail, wee Tat.”

  He roars away on the tractor, and Tatiana sits with her back to the water, staring at the forest where the boardwalk winds between the trees. To Hannah she’s like a tick without him, like a little red tick frozen as the time goes by. Squid seems content to let her sit there alone, but Hannah can’t bear it. She moves down the beach to comfort the child.

  “I’ve missed this,” says Squid. “These cookouts we had.”

  She’s feeding sticks to the fire, thrusting them in like swords. She doesn’t seem to care about anything, and Hannah doesn’t hesitate now to tell her, “We did it only rarely.”

  Squid looks up for a moment, then laughs in her unpleasant way. “Oh, not us,” she says. “God, not you and Dad. Alastair and I did this all the time.”

  It could be true. They could have done this by themselves early in the mornings.

  “And you know what got us started?” She pokes at the fire.“That Swiss Family Robinson. Remember how I loved that book?”

  “You hated it,” says Hannah.

  “Oh, Mom, you’ve forgotten. It was because of that book we went exploring. And that’s how we named Almost Nothing Atoll.”

  “We didn’t have the book then,” says Hannah. “We got it years later.”

  Squid shakes her head. “We launched the boat right here.”

  “Yes, I remember that,” says Hannah.

  “How can you? You didn’t even come to see us off.”

  “What nonsense.” Hannah remembers it very well.

  It was a gray morning, with rain sure to come. But the day had been picked a week before, and there was no delaying the journey. Alastair and Squid had filled the rowboat with every silly thing they needed; they had made the chart that Alastair said was vital for the trip. That was the word he used. “It’s vital,” he said. “You can’t go anywhere without a chart. Not anywhere.”

  Hannah went down with Murray and helped to launch the boat. Squid and Alastair sat together on the thwart, each with an oar. But the tide was still rising and the boat was overloaded. Murray had chores to do, so he couldn’t wait to witness the departure.

  It pained the children, she thought, that they had to face her as they rowed away. They were still watching one another when they made their first landfall, on the island across the lagoon. Then Squid called out, “Goodbye, Mom!” And they climbed up, and into the trees.

  Hannah walked alone back to the lighthouse. Murray was on his hands and knees at the wailing wall, cutting with a pair of scissors at the blades of grass against the stones, the ones he couldn’t reach with the mower. He said, “Are they off?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh, Murray, do you think they’re old enough for this
?”

  “It’s past time,” he said.

  But it was the longest day of their lives, followed by the longest night. Neither of them slept, and in the morning they both hurried to chores that would take them as high from the ground as possible. Murray lit off for the tower, to clean the glass and oil the hinges on the door, he said. But he didn’t explain how such simple things could keep him occupied for hours. Hannah got out the ladder and climbed to the roof of the big house. The eaves troughs didn’t really need cleaning; Murray had done it not long before, picking out every bit of leaf and grain of shingle before they tainted the drinking water or clogged the pipes leading to the cistern. Then, on their separate perches, she and Murray watched through the morning, though the rain started then, heavy and soaking.

  Murray went into the cupola, where he could fiddle with the wiring and wipe the windows and keep himself dry as he worried. But Hannah huddled in the rain, sheltered only by the chimney, like a huge bedraggled stork. She didn’t move until the children came up the boardwalk in their yellow coats that flared out from their hips to their knees. The two of them looked like bright-colored bells, their legs for clappers. How proud they were.

  They burst through the door just as Hannah came down the stairs in fresh, dry clothes, as Murray appeared from the tower.

  “We’re back!” shouted Squid. “We’ve named every island.”

  “Were you worried?” asked Alastair.

  “Not at all,” said Murray.

  Hannah shook her head. “Why should we worry? You’re almost grown up, the two of you now.”

  “You didn’t even worry,” says Squid. She’s scraping at the sand with a stick. “We were gone all night, and you didn’t even worry.”

  Hannah sees no point in telling her now. She’s sure that Squid wouldn’t believe her anyway.

  They sit in silence. Squid draws spirals and squares in the sand. Tatiana stares at the forest, and Hannah holds her, trying to remember how it was to hold Squid. Then she laughs, because Squid never stayed still to be held.

  “What’s so funny?” asks Squid.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, it’s true,” says Squid. “We could have drowned, and you didn’t even worry.”

  Hannah sighs. “No, Squid, we never worried.”

  “Maybe you should have,” she says.

  Hannah strokes Tatiana’s pigtails, the hair as dark as Alastair’s. If it weren’t combed and bound like this it would probably fly apart in the same way, into a clown’s mad tangles.

  She closes her eyes, suddenly almost in tears. It was Alastair who liked to be held, to be touched and comforted. She bends down her head and rests her cheek on Tatiana’s hair.

  But the child only squirms, reaching again toward the forest. And a moment later Hannah hears the sound of the tractor purring through the trees. Tatiana tears herself loose and runs to meet Murray as he trots across the sand.

  “Hello, Tatty!” he shouts.

  He has brought a paper filter for a second pot of coffee. He lays it neatly on the log, and Tat is right there, helping him to smooth it flat, patting with her little hands. “What a helper you are,” he says.

  Tatiana glows.

  “Let’s find those jingle shells.”

  They go off together, across the sand that’s heating now, as the sun streams over the trees. They walk, then run, then suddenly drop to the ground, beside a tide pool by the rocks.

  “Look at them together,” says Hannah. “I haven’t seen him run like that in years. She’s good for him, Squid.”

  Squid is building up the fire, blinking in the twirls of smoke.

  Hannah says, “Why did you wait so long to bring her home?”

  “It isn’t home,” says Squid.

  “Well, whatever it is.”

  Squid breathes little gasps through the smoke. She shifts sideways, from her knees to her hip. “I was sort of scared,” she says.

  “Scared? Of your father?”

  “No,” says Squid. “Not really.”

  “Of me, then.”

  “No.” Squid waves the smoke away. “The island.”

  “You were scared of the island?”

  “Yes. Sort of. I thought it would—I don’t know—take her over, Mom. I was scared she’d remember things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just things.” She adjusts the sticks she’s put on the fire. “What if she knew where the boardwalk went and where the auklets live? What if she came out on the beach and said, ‘I remember all this’?”

  “Why would she?” asks Hannah.

  Squid shrugs.

  “It sounds a bit silly,” says Hannah.

  “I can see that now. I didn’t think so then.”

  Hannah stares along the beach, at Murray and Tat lying on the sand. She imagines that he’s lecturing on all the little animals, and she wishes she could hear him. “So why did you come back now?” she asks. But she wonders: Why, of all times, in the autumn?

  “I had to,” says Squid. “I had to see it once more while I can.”

  Hannah’s heart leaps. A hundred fears run through her mind in a moment. “What do you mean?” she says, turning to face her daughter. “What do you mean, while you can?”

  “I’m going away,” says Squid. “We’re going away, me and Tat.” She steps around the fire and sits at Hannah’s side. “Mom, I met this guy, this really neat guy, and we’re going to live in Australia.”

  “Forever?”

  “For three or four years,” says Squid. “But by then . . .”

  “We’ll be gone,” says Hannah. It’s not even three years. She knows within ten the number of days until Murray turns sixty-five. And then, she imagines, the Coast Guard will have to come with crowbars to pry him from the island, tearing him loose like a mussel, breaking his byssus at last.

  “Don’t tell Dad,” says Squid.

  Hannah scarcely hears her. “Why didn’t you bring him, this really neat guy?”

  “Mom, don’t.”

  “But why?”

  “He left two weeks ago,” says Squid. “He’s already in Australia.”

  “Oh, Squid.” Hannah sighs. “I should have known it would be something like this. I should have known you were bringing bad news.”

  “Gee, thanks,” says Squid. “I don’t think it’s bad news. I think . . .”

  She doesn’t finish. Down the beach, by the shelf of rocks, Murray is springing to his feet. He moves as quickly as a flea; one instant he’s squatting by the tide pool with Tatiana, and the next he’s upright, hands at his hips. He takes a step backward, then another. Then he wheels around and runs straight toward them.

  Squid leaps up, scattering sand. Then Murray stops where he is. He glances back at Tatiana, then calls to Squid and Hannah. “You’ll have to see this.” He beckons frantically. “You won’t believe what she’s done.”

  chapter ten

  IT’S NOT A BIG TIDE POOL. IT’S SMALLER THAN a child’s wading toy. In its shallow water Hannah sees a sculpin dart from weed to rock, a shore crab glide the other way. The bottom of the pool is covered with small, empty shells, more thickly toward the end where Tatiana holds her hands below the surface.

  Murray puts a palm on Tat’s shoulder; one of her pigtails brushes his wrist. He bends down until his face is level with hers. He says, “Show them, Tatty.”

  She doesn’t move. Her hands are cupped together, fattened by refractions.

  “Come on, Tatty. Open your hands. Do it for Grandpa.”

  Murray’s fingers flex. “Come on, Tat. Please?”

  And slowly, like a clamshell, Tatiana’s hands fall open.

  Hannah has never before seen these animals that are gathered in the creases between Tatiana’s fingers, among the ridges that line her small, bent palms. They’re tiny things with oversized arms, with claws like a crab’s and thin, tapering bodies almost in coils. They don’t move; they shelter there.

  Squid says, “What are those?”

  “Lo
ok,” says Murray.

  Hannah can see it now. But it seems impossible. They’re so fragile. All those empty shells in the pool. “Hermit crabs?” she asks.

  “Yes,” sighs Murray.

  And Squid’s face turns as pale as the sand. “See, Mom,” she says. “It’s starting.”

  “Shhh,” says Hannah.

  No shells of their own, these little crabs have been living in the cases of dead periwinkles. The sprinkle of empty shells was their armor, their homes. But here they have cast them off, and crawled—so naked and vulnerable— into the safety of Tat’s small hands.

  “It was just one at first,” says Murray. “And then a second, a third. They climbed up over her fingers, over her wrists. They all came, through the water and across the sand.”

  And she holds them like jewels.

  To Hannah it’s almost like magic. It’s something that Alastair might have done.

  He would lie for hours, absolutely still, with a bit of gristle in his fingers. He would be a rock, like a piece of the island, unmindful of the rain or the wind, just for the chance to feed a gull.

  And then he would describe in the greatest detail, with the emotion of a preacher, the touch of this wild animal.

  “Its feathers were layered,” he said one day. He stood in the kitchen, his legs shaking with excitement, crossed close together. “There was a line of white and a line of black and each one was just perfect.” His fingers twitched in tiny gestures. “Just perfect, perfect feathers.”

  When he was twelve, he went after the auklets. He sat for nine straight hours by the mouth of a burrow before Murray brought him away. “Alastair,” he said. “Maybe they don’t want to be seen.”

  “Maybe not,” said Alastair. “But I think I want what I want more than they do.”

  For three days he sat there, from the moment his chores were finished until just after dawn.

  “I think Alastair’s gone off the deep end,” said Squid. She wouldn’t have the patience for that. She’d have to be staked to the ground to stay in one place for nine hours straight.

  But on Alastair’s fourth day at the burrow, the bird came out. And it wasn’t the one he’d expected.