The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read online

  “I saw the baby. It was tipsy and fat,” he said in his preachy voice. “It blinked at the sun; it didn’t know what it was—what daylight was. I saw it take its very first look at the world. I was the first thing it saw.”

  “Did it die of shock?” asked Squid.

  By the time he reached his teens, Alastair had read every biology text in the house. He craved more, ordering pamphlets and thin little volumes with staggering titles. For Hannah, it was proof the boy should be in school. But Murray outmaneuvered her, and brought the subject up himself.

  “You know,” he said one morning, “school would be a disappointment for Alastair now. The lad would far outpace any teacher; why, he’d be driven round the bend.”

  “I just wish he had someone to share with,” said Hannah. “That’s the sad part. He’s so much alone with all that he knows.”

  Murray’s face crumpled.

  “Oh,” she said, “I didn’t mean you. I meant children. Others his age.”

  “No,” said Murray. “Och, you’re right. He knows more than me by half.”

  Murray did his best to catch up. He settled down at night with a stack of pamphlets at his elbow. He nodded off to sleep like that, until the alarm clock woke him at three in the morning, in time to do the weathers.

  By then, the four of them overfilled the rowboat. They crowded into it like circus clowns into a silly car, and they brought the gunwales nearly to the water. But still they went drifting over reefs and sand. And through the glass floor they saw a marvelous thing. A nudibranch, one of the giants carried in from the open sea. It was like an orange flame burning through the water, a rippling of tendrils and stalks.

  Squid rubbed their breaths from the glass. “Which end is the head?” she asked.

  Murray launched into one of his lectures. “The nudibranch,” he said. “A snail without a shell. A free spirit wandering wherever the currents take him. He carries no weapons, no armor. He drenches himself in a strong perfume that protects him like a magic potion.”

  “But where’s his head?” asked Squid. “Does he breathe, or what?”

  Murray had no answer. He shook his head.

  “Those tentacles are called cerata.” It was Alastair talking. “The animal breathes through those. That darker part in the center is a crude liver. There can be vast differences between the nudibranchs, even among the solids. MacFarland says the Hermissenda is a voracious killer of other nudibranchs. It slaughters its own kind with the cruelty of a shark.”

  Squid stared at him. “Huh?” she said.

  Alastair blushed horribly.

  And poor Murray. His little whimsical lecture sounded pathetic compared to the teachings of Alastair. He said, “I didn’t know that. A killer nudibranch?”

  Alastair didn’t answer. He seemed embarrassed that he knew more than his father.

  “You have to let them go,” says Murray. He’s talking to Tat, about the hermit crabs. But it jolts Hannah back to before.

  She told him the same thing. The children, she said, were like balloons in a bottle; if he didn’t let them out they could only grow so big, and no bigger.

  “I’m doing the best for them I can,” he said. “I’m teaching them to think for themselves, to believe in the things they believe. If that’s not good enough, then one day they’ll tell me so.”

  “But they won’t,” said Hannah. “They love you too much for that. Doesn’t the eagle have to push the babies out of her nest?”

  “Och,” he said. “You don’t know about eagles.”

  He hurt her with his quiet anger. She said, “But I know about children. And you have to let them go.”

  “They’ll die in your hands,” says Murray. “They need their freedom, Tat. You’ll have to let them go.”

  Tat doesn’t move. She’s studying the poor, naked crabs with the same detached interest that she showed for Murray’s toys.

  The sun comes over her shoulder, dazzling on her hands. The rising tide laps at the far edge of the pool, and ripples run across it.

  “Come on,” says Murray. “Put them down, Tatty, and we’ll find some jingle shells.”

  She turns her head toward him. “Jingle shells,” she says.

  “Yes. That’s right.” Murray puts his big, pink hands into the water. He holds Tat’s wrist, and the crabs—frightened—go fleeing. They tumble from her palms like the urchins—so long ago—that had tumbled over the bottom of the sea. They twist and fall, wriggling down to the sand. They race toward the scattered shells, each to its own, and carry them off to the safety of the weeds, to the shelter of the stones.

  Hannah looks up, and Squid is gone. She’s back at the fire, scattering the sticks, kicking them across the sand. Hannah stands by the pool for a moment, watching Murray and Tat go off along the curve of beach, one so big and one so small. Now and then they crouch, and dabble in the sand. Hannah wishes she could join them, but she goes to Squid instead. She starts packing away the breakfast things.

  Squid is scooping sand on the coals, smothering the last of the flames. The smell is hot and bitter. “I’m leaving on the next boat,” she says.

  “That’s a month from now, and you know it,” says Hannah.

  “Well, maybe one will come sooner.” Squid stamps over the mound of sand. “As soon as one comes, I’m going.”

  “You’ll break your father’s heart,” says Hannah.

  “Well, he broke mine.”

  “Squid!”

  “He did. He killed Alastair. And I’m not going to let him get Tat.”

  “What a terrible thing to say. You make him sound like Bluebeard.”

  Squid’s laugh is almost cruel. She keeps bustling around, gathering the aluminum foil that had wrapped the potatoes. She finds Tatiana’s Barbie doll and sits it upright on the sand. She never looks at Hannah. “It’s already inside her.”

  “The island?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, how could it not be? It’s all you ever knew,” says Hannah. “You’ve probably told her everything about it.”

  “Maybe Dad’s right. She has come home.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “I don’t want it to be her home.” Squid crushes the foil into a ball and jams it in the bucket. “If she stays any longer something awful will happen. I know it will.”

  The sun is hot, the sand baking in its whiteness. Hannah is tired of arguing. “Fine,” she says. “But you’ll have to tell Murray you’re leaving. You’ll have to tell him about Australia.”

  “I will.”

  “Today,” says Hannah. “It isn’t fair to let him think he’s got a grandchild now, only to whisk her away forever.”

  “It’s his own fault,” she says.

  “Oh, grow up, Squid!”

  “Well, it is, Mom. You saw what he did to Alastair.”

  He drowned. Hannah has told herself over and over that it might have been an accident. She has tried to make herself believe that, in the end, no one could save him. He went out on a sea of rolling black hills, under a sky that was bright with stars. He went out past the rocks and out past the reefs, paddling on with his back to the light. He paddled so far that no one would hear him if, in his drowning, he shouted for help.

  From the bridge she saw the kayak. It was such a bright red in the morning, rocking on the waves with a bubble of air, and a slap, as the cockpit went in and out of the water. It was a thin, red smear, like bright-painted lips on the waves. But she could see from the bridge that it was upside down. And she knew right away; Alastair was gone.

  Squid was with her. They had walked together to the tower, slowly there and slowly back. She remembers how they paused at the middle of the bridge, over the highest part of the gulf, and put their weight on the railing. Through her elbows and her shoulders, she could feel the wood shake as the swells boomed through the gully below them.

  The tide was ebbing and the starfish clung to the rock like orange asterisks. The water rose over them and poured away, draini
ng through the barnacles with the sizzling sound of fat in a frying pan. She watched the waves roll in and thought, again, how they were eating at the island, each one taking a tiny particle that reduced Murray’s world by an atom. Then Squid clutched her arm. “Mom,” she said. “Look.”

  The kayak rocked on each crest and turned as it slid to each trough. It came toward them and veered away, borne by the ebb past the gray rocks at the tower, drawn down the passage where the sand, in the sun, looked like gold in the water. It bumped against the concrete steps, lifting on a swell that dropped away to leave one end stranded on the concrete. It rocked far on its side and then, lifted again, went along on its way toward the beach at the end.

  She called for Murray. She shrieked his name. Squid shouted too, and they frightened the gulls that swirled up from the surf, taking their cries in a high, winding circle.

  Murray came with a wrench in his hand. He came at a run, over the grass, a look of terrible fear on his face. He paused at the cliffs, and he panicked. He ran down the steps, down the chipped-away stairs to the sea. And at the bottom he kept running, up to his knees and his thighs, up to his waist, and the swell rose over his shoulders. He swam out to the kayak and groped underneath it. He rolled it upright and threw himself across the cockpit. On his waist and his elbows, the water pouring from him in silvery rivers, he looked frantically around him. Then he put back his head and shouted one word into that great emptiness of the sea and the islands.

  “Alastair!” he shouted.

  And the surf boomed on the rocks, eating at a world that had shrunk on an instant to nothing.

  “Alastair wouldn’t have been happy anywhere,” says Hannah. “If he had got everything he wanted, he still wouldn’t have been happy.”

  At last Squid looks at her. “You don’t know the things he told me.”

  “No.” And she doesn’t want to know.

  “I tried to help him, Mom.” Squid sits down on a log. She puts her hands to her face. “I did everything I could, and it just turned rotten in the end. I did the wrong things, I think.”

  “We all felt like that.” She stands as close as she dares to her daughter. “We should have seen it coming.”

  At thirteen he was a dreamy, distant child. He asked for a flute for Christmas, but not for a music book. “I don’t want a book,” he said. “I want to play from my heart, not from a splatter of dots on a page.”

  He blew across the mouthpiece and pressed the keys. Tootling, Murray called it. Alastair made bird sounds, whale sounds; he didn’t make music.

  He started going off by himself, often in the kayak. Even Squid didn’t know where he went, and she hated him for that.

  “I could kill him,” she said. “He makes me so mad.”

  Hannah told her, “He’s going through a phase.” She said, “He needs some privacy.”

  And Squid asked: “What if he paddles away? What if he just keeps going and never comes back? The stupid moron, he’ll be down in Vancouver before he knows he’s away.”

  “He won’t leave you,” said Hannah. “One day, I’m sure, the two of you will live as neighbors somewhere in the city.”

  That was the way she saw it. Alastair would tear himself from the island. Squid would follow a few months later. It would be impossible for them to live more than an hour apart.

  She tried to prepare Murray for that, but of course he wouldn’t listen. “Och, they’ll never leave,” he said. “We’re too much of a unit for that.”

  “A unit?” she said. “We’re drifting apart. We’ll be at each other’s throats if it goes on like this.”

  And Murray said, “Alastair will be the keeper after me. Squid will catch the eye of one of those Coast Guard types. We’ll build her another house where she can bring up her children.”

  She gaped at him. He had no idea that everyone but him was already thinking of leaving.

  “I’ve picked out a spot,” he said. He was splicing new lines for the flag halyards, and he put down his tape and his fids. “Come on and I’ll show you,” he said.

  It was a gusty day and the whirligigs rattled, then stopped. She followed Murray past the wooden lady at the pump, past the airplane that flapped its wings as they went by, like a bird they had startled, past the galloping horse and into the forest.

  He veered off the boardwalk and went close to the cliffs. There was a circle of moss in a clearing. He said, “This is the place. Look at the view that they’ll have.”

  She looked down the cliffs and across the channel. She saw a spot of bright red out on the reefs, tossed by the white of the surf. It was Alastair, paddling the kayak, heading straight out as the waves crashed on the rocks and shattered into feathery plumes. And then she saw the orcas, the killer whales, beyond him. Their fins flashed through the water, black scythes cutting thin little furrows. They spouted and breached. Alastair rode in a swell until she could see nothing but his head, and his hands with the paddle. Then the wave passed and he soared up on its green back, the kayak shedding water. The whales swam behind and before him, in a shimmering mist of breath.

  “This will be the living room here,” Murray was saying. He had marked out the place with stakes and string and crimson ribbons of plastic. “They’ll have the best view on the island. The kitchen there; the bedrooms at the back.”

  Alastair kept paddling. Leaning forward, he dragged himself through the water. He vanished in the trough, then rose again on the next wave. The whales went in circles around him.

  “I suspect she’ll have two children,” said Murray. “So we’d better plan three bedrooms right off the bat. And maybe a study—what do you think?—where she can work with her shells and her jewelry.”

  “It won’t happen,” she said. “She won’t stay.”

  “Of course she will.” Murray came up through the moss and stood at the edge of the cliff. “Och, she might go away; I’ll grant you that. They both might go away for a while. But they’ll see what the world is like soon enough, and they’ll be home before the year is out. Mark my words, Hannah. They can’t stay away from the island.”

  Alastair turned his kayak into the waves. They rolled below him, tilting him up their white-streaked faces, up their beards of foam, and he seesawed on the crests and went sliding down again. He put away his paddle and took up his flute instead, and the music that he made came to her in bits, in little squeals and shrieks that sounded to Hannah like voices in panic.

  “Look at him there,” said Murray. “Where else could he do that? Why would he ever want to leave?”

  She didn’t answer. It seemed to her that he’d left already.

  “Poor Alastair,” says Hannah.

  Squid mumbles something that Hannah can’t hear. Squid reaches out and, when Hannah steps closer, takes hold of her dress, squeezing big lumps in her fists.

  “He couldn’t bear to go, and he couldn’t bear to stay,” says Hannah. She touches Squid’s shoulders. “But he loved you more than anyone.”

  Squid groans.

  “I blamed your father; God knows I did. I blamed myself and him.” She holds on to Squid with a fierceness. “But don’t think you had anything to do with it. You kept him alive.”

  Squid pulls herself away. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand, then gets to her feet and shakes sand from her blouse and her jeans.

  “I’m going up to the house,” she says. “Okay, Mom? I just want to go up to the house by myself.”

  chapter eleven

  September 13. They say that drowning is an easy way to die. They say that there’s a moment of panic and a moment of pain and after that there’s pleasure. You try to breathe but you can’t. Your body won’t let you. You go back through your life, and into a brightness of light. And at the end you’re happy and fearless.

  So why do they scream? Why do they fight and struggle so much? Why do they call for their mothers?

  Squid lies on the bed in Alastair’s room. Stretched out on her stomach, her feet on his pillow, she props her chin
on her left hand, and turns through the pages of Alastair’s book. In the pages, and in her mind, he’s thirteen years old again.

  Last night we heard men drowning.

  She remembers that day, the bleakest day in a long, bleak autumn. It brought a storm worse than any she had known and any that would follow. It was seven months before the Odd Fellow sank.

  All through the morning, Murray tapped and tapped at the barometer, watching the pointer swing backward on the dial nearly as fast as a second hand moves. The clouds gathered in heaps, boiling dark tendrils as they swept up from the south. The wind rose with a fury that surprised even Murray. At noon it shrieked through the trees. At dusk it snatched the wooden lady from her pump and sent Old Glory galloping over the grass.

  That evening, Alastair polished his oil-burning lantern and trimmed the wick. The chimney—thin as paper—tingled with a musical hum as each gust of wind howled at the side of the house. He set the lantern on his windowsill with a matchbook beside it, the cover open, one match torn out and left lying across the striker.

  “If the beacon goes out,” he told her, “I want to be ready.”

  But Murray kept them all together in the big house. He insisted on that, then insisted on going to the tower himself, though it wasn’t his turn for the weathers. He wore his oilskins and a black, floppy sou’wester. He called his boots Wellingtons. “Och, I’ll be needing my Wellingtons,” he said. “The lawn’s like an ocean out there.”

  He was gone nearly an hour before they saw him— bent and staggering—fight his way back against the wind. A shrieking gust and a spray of cold rain came in behind him when he opened the door. His sou’wester had been torn from his head. His eyes, half blinded by spray, were as red as Christmas balls.

  “The waves are breaking right over the bridge,” he said. “I’ve seen nothing like it. Nothing half so bad as this.”

  The surf boomed and roared against the rocks. The bronze bell rang on the porch as a gust of wind pushed on the clapper.

  “I thought I might get carried away,” said Murray. He hung his coat on a peg, and his shoulders were wet underneath. He pulled at his Wellingtons. “The flag’s gone. Nothing but tatters. The gusts are too strong for the meter to read, and it’s getting worse all the time.”