The Lightkeeper's Daughter Page 15

  “Oh, it’s all right,” says Hannah. “Your father won’t know.”

  Squid comes along with her, close to the edge of the cliff. The rocks here are scraped to a whiteness where Murray has whacked them with the lawn mower blades. Squid walks on the outside, nearer the brink, but she keeps looking back, as though she’s expecting Murray to pop up from nowhere.

  “It’s not like you to worry,” says Hannah.

  “Huh?”

  “About something like grass.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that,” says Squid. “It’s just weird, not having Tatiana around every minute.”

  “Sorry,” says Hannah. “I should have realized.”

  “Why? You never thought about that with Alastair and me. We were always alone.”

  Hannah’s not sure if she’s meant to feel ashamed, but she doesn’t think so. As far as Squid is concerned, whatever was said in the tower will already be forgotten.

  “Your father was right about that, at least,” says Hannah. “It was one of the best things about the island. As long as you had a bit of common sense you were safe. You weren’t about to wander into traffic, or get lured into crime.”

  “Lured into crime,” Squid echoes, though without her usual scorn. “You must have got that from Dad.”

  “I guess I did.” Hannah laughs. They pass the concrete steps and the patch of trampled lawn. The route Hannah has chosen takes them in a curve nearly to the forest.

  “I have to watch Tat every second,” says Squid.

  “Maybe Australia will be different.”

  “Why? We’re not going to be in the outback, Mom. We’ll be right in the city, in the hugest city there.”

  “Poor Tat,” says Hannah, surprised to find how much she means it. And once more she thinks of Squid staying on the island, though she won’t mention that again. Squid’s anger still stings her. But then, for the first time, she thinks of Tatiana staying behind, of Squid going off and little Tat remaining. The child could spend a year on the island. Maybe the three years until Murray turns sixty-five. He would have his family back and Squid would have her really neat guy. But what about her? Hannah thinks of the winters then, of the storms and the rain, the darkness and cold. And she knows she can’t face it. Even the thought is a horror.

  “Lured into crime,” says Squid again. “I’d kill myself if that happened to Tat.”

  They circle round by the edge of the trees and meet the boardwalk. But Squid will go no farther. “I really don’t want to walk back to the beach,” she says. “I’m cold, and I want to get inside.”

  “Okay,” says Hannah. “Whatever you think is best.”

  chapter thirteen

  SQUID OPENS THE FLOOR BOARDS AND TOUCHES the books. She takes one from the back of the row, the last—or next to last—of all the ones he filled.

  She carries it to the seat in the window, looking out over the forest. At one time it was his sanctuary, and he would sit with a handful of bread crumbs, tempting the sparrows first to the sill and then into the room. In one of the books she has seen little bird footprints covering the pages.

  August 27. Sometimes I wish I was more like Squid. Things are so easy for her. She wants to go look for shells. She wants to search for feathers. For pretty stones and bits of moss. And then she spends hours and hours gluing them together, sanding the shells, wetting the stones with her tongue to see how the colors shine. For her the days go by one after the other, and she has no thought for tomorrow.

  There are things I want to tell her, but she doesn’t like talk ing about stuff she has to think about.

  August 28. Humpbacks. Two of them, the second time they’ve been here this year. I took the kayak out and played the flute for them. I think they have some understanding that I’m trying to communicate. But it’s a tough road ahead.

  August 29. I went to Dad and told him again that I’d like to study the whales. He couldn’t see at first that it means I’ll have to go somewhere to do it. And then he took me for a walk. He said that since I was leaving he had something he wanted to show me. We went to the toolshed and he picked up a rake handle. Not the rake but just the handle. Then he took me down the boardwalk and into the forest.

  We talked on the way and he asked when I wanted to go. I said, “Well, as soon as I can.” He laughed. “Tomorrow?” he said. I said, “I guess when I finish the high school courses.”

  We went up through the forest, right to the top of the island, to a tree where the eagles have an aerie. He said, “Alastair, this is where I want to be buried.”

  He poked his rake handle into the ground and pushed down on the end. It went in easily, four feet or more. “You see,” he said. “It’s good dirt. It’s loam down there. Now, I don’t want a stone,” he said. “Not even a cross. And for God’s sake don’t give me a coffin.” I said, “Dad, why are you telling me this?” He said he tried to tell Mom, but she didn’t understand. She wouldn’t go to the place, she said, and walk on his grave. “I just want someone to know,” he said. “I’ve set down directions, but I wanted someone to see where it is.”

  He made me sit down on the ground. It was covered with bead ruby plants, like water lilies on the land. He said, “Alastair, will you make me a promise?” I said I would try. “Just wait a few more years,” he said. “Wait until you’re twenty-one before you go away. The years will pass like the blink of an eye, and you’ll be old enough then not to have your head turned by the temptations of the world.” Then he asked again if I would promise him that.

  I did. I had to. In that place, knowing all it meant to him, I had no choice but to promise.

  “Alastair,” he said, “you’re a man of your word and I’ll take that as gospel.”

  I can understand what he wants. If I become the new keeper he won’t have to leave when he turns sixty-five. He can stay on the island as long as he wants, or as long as he lives, and that’s pretty much the same thing.

  But now I feel like a man on Alcatraz. Sentenced to life on the rock.

  September 1. The Sikorsky came, bearing technicians. It brought out the mail and a little box for Dad. He gave me the box. He said, “It’s a hydrophone, son. If you want to study the whales, I’ll help as much as I can.”

  It’s fantastic! I took it out this evening and I really heard for the first time the sounds the humpbacks make. In a way it was disappointing. There were a lot of groans and shouting sounds, here and there a squeal, but none of the songs that they sing. I think maybe they might sing at night.

  She remembers that morning, the excitement of the helicopter. And then the disappointment. For the first time in her life a present came for Alastair without one for her.

  He opened the box and took out the cables and all the pieces, and his face lit up with a joy that she hadn’t seen in months. He clamped on the headphones and grinned like a lunatic.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “A hydrophone,” said Alastair. “You can listen underwater.”

  She said, “Why don’t you just go and stick your head underneath?”

  It was meant to be funny, or mostly funny. But Alastair was angry. He whistled through his nose. “Can’t you at least pretend to show interest?” he asked. “This is important to me.”

  “Talking to whales?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Okay, Dr. Dolittle.”

  “Oh, grow up,” he said.

  But she was proud that she’d thought of that name. She taunted him with it for days. And then the fun went out of her game, because Alastair was never there.

  September 7. I think I’m making progress. The sounds, I’ve decided, aren’t meant to be words. They’re pictures. They’re whole ideas carried in a few different notes. And I think the whales are maybe trying to teach me.

  September 12. I heard a song! It was wonderful, so long and complex. It was an incredible thing. And in the middle of it, I SAW a picture. I actually saw it. I saw one little verse of the song. An iceberg, from the bottom up, a
mass of fish below it, swimming in a warm yellow light in front of a wonderful curtain of blue.

  I’m camping on Almost Nothing Atoll. I can’t be around people right now.

  The pages are wrinkled from water that’s soaked them and dried. The writing gets wilder, the letters bigger, and it breaks into verse that goes on for page after page.

  in a crash of sound

  through water rich with sun

  i thrust myself up

  to the air

  to the sky

  to another world of quiet and eye-burning bright

  to the world of the birds

  and i fly

  my flippers are wings

  albatross wings

  and i float in this world of above

  then tumbling down

  i shatter the water

  into millions of bubbles

  each a part of the sky

  Squid flips through the pages; the verses have no interest for her. She feels a sense that he’s close as she reads through weeks that she barely remembers.

  September 20. Another dreary day. Constant rain for three weeks now at least. I try to talk to Dad and he brushes me away. He won’t listen. “Stop whining,” he tells me. CAN’T SOMEBODY HELP???

  September 24. Raining again. And stormy now too. It’s frightening to go out in the kayak, but I make myself do it. Dad’s so stubborn that we go on with the chores, and we’re all soaking wet before noon. I get sad. Just deeply, terribly sad.

  She would look up, and he would be crying. He would be sitting perfectly still, just staring at nothing, and tears would be going down his cheeks in huge, trembling drops. They would fall from his chin and drop onto his shirt. And she would watch him and think: He doesn’t even know it.

  “Alastair,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “Hmm?” he said. “Oh, nothing. Nothing’s the matter.”

  “You’re crying.”

  He reached up and touched his cheeks. Then he held his fingers up to his glasses, nearly touching the lenses. He squinted through those bottles at the water on his fingers.

  “Can’t you tell me?” she said.

  “Please, Squid,” he said. “I just want to think.”

  September 27. Four days without a break in the gales. They come one after the other. I can see why men go mad in places like this. I keep thinking of the hanged keeper. His poor ghost trapped on the island. Is that what happens when you die? Will none of us EVER get away?

  At the end of the month, after thirty-four days, came sunshine. It broke through the clouds on the last Sunday morning, as the four of them, all in a row, went across the lawn with tablespoons, digging up the old and flattened dandelions that Murray waged his war against.

  It made a patch of light on the grass, and it caught them in their boots and their rain gear as though in a spotlight. Then, one by one, they bent themselves straight and looked up at the break in the clouds. And Squid did a dance. She did a scarecrow dance, twirling herself over the lawn, stumble-dancing past Murray and Hannah, past Alastair, and back down the row again. She laughed and she sang, and she danced in her bright, plastic suit. Then Hannah danced too, and they spun around holding hands. And even Murray joined in, hopping up on one foot, as awkward as a whirligig man.

  But Alastair wouldn’t dance. He goggled at her through his rain-speckled glasses and stood like a post on the lawn. And Squid teased him for that. She called him names: Mr. Stick-in-the-mud; Alice-the-maid. “Dance, Dr. Dolittle!” she said. And he smiled.

  It was the smallest, saddest smile she’d ever seen. His face cracked with it, like a window hit with a stone. It was hardly a smile at all.

  But it was there.

  The next day was a bit brighter, and the one after that even more so. Then the sky was bigger and bluer than ever before. And all of them but Alastair forgot that it had rained for more than a month.

  Alastair was like the droplets on the lawn. He vanished with the sun.

  “I think he’s changed,” said Squid. “He’s just not the same anymore.”

  She ate breakfast at the big house; it was too lonely at Gomorrah.

  “Does he talk about it?” asked Hannah.

  “He doesn’t talk,” she said.

  Hannah buttered Murray’s toast as he worked his way through his oatmeal. “What can we do?” she asked.

  “The best thing?” said Squid. “Send him to town. When the boat comes, let him go into town for a week.”

  Murray glanced up. “And I suppose you’d go with him?”

  “Well, he can’t go alone.” She grinned.

  “And he can’t go at all,” said Murray. “All his life I’ve taught him to face up to his problems. You take trouble head-on, not with your back to it.” He asked for jam with his toast. “Yet here, all of a sudden, at the first sign of a problem—”

  “The first sign!” said Hannah. “Oh, Murray. Look around you!”

  “At what?” he asked, bewildered.

  “He’s miserable here.”

  Squid turned to her mother. “You know what it is?” she said. “Dad’s frightened that Alastair won’t come home.”

  Murray’s eyes blazed. “Is that so?” he said. “Well, I’ll have you know he’s given me his word. He won’t be leaving until he turns twenty-one.”

  Hannah’s hand stopped in midair, a smear of jam like blood on the blade of her knife. “When did he say that?” she asked.

  “Not long ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not!” snapped Murray.

  Hannah backed down; she wouldn’t argue with Murray. She put the jam on his bread and—it might have been to herself—said, “I didn’t know that’s how he thought.”

  “Och, it’s a paradise here, if you’ll only open your eyes to see it.” Murray took the toast. It was cold and hard, and it crunched as he bit it. “The boy’s got more than enough to keep himself busy as long as he lives.”

  Squid left the table with her breakfast half finished. She went down to the beach and launched the glass-bottomed boat. She rowed through the lagoon, out to the channel with the sun blinding back from the glass. The bow was aimed for Almost Nothing Atoll, and her arms, like machines, pumped the oars around and around.

  Water burbled up behind her and rippled down the sides. When the boat skittered sideways she brought it straight with the oars. Then she slid them inside when she was close to the island, and the boat slewed around with its stern to the shore. A huge cloud of birds rose from the trees; they circled around her, ravens and gulls.

  It was the sun in his glasses; that was all she saw at first. He stood absolutely still, peering down at her between the cedar boughs. His arms were spread across them, and he looked as wild and wary as an otter, ready to flee—to slither away—if she came any nearer.

  Squid stood up in the boat. Her feet straddled the pane of glass; her hands were on her hips. “You told Dad you were staying until you’re twenty-one,” she said.

  He didn’t move. He came no closer.

  “Alastair,” she said. “You tell me if it’s true.”

  The boughs shook as he lowered his arms. They swept in from the sides, closing around him.

  “Are you going to be like this until you’re twenty-one?” She shouted at the trees. “You’ll be a crazy old loon by then. They’ll have to take you off in a straitjacket.”

  There was no answer.

  “Alastair,” she said. “Alastair!”

  She plopped herself down on the seat. She fitted the oars into the rowlocks. And Alastair came out from the trees.

  He came slowly; he stumbled on a root. He wore gray sweatpants without any shirt, and his stomach was round and white. He stepped down from rock to rock—he was barefoot, she saw—and sat by the edge of the water. He said, “Did you come out here just to ask me that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I thought you had plans. You were going off to college. You were going to do something.”

  He paddled a foot in the water.
He looked up at her, then down. “Dad needs me here,” he said.

  “He doesn’t.”

  Alastair shrugged. “Well, I’ve told him I’m staying. I have to make the best of it now.”

  She stared at him: at his hunched shoulders with the bones sticking out; his thin twigs of arms; his funny, impossible hair; his glasses; and the thin cords of white rope that dangled from his waistband, cinching tight the pants that were too baggy to fit. “And this is it?” she asked. “This is you doing your best?”

  On the fifteenth day of October, a kayaker arrived at Lizzie. He was tall and bronze, like a statue loosed from a pedestal. He landed on the strip of white sand where Squid was gathering shells.

  She carried them in her skirt, holding it up high at the front to make a sling for the little clams and the periwinkles. She turned around and he was there, the tallest man she had ever seen.

  There was only a breath of wind, and it blew from her back. It pressed her skirt between her legs and ruffled through her hair. The man looked down at her, smiling. She said, “What are you looking at?”

  He told her, “I didn’t think mermaids were real.”

  They sat on the beach, up high by the logs where the sun made white heat from the sand. The kayaking man stretched flat on his back. He opened and closed his legs; he swept his arms as far as he could reach. He made an angel in the sand.

  Squid was thirteen. She had never before sat on the beach with a man who made angels. She showed him the shells, though it seemed awfully silly, because he wanted her to. He took each one from her fingers, so that their hands were always touching, and after he’d looked at the swirls on the white—all colors of swirls—he put them down in a pattern. It was the most beautiful thing in the world, a spiral of shells. And when she stood up, she saw that it was one big shell that he’d made from them all.

  They went for a walk on the beach, close to the water, and the waves came up and covered her toes. They sucked at her feet, and now and then he had to reach out to hold her.

  Alastair was at the end of the sand. He rose up from the space behind the logs; he stepped ungainly across them. He looked half as tall as the kayaking man, very white and small beside him, as crazy as old Ben Gunn. His face was twisted into a look of dismay, and his eyes—unnaturally big in the glasses—blinked very quickly. “I’m Alastair,” he said, his eyes going like strobes. “Who are you?”