The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read online

  “It’s Squid,” she says. “Squid McCrae.”

  A babble of voices squawks from the speaker. She knows them all, old friends she recognizes only like a blind person—only by sound. Friends she sat up with on nights of screaming wind, when waves battered at tower walls and the spray—thick as snow—set automatic horns howling like lost souls. She sat with them on nights crackling with electrical storms, on days when tidal waves were zooming toward the islands at six hundred miles an hour. And on clear nights, too; on perfect nights, just to hear another voice in this huge and lonely blackness of the ocean.

  All the voices come at once, bubbling with happiness and questions. Squid talks for a while, then abruptly passes the handset to Hannah. She jams it toward her, a sentence half finished, her lip quivering and her eyes blinking madly. And Hannah reads out the weathers over the sound of her daughter sobbing in the corner.

  When she hangs up, she fiddles unnecessarily with the pencil and the book. Squid sniffles and gasps as the speaker drones on, through Bonilla and Langara and on to the south. And after the last one has reported, the circuit buzzes with this latest and exciting gossip. A voice new to the lights, not thinking who might hear, asks, “Wasn’t she pregnant? Wasn’t that the girl who went crazy?”

  Squid lets out a stifled little cry. Then bolts through the door.

  Hannah knows it’s a silly fear. But for some weird reason she expects to find her daughter dangling head down from the bridge. And the truth, she sees, is nearly as bad.

  Squid is folded up on a smooth shelf of rock, one of her childhood places, a stony love seat on a clifftop. She’s got a handful of pebbles, and she’s flinging them one by one into the sea. She says, accusingly, “What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing,” says Hannah. “You know I was with you. I—”

  “Then what did he tell them?” A pebble hurtles down.

  “Squid, that isn’t fair.” Just looking at that shelf of rock gives Hannah a feeling of spinning. “Your father wouldn’t say a word. And you know that better than anybody.”

  Squid brushes the rest of her pebbles from her palm. They skitter down the rock face, leaping from the stone. In her silence she acknowledges that it’s true about Murray. He would never talk about problems, or pains.

  “It’s only gossip,” says Hannah. “You’ve seen how it works. The rumors spread because we kept it to ourselves.”

  “Well, my ears are still burning,” says Squid. She shifts to the end of the hollowed seat, making room for her mother. But Hannah can’t possibly join her, though it’s only one step down from the grass. She sits instead at the top, as close as she dares to the edge.

  “Mom?” says Squid. “Does Dad think I’m staying a long time?”

  “He hopes you will. It’s what he dreams about, that we’re all together.”

  “All of us?”

  “Yes. Alastair too.”

  Squid draws her legs up on the shelf. Hannah shivers; if she rolls sideways, she’s gone. “Mom, does he dream that Alastair’s still alive?”

  Hannah has wondered that. She has seen him asleep in his chair, the old windup alarm ticking beside him, set to wake him for the weathers. She’s seen, when he’s sleeping, a smile on his face like none she’s seen in years when he’s awake. Sometimes he says his name, Alastair’s name, and she never wakes him then. It would be too sad to see his face if he came awake thinking it was Alastair nudging his shoulder.

  “Mom?” says Squid. “Do you ever wonder where Alastair is?”

  “Sometimes,” says Hannah. “Yes, sometimes I do.”

  “I see him in a library,” says Squid. “A big quiet room full of dusty books, every book that was ever written. He just sits and reads. And he doesn’t have to squint to see them.”

  “That’s nice,” says Hannah. “He’d be so happy there.”

  The Darby is going slowly down the channel as Hannah walks back with her daughter. The water lifts at its bow and curls back in a ripple. The smoke from the funnel thickens into swirls of brown and black.

  Squid is watching it leave. By the way she slows as she walks, the way her head turns, Hannah wonders if she’s wishing she were on it.

  The whistle blows and they each raise a hand, the smallest of gestures. Hannah lets her scarf dangle down, swinging at her ankles.

  Squid says, “I’m worried about Tat.”

  “Oh, you’re doing all right,” says Hannah. “She’s a bit shy, that’s all.”

  She feels she’s spoken too quickly and somehow annoyed her daughter. Squid rolls her eyes. “That’s not what I mean,” she says.

  “Then tell me.”

  It’s almost there, an answer on her lips. But Squid simply stops on the path. “Oh my God,” she says.

  Hannah can’t see what Squid has seen. Her eyes aren’t as clear as they used to be.

  “What is it?” she asks. “Squid, what’s the matter?”

  “A bird,” says Squid. “A crow.” She hurries along, and Hannah trots to keep up.

  It’s not a crow, but a raven. It’s enormous—nearly half of Tatiana’s size—its feathers unruly and ragged. It’s perched on Murray’s toy lighthouse, just a foot from her. But she seems oblivious to it, busy with the wooden cars and the chunky little ferry. If the bird stretched its wings it could touch her.

  “Tatiana!” shouts Squid. But only the raven looks up. It twists on the top of the lighthouse with a sharp clatter of talons. And then, with no hurry at all, it spreads its wings and rises, with a melodic croak and a whistle of feathers, up to the roof and on to the sky.

  The sand is pitted with tracks, with ruts and scraped-away hollows, as though a dozen birds had scuffed among the wooden boats. Hannah stares at the patterns of crosses and diamonds as Squid, kneeling down, starts to scrape them away. She does it almost frantically, and the grains rise up through her fingers; they flow past her hand to make wide sweeping fans. And Tatiana keeps playing, until Murray comes up, and she turns to look at him with a grin on her face.

  “Hello, Tatty,” he says. And then surely he sees the tracks that are left, for his head jerks back with surprise. “So.” He smiles at Hannah. “We’ve another one like that.”

  She was thinking the same thing, remembering how the wild birds flocked around Alastair. They filled the trees, ravens next to gulls, cormorants with crows. They spaced themselves along the branches to hear the music that he played. And this raven from the sandbox might have joined them then. They live a human lifetime, Hannah knows. He might have been on Lizzie when Murray came to live here.

  “It’s not the same,” says Squid. Her hand rubs at the sand so hard that it squeaks. “One raven, that was all. It was picking for shells and fleas.”

  “Och,” says Murray, with a shake of his head. “She’s come home, Squid. Can’t you see? She’s come home.”

  He said those same words to Hannah the first time she met him. She was kayaking along the coast, from Vancouver to Alaska, in the days when very few would even think of doing that. Her boat was canvas over wood, her clothes just wool and cotton. For a girl alone, only nineteen, it was a thing of daring and adventure; she was like that once.

  In Prince Rupert a fisherman told her, “Be sure to stop at Lizzie Island. It’s like something from the Caribbean.” He spoke of sandy beaches, a sheltered lagoon. His hands drew sweeping curves across the air. “And there’s a lighthouse there,” he said. “The keeper’s like a hermit.”

  She paddled across the sound, from Tugwell bar to Melville Island, then through the gap below Dunira. And she saw the light then, Lizzie light. She thought it was cheerful and brave.

  For three days she camped in the rain and waited for the wind to shift. The bugs came in clouds; they covered her tent and crawled through the wool of her sweaters. They blackened her skin like coal dust. And when the weather broke, late on the fourth day, she didn’t give a thought for time or tides. She loaded her kayak and set off for Lizzie.

  It was farther than she’d thought. Dar
kness came and the moon rose behind her. She paddled down a silvery path, toward the beacon that flickered on the wave tops. She landed at two in the morning, in a hush of surf at the back of the island. She built a fire of salty wood that crackled and sparked, and she lay beside it, on her back, watching the stars.

  In the morning the sun glinted off sand that was silver and gold. The surf broke in a continuous rumble, echoing back from the forest behind her, as though the island were breathing. She found old railway tracks buried in the sand, and followed them up to the crumpled ruins of a boat shed. There was a trail that took her over moss and devil’s club, round windfalls and enormous old cedars, past tumbling banks of shells turned gray with age. Then a side trail led down to the shore, to a smooth shelf of rock where sea lions lay like buff-colored slugs, in a mass all over one another.

  As she walked closer, one of them arched up from the rock, pushing with its flippers. Then the whole herd, with a ferocious bluster and roar, rushed headlong to the water. They tumbled and slid; they rolled from their shelves. They went in a wonderful, thundering rush, and the sound stirred the birds into a screaming cloud of white and black.

  There was one animal left. It was a pink blob high on the rock. Then it stood up on freckled legs and snatched at a towel.

  “You gave me a fright,” he said, calling down. It was Murray McCrae.

  He gathered his clothes and walked barefoot over the barnacles, as fast as he could, hopping and flouncing like a pink elf. He disappeared behind a boulder.

  “Do you know,” he said from there—half shouting— “that sea lions are the original mermaids?”

  She saw an elbow, a knee, a flash of bright hair. “Really?” she said.

  “When the sailors came across them—they must have been years at sea—they saw chubby and voluptuous women.”

  His voice was soft, his words almost like a song.

  “Frankly, I don’t see it myself,” he said. “Imagine a woman like that, with arms but no legs.” He came around the boulder in kneesocks and shorts. He was fitting the buttons into his shirt, but he had them in the wrong holes. “Och,” he said. “She’d flop like a dying fish, a woman like that. But they’re fascinating creatures, sea lions. Do you know that the bulls collect whole harems of females?”

  And then he blushed.

  Later, Hannah would see the same thing, a rambling babble, from other men who spent years alone on the lights. But at the time, she thought Murray McCrae was just plain odd.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Hannah James,” she said. The first words that she’d spoken.

  “I’m Mr. McCrae,” he told her. “Hannah, have you ever seen a lighthouse?”

  He took her on what he called the grand tour. He showed her everything, talking all the time. He took her to the powerhouse and pointed out the parts of the generator as it rumbled away in its spotless house. “The injectors here; one, two, three, four of them.” He had to shout to make himself heard. “The starter motor, see. Twelve-volt, of course. It’s a three-phase generator, pumping out a hundred and ten volts.” He stepped back, then looked around the room. “What else?” he asked. “Oh, yes. Silly me.” And he unscrewed a battery cap, to let her see the acid.

  “And now,” he said. “The tower.”

  She loved the tower, its staircase spiraling up, the huge lantern with the polished machine in the middle, the prism and lens turning slowly around. “Don’t look right at it,” he warned. “It would burn your eyes in an instant.”

  When they stepped out to the platform he was talking less quickly, more carefully, and his voice had lost its shrill of excitement. They stood in the sunshine, looking at the island.

  He had been there nearly ten years already. He was a coal miner’s son, from Drumheller, Alberta. “I was lucky,” he said. “Sheer blind luck. I went looking for a job the day after the lightkeeper died. They were desperate for a replacement.”

  “What happened to him?” asked Hannah.

  “Oh,” said Murray. He looked away. “I believe that he died here on the island.”

  The house was nearly empty. Murray had burned all the old, moldering furniture the previous winter and was now building his own a piece at a time, starting with whole logs pulled from the beach. He had one chair and no table, but a wallful of shelves full of books. Hannah stared at the titles, standing before them with her hands at her back, as he boiled crabs for their dinner.

  “Are you a biologist?” she called to the kitchen. There were books about plants, books about animals. There wasn’t a novel among them.

  “No,” he shouted back.

  She waited for more, but it was all he said.

  They sat on the floor to eat, cracking the shells with their hands, using the crabs’ pointed feet to dig out the flesh from the claws. It was just before dark when they walked back down the trail to the camp.

  Hannah had heaped sand onto the fire, and the coals were hot underneath. They stoked them with moss-covered twigs and slivers of cedar that Murray peeled from a log with his little red knife. Then he fanned up flames with a copy of the Audubon guide that he carried in his pocket the way her own father had once carried the Book of Common Prayer.

  She was smitten with Murray. He was a gentle, shy man who hadn’t touched so much as her elbow. He was twice her age and a little more, and she found that exciting. But dangerous too.

  “Sit with me,” said Hannah. She spread her poncho on the sand. She didn’t bother unfolding it first. “Come on,” she said, and patted the cloth, quartered into a square.

  Murray sat in the sand.

  He wasn’t about to seduce her. And she sighed and thought it was all for the best. In the morning she would load up her kayak and paddle away to the north. But then the auklets came; it was the auklets that kept her on Lizzie.

  It got very dark. She watched Murray prod at the fire. And then she heard a whistling, and something darted past her head. It crashed through the bushes behind her, crackling through the branches. Another came behind it.

  “What was that?” she said, startled.

  Murray poked at the fire. “Auklets,” he said.

  “They scared me,” she told him.

  Murray came beside her. She thought he was about to hold her, but he only reached past—“Excuse me,” he said—and picked up his Audubon book. Two more of the things hurtled by with the same weird hum and whistle.

  “Rhinocerous auklets,” said Murray. He opened the book and held it flat to the firelight. Hannah saw a funny, fat-bellied bird with a little spike of feathers above its beak.

  “They feed far from shore,” he said. “They come back after dark to their burrows in the woods.”

  Hannah had seen the holes; she’d thought they were marten dens.

  The auklets came in a flurry, smashing blindly into the dry undergrowth.

  “Och, for heaven’s sake,” said Murray. He was looking at the book, bending so close to the fire that Hannah worried he might set his hair alight. “They’re not auklets at all. They’re actually a type of parrot, if you can believe that.”

  “A parrot?” she said.

  He twisted the book. Then he laughed. It was the first time she had heard his laughter, and it was a lovely sound. He said, “I can’t read in this light. It says puffin. ‘A type of parrot-billed puffin.’ You see, I transposed the words.”

  Three or four auklets whirred past in the darkness. A straggler came blundering by, and then it was quiet.

  “Apparently,” said Murray, “they have very poor eyesight.” He closed his book.

  “But they find the island,” said Hannah. “And I’m sure there’s a hundred burrows back there, but each bird must go right to its house. How do they do that?”

  The book cracked open. Murray hummed as he read. “It doesn’t say.” He slapped it against his palm. “What a question,” he said. “What a puzzle. I think tomorrow I’ll have to sleep out in the bushes here. Try to watch the burrows.” He nodded. “I’ll
see if there’s any coming and going.”

  He stood up then. The sand was cold and dewy, and it stuck in a black patch to the seat of his shorts. “Well, good night,” he said.

  “Wait,” she said. “Do you think . . .” He turned around. “Could I get a job here?” she asked. “Do you need an assistant or something?”

  Murray stared at her. He said, “I think you belong here, Hannah James. Och, you’ve come home.”

  Squid is furious. “What do you mean she’s come home?” she asks. “She hasn’t come home at all.” She whisks Tatiana from the sandbox. Grains whirl in the sun like shaken salt. “She’s never been here before, so don’t say she’s come home.”

  Murray shrinks into sadness. “I only meant,” he says, “that she’s so much like family.”

  “Family?” says Squid. Hannah, too, is shocked by the rage. Squid is shaking. “She doesn’t look like you. She’s never met you.”

  “Well, she’s family now,” says Murray. It amazes Hannah that he can go patiently, doggedly on. “I don’t give a fig about anything else.”

  Squid laughs her ugly laugh. “You sure did,” she says. “When it happened.” She rears back. From her forehead to her neckline she’s a vivid red. “Well, guess what?” she cries.

  “Stop it!” shouts Hannah. “The two of you stop it!” She lunges between them, frantic to keep them from opening doors that aren’t meant to be opened. She can almost imagine a squeal of old hinges, the echo of voices down cobwebbed corridors. It’s Squid’s fault, she thinks; Squid has always done this. She’s the only McCrae who’ll go rampaging through these private and secret places.

  Hannah shakes her finger, first at Squid and then at Murray. It horrifies her that she is actually shaking a finger under Murray’s nose. “And now,” she says, another echo from the past, “not another word from either of you.”

  Murray looks shocked; absolutely shocked. His pale eyebrows arch on a sunburned forehead. Squid laughs. Surprisingly, Tat does too—a glimmer of life dancing in her eyes.

  Hannah forces her face into a look that’s meant to seem stern. Already, she can see, the matter is settled as far as Squid is concerned. Squid can forget these things, these arguments, as easily as she can shrug her shoulders. It’s not the same, though, for Murray.