The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read online

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Please promise me that.”

  “I promise,” she said.

  Still, he didn’t trust her. He hid the book, and it took her nearly half an hour to find it, tucked where it was behind the others on the shelf, standing up against the back of the bookcase. She took it to her own room and sat with her shoulders against the closed door. And she went first to the last thing he’d written.

  I’m drowning. Can’t breathe, can’t surface, can’t escape. Dad just WILL NOT LISTEN!!!! Mom can’t persuade him and won’t even try anymore. Thank God for Squid. It would be HELL here if it wasn’t for Squid. I’m afraid to tell her that I think I’m

  The page ended there, and she didn’t turn it. She closed the book, feeling dirty and ashamed. She felt just the way she had the time Murray found her sunbathing naked on the back porch of Gomorrah, feet together, arms spread wide across the hot red paint. She touched the book to her forehead; she rapped it on her brow.

  But the book had a power. It called to her like a siren to a sailor, tempting her with all its secrets. She felt that she would not be able to set it down; it would cling like tar to her fingers. Or if she could, it would only leap again into her hands. She couldn’t possibly not find out what Alastair was too frightened to tell her.

  I think I’m going blind.

  I think I’m going insane.

  She cracked open the book; her finger still marked the right place. She wanted to see that one sentence and no other. No matter what it said, she would not read any more.

  Alastair’s letters slanted backward. They leapt over the page with no thought for the lines. They shouted at her, full of rage and frustration.

  I’m afraid to tell her that I think I’m

  She plucked at the edge of the page, peeling back the corner. And suddenly she hurled the book away. It hit the wall and fluttered down like a wounded bird. It crumpled on the floor, upright with the pages fanned toward her. And she sat, and she stared at the thing; she couldn’t betray him that way.

  In her whole life she’d met no more than fifty people. But no one on earth could have a greater sense of righteousness than Alastair. “I have a rule,” he’d told her. “Don’t do something if there’s a single person—anywhere— that you don’t want to know what you’re doing.”

  She collected the book, and she put it back where she found it. She was sitting downstairs when Alastair came in from the rain. He hung up his slicker. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. And then, hoping to make him smile, “Really, nothing at all.”

  He never smiled anymore. He frowned at her as he took off his glasses and wiped the rain from the lenses. He went upstairs. And a moment later he was back, storming down the steps, waving the book in his hand.

  “You read it!” he said. “I asked you and asked you, and you went in and read it.”

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  “You did!” He was whining. He trembled like a whirligig man. “I put a hair between the pages. And now it’s gone. And there’s no one on this whole stupid island who would do this except for you.”

  “You put a hair in there?” she said. “You’re a nut, Alastair.”

  “Don’t turn it onto me,” he said. “You went through my room, and you found the book and you read it.”

  “I can’t believe it.” She shook her head. Inside, she felt awful, like an apple rotted below the skin. She looked at the ceiling and sighed. “He put a hair between the pages. What sort of a mind would think of that?”

  Alastair breathed through his nose, a whistle and rasp. His hair stood up in tufts, and water dripped from the bony point of his chin. He sort of shrank inside himself, like a fan folding closed. “How could you do this?” he asked. “I trusted you, Squid.”

  “You did not,” she said with a laugh. “You hid it away at the back of the shelves. And anyway . . .” She stood up. “I didn’t read it, so you don’t have to torture yourself. I found it, but I couldn’t read it.”

  He didn’t believe her, not fully. And she knew there was nothing more to say. She went out in the rain, and Alastair went back to his room. He turned the radio on and set the volume as high as he could. They only got the one station, the public broadcasting, and the house shook with the sound of opera. The deep voice of a tenor vibrated in the windows and the walls as Alastair, with a hammering and a screeching of nails, hid his book in a new place, one she would never find in all the hours that she looked.

  Night after night she lay awake, reliving that moment when she fumbled through the shelves and found his book behind the others. She was haunted by his secret, but couldn’t ask him what it was. And she wasn’t fully sure that she didn’t already know it.

  I’m afraid to tell her that I think I’m

  In her imaginings, a parade of nightmares passed before her.

  I think I’m going to run away.

  I think I’m going to murder them.

  I think I’m going to kill myself.

  Even now, more than four years later, Squid regrets what she did. She’s sorry that she ever looked at the diary, but she’s more sorry that she didn’t read what her brother had written. She can’t help thinking that she might have saved him if she had.

  Oh, she tried to get it out of him. She asked him, “Alastair, dear. Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  “Like what?” he said. “What sort of thing?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. They were painting—on the house or tower, she can’t remember which. Whatever it was, she was dangling in a bosun’s chair as Alastair peered down from the top; he liked heights even less than his mother. Whatever it was, it was red or white, the only colors they ever saw inside a can of paint, and it was one of the last jobs they ever did together.

  “Well, give me a clue,” he said.

  “Anything.” She skittered sideways with her feet. She loved to hang in the bosun’s chair. “You know. Stuff. Anything you’d like to say.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Nothing you don’t already know.”

  She pushed herself out and bounced back to the wall. Her shadow bounded beside her, meeting at her feet.

  “Don’t do that,” said Alastair. “You’re making me dizzy.”

  She did it all the harder. Her legs for springs, she shot herself back and forth, out so far that she twirled around before swinging in again. She felt the air rush against her back, then against her chest, against her bare legs, brown as hemlocks in their sawed-off denim shorts. The rocks and sky and grass went spinning past, and she laughed at the freedom she felt. But Alastair was horrified. “I can’t watch,” he said. “Oh, Jiminy, Squid. You’re scaring me sick up here.”

  She pushed with her feet. She spun in the air. And she saw Murray below her, his head tilted up, his hands on his hips.

  “Are you daft?” he shouted. “Stop that, before you break your damned neck.”

  She hit the wall with one foot and bounced off at an angle. Her back slammed against the wall.

  “I’ve got hooligans for children,” said Murray. “Alastair, I’m ashamed of you. Jiminy! Is your head full of sand?”

  Squid stared at him, down between her legs. “It wasn’t Alastair,” she said. “Don’t shout at Alastair.”

  “And why not?” he said. He crossed his arms. “You put the reins on the head of a horse, not on its arse.”

  And he wandered away. She saw the sun glinting in his hair as he shook his head again and again.

  “You see?” said Alastair. “Now do you see what I mean?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Why I feel like I’m drowning?”

  Tatiana never closes her eyes when she sleeps. There’s always a crack at the bottom, wider than the lashes, where the white shows through. Squid has sometimes seen the eyes moving, rapidly back and forth. She finds it a little spooky.

  The child is using a hand for a pillow, her body curved along the whorls of th
e rope mat. Squid moves beside her; she slips her finger into Tatiana’s fist. It pleases her to think that Alastair would like this, to see the girl asleep on his treasured creation.

  It’s soft rope, almost woolly, that once worked a fishing net in Dixon Entrance. Alastair found it cast up on the beach after a northerly gale, fifty fathoms of it nearly, tangled round the rocks and in among the driftwood. It took him two days to work it free, patiently pulling the whole length clear of every snag. He dragged it home in a long and twisting line, all his weight leaning forward to keep it moving on the boardwalk. He came back as proud as a hunter, as though pulling a monstrous snake that he’d slain.

  “I’m going to make a mat,” he said, and set to the job with that infuriating patience, puzzling out a sense from a terrible snare of half-closed loops and the intricate patterns of his knot. “It’s basically a Turk’s head,” he told her, pushing up his glasses.

  She said, “It looks like a ball of giant lint.”

  “Well, now it might,” he said. “But when it’s finished it’ll be all flattened out.”

  She runs her fingers along the strands. They go over and under, around and around; she has no idea where he started, no idea where he stopped.

  What a knotty little problem.

  “Tat!” she says, jumping up. “Tat, wake up!” she shouts.

  Tatiana, startled from her sleep, struggles on the mat. Squid hauls her up, laughing, and turns in a circle with the child in her arms. “Oh, Tat, you found it,” she says, and sets her on the floor again. “You found it. You showed me right where it is.”

  She grabs the edge of the mat. The rope bunches in her fist. She lifts and shakes, and a shower of grit and sand goes tumbling down. The mat is heavy, and the edges fold under themselves as she drags it aside. Strands of the rope stretch and pop, and an oval of pale, dull floor appears, where the head of one nail stands like a stud, catching a long white thread.

  Squid lets the mat fall with a whoosh of air. She stamps her heel on the bare patch of floor, on one board and then another, on a third and a fourth, until one of them chatters under her foot. She drops to her knees. She pries it up, her red-painted nails scratching at the wood. It lifts and falls back, then lifts again, and flips onto the floor with a smack. She hunches forward and peers into the space. There’s not the one book she’d imagined, but eight. They disappear into the hole as far as her fingers can reach, all identical, bindings of red tape on dark blue covers. Tatiana crawls quietly beside her and stops at the edge of the hole.

  “Listen,” says Squid. “This is a secret, okay? We won’t tell anyone about it. Not your grandpa. Not anyone.”

  Tatiana shakes her head.

  “It’s our little secret, just yours and mine.”

  She lifts four books at once. The edges are sticky with spiderwebs, the pages a deep yellow down at the bottom, nearly white at the top. They have a curious odor of dryness and age.

  She puts them down at the edge of the oval left by the mat. She starts to put the floorboard back in place. But again the books have a power, and she leaves the hole gaping as she takes up one of the diaries.

  February 10. The Darby came. It brought books. Southward’s Grazing in Terrestrial and Marine Environments. Elton’s The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. No sign of Ecological Monographs. Dad said it might come next week on the Sikorsky. I think he forgot to ask for it.

  Elton is fascinating. I think now that limpets are like herds of buffalo. They just wander along grazing all day. I think they have a sense of where they want to go and they seem to know the best places. I saw them come across the empty shell of a dead one and they seemed to gather round it and nudge at it. Dad says they were probably eating algae off the shell but I think they maybe know what death is and were trying to recognize an individual that used to travel with them.

  February 11. I tried to get Squid interested in limpets but she only laughed and went away. There’s something wrong with my eyes. Things get blurry and out of focus, and my glasses don’t seem to help. Dad says not to worry. He says I’m just a bit tired.

  Squid flips through the pages, forward and back.

  February 12. Dear God, please don’t let me go blind. I know I don’t pray very much and I don’t think of you at Christmas but I’m frightened, God, and if you can do this I’ll believe in you then. Please, please fix my eyes and let me look at all the wonderful things you made. I beg you for this please, God. Amen.

  February 14. Squid seems restless. She’s surly and snappy but I don’t know why. She threw a paintbrush at me and called me a freak. Paint in my hair.

  She remembers that day. They were painting a fuel tank, and he kept moving the paint out of her reach, shifting the pail, leaving white rings interlocked in a line down the pad. They were talking about ravens. All that morning the birds had been soaring along the cliff, riding a wind that rose up the rock and carried them high in an instant. Wings held open, they did barrel rolls and loops.

  “They’re showing off,” said Alastair. “They’re trying to see which one’s the best.”

  “Yeah, because the best one gets the girl,” she said. “All they’re doing is mating.”

  “No, it isn’t that.” He moved the pot and dipped his brush. He squinted as he painted.

  “Sure,” she said. “They can’t conk each other on the head, so they fly around a bit.”

  She gazed at the sky. The ravens moved as fast as darts, soaring on the rising wind. “I wish I could do that,” she said. “What a waste that only birds can fly.”

  “Just paint,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Don’t you think it’s a waste, Alastair?”

  “No,” he said, with a sigh. “Now let’s get this done.”

  “But they’re just machines. Little flying machines. They don’t think about it. They just do it; they’re birds.”

  She reached for the pail, but it was gone again. Alastair was staring at her. He said, “Do you mean that?”

  “Yes, Alastair dear. They’re birds. They really are.”

  “But you said they don’t think. What do you mean they don’t think?”

  “What’s to think about if you’re a bird?” She watched him dip his brush again and spread another swath over paint that was already thick and sparkling white. The tank was painted every spring and every fall, according to Murray’s schedule. “You fly, you eat, you poop a lot.”

  “Oh no,” he said. “No. You fly up as high as you can, just to see what things look like from there. You go hurtling down and you think, I’ll loop the loop when I get to the bottom. I’ll do a roll and a spin, and I’ll do it better than anyone else. You figure out where the clams are and how to break the shells. And when the sun goes down you think about tomorrow and all the things you’ll do in the morning.”

  She laughed. “You sound like Dad.”

  “Paint!” he told her.

  “Yes, sir!” she said. “Forget the dumb birds.”

  “They’re not dumb,” he said. “Ravens are smart. They’ve got the same IQ as a dog.”

  “As if you would know,” she snorted.

  “I do know.” He slapped his brush against the steel. “I’ve read it in books. Lots of books.”

  “How many were written by birds?”

  “That’s stupid,” he said.

  “You’re stupid.” She turned to face him. “Your head’s full of all these weird ideas, and when you get off this island what’s going to happen then? Everyone’s going to think you’re a freak.”

  He turned his head as though she’d slapped him. His cheek was crimson, his pointed chin poking at his shirt.

  “And you know what?” she cried. “You already are. You’re a freak, Alastair.”

  He didn’t look up; he didn’t speak. He dabbed at the tank, and the paint dribbled down like tears.

  “You’ve never kissed a girl; you’ve never ridden in an elevator. You’ve never played a baseball game and never watched TV. And in all your life you’ve
never been more than thirty miles from home.”

  He answered in a childish voice. “What you say is what you are,” he said. And she hit him with the brush.

  She threw it hard; it went spinning from her hand. It spun in a blur, the red of the handle and the white of the bristles, flinging drops of paint. It smacked on the back of Alastair’s head and ricocheted onto the grass. And still he didn’t look up. He flinched when it hit him, then went on painting. There was a streak of white in his hair, a spray of white across the green of lawn.

  Squid turned and sprinted off. She ran across the grass, past the whirligigs, past Gomorrah, down through the forest on the humps of the boardwalk. And she slowed to a walk when the futility struck her; she could only run in a circle and get back where she’d started.

  It was true. She was a freak. They were all freaks, every one. But what difference would it make, so long as they stayed together? They had to stay together, but Alastair was desperate to be gone.

  chapter five

  IN THE KITCHEN OF THE BIG HOUSE, HANNAH unpacks the boxes as Murray brings them in. She is fondling the fresh crisp lettuce, gloating over tomatoes. It’s been nearly a month since she held a banana, and she squeezes one gently. She holds it like a mustache below her nose to smell the smell of bananas.

  The back door opens again. Murray kicks off his shoes on the porch, then barges backward into the kitchen. He’s bent by the weight of a box, turning to set it on the table.

  “Go slowly,” says Hannah. He’s puffing. “Ask Squid to give you a hand.”

  “I can do it,” he says. “Nothing I haven’t done a thousand times before.”

  He puts down the box and he leans his weight on the table.

  “At least sit for a minute,” she says. “Have a cup of tea.”

  He shakes his head. “The wee one hasn’t eaten.”

  “There’s plenty here,” she says, but already Murray’s on

  There are steaks and pork chops, a roast of lamb. They’re wrapped in brown paper stained with blood. She lifts them out and stacks them on her arm. She takes them to the freezer, down a trail that’s worn in the white linoleum.