The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read online

  They ran together, down the path and up the steps of the big house. Murray and Hannah were in the kitchen, sitting close together on separate chairs. They huddled up to the radio as they would to a fireplace, leaning forward, their heads turned away from the speaker. They looked up as Squid and Alastair burst into the room.

  “You know?” said Alastair. “You know all about it?”

  “Shhh!” Murray held up a hand. He reached forward and turned up the volume.

  “Mayday, mayday!” The voice was a man’s. It was screaming. “Oh, Christ, aren’t you coming? Jesus God, I’m going down.”

  “How long have you known?” said Alastair. “How long have you sat here and listened?”

  No one answered. On the Odd Fellow, the man was crying. “The windows are busted. The waves are coming straight in. My arm’s . . . She’s going over. She’s going over! Oh, God, can’t you help me?”

  Alastair stared at the speaker. His face was like whitewash.

  “I’m dead! I’m dead!”

  “Do something!” said Alastair. “Oh, Dad, please can’t you do something?”

  Again, Murray reached out. He turned the dial, and the radio clicked and went off. “That’s all I can do,” he said. The wind wailed past the roof and banged at the window; the rain gurgled and howled in the pipes. Outside, the surf was like a deep and steady drumming. The bell rang again on the porch, but the kitchen seemed silent.

  “We don’t have to listen,” said Murray. “I’m sorry; that’s the best I can do.”

  Alastair flung himself out through the door. He ran into the blackness, into the storm. Squid went after him. Murray and Hannah came after him too, their chairs falling back on the floor.

  He ran over the grass, through a whirlwind of spray, out to the bridge where the waves reared up and crashed through the gap in a thunder of sound.

  “No!” shouted Hannah, but he headed across it. He vanished into a wall of white-tipped water. The sea came over the bridge. It leapt up the rail, surging round the posts, squirting through the gaps in the planks. The beacon turned, and the wave was huge in the flash of hot white light. Then it fell away, booming down on the rocks. And there was Alastair, climbing up the slope on the far side, staggering to the edge of the island, toward the flare he’d seen.

  Murray started to follow, but Hannah clung to him. “No,” she said. “Murray, no!” And Squid went instead. They shouted her name; Murray bellowed at her to stop. But she kept going, over the path and onto the trestle, her head down as she ran. A wave rose in foam that covered her shoulders, and she groped for the rail as the water tugged her feet across the planks toward the edge. Her head went under; she held her breath, then gasped and carried on.

  Alastair stood on the very last bit of land. He had his fists in the air, shaking them, shaking his arms and his hair and his thin, narrow chest. Squid held on to him, and the wind tore at them both. The surf raged up at their feet.

  “Damn you, God!” he shouted. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.”

  The helicopter arrived at daybreak, as the storm was finally easing. It fluttered back and forth across the sea. Back and forth, back and forth. And then wreckage came ashore: bits of wood; a red running light in a broken frame; a quilted comforter that oozed like a huge blue jellyfish onto the sand. Up came the dead man’s boots, the dead man’s coat, the dead man’s plastic thermos. Everything that washed ashore, Murray nudged at with sticks until it drifted off again.

  But Alastair stayed in bed. For three days he never moved.

  “He just lies there and cries,” said Squid. No one was allowed through the door. “I don’t think he’s crying for the dead man so much as for himself.”

  “He’s not ashamed, is he?” asked Hannah.

  Squid shook her head. “It isn’t that, Mom. He says he’s crying because he found out that there isn’t a God.”

  On the fourth day, he came out from his room. He went quietly to the window and curled up on the seat. In the sunlight he looked as pale and soft as an oyster out of its shell.

  “I cracked,” he said. “Didn’t I?”

  “Alastair, it’s all right,” she said.

  “No. I snapped. I did.” He gazed over the lawn. Murray had carted off the kelp and the tangles of sticks two days before, and there was nothing to show that a storm had gone by. “I don’t know if I can take it,” he said. “One day I’ll just go crazy. I’m sure of it, Squid. I’ll go nuts.”

  Squid sits on the floor and stares at the words that Alastair wrote.

  chapter seven

  COULD YOU GO FIND SQUID?” ASKS HANNAH. “She’s at the small house, I think.”

  “At the small house?” says Murray. “On delivery day?”

  It would have been unthinkable once. She and Alastair, as children, would hover in the kitchen as Murray brought the boxes in. They would marvel at the cherries as though they’d never seen such a thing. They would sit backward on the chairs or perch on the table or the countertop, peering in the boxes, shouting out, “Bananas!” Or, “Crumpets!” Murray always ordered crumpets. Or, “Oh, yuck, asparagus!”

  “We should have waited,” says Murray. “Tatiana’s just the age to appreciate delivery day.” He’s holding his shoes again, fingers curled in the heels. “We’ll make a McCrae of her yet.”

  “She’s already a McCrae,” says Hannah.

  “Not really.” He closes the door as he speaks, to let himself have the last word. “She’s only half a McCrae, I’m

  Hannah stares at the door, through its window at Murray retreating. She wants to ask: What about me? What about Alastair and Squid? Aren’t we all only half McCraes? But she knows what he means. Tatiana’s father was an Outsider.

  His name was Erik. “Erik with a k,” said Squid at the time. He came to the island by kayak, all alone, just as Hannah had come years and years before. He camped on the beach where she had camped. He, too, was startled by the auklets.

  But Hannah didn’t see him, and Murray didn’t see him.

  “He had a beard and long hair,” said Squid. “He looked like a Viking.” He paddled a boat that rose up at the bow, in a curve like the neck of a swan. He made a fire in a scraped-out pit in the sand, and he lay on his back, reading poems by Keats. This is what Squid told them had happened.

  “He read me a poem,” she said. “It was beautiful, like it was just for me. He read me a poem, and he told me how pretty I was.”

  He had a tent with flags on the poles. He read her a poem and then . . .

  Hannah doesn’t want to think of this. She busies herself with the big sacks of lentils and rice, tearing them open, setting out the storage jars. But she can’t stop herself from seeing the things she’s seen a hundred times. Squid, a child, taking off her clothes, laying them in the sand. Erik watching in the firelight, helping with the buttons.

  “No!” says Hannah, aloud. The rice swirls out of the bag and into the jar, mounding against the glass.

  Squid was so young. A beautiful girl—yes, maybe a woman—but only thirteen. She made jewelry out of pretty shells. She liked to go barefoot at the edge of the water. She liked to weave daisies into chains.

  It was Murray’s fault, what happened. Hannah might have started it, but Murray never stopped it. She had warned him that something awful lay waiting. She had known it ever since Alastair was ten, and the giggling sounds had come out of the forest.

  She was on the south side of the island, where the trees went right to the rocks, and the rocks right to the water. She heard Squid and Alastair playing among the hemlock trees. She had to climb over lichen-spotted boulders to see what they were up to.

  Otters lived there. They dug dens out of the earth at the roots of the trees. Some of the holes were enormous.

  Hannah used branches to pull herself up. She stepped from the rocks to the dirt. And she stopped when she saw what the children were doing.

  They were upside down. Alastair had his head in an otter den; Squid had hers in another. They were hold
ing themselves on their elbows less than a yard apart. Squid’s dress had fallen around her, and her stomach was bare— and her chest—so smooth and pale. Her legs kicked from white panties, her red shoes flailing. Alastair’s feet groped like tentacles, like stalks of blue in his overalls.

  Suddenly, from the ground, burst another chorus of muffled giggles. Then Alastair’s foot touched Squid’s, and she trapped it between her ankles.

  Hannah rushed forward. She pried the children apart, pulling on Alastair’s foot, pushing on Squid’s. She knocked them down, and their heads popped out of the dens. Their faces were flushed; they stared up at her. Alastair had caught his ear on a bit of root, and he rubbed it with his hand.

  She said, “What are you doing? What on earth are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” said Squid, in her cheery voice, chirpy as a songbird. “We were playing barnacles.”

  “Well, stop it,” said Hannah. “Squid, pull your dress down. Just look at you both!” There were twigs in their hair, old and blackened leaves wedged in their collars and cuffs.

  Alastair kept rubbing his ear. “We were only playing,” he said.

  Squid grinned. “He was trying to put his penis in my house.”

  “Stand up,” Hannah told them. “Both of you.”

  They got up. They stood there, adjusting their clothes, and something in Hannah’s voice or her look must have scared them.

  “We were only playing,” said Alastair again.

  “Then you just play on the beach,” she said. “And not another word from either of you.”

  Hannah tilts the bag to stop the flow of rice. A few grains skitter over the top of the jar, and she collects them with her fingers and pops them into her mouth. She moves down the table and starts on a second jar.

  She never told Murray what the children had been doing at the otter dens. But a week later she woke at midnight in a bed that seemed empty without Murray. And thinking about it, she couldn’t fall asleep again. She put a coat over her nightgown, rubber thongs on her feet, and stepped out through the door, down the steps into an ocean of stars.

  The sea was utterly calm. There was no wind and no swell, and the water lapped at the shore as soft as cat tongues. The Milky Way was a shimmering bracelet of diamonds that girdled the sky and looped right around through the sea. Every star was mirrored on the water. And the beacon turned round and round, a huge propeller of light with blades that paled against them.

  Her thongs slapped on the concrete. It must have been the dew; it was all she could guess. But something had brought the frogs up to the lawn, onto the path. And they crouched down as she passed, or went crawling away in slow-stretching bounds, as though the moisture held them like glue.

  She crossed the bridge and climbed the slope, and found Murray sitting at the base of the tower. He was staring off to the southeast, toward Triple Island far away, a faint and tiny version of the beacon right above them.

  “Fog’s coming,” he said, hearing her thongs. “Green Island’s obscured already.”

  She nestled beside him, arranging the coat across her knees. Murray seemed so peaceful and calm, so contented, that she shivered as she planned what to say.

  Everything comes to an end, she would tell him. She would give him one more year on Lizzie Island, and then they would move to the city. It is time that the children go to a real school, she would say. They should have friends their own age. It’s not right, she would say, to raise them in isolation, with no idea of a world outside. She was going to say, “In captivity.”

  She coughed; she started to speak. But Murray reached out and put a hand on her knee. He said, “Hannah, I think we’re about the luckiest people in the world.”

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Why, sure we are.” His fingers squeezed, and he smiled. “Och, we’ve no money in the bank. We’re dirt poor if you think about it. But we’ve got all this.” He lifted his hand and made a small, shy gesture. “We’ve got two healthy children and a paradise to live in, free of crowds and smoke and noise.”

  It wasn’t exactly true. There had been one day, several years before, when electricians came to rewire the light. To do it, they had to shut down the generators. Hannah was outside when they pulled the switch. It was sunny and calm, a wonderful day. Then suddenly there was silence. There was total, absolute silence. For the very first time she heard nothing. No machines or generators, no fans or radio noise. And it was eerie, even scary. She was actually frightened at first.

  But at the same time, what Murray had said was true. He’d listed the things she liked best about Lizzie.

  He put his hand back on her knee. He rubbed it, as he might rub at the head of a dog. “And what does it matter,” he said, “what goes on in Russia or Cuba or Korea or anywhere else? What scrap of difference does it make whether you know or don’t know which group of people is killing which other group of people?” He glanced toward her. “It matters not a whit.”

  She said, “No man is an island.”

  Instantly, the mood changed. Murray stopped talking, and she felt the silence; it closed round them like a fog. A fish, or maybe a seal, splashed below the tower. Murray turned his head and looked off toward Barren Island, its prick of light flashing far away, a fallen star among the thousands.

  She nudged him with her elbow. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He said, “You don’t agree with me.”

  “Oh, but I do,” she said. “I love it here.”

  “But this is the end,” he said. “Or the beginning of the end. Children start growing, a mother starts talking of schools and friendships. And the next thing you know, another lightkeeper moves to town. It’s always the wives. One day they start thinking, and the next they start packing.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. But he was pretty close to the target.

  He said, “I’ve seen it happen twenty times or more.”

  She couldn’t deny it was what she’d been thinking. But neither would she admit it.

  “Well, I’ll grant you this,” said Murray. “You’ve outlasted most of them, Hannah. Most of them are gone in two or three years.”

  “I love you, Murray,” she told him.

  “Well, it won’t happen here.” His accent was thicker, stronger. “I’ll not be moved from here, Hannah. Not by hell or high water. I watched my father go coughing into the coal mines for eight years. I saw a toilet bowl full of black spittle. And when they buried him, when they threw down the first bits of earth, the sound they made—I thought it was him coughing.”

  “Murray,” she said.

  “My brother’s still in the mines. He always will be. He was trapped by a cave-in when he was just seventeen.”

  Finally he stopped. He must have thought that if he said one more word, she would know that he was crying.

  She wanted to hold him, but knew he wouldn’t let her. She said, “I wouldn’t ask you to do that.”

  And then he did cry. “There’s nothing bloody else I can do!” he said, and jumped to his feet.

  She said, “Murray. Don’t leave me like this.”

  “Och, I’m not leaving you,” he said. “The fog’s coming in.”

  She could still see Triple Island. Even the little light at Barren. But when she looked up, the Milky Way was shrouded in a feathery veil. The beacon whirled ghostly arms. She got up too; she couldn’t sit there with the foghorn going.

  The tower door was open, spilling yellow light across the blackness. Murray was bent over the motor, turning the crank. It started, and gray smoke spat from the exhaust hole beside her. The compressor rattled, building pressure.

  Murray studied his gauges. “All right, Hannah,” he said. “You might as well go.”

  She didn’t know right then if he meant for her to go from the tower, or go from the island. She set off back to the trestle, her thongs whapping against her soles. And just as she crossed the gap, she heard the first blast of the horn, a deep and mournful bellow of sound that she felt as well as heard. I
t rattled in her jaw and rattled in her head; it shook inside her ears. Three seconds later she heard it a second time, and again after three seconds more. There’d be forty-eight seconds of silence, and another three blasts. And so it would go, hour after hour, until someone shut off the motor.

  At the house, the front window rattled with the sound. In the kitchen, the dishes quivered in their rack; the spoons and forks shivered in their nests. Hannah went up the stairs.

  The children were asleep in their bunks, Alastair above and Squid below. Before winter had come, Murray would put up a wall and carve the room in two, giving them each a tiny space. He would do it at her insistence. But that night, as they always had, they slept in their bunks. And when the horn blew, their eyelids twitched; but they didn’t come awake. Only on the first foggy night of the summer would the horn keep them from sleeping.

  Hannah tops off the second jar and puts down the bag. It’s half-empty, swollen at the bottom, flaccid at the top. She reels the jar around on its rim, settling the rice with a rumbling sound.

  Murray never came back to bed that night, and not because of the fog. Falling at night, in the middle of summer, it would still be there at noon. She heard his footsteps on the path and, looking out, watched him pass toward the boardwalk. Then she lay awake till dawn, wondering if Murray was right, if it really was the beginning of the end. She thought she’d set them all rushing to a downfall, as though she’d pushed them into the currents of a quickening river.

  There wasn’t another word spoken about sex until Squid, nearly thirteen, came to the kitchen of the big house. She was crying, and that was unusual for Squid. “There’s something wrong with me,” she said. “I think I’m busted up inside.”

  Squid hauled up her skirt. Her white underpants were clotted with red. She held up the skirt for only a moment, then dropped it again. “Oh, Mom,” she said. “Am I dying?”