The Lightkeeper's Daughter (9 page)

chapter nine

HANNAH CARRIES A PLATTER OUT TO THE porch, a selection of all the fresh foods, a pile of cherries in the middle. She puts it down on the table, an old cable spool that Murray dragged from the beach years ago. She looks up and sees him coming, with Squid several paces behind. She’s surprised not to see Tatiana.

Murray climbs up the steps and goes right past her, into the house. He whispers as he passes: “For heaven’s sakes don’t ask where the wee one is.”

Hannah frowns. What happened in the little house? she wonders. But Squid isn’t any help. She waits till her father has gone inside, then sits on the steps, facing the evening sun.

“Hungry?” asks Hannah, touching the platter.

Squid shakes her head.

“But you haven’t eaten. And Tatiana—”

“She’s sleeping.” Squid straightens her legs and lies back on her elbows, fitting herself to the steps. Her fingernails are bright red, her stomach—where it shows below her blouse—as smooth and white as ivory. “Why’s Dad so angry?” she asks.

“He’s not.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Hannah closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to be put in the middle of whatever’s going on between Murray and their daughter.

“I’m trying to be nice,” says Squid. “I’m doing the best that I can.” She sighs mightily. “Nothing’s ever good enough for Dad,” she says.

The door creaks as Murray pushes it open. He’s put on his slippers, fuzzy plaids of red and black. They’re four years old, but he’s still self-conscious when he wears them, thinking their colors too loud and garish. If he heard what Squid was saying, he doesn’t let on. He just stands in the doorway, rocking on his feet.

There’s a bell hanging there, a big bronze bell with a beautiful knotted lanyard dangling from the clapper. Once that bell hung on the bow of a ship, but it’s been on Lizzie so long that even Murray doesn’t know the story behind it. He reaches out and runs his fingers over the weaving on the lanyard.

“Come sit with us,” says Hannah.

He closes his fist round the lanyard, as though he has to hold on to something.

“Please.” Hannah offers again her platter of food, hoping Murray will close the distance between himself and Squid. But no sooner does he shuffle toward them—with a sigh and an “Och” and “I’ve only got a moment”—than Squid gets up, and stretches.

“I’m sort of wrung out,” she says, and starts down the steps in a slow and languorous way. “I think I’ll call it a night.”

It’s not yet eight o’clock. No one has touched the wonderful food. “I was going to make supper,” says Hannah. “One of your favorites, Squid.”

“Mom, I said—”

“Canned salmon on toast. Sockeye.”

“Whoosh!” Squid presses her hand to her stomach. “I’d never sleep with that.” She takes another slow-swinging step. “I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

Murray’s staring after her. Then he hangs his head and stares at his slippers.

“We love you, Squid,” says Hannah.

It felt just this way after that night at the foghorn, when Murray cried to see his world collapsing. They passed through the rooms and the doorways like guests in a grand hotel. They had short, polite conversations.

As far as Squid was concerned, nothing had changed. She went out to her tire swing behind the house and shouted for someone to push her. But Alastair was the sensitive one, and he knew that something was wrong. He asked Hannah: “Are you and Dad having a fight?”

“No,” she said. “We had an argument. A discussion.”

“About leaving the island?”

“That was part of it, yes.” She had no idea how he knew.

“I don’t think we should go,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because we’d be so sad if we left.”

Once a month the
Darby
came. Or the
Alex Mac,
or the
Bartlet.
They brought the groceries and the diesel fuel. They came loaded with Murray’s books, bringing boxes of books as they never had before. There were books on herbs and kangaroos and dinosaurs, on ancient Greece and superstitions. There were travel books from around the world, and even one on photography, though no one owned a camera. Only one thing was missing: any mention of sex.

It seemed to Hannah that Murray had dwelt—in his dogged way—on the business of school and development, and this was his compromise. If correspondence school wasn’t enough for the children, they could learn anything else by reading a book.

“Gateways to learning,” said Murray, pompously, she thought. As he took each book from the box, he set it onto one of the four stacks he was making: one for each McCrae. Hannah looked at the titles and saw how he was building Alastair and Squid, and even herself, into the people he thought they should be. Alastair would learn how things worked; he would be a great thinker, a philosopher of nature. Squid would be a tinkerer, able to change the things she didn’t like, to adapt the world to herself. Hannah looked through her own little pile and saw herself as frivolous, with a narrow range of interests. Murray would know a little bit about everything.

“Here’s a good one,” he said. “
The Swiss Family Robinson.
It’s about people like us.”

He held it in his hand, waving it over the table like a sorcerer, trying to decide which pile to put it on. To her surprise, it went to Hannah’s.

They read it aloud in the evenings, and all of them were horrified, but none so much as Murray. He must have hoped that it would hold a message for Hannah, how a family—shipwrecked on a strange shore—could build a paradise from nothing.

But the Robinsons spent their days slaughtering everything they saw. “They’re killing the whales now!” cried Squid. “How can they do that?”

Murray put the book away. He tucked it on a shelf among his tomes on ancient art. But Hannah took it down again and plugged right through to the end. She was disappointed; the Robinsons turned out to be sane and normal.

“What are you thinking?” asks Murray now. He’s staring down the path toward the small house.

“Oh, I don’t know. Just remembering things.”

“Bad things or good things?”

She smiles up at him. “There haven’t been many bad things,” she says.

“I dread the morning,” he tells her. “It’s like waiting for a storm.”

But the new day brings a cheerfulness, a sense of friendship like a relic from the older, happier days of long ago. Squid shows up soon after seven, and Tatiana—barely awake, looking absurdly young in pigtailed hair, dressed again in red from head to toe—almost glues herself to Murray.

Squid wants breakfast on the beach.

“Over a fire,” she says. “Eggs and bacon and potatoes. The way we used to do it all the time.”

Her memory has fooled her. They only had breakfast on the beach when Murray declared a holiday, and he seldom did that. But it’s risking this new mood to point that out.

“Sure,” says Hannah. “It’s been a long time.”

Murray is delighted. “You sit here,” he says. “I’ll get everything ready.”

He brings out buckets and boxes, then loads them onto the tractor, lashing them down with a web of bungee cords stretched in every direction. The kettle at the top sloshes water from its spout.

Squid keeps Tatiana with her, sitting at the edge of the steps. But it’s like trying to hold a kitten; the child struggles and squirms to keep her eyes on Murray. When he disappears around the corner of the house, she breaks free and dashes after him.

“She’s sure glommed on to Dad,” says Squid.

Hannah isn’t sure if it’s sadness or amusement in her voice. She can’t see Squid’s face. “You were the same way whenever you met someone new,” she says. “You followed them around just like that.”

“Who did
I
ever meet?” asks Squid.

“Oh, come on,” says Hannah. “You met technicians, junior keepers . . .” But it’s true there weren’t very many, and she has to think of others. “The Coast Guard, I guess. And Santa Claus. Oh, and kayakers.” Then she stops, almost biting her lip.

“Yeah, I remember,” says Squid.

Then Murray comes back down the path, wheeling his wagon behind him. Tatiana is right on his heels, trotting along in her funny walk, one hand on the towbar as though she’s the one doing the pulling. Her voice is as shrill and bright as a bird’s call. “Look, Mom! I’m helping.”

“That’s good, Tat,” says Squid.

Murray hitches the wagon to the tractor. He asks, “Who wants to ride in the cartie?”

Nobody answers, and that seems to break his heart. He must have said the same thing a thousand times, thinks Hannah, and always Squid would shout, “I do! Oh, I do!” She would leap right from the ground, bouncing like a spring across the grass.

It was too wild for Alastair, too dangerous for anyone but Squid. She loved to stand up in that rickety thing, rocketing down the boardwalk. It was a chariot and she was Ben Hur, and she shouted “Faster!” and “Faster, Dad!” as Hannah held her breath.

But now nobody answers. “Anyone for the cartie?” asks Murray. “Would the Tatty like to ride in the wagon?”

The child gazes up at him, then nods like a jack-in-the-box. She’s grinning her wide, funny grin.

“I knew you would!” Murray whisks her up and stands her in the cart. “Hang on,” he says. “You hold on to the bar at the front, and if I’m going too fast you just shout ‘Whoa!’ And don’t be scared, wee Tat.”

“Dad, please go slow,” says Squid.

“Och, who’s telling me this?” asks Murray. But he’s smiling now, and Tatiana grips the bar as he starts the tractor. It clunks into gear. Tat jolts back, her arms going stiff, as Murray sets off down the path.

She seems to enjoy it, but it’s hard for Hannah to tell. From the forest ahead, Tat lets out a cry, and Hannah says, “Something’s gone wrong.”

“That was a happy shout, I think,” says Squid.

But they catch up to Murray, who’s parked the tractor and is hurrying back. He snatches something from the boardwalk.

“She dropped her Barney doll,” he says, holding it up, then dashes off again.

It takes more than half an hour to walk the boardwalk’s length this morning. Squid stops at the places she remembers: at the midden; at the eagles’ nest; at the look-out spot above the high north shore where tattered bits of plastic ribbon have turned from red to pink. And with every step Hannah dreads coming to the meadow. But they pass that little splash of green and yellow without stopping, without a comment from either of them. It was in the meadow that Squid was found unconscious, nearly dead.

Now and then they nudge together, then come apart and veer across the boardwalk, in and out of spots of light filtered through the trees.

Murray has the tractor unloaded before they get to the beach. He has spread out the plates and the cutlery down a weathered old log. He’s building a fire in a hollow scraped from the sand. Tatiana is watching him intently.

“How’s it going?” says Squid.

“Great.” Murray takes a bone-dry pine bough and breaks it into twigs. “We’re having a terrific conversation here.” He arranges the twigs precisely on his moss.

Squid walks around behind Tatiana. She cocks her head. “Really?”

“Oh, yes.” He pokes Tat with a twig. “We’re going for a swim.”

Tat’s eyes wrinkle. Her mouth stretches. “Going for a swim,” she says.

“It might be too cold for swimming.” Squid sits down on the log and pulls Tat back toward her, between her opened legs.

“And you know what else, Tatty?” Murray leans close to her. “Shells!” he says, slowly, bug-eyed.

Tat giggles. “Shells.”

“Right you are.” He’s stacking twigs like teepee poles. “We’ll find some periwinkles maybe. Some limpets and some jingle shells. We’ll make a pretty necklace.”

Murray puts a match to the fire. Out of the moss come gray genies. They bow and stretch, then sink back into orange flames. And onto the crackling twigs go bigger sticks, then driftwood and bark. The smell’s like incense to Hannah, wonderfully strong.

“More wood,” says Murray. But when he starts up, Squid says, “I’ll get it, Dad.”

He’s clearly surprised. “All right,” he says. “Thank you.”

It’s a lovely, lazy meal that lasts until 9:20, when Murray suddenly remembers the weathers. He gets up, and Tatiana reaches after him, blubbering on the instant.

“Och,” he says. “I’ll be right back. In the shake of a lamb’s tail, wee Tat.”

He roars away on the tractor, and Tatiana sits with her back to the water, staring at the forest where the boardwalk winds between the trees. To Hannah she’s like a tick without him, like a little red tick frozen as the time goes by. Squid seems content to let her sit there alone, but Hannah can’t bear it. She moves down the beach to comfort the child.

“I’ve missed this,” says Squid. “These cookouts we had.”

She’s feeding sticks to the fire, thrusting them in like swords. She doesn’t seem to care about anything, and Hannah doesn’t hesitate now to tell her, “We did it only rarely.”

Squid looks up for a moment, then laughs in her unpleasant way. “Oh, not
us,
” she says. “God, not you and Dad. Alastair and I did this all the time.”

It could be true. They could have done this by themselves early in the mornings.

“And you know what got us started?” She pokes at the fire.“That
Swiss Family Robinson.
Remember how I loved that book?”

“You hated it,” says Hannah.

“Oh, Mom, you’ve forgotten. It was because of that book we went exploring. And that’s how we named Almost Nothing Atoll.”

“We didn’t
have
the book then,” says Hannah. “We got it years later.”

Squid shakes her head. “We launched the boat right here.”

“Yes, I remember that,” says Hannah.

“How can you? You didn’t even come to see us off.”

“What nonsense.” Hannah remembers it very well.

It was a gray morning, with rain sure to come. But the day had been picked a week before, and there was no delaying the journey. Alastair and Squid had filled the rowboat with every silly thing they needed; they had made the chart that Alastair said was vital for the trip. That was the word he used. “It’s vital,” he said. “You can’t go
anywhere
without a chart. Not anywhere.”

Hannah went down with Murray and helped to launch the boat. Squid and Alastair sat together on the thwart, each with an oar. But the tide was still rising and the boat was overloaded. Murray had chores to do, so he couldn’t wait to witness the departure.