Woman Who Loved the Moon (16 page)

“To an island,” said Janna. “Can I have a jelly bean, Sally?”

There was a jar of jelly beans on the counter. Sally tipped it down. Janna hunted with concentration for a green one. She only liked the green ones.

“Which island?” Sally asked.

“I saw it from The Turrets’ window,” said Douglas. “North of here, small and round and very flat, almost like a Pacific island. You know the one I mean?”

“Seal Island. I wouldn’t go there. It takes some pretty fancy sailing.”

“I’m not a novice.”

“I know. You’re renting my boat. The channels to it aren’t marked and there are a lot of rocks around it. The water’s shallower there than you might think.”

“All right.”

Janna was listening. “We can’t go?” she said.

“Sorry, lovey. Sally says we better not.”

“Have you been there?” Janna asked Sally.

“No.” The woman’s voice was almost gruff.

“There’ll be other islands, lovey,” Douglas said.

Janna nodded. Another child might have argued or wheedled. Janna accepted, stoic.

So she had looked at him, expressionless, shoulders set, when he told her Laura was not getting better, was not coming home, was dead.

“Come on, lovey,” he said to his strange girl, his bleak baby. “Let’s go to the dock.”

* * *

Kennequit harbor was famous. There were half a dozen picture postcards of it—at sunrise, at sunset, in fog—and one Early American painting which hung in a Boston museum. Sally’s boats were named the
H2
and the
0.
The
0
was the small one. They raised the sails. Janna was serious and careful as she strapped herself into her life vest. Douglas hated the bulky things.

He stowed his under the seat, close to hand. “Shall I untie the lines?” asked Janna. She loved nautical words and now called all ropes
lines,
even pieces of string that had never touched water. They maneuvered slowly out of the marina. The wind was just right. It belled the sail. When they were clear of the other boats, Douglas handed the tiller to Janna. She steered lightly and surely, she was a natural sailor, better than he would ever be. He wished that Laura could see her.

His nerves knotted. Janna was singing. “Cape Cod girls they have no combs, Heave away, haul away, Comb their hair with codfish bones...” Laura had taught her the song, sung it with her. The lonesome thin soprano rose again. “Cape Cod boys they have no sleds, Heave away, haul away...” They had told him at the hospital that he had to forget, that he would forget. How
could
he forget?

“Janna!” he said.

She stopped.

No, he thought, you mustn’t stifle her. You came here to make barriers dissolve, not reinforce them. Praise her. Tightly he said, “Go ahead, Jan. I like it when you sing.”

She shook her head. She was watching his face. Her eyes were blue, like her mother’s, just like her mother’s. She had seen his pain and was guarding her tongue.

“I remember when mother used to sing that with you,” he said. “Other songs too. You remember the Greenland whale song?” He tried to sing. “Oh, Greenland is a dreadful place, it’s a place that’s never green. Where there’s ice and there’s snow and the whale fishes blow—”

“That’s the end,” Janna said.

“Sing it.”

She shook her head again. “Can we go look at the island?” she asked.

“Yes. We’ll do that.”

They nosed up the coast.

For no good reason, it was hard to find. Finally Janna steered straight at a blowy patch of fog, and there it was. Douglas caught the tiller. They zigzagged around the island. It looked a perfect place to picnic. The fog stayed just offshore of it, and the bright autumn sun made the white beach glitter. There was an ethereal quality about the place. But except for the clinging fog there was nothing soft about it. It was white and sharp and as unshadowed as a piece of paper.

Then he saw her.

She was sitting on a rock, her feet in the spray. She wore a long thing like a caftan, and her hair fell around it, black and thick and long. She was not looking at him. He knew how her hair would feel... His breath clogged in his throat.
No.

She stood up. He slammed his fist on the gunnel. She—!

She walked into the center of the island.

Her walk was a stranger’s.

“Da!” said Janna.

Douglas wrenched his mind back to his daughter, the boat, the sea—they were too close. He tussled the boat away from the island. He kept wanting to look away, to look at the beach. The boat balked, it would not come.

“Let me,” said Janna. She closed her hand round the stick. The boat turned like an obedient dog.

The fog blew in, hiding the island.

Douglas sweated. Laura was five and a half months dead; he had lain beneath a car a foot from her, helpless, trapped, and heard her die—but he had seen her, there! He hit the gunnel again to make it stop. So there was another woman in the world with hair like thick and inky rain... That someone, not Laura, was on the island. A local woman, with a knowledge of the rocks and tides.

“Let’s go back now, lovey,” he said to his daughter.

* * *

“Well,” said Sally, “did you have fun?” She tipped the jelly bean jar for Janna.

“Where’d you go today?”

“To the island,” said Janna.

Sally looked at Douglas. “We just sailed around it,” he said hastily. “We didn’t land. Janna really wanted to see it. There was someone on it.”

“Oh?” She was annoyed.

“A woman. With black hair. Tall woman. Do you know who it might be?”

“Could be anyone. Some tourist.”

She was not going to help him. He would have to ask Mrs. Alverson. He collected Janna. “Come on, Captain.”

Sally relented as they neared the door. “You want to take the boat out tomorrow?”

“We’d like to,” Douglas said.

“Not that many more days of good weather. You might as well take advantage of them while you’re here.”

“Thank you.”

He had his hand on the door when she said, “What kind of a boat did she have?”

“Boat.” He thought. “I didn’t see it.”

* * *

He was driving. His eyes felt like sand and his arms like lead. He had been driving for four hours. Laura sat beside him, frowning at the dark road, hands knotted in her lap. Her tension reproached and irked him. “Janna’s all right,” he said. She glanced at him, eyes like blue ice. The babysitter had called. Janna was feverish. They had been out on Cape Cod for a rare three-day vacation, just the two of them—

“All kids get fevers. Let’s stay and call in the morning. It’s a six-hour drive.”

“No. I want to go home.”

He argued.

“I want to go home.”

The road was a monotonous strip of white, leading nowhere. Douglas rubbed his eyes.

The truck lurched out in front of them from the right. He had not seen the crossroads. The big sluggish station wagon squealed as he fought to turn the wheel. He smelled rubber. Laura screamed. Under his hands the wheel spun and the car seemed to leap at the wallowing whalelike tanker. They hit it...

“I want to go home,” she whispered to him. He could hear the drip, drip—reason and his senses told him it was the gasoline running from the car, not blood, not her blood. Her voice got fainter. I want to go home, Doug.”

“Laura!”

He clawed out of the dream. “Laura,” he said. She was not there to hear him. She would never hear him. The pills were in the dresser drawer; they would put him out. Sweat coated him. He made himself stop shaking. He felt his way through the dark round room to the dresser. From the dresser to the door, from the door to the hall, to the bathroom, pills in hand—he took two. He would never forget. The doctors in Boston were crazy to think that he ever would, or could.

His dreams would see to that.

He went back to bed. He didn’t try to sleep. The pills would make him sleep. He lay beneath the quilt and listened to the sea sound, rhythmic as the susurrus of cars on a highway.

In the next bed, his daughter slept, her breath even and untroubled.

The next day Douglas took the tiller. “Da, where are we going?” Janna asked.

“Oh, around.”

They went north.

Douglas had no trouble finding the island.

She was there. She sat in the same place, maybe on the same rock. The sea surged roughly up. She seemed oblivious of the chill spray on her long legs. Maybe she owned the island. She sat there as if she owned it. He waited for her to see the sails and the tossing boat, to see him. He waited to see her face. She bent her head so that her hair hid her features wholly. She combed her hair.

“Janna.”

“Um?”

“Look.”

“What?”

“Do you see her? The woman?”

“I don’t see anybody,” she said. “Where is she, is she swimming?”

“No—there. On the island.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Janna, look!” He didn’t want to point. He caught her thin shoulder with one hand. “Look, there she is. She’s combing her hair.”

“I don’t see anybody. There isn’t anybody.” Janna looked from him to the island. “Da, I don’t like this game.”

“Janna, this isn’t a game. There’s a woman sitting on the rock—she looks like mother! Can’t you see her?” He couldn’t believe her look of fright, confusion, innocence. He wanted to shake her. The denial seemed pointless. Was it because the woman looked so like Laura?

He would be patient. “Janna, honey, look there. Look again.” The hands still moved, softly stroking. “She has black hair, she’s sitting on that rock—”

“No!” said Janna, and burst into wild tears.

He had to turn the boat in order to comfort her.

“All right. All right, lovey, never mind. Never mind.”

The psychiatrists in Boston would have fancy names for what she was doing. He cuddled her. Suppression, repression, avoidance. “I want to go home,” she said into his knees.

“All right, lovey, we’ll go home,” he said. “Listen, we won’t tell Sally we were at the island again today, okay. It will be our special secret. When she asks where we went, let’s just say ‘North.’ Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Well,” said Sally, “where’d you go today?”

Janna’s eyes were red and her nose was swollen, but she answered calmly, “North. Can I have two jelly beans, Sally?”

“Just north?” said Sally. She tipped the jar and looked at Douglas.
Nosey,
he thought.

“Just north,” he said.

After dinner he spoke with Mrs. Alverson. “I think we’ll go back tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll take off around noon. Maybe we’ll come back next year in the summer.”

She was stirring batter. “You do that. It’s been good having you here, not like some. I’m making brownies. You want some to take with you on the road?”

“Oh, no, that’s—”

“I’m making them anyway,” she said. “For my grandkids. The youngest of them, Arabella, is three tomorrow.”

He imagined her surrounded by grandchildren. She was all angles and bones, like her tall gaunt house. “Do they live here? In Kennequit?”

“My family’s been fishing the Maine coast for 150 years, Mr. Murdoch.”

“Then you must know just about everybody.”

“They call me the Recorder,” she said and grinned slyly. “Like the Recording Angel, you know? They call me that in church.”

“Who is there in Kennequit with long black hair? A woman, I mean.”

She shook her head, stirring, stirring. “Nope. Nobody I can think of. We’re mostly blonds here. Swedes and Danes and Celts settled this part of the coast. Lots of Scots folks. Even a few Murdochs. Got any cousins in Maine?”

“No,” he said. “The island? Seal Island?”

“Silk Island, we call it,” she said. “I know it.”

“It looks like a good place to fish.”

“It isn’t,” she said. “Don’t go there.”

“Do you know who owns it?”

“Nobody owns it, Mr. Murdoch. It isn’t a safe place. Nobody owns it.”

* * *

He woke at dawn.

The house stayed compliantly still and silent as he dressed and limped down the stairs. The fog was thick and cold along the coast. Somewhere out on the sea the sun was rising. He walked down to the docks. Fishermen on their boats handling their traps watched him as he freed the
0
from her moorings and coaxed her out into the icy bay. He didn’t know any of them.

Janna was asleep. He would go and come back so quietly that no one would know he had been out... He had to do it.

The fog twitched aside for him like a velvet grey curtain. He saw the island plainly: a white and shadowless space, glittery with quartz sand. He sailed around it. There seemed to be no good place to land. There had to be. He went round once more, looking for it. The fog smelled of salt and rain.