The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read Free Page A

then?” And a voice calls back, “Just the girls left, Mr. McCrae.”
    He insists that the Coast Guard calls him that. Even Hannah called him that the first time, when he ran before her—absolutely naked—and came back with his shirt buttoned in all the wrong holes. “I’m Hannah,” she said, and held out her hand. “I’m Mr. McCrae,” he told her. She thought it was a bit of old world dignity, but now she knows he’s claiming title to his island. It pleases him to see a man in uniform subservient. If he’d thought of it, she imagines, he would have told them all, “My name is Lord McCrae.”
    “We’d better get down there, Murray,” she says.
    “Yes,” he tells her. “I’ll be along. I just have to put the winch away.”
    This morning his fussiness annoys her. She would like to leave him there, but can’t. The boat will bring Squid to the concrete stairs, and she won’t go down alone. She hates those stairs that fall right down the cliff and into the water, vanishing in a murk of green and blue. Squid, as a child, would sit there with her feet in the swell, chattering on and on about how much she would like to walk right to the bottom, to hold her breath and go down, to stroll among the starfish and the crabs. But Hannah stays clear of the stairs, and won’t go near the place after dark. It scares her to think what might come walking up them from the sea: a drowned boy, bloated and white, squelching in the algae.
    “Murray,” she says.
    “Coming.” He swings the derrick into place. He lowers the hook, snaps it to its loop of rope, then pulls it tight. He sets the controls exactly in the middle, then tests each one three times. “Right,” he says. “Right. Let’s go.” And he stoops to turn a cardboard box an inch to the left, in line with another below it.
    There’s no railing on the steps. Hannah walks down the middle, right behind Murray, and they stop at the landing and wait side by side. For some reason it takes three men to bring Squid to shore. They stand as straight as admirals, each one in a pale blue shirt, in dark and ironed trousers. The bowman grabs for a hold with a metal-tipped boat hook, and it clangs and rasps over the concrete. The boat washes up against the steps, tilts, and washes back.
    “Careful,” shouts Hannah. The steps are slick at the bottom, the concrete chipped at the corners by the battering of logs. She fears that Squid will slide right off them, dragging Tatiana behind her. She clings to Murray—to solid, fearless Murray.
    Squid is beautiful—all rosy and tanned. The men in the boat hover around her as she lifts Tatiana across to the steps. They lean with her, reaching out as the water licks at her shoes, and finally their hands fall away as she comes hurrying up to the landing. She lifts her head and looks up, and in her eyes Hannah sees disappointment. It flashes there for only an instant before it’s hidden by a smile. But Hannah sees it, and she isn’t surprised.
    Murray is sixty-two now, getting fat where he never was before. His legs are chubby and pink. The sun and the wind have worn him smooth, but they have chiseled away at Hannah, carving deep lines in her face. She and Murray must look older than they should.
    It’s an awkward moment when they all stand together, though Hannah fears that it’s hardest on Murray. Squid is so changed, so much a woman, that she isn’t the least like his daughter. She steps toward him only to balk back. And then nobody moves, until
everyone
moves, and they tangle like trees in a gale before they all step away, breathing heavily.
    Squid reaches behind her and drags out Tatiana. She thrusts the child forward. “Say hello,” she says, “to your grandma and your grandpa.”
    Murray squats down, his pink legs bulging. “Hello, Tatiana,” he says.
    The child turns crimson, and thrusts her fingers into her mouth.
    “We saw the whale,” says Murray. “Did he give you a fright, the big beastie?”
    Tatiana sits