The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read Free Page B

down. She swings her red purse into her lap, and unfastens the top.
    “What’s that you’ve got there?” asks Murray.
    Squid says, like a song, “That’s her Barbie doll there.”
    Murray reaches for it, but Tatiana pulls it away. “Well,” he says. “That’s sure a nice Barney doll.” And he stands, embarrassed and bewildered.
    Below them, the boat backs off from the steps. The men stare up. They call out to Squid; only to her. “Good luck,” says one. “See you in a month,” says another. And Hannah catches the look Squid gives them, a smile that’s almost a grimace.
    “A month?” says Murray.
    “Yes, I’ll stay the month,” says Squid.
    “And no more than that?”
    “Let’s not talk about that now.” She stoops, takes Tatiana’s hand, and starts up the steps.
    “They’re slippery,” says Hannah. “And there’s no railing to hold.” Her heart is in her mouth; if the child were to slip she’d crack open her skull. “Go slowly, for heaven’s sake.”
    Squid looks back, laughing in a way that Hannah finds annoying. For such a beautiful girl, Squid has an ugly laugh.
    Murray goes slowly, boosting himself up each concrete step by pressing his hands on his thighs. Once he would have sprinted, carrying Squid in one arm and Alastair in the other, twirling at the top, balancing right at the edge. The children would have squealed with delight as he all but dangled them over the brink. Hannah, coming behind him, is glad those days are over.
    But Squid is impatient. “I’m going to run ahead,” she says. “I want to show Tat my old room.”
    Then she’s gone, pulling Tatiana by the hand. She skips up the steps and vanishes on the level ground.
    Murray bends forward and hurries a bit. Hannah sees the look in his eyes and knows what he’s thinking. He’s worried about his grass seed; the ground is nearly bare at the top of the steps. No matter what he tells them, everyone walks on the lawn. So he boosts himself up a step, up another, before he slows again.
    “Och,” he says. “I can’t keep up.”
    Hannah wants to march up the steps and tell Squid to go back. They might all have walked together, she thinks. But Murray’s looking pained, and she doesn’t want to leave him. She’d like to comfort him, but isn’t sure what to say. She could tell him that reunions are hard, that everything will be just fine as soon as Squid settles in.
    But she isn’t sure that it’s true.
    On posts and pillars, nailed to the trunks of trees, Murray’s whirligigs flutter and jerk in gusts of wind as Squid hurries by. A wooden lady throws her weight against a pump and then rests on the handle; two little men rock lazily with a bucksaw between them; a lion tamer holds his whip high over two golden lions faded to yellow.
    There was a time when Squid lay for hours watching these things. Horses ran in an endless race. Sailboats tacked for miles and miles on a squeaky, rusted pivot. Alastair was beside her when they imagined themselves at the controls of the little airplane, cranking the propeller and flapping the wings, flying off to places they had never seen.
    She almost drags Tatiana behind her, past the lightkeeper’s house and on down a pathway of gravel and shells, past the sundial, past the flat wooden horse galloping into the wind.
    There are only two houses on Lizzie Island. The second is smaller, so glaringly white that the gleam of the flower box shimmers on the wall like northern lights. It was built for a junior keeper, but there never was one who lasted more than a week on the island. In Squid’s early childhood they came like a parade—lonely young men who could never match Murray’s high standards. They would come on one boat and be off on the next, often without unpacking their bags. Then the house sat empty, until Alastair first—and Squid a year later—celebrated turning twelve by moving down the path to the house they called Gomorrah.
    “I love that name,” said Alastair. He said it