I run my hand across the top of the frame and over the glass. I can see the image as clearly as though my vision never paled. I can pick out every brushstroke; I know every color and shadow. Of all the work that Emily completed, of all the paintings that hang in galleries and prestigious offices and expensive lofts around the world, none speaks to me so completely as this image of two dragonflies, one larger, one slightly smaller, not quite entwined but connected through the swirling patterns in the background, the subtle correlation in shading that creates movement. I have named it, as I have all of Emily’s paintings. I call it Sisters in Flight.
The girl gets up off the bed and returns with the stack of Pa’s journals, rifling through the pile.
“I found them,” she says, “here.” She lifts my hand, placing it on the page. The lines are barely discernible, merely suggestions of the images floating beneath my fingers, captured by the same innocent hand, an imprint left long, long ago.
My Emily. My dear, sweet Emily.
Who is this girl? With his violin and Emily’s pictures? With the music that beats in her heart like it did in his, with his blood coursing through her veins? Does she know that the story that has its roots in the pages of these journals is as much hers as it is mine?
I slide my hand out from beneath hers, leaving the lines of the image, but resting for a moment on the girl’s fingers, hesitant but full of question. “Would you like to know how your grandfather knew Emily?” I ask quietly.
She answers with silence, but I can feel the yearning in the soft hand beneath mine. I realize that we have both loved the same man. He holds a place in both our hearts that gapes empty.
“Perhaps we need to adjust our little arrangement,” I offer. “Perhaps I should take a turn as the storyteller.”
I have no idea when I begin to speak, giving life to the story of the lightkeeper’s daughters, that she will be the one to find the beginning long after the end has been told.
part two Ghosts
26
Elizabeth
The story of your grandfather and Emily begins a long time before he stepped onto the black volcanic shores of Porphyry Island. You see, my sister was extraordinary; she didn’t fit easily into the conventions of society. At first I was not aware. To me, Emily was just Emily; beautiful, wonderful, silent Emily, my sister, my twin, an extension of me. Until one night I overheard a conversation between my parents, and it changed my life. And it is there this story has its roots.
It was late August 1935. The Great Depression gripped the world, but we barely noticed, settled in our home beneath the light far out on Lake Superior, with a roof over our heads, fed and content. It was my favorite time of year on the island, and we were busy with preparations for the long, cold, isolated months that stretched in front of us. Mother preserved vegetables from our garden. She picked and chopped and packed and sealed, and the green-and yellow-tinted jars joined the lush tomato red on the bursting shelves in the dugout cellar beneath the stairs. Braided onions hung from the rafters. Potatoes, pulled from their beds, were mounded into baskets and settled close to the cool earthen floor. Bags of flour, tins of canned meats, oatmeal, salt, and sugar were purchased and stashed away for the months when we could not get off the island, not by boat and not across the ice.
In a few days when Mr. Johnson aboard The Red Fox dropped anchor and nosed into shore off the point, both Peter and Charlie would climb aboard and head to Port Arthur. Thunder Bay wasn’t a city then—and it wouldn’t be for years—but the name defined the expanse of water between the Sibley Peninsula and the mainland where the communities of Fort William and Port Arthur had sprung up in close proximity to each other.
Peter had already spent a few winters in town, studying with other children his age, and now, Charlie was to join him. They would live with the Niemi family, one of the brothers who fished from the camp on Walker’s Channel in the summer and lived in a little blue house on Hill Street in the winter.
Mother thought it was time that I go to school in town as well, which was unusual, given her disregard for most of society. Pa disagreed. He preferred to teach us at home, and felt I was too young to be away for such long stretches of time. Besides, there was Emily to consider. Any decision of Pa’s became the rule of the household, always, and this was no exception. I know this because I heard them whispering about it one dark summer night when the rest of the house slumbered, weary from the chores of the light and the efforts of bringing in the gardens and putting food by.
I remember the conversation clearly. In itself, the discussion of my schooling is not memorable. It should have faded, one of hundreds of inconsequential exchanges inadvertently overhead. But I remember it because of the other words my mother spoke in reply, words that settled deeply on my soul, words that opened my eyes and charted a course for my life. Pa was pulling on his boots to complete some last-minute chores before turning in for a few hours of sleep. I had been up to use the chamber pot we kept in the corner of the room and had just crept back under the covers, my body cleaving to Emily’s. My parents’ voices floated against the stillness of the evening, when even the Lake slept quietly beneath the pinpricked ceiling of the late summer sky and refused to join the conversation. “We’ve done a fine job teaching her all these years,” Pa said, so soft I could barely hear. “I don’t see a reason to stop now. Besides, it would not be right to send one and not the other. And we cannot send the other.”
Through my sleepy, half-closed eyes, I saw Mother’s shadow pass the doorway as the light swept its eye across the house and back out over the still, black water.
I was not concerned. I did not want to leave the island, although I enjoyed our rare trips to town and admit to entertaining thoughts of school and classmates and lessons. But I loved the freedom, the sound of the Lake, the wind in the trees. And I had Emily. I drifted, sleep reaching up and wrapping itself around my sister and me.
I heard Mother laugh. It was not a happy, amused sound, not one of contentment. It was a sad, remorseful one, which hovered close to a sigh. I wanted to close my ears and stop listening, but I couldn’t. My sleepy eyes opened wide, and my ears sharpened. I heard the ticking of the clock on the mantel, the squeak of a mouse beneath the wooden floor, and Emily’s breath, soft and regular.
“We . . . you should have let her go. You should have let her die,” came my mother’s voice, angular and ragged. “What good is it? We have damned them both. Emily will never be right.”
Time stopped. The clock ceased ticking, and the mouse was silent. There was only Emily breathing, steady and rhythmic like the light.