She didn’t look back. But I did. I watched the animals regroup, bounding away from us across the bay toward Edward Island.
It was then that I saw him for the first time. He was barely visible, blending into the trees in his deer-hide coat and thick black beard, a fur hat on his head. He held a rifle in his hands, and I saw him empty the chamber and lower the weapon to his side before disappearing into the shadows.
I followed Emily back to our little cottage beneath the sleeping light. As with most journeys, the return trip felt much shorter, but even still, the sun hung low in the winter sky by the time we rounded the point and saw my father.
Emily trudged past him, barely acknowledging his presence.
“She was around Walker’s Channel,” I said. “A pack of wolves had wandered out onto the ice, and she was . . .” I have never been one given to superstition, but I was certain something had passed between the wolf and my sister, some agreement forged there in the snow-blanketed passage between Edward and Porphyry Islands.
“She was watching them, and they were watching her.”
My father fell in step beside me, and we continued in silence for a while. Emily was a few feet in front of us, methodically placing one snowshoe in front of the other. “She does have a way,” he said very quietly.
“There’s more,” I continued.
Emily halted.
“I thought I saw—”
Emily turned quickly and looked at me, her eyes dark and fierce and pleading. In silence, she asked me not to tell, not to speak the words that struggled to take shape. Not that. Not now. It was to be our secret.
“What, Lizzie?” my father prodded.
Emily continued on her path. She knew I had understood and would honor her unspoken request.
“I thought I saw caribou tracks. I’m sure the wolves were on their trail.”
My father grunted in approval, and I knew he would head out the next day in search of the herd. The wolves had come out onto the Lake to track something; I hoped it was caribou. I hoped he found them.
That night, tucked snugly into bed, a sliver of moon shining bright on the snow outside, the Lake grumbling and popping in complaint against the confines of winter Emily and I heard the wolves howling. My parents were in quiet conversation around the fire, and the moonlight made a window-shaped puddle of silver on our covers, Emily and I two tiny bumps beneath. She turned toward me and, in a gesture so unlike her, reached over and traced my face with her slender fingers, across my forehead, around my eyes, down my nose, over my lips to my chin. And then she rolled over. I snuggled up tight against her, sharing her warmth, listening as her breath became soft and regular and she fell asleep.
It was some time before I was able to drift off. The nighttime chorus both thrilled and terrified me as I thought of the wolf and his yellow eyes staring intently at Emily while the rest of his pack paced, waiting. I thought, too, of the man I had seen. I tried to convince myself that he was merely a figment of my imagination—an apparition conjured by the white snow and the presence of the prowling wolves. But Emily had seen him too. She had known he was there, just as she had known that I was.
Emily had seen him, and she didn’t want my father to know.
28
Morgan
I’m sitting on her bed, leaning back against the wall, my knees pulled up against my chest and my arms wrapped around them, listening. I’ve been carried to her world, back through the decades. She talks in a way that makes me feel like I can touch the snow, see the stars, and hear the crashing waves. She picks up the framed picture of the dragonflies, and as she does, the blue veins beneath the skin on her hand jump with the movement of her fingers, and I try to imagine her as a little girl. In some ways, it’s impossible. But then there’s something about her that makes it not. She slowly gets up, walks to the dresser, and stands the picture back up with the other two.
The journal sits on the bed, open still. I close the cover and let my hand rest on the raised letters, tracing the A and L. The lightkeeper never wrote about the bearded man. He mentions the wolves and the caribou, which he did find, and Emily wandering off, but not the strange man who hid in the trees and watched. It’s a secret kept by a ten-year-old girl.
“He was my grandfather,” I say. It’s not a question.
Her back is still toward me as she arranges the pictures. I see her straighten, but she doesn’t turn around.
“Good lord, child, no!” She turns toward me, her vacant eyes desperately seeking to connect with mine. “He was the man your grandfather killed.”
In the moment it takes her to tell me that, my whole childhood shatters.
29
Elizabeth
I don’t need to see her face. She is stunned. Of course she is. Why did I expect that she would know? He would have told no one. To protect us. To protect Emily. It was much too complicated. And yet I ask a redundant question: “You didn’t know?”
“No, actually, it never came up.” I sense a tremor in her voice. She is upset. But she is quick to raise the mask again, and her next words are laced with sarcasm. “But then again, it’s not the type of thing that someone would just drop into conversation with their ten-year-old granddaughter, now is it? ‘Oh, my dear, did I happen to mention I killed a man? Would you like some more mashed potatoes?’”
“Ten?”
“Yeah. He died when I was ten.”
He is gone. Of course he is. Morgan would still be with him if he weren’t. All those times I permitted myself the luxury of memory, to picture him, imagine where he was, what he might be doing, whether he had loved again. Whether he thought of me. He is gone. It pains me to hear it spoken into reality, but in truth, I have known for many years now. A heart recognizes when part of it has died, and he’s carried a piece of mine since the day we slipped away to the north end of the island along Walker’s Channel and lay together on a bed of moss. I take a deep breath and allow my mind to register the loss, to piece together the imagined pattern that was his life and allow the seam to close. There will be time to grieve later—if there is any grieving yet to be done.
“How?”
“A stroke.”
“And your parents?”
“My dad was never in the picture, and I don’t remember my mom. She died when I was about a year and a half. She got cancer when she was pregnant with me and refused treatment. Refused to terminate, even though the doctors said she would die if she didn’t. Grandpa took care of both of us.”
I sense a tenderness for this mother she never knew, a longing for the woman who chose to give her child life instead of keeping her own. It is remarkable, the human capacity for love. To have such a deep and profound connection to someone you have in essence never known. The sentiment doesn’t last.
“I never really gave a shit anyway—didn’t need them. Didn’t need either one of them. He . . . we had each other.”