She doesn’t say anything about the journal. I know right away what it is. And I know what years it covers. I pick it up and carefully open it, my heart racing, thinking about the information it might have in it.
“It is no use,” she says. “I have already asked Marty to look. The water has not been kind to the ink. Whatever words my father penned on those pages have been washed away by the waves. I will perhaps never know the reason Charlie had to exhume these relics from their decades-old grave. Whatever secret they keep, the Lake has claimed, along with Charlie’s life.”
I run my fingers over the first page. She’s right. The writing is smeared. The pages themselves are stuck together, and as I try to separate them, they start to tear and fall apart.
We sit silently. I figure it’s better to say nothing than to say something stupid and useless. I notice that she’s holding something in her hand. “What’s that?”
She lifts up a rattle. It looks old and is made out of silver but has turned dark and dull. It tinkles delicately. “It was in the pocket of his jacket.”
“May I see it?”
Miss Livingstone hands it to me. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I turn it end to end. It’s engraved. There’s a name on it. Anna.
“Miss Livingstone,” I shake the rattle, “who’s Anna?”
“Anna?” She leans toward me, reaching out, frantically grasping at emptiness, until I put the rattle in her hand and she brings it close to her chest, her fingers running over the etched letters. “It says Anna?”
46
Elizabeth
I feel as though I am floating. Everything that keeps me grounded has become an apparition. I am no longer sure what the truth is. I am swimming. Elizabeth. Emily. Anna.
It makes me ache. It cannot be hers—I know it isn’t—and yet . . .
I clasp the rattle to my chest, not because I find connection through it, not at all. It is because of the name.
Anna.
“There is, perhaps, more of the story you need to know.”
*
I began to suspect the pregnancy in November.
Emily needed time to heal and kept to her bed for several weeks. The light in her had faded, but I could see it flickering and tried to encourage it by bringing sketchbooks and pencils and cakes of paint to her bedside. She had no interest in them. This worried me more than the bruises that turned purple before fading to green and yellow and finally disappearing from her skin. I knew that the marks that didn’t show would be the ones to last the longest. By the end of September she was spending small amounts of time outside, but only venturing as far as the chicken coop or the rocky point. More often than not, I found her sitting on the stoop of the assistant keeper’s cottage, her head leaning against the door, her eyes questioning. I explained to her that he had to leave. For her sake. She did not understand. I’m not sure I did either.
I longed for him, but knew that it was best. I could not have devoted myself to Emily had he been there, and she needed me. What happened was evidence of that. They divided me; I had to choose between them. But I missed him. I missed his comfortable presence. I missed our conversations. I missed the music. I missed what could have been.
We heard nothing about Grayson’s death until the following spring. He was a hermit, known by only a few, as he spent months at a time out on the water in summer or along his traplines in winter. He was not reported missing until after the close of shipping season, when he failed to collect an order he had placed at Sewchuck’s Brokerage. It was assumed he had capsized and drowned or been attacked by a bear or some other calamity consistent with living in the wilds of northern Ontario. There were whisperings, rumors suggesting that he had encountered the group from Silver Islet and chased them back to their boat and off Porphyry Island at the end of his gun. And further speculation about the disappearance of the assistant keeper from Porphyry Light at around the same time. But the gossip shared over cups of tea in the old miners’ homes along the waterfront road in Silver Islet, or conversations held on the wharf, went no further. No one from that group who came to the island that late August day breathed a word of it. Not even Arnie Richardson. At first, I wasn’t sure he was even aware of what Everett had done, but I suspected that he did when he didn’t bother warning us about their encounter with Grayson. There was a reason he didn’t feel a need. He knew the lone wolf was not a threat to us, that he had chased Everett away from Emily and the group of them off the island. It angered me that he hadn’t found some way to protect Emily in the first place, but I was oddly grateful for his silence. I knew she could not survive exacting justice for what had happened. It would have been her silent word, the word of the lightkeeper’s eccentric daughter, and that of a dead hermit, against those of young, educated men from well-off families.
Emily seemed to be more like herself by October. I assumed it was because we heard from Charlie that he was coming home. He did not elaborate. All he said was that he would be returning to Porphyry Point Light in the spring. This was welcome news on many fronts, not the least a logistical one. David’s sudden departure had left the Department of Transport in a quandary. Mother and I managed, and it was so near the end of the season that they did not make any changes to staffing. Once again, we were able to stay on.
Before winter set in, I took a trip into town to stock up on supplies. Emily and Mother stayed behind. I stopped in to see Peter’s wife, Maijlis. She had remarried, to a man almost ten years older than she who worked in the bush camps outside town, harvesting the forests of pine and spruce to be sent to sawmills and made into lumber. I sat in her kitchen drinking strong black coffee and eating her freshly baked cake. She was the picture of domesticity, and I found myself a little jealous of her snug house and electric stove and blond hair. I was dressed in the pants I had become accustomed to wearing, my straight black hair that spoke of my heritage pulled back and loosely plaited so that it hung in a thick rope down my back. I felt coarse and awkward next to Maijlis. She was expecting a baby, her belly round, her breasts full, her cheeks flush with the glow of motherhood. As we talked, her hands moved absently to the child growing within her, caressing it through the flowered fabric of her dress and the flour-dusted cotton of her ruffled apron.