She looks at me with those piercing gray eyes, and I take a small step back. She smiles at me, like she recognizes me, like she knows who I am. And then she does the strangest thing. She reaches up with one hand and touches my cheek. She traces a finger around my eyebrows, down my nose, and over my lips. I want to pull away, but I can’t. She cups my face in her hand and makes a noise, but her mouth does not form words.
A car pulls up next to us. It’s a cop car. Still I stand there. We both do. The snow swirling around us flickers in the headlights, like the sun sparkling on the surface of the Lake.
52
Elizabeth
They say the girl found her. That she was wandering around in this god-awful blizzard that tears at our building and throws itself at the windows like a pack of hungry wolves. She is back, now, in her room, warmed beneath blankets, but I can tell that she is not well. I am surprised she had the strength to climb from her bed, to find a coat and navigate the chaos brought on by the power outage, to find the doors and slip out into the storm. Whatever possessed her to do so?
I am sitting by her bed. Her breathing is ragged, and the hand that I am holding is dry and hot. Too hot. Morgan is here with me. She is standing, silent, near the door, but I know she is here.
“You don’t need to stay,” I tell her.
“No, I . . . I want to.”
I am glad of her company. I am more glad still that she wants to be here.
She didn’t know that Emily shares the same building; that her room is just down the other hall from mine in an area that restricts comings and goings and where there are nurses with watchful eyes and keen ears. Emily needs more. More than I am able to give her. She is prone to fits. I can manage them, most of the time. But I am old. And tired. When I found that the Lake was calling us back home, drawing us from our reclusive life in Tuscany, it was partly because I could no longer give Emily the care that she needed. This place offered us the privacy I wanted, and the proximity to the Lake that I craved. The world does not know where Emily Livingstone is. They could not accept her as she is, I am sure of that. So I hid her. I protected her. I have spent my life doing that. It is my purpose.
The girl moves a chair to the other side of Emily and sits down. I can hear her fumbling with her bag.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” she says. “Something I think you should know.”
I can smell the mustiness of the book. I know it is the journal. She has found something in it that the Lake tried to steal. I’m not sure I want to know what it is. But she begins to speak, and I cannot stop it. It spills from her, my father’s words, like waves rolling toward the cliff, crashing and hissing when they arrive, and then slithering off to disappear into the depths, only to be followed by the next, and then the next.
They are mesmerizing.
53
Morgan
The book is in layers, paper towel alternating with the pages so that it’s even bulkier than it was to begin with. I open it carefully, flipping through the damp sheets until I find the part where Elizabeth and Emily were born. I’m not sure how to start.
Miss Livingstone . . . Elizabeth . . . is holding her sister’s hand. Emily is frail. She isn’t breathing well, and she hasn’t opened her eyes since we brought her back to her room. I rode with her back to the home. In a cop car. Not how I ever thought I would end up in the backseat of a cop car. By the time we managed to make our way through the ice and snow and pull up at the front doors, Emily was shivering, her eyes glassy. Even then she didn’t want help from the nurses when they tried to take her to her room. But she is calm, now, peaceful even. Elizabeth and I are here.
Her room isn’t like Elizabeth’s. The quilt covering her is similar, but that’s all. The walls are plastered with paintings and drawings, and there are pencils and papers and paints lined up on a desk beside the window. The paintings are all of the same thing; a baby, a newborn baby. Intricate, detailed. No one has to tell me it’s Anna.
I take a breath and begin.
The old woman listens as I read her father’s words. He speaks of the babies, twin girls, born too soon. He talks of the illness, the days spent caring for first one and then another of his children, cut off from the world as fevers consumed them. And then, the death of Elizabeth.
She doesn’t say a word. Nothing. Her face shows no emotion. So I continue. I read of the boat, floating ashore in a storm, of a woman with red hair, of the child wrapped in her cloak, who the lightkeeper placed in the cot beside Emily. And there, in taking on the warmth of her body, gives life to them both.
The story isn’t finished. There’s more. I’m about to turn the page when she interrupts me. Her voice is quiet, trembling.
“I know,” she says. “I have always known.”
54
Elizabeth
I can hear Mozart playing. Marty would have put the music on. It is soothing. I take a deep breath and run my fingers through my hair, sweeping it from root to tip. I know it is completely white now. The color of snow. It tells me I am old, but it lies. Inside, I am not.
The child, Elizabeth, I can feel her. Cold and buried beneath rocks, tugged at by the wind and washed by the rains. Is she lonely? I am with her. I have walked with her along the shores of the Lake. She has lived with me, been with me always. She is me. We are one.
Emily and I, we complete each other. We are threads woven together as a single piece of cloth. We share a life just as the baby Elizabeth and I share a death. She could not have survived without me. I lived for her. It is our truth.
I begin to speak. It will fill the room with more than Emily’s labored breathing, words that will chase around the walls and up to the ceiling and hover in the corners. Perhaps it will keep the wolves at bay.
“There is part of the story I have not told you,” I say.
*
The morning after Anna was born, I woke before Emily did. The day was so new that night hung desperately to its edges, gray and silent, unwilling to let go. It was still; the birds had not even begun their warbling, withholding their songs until the sun peered tentatively over the eastern horizon to nudge at the darkness. There was just enough light to see. Emily was curled beside me, her dark hair splayed across the white sheets, one hand trailing off the bed, resting, I assumed, on her child’s makeshift cradle. I sensed immediately that there was something wrong. It was too silent. Too still.
The light.
In all my years on Porphyry, throughout all the storms, amid illness and adversity, not once, not once, had we let the light go out. Until then.