Marty asked me to paint the fence. I thought he was fucking with me, but he meant it. He said it might be nice to have some kind of mural—that the white surface seemed to be waiting for color. We went out and looked at it, looked at all the work I did, standing there silent while the wind blew snow around us. The sky was bright enough that I could see the faint lines of my dragonfly—Emily’s dragonfly—beneath the white.
“You know,” he said, “when you paint over something, everything that was there before isn’t really gone. It’s still there. All the layers of color, the scrapes and dents, even the bare wood hiding beneath, they shape what’s painted on top, inspire it even, but they don’t define it. That’s up to the painter.” He looked at me with those sapphire eyes, twinkling beneath bushy white brows. “The artist.”
I knew he wasn’t talking about fences.
I’m not talented like Emily, but I’m challenged by the thought of taking her work and letting her story flow through me. I can already see what I want to do. I think I’ll paint both dragonflies, one larger, one slightly smaller. Sisters in Flight. It seems right.
There’s a raven sitting on a piling just off the point, feathers ruffled to keep warm, its thick black beak silent. It spreads its wings, and I can hear them cutting the air as it flies overhead and disappears above the city. Marty and Elizabeth will be here soon. It was Marty’s suggestion that we sprinkle Emily’s and Charlie’s ashes over the water, and I think they would have liked that. I hope the strings of the fiddle will allow me to play at these temperatures.
The water is deep blue today, liquid ice. I have the journal. I open it up to the page that talks about Charlie and his sisters and read it one last time.
Saturday, 11 December—Lil has remained in bed for almost a full week, but her fever has broken, and I know this influenza has now been contained and we are on the road to recovery. She will be back on her feet and managing our household soon, and I thank God there have been no more deaths. I have not spoken to her of the child, nor of the woman I have buried at sea. There will be time for that when she is well. Besides, what is done is done, and I am grateful for the gift that has brought life back to my daughter, completing her, filling the emptiness left by the loss of her twin. Peter knows. I can see it when he looks at them; he knows the small child is not his sister at all. He will say nothing. It is his way. But Charlie does not remember that Elizabeth died. He was still delirious with fever when I took her cold form from Emily’s side and when I slipped the life-giving form of another into her place. Oh, they are similar enough, with their raven-black hair so like each other’s, their fair skin and delicate features. But even the twins were not so alike, Elizabeth always being the larger and stronger of the two. Now it is Emily who is larger. And so, today, when Charlie ventured from his bed and peered down at the girls, when he spoke to them and caressed their cheeks, as he is wont to do, he has confused their names. In order to keep our dark secret, in order to ensure that a young boy given to casual conversation does not speak of it, I will do what I must do—for Emily’s sake. She will take the name of her dead sister and pass her own to the child of the Lake.
I tear the page from the journal. God, it makes so much sense, really. It explains why their mother never really accepted her. It explains so much about who she was, how she never quite belonged, wandering through life caught somewhere in a world of her own creation, silent except when she spoke to the wind and the trees and the animals. I can see how she would have been captivated by the Lake and at the same time terrified of it; it almost killed her. And when the Hartnell was wrecked and she spent day after day walking the shore, searching, she was living it all over again. She even gave her own child the name from her past. Emily remembered. She remembered being Anna.
You should have let her die.
Their mother’s words haunted Elizabeth; they shaped her life. She became the protector, the advocate, sacrificing everything for the sake of her sister. In the beginning it wasn’t Elizabeth who lived for Emily; Emily lived for her.
But in the end, the lightkeeper wouldn’t let any of them die; not Elizabeth, not Emily, not Anna. He saw to it that they all survived, somehow, some way. Even if it meant living a lie.
Charlie knew the truth. He must have. That’s why he went back for the journals when the Kelowna was discovered. He was going to tell Elizabeth, after all those years. He probably read his father’s words when he returned to the island after the war. Did he blame himself for the secret? He would have been only about five years old. He had been too sick to see the lightkeeper take the dead baby Elizabeth out of the cot and replace her with another, smaller baby, a baby that had washed ashore in the middle of a storm; he wouldn’t have known any better. He would have thought that they were the twins, his sisters. And he would have assumed that the larger girl was Elizabeth. Of course he would. What reason would he have to believe otherwise? And so the child that was born Emily becomes her dead sister, Elizabeth. And the daughter of Robert Larkin, the little girl named Anna, stolen from the Lake, stolen from her life, becomes Emily.
I tear the page into pieces and toss them to the Lake. They sprinkle across the surface, dancing up and down on the ripples. They don’t melt like snowflakes, but eventually they drift apart, carrying with them the truth.
56
Arnie Richardson
He leaves the old dog in the car and walks along the road in front of the CN Station, pulling his scarf tighter around his neck and leaning on his cane. He can see them out on the point at the end of Pier 3, the old woman tucked in a wheelchair. It is Elizabeth Livingstone, he knows. A girl is there, too, playing a fiddle, in spite of the cold wind. It’s a subdued ceremony, not matching the publicity that consoles the rest of the world in the wake of the news that the renowned artist Emily Livingstone has died.