They said it was Arnie Richardson who found the boat. Who thought I should have the journals. That is a name I have not heard for a lifetime. He sent a letter once. We received it years after it was mailed, having chased us around the world, finally arriving tucked into a package from our agent along with correspondence about books and royalties and invitations to events we never attended. It spoke of his return to the island in the weeks after the fire, back to the Porphyry light station to collect what he could from the charred remains of the smoke-stained buildings. Should we come home someday, he said, we could find what little was salvaged in the attic of Maijlis’s house. I did not write him back. What difference would it make after so long? It was all behind us. Lives were being lived. It doesn’t surprise me, though, that he would know I’d come home. In spite of our seclusion, he would have heard that the few possessions he had stored away for us had been claimed. Maijlis passed away years ago, but her daughter happily arranged the delivery to Boreal Retirement Home.
I have not thought of these journals for many, many years, but I have not forgotten the moment when I saw them last. It was early spring, and Emily was supposed to be bringing in kindling from the woodshed. She had been gone too long, and in those days I was not comfortable having her far from my side, not after what had happened. I found her in the assistant keeper’s house. She went there sometimes, perhaps as I did, to remember. She was sitting in Pa’s chair, the oilskin wrapping hanging loose, the books open in her lap. I remembered the journals. Remembered Pa sitting at his desk writing, while music played from the radio and the woodstove popped and snapped. They had disappeared when he died, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that they were gone. Emily couldn’t read the words, but I watched her hand draw across the pages, feeling the letters, hearing his voice, and I was overcome with a longing to do the same. I picked up one of the books, brushed my hand across the top, just as I do now, my fingers tracing the engraved “A.L.” on the dark leather cover.
The squeaking wheel of the kitchen trolley in the hallway announces that it’s time for afternoon tea, and I am drawn from my contemplation. There’s a knock at my door.
“Would you like tea, Ms. Livingstone?” the aide asks. I always do. She places a tray on the table. “Would you like me to pour?”
“No. No, thank you.” I thumb the books. “I can manage quite well on my own. But if you wouldn’t mind passing me the tin of cookies from next to the lantern.”
The aide places it in my outstretched hand. “Can I get you anything else?”
The metal feels cold. I am back in the assistant keeper’s house, my father’s journal in one hand. Emily had piled the other books on the table beside her and picked up a metal biscuit tin. She held it out so that it hovered between us. Just as my fingers closed around it, Charlie’s shadow eclipsed the door. He paused only a moment, only a brief breath in which he took it all in—me, the journals, Emily, the tin. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” It wasn’t a question. His voice was angry, and he strode across the floor, grabbed Emily, and pulled her out of Pa’s chair, shoving her past me toward the open door. The tin dropped from my hand. It fell, bouncing off the arm of the chair, the lid popping open, spilling its contents across the wooden floor like a cracked egg. Time stopped. I couldn’t move. It was as though the world ceased spinning. Charlie had never yelled at Emily before. Charlie had never been angry with Emily before. Never.
I still held one of Pa’s journals in my hand. He grabbed it from me, and I backed away from a man I didn’t know.
“Get out! You have no goddamn business in here!”
Emily had not seen the tin fall; she had her face pressed against the doorframe, looking away from Charlie, away from me, trying, I knew, to understand what had happened, what she had done. She didn’t notice the flash of silver escaping from an old piece of white cloth. She paid no attention to the soft tinkling. But I did, oh so briefly, before Charlie stuffed it back in the tin.
I went back on my own a few days later and searched everywhere, but I never found the biscuit tin. I never held the journals again.
Until now.
“Miss Livingstone? Are you okay?”
My hand shakes slightly, so I lay the tin of shortbread down on top of the journals. “Yes, fine.” I force a smile. “Thank you.”
Oh, Charlie, what secrets have you kept from me for so many, many years; secrets captured in words penned by our father, Andrew Livingstone, lighthouse keeper at Porphyry Island, secrets so powerful they consumed your love for Emily?
8
Morgan
It’s after midnight. I slide the violin case from beneath my bed. It looks like it’s been through hell, and there’s sticky black tape holding the handle together. I haven’t even opened it in months, but I know every detail, every curve of the body, the position of each peg, the number of hairs on the bow.
I lay the instrument beside me and pull out the papers that I found years ago, hidden beneath the lining of the case. They’re pencil crayon sketches of birds and insects, and they look so real they could fly off the page. And yet at the same time they’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’ve studied them, drawn them, dreamed about them, and drawn them again, but I haven’t shown them to anyone. They’re mine. I like to look at them when I’m lonely.
I scatter them around me on the bed, and the one of the raven catches my eye. It perches on some decaying animal, a deer maybe, killed by a pack of wolves, caught between the living and dead.
I pluck at the violin’s strings, and decide to apply rosin to the dry, forgotten hairs on the bow. Tonight is different. Tonight the instrument is calling to me. I answer with a sigh and tuck it under my chin, holding it there while I adjust the tuning. I lift the bow and then lower it onto the strings. It begins to dance.
The notes come slowly at first, as I remember, but gradually build, the music coming from inside me rather than from the movement of my fingers and bow on the strings. I don’t need sheet music for this piece. It’s one I learned by heart, and we played it together often; me standing beside his chair in the living room with my small violin, watching wide-eyed the way he held his bow, the way he swayed with the rhythm. He played the beautiful instrument that carries my music now.
“You have a gift, Morgan.” He smiled at me, clearly pleased. “The music has chosen you.”
God, I miss him! It’s been six years. Feels like more.
I switch to a reel. It’s more upbeat. He made me learn Bach and Mozart, but he liked folk tunes best, and so I did too. Once I’d finished all my scales and practiced fingering and dynamics, we fiddled. His foot tapped the floor, and the tempo grew until I had to stop and all I could do was watch him play. I can see his eyes, crinkling with laughter when I tried to copy him.
He was enough. The two of us didn’t need anyone else. We ate potatoes and canned soup and fish he caught himself in the Nipigon River. On dark winter nights, we sat close to the fire and he told me stories about shipwrecks on Lake Superior, and the years he spent fishing on Black Bay with his buddy Jim. And sometimes, when the wind crept through the cracks in the walls and drove icy snow against the windows, he drank whiskey out of an old chipped mug and talked about my mother. “She loved you, Morgan,” he told me, his accent getting thicker the more he drank. “In some ways, she reminded me of your grandmother. She was like the wind. Unpredictable. Free. Never knew what to expect from her. You can’t tie down the wind, Morgan. It dances where it pleases.” And then he’d take a big swallow, and tell me that my mother had fought. She fought so hard, but she wasn’t strong enough, and the wind had carried her away. I was only a baby when she died.