ONE

January 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.

He came through the door like a thunderclap, like a breeze. Hey! he yelled. Or, Hey, he said. He let the door slam. He eased it shut.

Which way had it gone? She couldn’t be sure. She was tired, not paying attention.

To walk right in was normal for Evvie, to roar, to not care.

But something was different this time. Something was wrong. You could see by the look on his face.

She saw — she understood what she saw — and then she could no longer hear.

Wooooooor, he said. Whirrrr, whooaar. As if they were underwater. As if the words he’d spoken had travelled through a mile of sea.

In some part of her brain, alarm bells rang and panic set in. But the words themselves eluded sense.

Stella’s gone.

What did it mean?

Frances grasped her arm. “Mum! Mum, please — ” Then Frances too disintegrated into underwater roar.

The room spun.

Someone led her to the cot and sat her down.

Inexplicably, she heard a baby cry.

Dan and Rose took charge and Frances stayed by her side, forced to remain at home minding her inept mother while everyone else in the community searched for Stella.

Later, that’s how Sonia thought of it.

To Sonia, it seemed everything was connected to that moment — or contained within it, like the tree inside a seed.

But even in retrospect she could not make sense of the welter of contradictory impressions that washed over her.

Had she imagined Evvie into being? Was it possible she’d brought this all on, somehow?

TWO

Surely she could make sense of everything that happened if she tried. If she went back to the beginning.

She’d been working at the stove: frying fish cakes, making tea, taking beans out of the oven, adding wood to the fire, putting biscuits in to bake.

Frances came up beside her, dropped an armload of kindling into the woodbox, and stretched across the stove to inhale the seductive aroma of fish cakes browned in butter, biscuits puffing in the oven, beans enriched with bacon. She clapped the wood dust from her hands, slid into the rocker and closed her eyes.

Sonia had also been outside for hours, and she was hungry too. But she was not floating on a reverie of food, as her perpetually famished sixteen-year-old daughter seemed to be. She was caught in a replay of the walk she’d taken that afternoon, along the tamped-down path Rob had made with Dan’s snowshoes through the woods behind their house.

She felt the heat of the stove against her hip. At the same time, she was in the woods, below the pastel sky and naked trees, surrounded by the bubbling voices of tiny acrobatic birds she’d never seen before and the intoxicating, hope-inducing smell of spring rising from the evanescent snow. Borrowed day, she thought, her mind lighting on the phrase Islanders used to describe the unexpected arrival of a springlike day in winter.

It had been a hard winter, a hard few years. But she felt satisfied that she had made the most of this one borrowed day. Now she would eat a good supper and she and her children would bask in the pleasure of relaxation after their busy day.

But then Frances stopped rocking. “Mum?” she said.

And Rose broke in. Nineteen-year-old Rose speaking in a child’s fearful voice, not her usual, impatient one — gasping — shrieking — “What! What do you mean?”

Sonia turned, and there was Evvie in the doorway, holding Kate against his chest.

It was all wrong, Evvie holding Kate like that. Funny thing, he said. Casual as anything. Stella isn’t home. Then Kate slithering out of her father’s arms and Rose and Frances shouting and everything going silent and screaming noise at the same time. The spatula falling from her hand and its silent clattering across the lino floor.

Kate crying.

Evvie going on.

Funny thing. He thought he saw her coming toward him on the ice, but when he turned to look, she wasn’t there. First he thought she was a vision. Then he thought she was bringing him his lunch.

There was a soft spot covered over with slob ice, he said, what the fishermen called lolly. He’d walked around that spot himself.

How she remembers that moment depends on how far back she travels. Her focus changes depending on whether she is re-experiencing the instant of knowing, or remembering what preceded it, or trying to make sense of all that happened later.

Memory changes, as the events of history never do.

Scrap that.

She is determined to make the ending come out a different way.

THREE

Because memory is pliable, isn’t it? It depends on where you start, on the details you attend to, and on the ones you let slip away.

The way it began: there was an ice fog in the night, and she woke to a silver thaw.

Every tiny twig on every branch was glazed — every bud at the tip of every twig. It was as though the world had been dipped into liquid glass.

It was a liar, that stunning day. Trust me, it said. Revel in my beauty. Who imagines betrayal behind such glittering, extraordinary promise?

She went out after breakfast with suet and bread crusts for the birds, but only the blue jays took the food. The smaller birds that like to wait nearby couldn’t get a grip on the coated branches. She tried to coax them, holding bread in her hand and calling, chickadee-dee-dee, but they wouldn’t land. They fluttered all around then flew off, leaving her alone in the sparkling world.

Of course, it was a temporary state. By nine o’clock the tips of twigs had begun to drip, and by ten the sun had melted most of it away.

The weather had been strange all winter. Days of odd phenomena, days that started off super cold and heated up so rapidly that ice was melting off the roof at noon, days of whipping winds and massive quantities of snow. Recently, days that seemed too warm for winter. There had never been so much snow, and no one had ever seen it melt away so fast.

The melting seemed a blessing. The sun was out for the first time in a week, and everyone was outside to enjoy it. As soon as Rob and Frances got home from school, they went outside. Sound expanded with the warmth of the day. Sonia could hear their conversation, the chatter of the small birds in the trees, and over that, Dan singing to himself.

Every now and then there was a rash of banging. Dan was doing something complicated underneath the hood of their old truck. Evvie had called in to borrow Dan’s auger and was on the river fishing smelts. Rose was hanging clothes out on the line. Rob was down to shirt sleeves, shovelling through a snowbank in the blazing sun. And Frances cleared a path from the woodshed to the woodpile behind the granary.

Sonia spent hours tromping through the woods. She lost track of time, her muscles ached deliciously, and she felt inexpressibly alive.

Then it was suppertime. She shaped and fried the fish cakes. Frances brought the kindling in. Evvie came through the door.

After Sonia screamed and dropped the spatula, Rose said, “Now, let’s think,” in her authoritative voice and everyone went quiet. “Where could she be?” Rose said. “She could have gone down to the root cellar or out to the woodshed. She could have gone to Cece and Mae’s.”

Stella and Evvie’s house was half a mile away. Cece and Mae’s was in between.

Evvie said, “I checked the cellar and the shed. I’ll call in at Cece and Mae’s.” And he turned and was gone, leaving Kate.

Rose made up packages of food and Dan got on the phone and organized a search. Rob found two flashlights and filled all the oil lanterns. When Evvie didn’t come back, Frances went to Cece and Mae’s. Evvie was sitting down to supper, she reported when she returned. He hadn’t told them Stella was missing.

Evvie often ate at other people’s houses. He had a knack for walking in on meals. Stella doesn’t feed me enough, he’d complain, and laugh.

It was a moonless night, cold and very dark. Dan built a fire in a barrel on the riverbank, a light to see by and a beacon for Stella, wherever she had gone.

The wind whipped that fire like a flag.

Neighbours came. Cece Ladner and his lame brother Jim, Lyman Cray, who went to school with Frances, Grover Hurry, Eddie Mack, a dozen farmers from all around. For the first few hours they were calm, hopeful maybe, or soothed by the rhythm of the work, as men are who work in fields or woods together, in the familiar comfort of each other’s company.

They searched steadily and systematically, walking in parallel lines, calling Stella’s name, beating the dark brush at the river’s edge with sticks.

Mae Ladner and Marina Cray sent over sandwiches and squares and bottles of tea, and Rose took them down to the men.

At midnight, intending to relieve Rose, Sonia went down with hot baked beans in a pan and a fistful of spoons. “Go home and sleep,” she said, but Rose would not leave. Her eyes were wild. They seemed to reflect both Dan’s ferocity and Evvie’s strange intensity. Someone had taken out a flask and it was going around from hand to hand. Sonia watched Dan wave it off. “We have to look farther out,” he said.

Now the bean pan was coming back, scraped clean. Sonia took it in her hand. The dented metal already cold.

Eddie Mack whispered something to Rose, then came up beside Sonia. “Go on back, dear.” He put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her body into the curve of his own. “Take your daughter home. Look after her.” Then he released her.

Sonia stumbled up the bank, Rose already yards ahead, stepping mechanically through tracks created by the men, whose strides were so much longer than her own.

Sonia watched her daughter walk ahead, alone into the dark.

Later, she would wonder what Rose’s experience of that moment was. She would try to fathom how Rose could bear the terrible uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to her older sister and when, or indeed if, she would turn up.

Sonia hadn’t known how to help.

Later, she would hear Rose say, Mum is somewhere else.

This certainly seemed true. In retrospect, there were so many moments in which Sonia herself did not know where she had gone.

FOUR

Stella ran away.

Sonia said it, and her conviction grew.

In some part of her mind, she had always known this would happen. It was her fault, her punishment. The mistakes we make have consequences we cannot predict.

How far back would she have to go to change what happened? Sonia thought about Stella leaving home; Stella’s accident, in which she lost the sight in one eye, when she was thirteen; Stella with Max and the other kids; Stella playing alone at three. She thought about Stella being born, a winter baby. She wrapped her arms around that sad, lost child. She smoothed her hair. And then she was on a beach, under a barely overcast, inscrutable sky.

June 1941. Surplus Island, Malpeque Bay, Prince Edward Island.

They walked, and it seemed to Sonia she had never walked before.

The surf rolled slowly up to the wrack-lined beach, stalled, and rolled slowly back, leaving in its wake a distasteful foamy lacework she stepped over automatically, other days. Today, the same pinkish seafoam called up the frilled edge of a dainty chiffon skirt.

“My dear — ”

He looked at her, and she wanted to scream out the queer feeling of excess that filled her chest. Exhaling did nothing to dispel it.

She was aware of her mind divided. A part of her transfixed, a part moved solely by curiosity: How would this turn out?

“I want to ask you something. Will you tell me if I overstep?”

She turned to find him gazing at her, intent upon her answer. His mock-decorous manner comical, but tender at the same time. She nodded slowly.

“Why are you here alone?”

She rambled out the story of her tenure at Surplus light. How her husband, Max, secured the position when the previous keeper, who had lost a brother overseas, begged to enlist. How they’d met at a lighthouse station on the St. Lawrence River and married and immediately travelled here, to this tiny island in Malpeque Bay on the sandy north shore of Prince Edward Island, a different landscape than any she’d ever known. How, when they’d found the station in disarray, Max decided they’d be better off to farm. How he was farming now, an hour’s drive inland. She did not say: on a portion of his aunt Lil and uncle Hector’s land. She said he was making money so that they could quit the station for a simpler, more stable life. How this was what Max wanted.

“And your husband’s given you the job he signed on to do?”

“I grew up on lights. I am as capable as he is. Maybe more so.”

Apparently Peter Cope had no response to this.

She walked on.

In the dune-sheltered cove on the south side of the island he stopped abruptly, drew his braces back and dropped his pants, then felt for the buttons on his shirt.

Underneath his clothes he wore a pair of swimming trunks.

Still.

Sonia had never seen a man disrobe so casually before. Not even Max, in the privacy of their bedroom. Later she wondered if this strange ease with unclothed skin was a function of his medical training or evidence of oddness.

“I’m going for a swim. Will you join me?”

She shook her head. She wanted to swim. But she wasn’t in the habit of wearing a swimming costume underneath her clothes.

The second time they met, she was hanging laundry from the clothesline at the station.

He walked up behind her on the path that ran between the dunes, and she didn’t see him until he was beside her with a wet shirt in his hands. Her own shirt, from the split-ash basket at her feet. She took it from him and hung it on the line.

“I saw you from the shore,” he said. “The lady lightkeeper of Surplus Island.”

The naïveté in this remark made him sound like a summer visitor, a dilettante at Island life. How strange this was, since he’d grown up nearby. It made her wonder about the other life he led, at university in Montreal. She’d grown up in Montreal and missed it desperately sometimes: the handsome and historic buildings with their soulful interiors, suffused with mystery; the colour and drama and staccato music of the streets; the art classes she’d been so lucky to fall into. She loved the Island, but she envied him his urban life.

“I thought I’d stroll the beach this lovely morning. Would you be willing to accompany me?”

His smile was like a just lit wick, swallowing all the oxygen around it in a vivid burst of flame. The formal phrasing of his invitation, delivered with a deep, theatrical bow, made her want to laugh.

She knew even as she tied the basket to the clothesline that she shouldn’t leave the light. But Max had been back only once in the past month: she felt desperate for conversation with another human being.

He said, “I’ll walk — you talk.” He said she hadn’t told him anything about herself. “Only what your husband’s planning for that farm of his.”

Your husband. That farm. Something about the lightness of his tone alarmed her slightly, but she didn’t stop to wonder why.

He stopped, though. He took hold of her arms and turned her to face him, his expression serious all of a sudden. “Sonia, what is it you want?”

What did she want? She turned away, took a breath. This cleared her mind. Still, she didn’t know.

He tried again. “Tell me about your life here.”

She turned to look at him.

His smile. How his eyes liquefied in the watery light. She considered his simple request: Tell me about your life.

What was there to tell? Her life consisted of lightkeeping chores, walks along the beach and rare — very rare — visits from her husband. Surplus Island was uninhabited, so she lived a life of almost perfect solitude.

“You like to walk,” he said. “Where do you walk?”

There was nowhere to walk. “Sometimes I cross the causeway to Oyster Cove. When I need meat or milk or eggs I walk across and buy them from a farmer on the shore road.”

“George Proffit?”

“You know him?”

“Sure. But what about this place? Tell me about your lighthouse chores.”

She wondered if he was off his nut. Who’s to say he wasn’t?

He smiled. He had a relaxed, sincere face.

“If you like, I’ll show you how the lighthouse works. But it’s your turn now. Why are you spending the summer in this empty corner of the world?”

His story was the better one. She listened intently. Winters at McGill University, studying medicine. Summers at his parents’ home nearby on Malpeque Bay, where he worked part-time as an assistant to the veterinarian, Cy McRae. He liked to cycle, so he toured the area. How he found her, alone on her island — he’d seen the brilliant, flapping laundry on her clothesline. Harold Pyke, the previous keeper, never washed, he said.

She laughed. She said she might have guessed as much from the state she found the station in.

He said, “But Cy McRae is a demon for clean in his veterinary practice.” Then he stopped, set a hand on her elbow. “You know Cy?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll introduce you.”

This seemed unlikely, since she rarely left the light. But she didn’t comment.

He talked of Cy a little longer. They walked companionably enough.

There didn’t seem to be a natural place to turn around. He said, “So, we’ll circumnavigate the island.”

They did, and he said it wasn’t as long a walk as he imagined it might be. Afterward, as she’d promised, she took him to the light. They circled the woodshed and the house, stuck like barnacles to the four-storey wooden tower. She’d left the tower door open and he went in ahead of her.

“We’ll go up to the lantern room,” she said, stumbling slightly, made uncertain by his movement through her familiar terrain. “I’ll show you how the lamp and reflectors work,” she offered. In the sudden dark, she couldn’t see him. Mentioning the light was reassuring.

“This way?” His voice near the stairs.

But then he stopped unexpectedly, or he turned, or she misjudged — and they collided. Instinctively, she put her hands up in a gesture of self-defence, and her palms fell flat against his chest.

He felt as resilient as a rubber band.

She brought her hands down, stepped back.

He was tall and slight but strong. He was not as broad as her muscular husband, but his body was finely made in a way that Max’s wasn’t. She thought, He’s only young, probably just a few years older than I am.

He said, “Maybe you should go ahead.”

He stepped aside to let her pass, and they made their way up the narrow staircase.

On the landing, she paused to point out the fuel tank and pipes and the pumping mechanism that delivered oil to the lantern room. On the third floor, she showed him her charts and logbook and the supplies she used to maintain the light: chamois, rouge, extra wicks and reflectors. They climbed the final staircase, really a narrow ladder made of boards. In the lantern room she showed him how the lamp was lit and gave him her binoculars to look through. To her what was past the storm panes was no less than the light’s dominion, but to him, she knew, it was only view: not complex or threatening, merely picturesque. He was silent for a while as he looked, first with the aid of the binoculars, then without.

“I can see you up here, tending to this light. I can see you climbing up those stairs at night, completely confident of every step.”

She nodded. What he said was true. She felt at home on the light.

“I’d like to visit, one night when the lamp is lit. Would that be all right?”

It wouldn’t be all right. Of course it wouldn’t. But she could not articulate the reason why: her throat had seized up. The way he was gazing at her. She nodded assent.

They spent four nights sitting up in the lighthouse, talking through the dark. She loved his company — the stories he told, his calm presence and warm, resonant voice. His ardent curiosity.

Mostly they sat in the lightroom, one floor down from the lantern. During the day that windowless storage room was cool and dark, but at night, when the lamp was lit, a concentrated beam shone from the floor above, illuminating the space between them, the limbs they let fall across that space, the objects they brought into it. Pete entertained himself by reading to Sonia from the instruction booklet that governed her working life.

“Rules and Instructions for the Guidance of Lightkeepers and of Engineers in Charge of Fog Alarms in the Dominion of Canada,” he read, and laughed.

“Rule no. 25. Any scratches in the silvering must be due to dust or careless work, and the keeper will be held accountable for them.”

“Rule no. 81. Keepers must conduct themselves with civility to strangers — ” He waggled his eyebrows.

“Are you so casual at school?” she asked, and he just laughed again. They lay with their backs against the floor, their knees in the air, their heads close enough in the uneven light that it seemed possible for them to discern each other’s emotion, and intention.

“I think you’re pretending,” she said. “I think you’re more serious than you want me, or anyone, to know.” The smell of oil in the air, the bitterness of the rouge she used to polish the reflectors, the dust and the old wood of the structure itself mingled with a clean, piney aroma she now associated just with him.

“I’m not serious,” he said, laughing and throwing his arms out, and the motes of dust tumbling in the shaft of light from above seemed to carry that play of fragrances, a careening, seductive scent.

Near the end of the fourth night, he fell asleep on the lantern-room floor, one arm flung protectively across his eyes.

She drew him lying there.

The slow flare of his arm, its resolute shape emerging from the crumpled sleeve of his thin cotton shirt; the crease in his neck, its depth a match to the spaces between the floorboards; the gentle curve of his jaw at odds with all the straight lines beyond. Drawing is about relationships, her art teacher, Mme Chevalier, had said.

She drew the boundaries around his body and she marvelled at — but could not begin to draw — its intricate movement. She wanted to cup her hands around the tender shapes, to memorialize and console and contain them.

When dawn broke, she extinguished the light and, yearning for sleep herself, woke him by touching his shoulder and his dark, silky hair. “The tide’s coming in. You should go.”

He seemed to wake, then fell asleep. Struggled, then woke again.

“Don’t you have to work today?” she asked.

Throughout these nights she’d thought only of the time they’d shared. Now she realized that he was losing sleep in order to spend his nights with her.

She touched his hair again, and he took her hand and kissed it. “My dear, I’m on my way.”

She listened as he stumbled down the stairs. Through the lantern glass, she saw him mount his bicycle and ride down the track toward the causeway. She saw him jump off his bicycle and drag it through the water. The tide had come in so far already that a short stretch of road had disappeared.

He didn’t reappear for nine days. Nine fine, quiet days.

These were days of utter innocuousness. A high sun, no wind, moderate heat. From the gallery outside the lantern she watched lobstermen drop their pots — each vessel appearing on the horizon pregnant with a massive, unbalancing dark shape — a mound of stacked pots — then returning to port unburdened. The reeling in of that day, and the sober, steady, rhythmic unspooling of the next: the men hauling their pots back up, emptying or examining them, replacing the bait, releasing them into the depths again. This pattern repeated, repeated, lagged, its sameness enervating. At the base of the tower, waves lapped in a desultory way, incapable without the wind.

Away from the light, she wallowed. She mourned his absence. She walked the beach, plodded through her chores, invented additional chores. From the tower, she watched the shoreline road. Once she saw a farmer, probably George Proffit, his team of horses pulling a trailer with a dark load, manure for a distant field. There was never another soul.

She knew it was a good thing he’d gone. Twice she’d forgotten to listen to “Instructions for Lightkeepers,” broadcast in code on the radio.

She loathed this six-times-daily duty. Because she’d never yet heard anything out of the ordinary, it hardly seemed necessary to listen. “Rule Britannia” would play, and then: “Attention lightkeepers. All lightkeepers in East Coast areas. Instruction A — A for Apples — is to be carried out.” Since this simply meant “display lights normally,” she usually tried to slip in at the last moment so as to avoid as much as possible of the song, whose strident notes inevitably grated against her mood. Of course she would not ever skip “Instructions” by design. One day — you never knew — the government might broadcast Instruction B, which meant extinguish lights. She had heard tell in a letter from her father of a German submarine in the St. Lawrence River near Cap-aux-Morts — “A Load of Hay,” he said they’d called it, on marine radio — and the keeper at North Cape, on the Island’s westernmost tip, claimed to have seen a sub cruising in the moonlight.

She was taking linens off the line when he turned up finally, late one afternoon, a swooping dark presence on a clanking bicycle.

Dismounting at a run, he leaned his bicycle against the shed and raced toward her, grinning.

“Sonia! I have a surprise!”

From his pack he removed an empty flour bag full of baby beets — dull purple balls dusted with red earth and white flour — fresh peas and new potatoes. There was a piece of beef, wrapped carefully in the foil from a pound of tea and page after page of newspaper. (This she thought to save for reading.) And there were a dozen hen’s eggs packed in sawdust in a biscuit tin.

He laid the gifts on the sand at her feet and she bent toward the bounty.

George Proffit had peas and beans and potatoes in his garden. She’d bought some earlier in the week, and they had been delicious. But somehow they hadn’t seemed to shine with promise the way this food of Pete’s did.

He smiled when she looked up. “Cy and I did some work for a farmer in Darnley this morning. There was no money, so he loaded us down with food. Cy took his half home. I thought we’d cook this, you and I, and picnic on the beach.”

She shook her head and stood.

“Or we can eat in your kitchen — ” He nodded toward the station house.

She imagined cooking an elaborate meal for him in her kitchen — something she had rarely found the energy to do for Max. “No . . . this is your food. Keep it. Take it home to your mother.”

His face went pale and he bent toward the sand.

Why? Why had she said that?

He began to gather up the food.

I’m sorry, she thought, but did not say.

“I wanted to thank you for showing me the lighthouse and letting me see what it’s like up there at night.” He wrapped a hand around her ankle. “And . . . aren’t we friends?”

Friends. Could they be friends? She thought of the drawing she’d made while he lay asleep on the lantern-room floor. She imagined tearing that page from her logbook, touching an edge of it to the flame in the lamp and then holding the blazing paper over the gallery rail. The image would collapse into scraps of ash, the wind would take these, and they would vanish before her eyes.

Was friendship what he wanted? All right. She picked up the tin of eggs and led the way toward the kitchen. He carried the bag of food bundled in his arms.

In the kitchen, they laid things on the table, where, somehow, they looked all wrong. “There’s really too much food here for two people,” she said.

“So, I’ll come back tomorrow.” He smiled. He reached for her hand.

She had to laugh.

Then there was a rattle in the air, louder than the sound his bicycle had made. He turned toward it.

“Max!” Her heart began to pound.

She looked around — food spread across the kitchen table, his bag slung on a chair, himself.

“You don’t need me here,” he said, picking up his bag. “I’ll leave this for the two of you to share.” He indicated all the food. “Oh, and here’s your mail. I stopped at the post office yesterday.”

He removed a letter from inside his jacket and set it on the table. From the envelope Sonia could see it was nothing special — a standard correspondence from Agent Harry Lank, her tedious, rule-bound boss. It was addressed impersonally, as always: Keeper, Light Station No. 17, Surplus Is., Malpeque, Prince Edward Is.

Max’s truck sighed and stopped. He’d driven it across the causeway.

She tucked the letter away.

A truck door slammed.

Pete turned to leave.

“Stay,” she said. “You can meet Max, and we’ll all eat together.”

“Not this time.”

Then Max walked in, his head hung low, one arm dangling weirdly outside his shirt, the meaty forearm wrapped in a bloodied, torn-up pillowcase. Sonia recognized the tatted edge that bound his wrist, its pattern unique to the linen that had been their wedding gift from his aunt Lil.

“My God, Max!”

He sank into a chair. “I had an accident clearing brush. Lil saw to the arm. I’m all right now.”

“My God . . .”

“I’m all right!”

He turned toward the stranger standing in his kitchen. He opened his mouth to say, Who in hell are you? But Sonia beat him to it.

“Max, this is Peter Cope from Sea View. One of the oyster-fishing Copes. Peter is a doctor, studying to be a doctor . . . with Cy McRae . . . ”

Pete stepped forward. “Why don’t you let me have a look at that?”

“It’s all right. It’s tied up now. The drive was rough. I banged it up some on the drive is all.”

Sonia crossed her arms. “I bet Lil told you to have that seen to!”

Max stared at Sonia for a moment and set his jaw.

“Didn’t she? Let Pete look.”

As Sonia watched, one man pulled a chair up to the table and took the other man’s hand in his. She blinked and the scene came clear, but still it made no sense: Pete Cope, her new friend, undressing her husband’s sliced-up arm.

“This is an awfully neat cut. How did you say this happened?”

“I said already. I was cuttin’ brush.”

“This cut is from a straight blade, like a folding knife. Saws are serrated. They tear the flesh.”

Pete looked at Max. Max held his gaze. Sonia wasn’t sure what was happening.

Pete rewrapped the arm. “You need stitches.”

“What did you say you were, Cope? A people doctor or a creature doctor?”

Pete stepped away. “Look, I can stitch your arm, but I’ll have to cycle home to get supplies. I want you to keep this wrapped. Don’t move around. You need to keep the arm immobile or it’ll bleed too much.” He turned to Sonia, spoke softly. “Give him whisky, if you have any. But just a little. He’s trouble enough already.”

Max stayed for two full days. He’d parked his truck on the island, snugging it against the station house. He had to wait for low tide to drive back across the causeway. (Spit, Pete had called it: sandbar, tide road, tombolo. He claimed to love the way it vanished and reappeared, like clockwork magic, twice a day. The only way to you, he’d said.)

Surely there were things to do back on the farm, but Max seemed not inclined to leave. “It’s too quiet here,” he complained. “I don’t know how you stand it . . . But it’s good. We need the money . . . Sonny Laybolt took a hundred dollars off-a me at cards last night. How the hell am I gonna buy seed now?”

His arm bled intermittently. Sonia kept the bandage fresh, changing it when necessary with strips torn from a sun-bleached sheet. She cooked the food that Pete had left, but badly. The meat she burned and the potatoes she under-boiled.

A hundred dollars! How could he have lost a hundred dollars at cards? And his arm — was that Sonny Laybolt’s doing too? She pictured a knife, steel grey with a chestnut handle. She wondered what threat or act of violence might have provoked its use.

They ate in silence. They walked the sandy shore. They slept like lonesome strangers, afraid to merge, afraid to part.

Finally, Max went home. Alone again, Sonia began to feel combustible, explosive, as though the molecules that composed her body might suddenly fly apart.

What it was: the possibility Pete might return, now that Max’s truck was no longer visible beside the tower.

And with Max gone, there was the simple pleasure of solitude, the restoration of her daily rhythm and routines, the ease of oats instead of eggs for breakfast.

She told herself Pete would turn up a few days after Max left, not right away.

After a week alone, she began to feel resentment. Had those days together meant so little? Had he been toying with her? Were they not friends after all?

She could walk across the sandbar at low tide, but she had no transportation on the mainland, no way of reaching him, no option but to wait.

It began to seem he wouldn’t ever return, and while it was possible to write a letter, she wasn’t about to.

Tidying up one day, she found the letter Pete had brought. Far from being what she’d imagined — a standard communication from the Department of Transport — it was a reprimand. “You’re on notice,” Agent Lank had written. “Consider this your only warning, Keeper MacAusland.”

She’d missed a crucial coded message the day she left the light to walk with Pete. “C for Charlie” had been broadcast, and she was meant to send a written report on hearing it. Now Agent Lank didn’t trust her — or rather, Max — to mind the light.

Worse, she realized she could no longer trust herself.

FIVE

January 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.

The memorial service made Stella’s disappearance real. For ten days Sonia had been trying to position her daughter’s absence as a magic play. Stella’s Clever Vanishing Trick, she tried to think of it as, a routine Stella would soon complete with a theatrical flourish. Ta-da! Here I am!

But now, as she zipped on a black wool dress, pinned up her hair and slid her feet into pumps, Sonia felt no faith in magic or drama or any other creative force. Stella was gone, and evidently she had made a decision not to return. Having a memorial service imbued this fact with a sickening finality.

It was embarrassing, this proof of her failure as a mother. Her daughter had run away from home.

Of course, publicly no one took this view. Evvie, they whispered, or tragic accident. They were good neighbours. They went to great lengths to make it not her fault.

She entered the church with her two sons and her remaining daughters. Together they walked toward the seats that waited empty for them in the first pew. Dan wore an old suit of his father’s. It fit well, and he wore it unselfconsciously, creating an impression of maturity beyond his twenty-one years. Rob was the opposite. His limbs extended too far beyond his dark trousers and white shirt and his skin was unnaturally pale, as though his body had used all its energy in growing and spared none for general health. Even before Stella disappeared, Rob had seemed ill at ease. Turning fifteen, growing so tall in a short space of time, the social and academic challenges of high school — something had unsettled him.

Behind her brothers, Rose was tall and certain, but Frances held her head slung low like a flower felled by frost. As they walked, a hush came loose — the exhalation of three dozen pairs of healthy lungs at once — an obscene sound.

People shuffled in their seats. The wood of a pew creaked lightly as someone arched her back against it, a familiar Sunday morning sound. For a moment this blameless gesture seemed to ripple outward, through one body, into the next. Then, nothing. Evvie walked in and sat down. The church was nearly full, and the silence in it roused in Sonia a feeling of elaborate suffocation — as though a thousand hands wrapped themselves around her throat in quick succession.

Beside her, Frances dropped.

Mum, she heard, or thought she heard. Automatically, she put out her arms and Frances fell into them.

By now Sonia knew something about the experience of collapse, with its curiously inverted stages. First, you felt that captivating sense of reassurance so familiar from childhood, like the fall toward sleep. Then, instead of feeling imbued with calm, you were overcome with panic. Finally, a wave of nausea hit, and you felt an uncanny tug as some essential part of you was drawn away.

Frances looked relieved, as though she’d managed to escape.

But Sonia felt panic. Her voice wouldn’t work. She was pinned by her daughter’s weight. She could do nothing but look wildly around.

Rob and Dan stood up. Some of the men — men who would have been pallbearers if there had been a casket to carry — came over to help. They carried Frances to the vestibule, where she could wake in privacy, and almost as soon as they set her down, Frances opened her eyes. Sonia watched, a hand on her throat, unsure what to do. Grover Hurry rushed over and began to fan Frances with his large, rough hands, wafting, from the depths of his only suit, odours of rum and egg and the onion-alum pickle he gave away at Christmas. “There you are, my dear,” he said. “There you are now.” Mae Ladner put a hand behind Frances’s back and tilted her body into a half upright position. Sonia moved to kneel beside her. She could see the tiny lines where Mae’s lipstick bled into the sweetly fragrant, soft pink powder she’d dusted on her face. “Mary’s coming with a cup of tea,” Mae said, and Frances nodded.

On the floor beside her daughter, Sonia felt the reassurance that was the beginning of escape. She held her body still in an effort to fend it off. Mae drifted back into the distance next to Grover, who slumped against the door frame, hands stuffed in his pockets.

Sonia watched them closely. She refused to let the uncanny feeling conquer her.

After a moment, Mary Walt floated up. She put a chipped cup full of weak tea cut with milk into Sonia’s hands and held them for a moment so she wouldn’t let it go.

Mary knew how to manage loss: her husband, Walt, had now been gone a year. “Just drink that slowly, dear,” she said. “Take your time.”

Later, Sonia sat like a guest in her own living room while Mary Walt and Marina Cray served tea and biscuits and plates of ham and beans and other things the ladies in the community had brought over. Rose herded the ladies, and bossed them. Frances slid from one room to the next to avoid their sympathetic eyes. Sonia watched her, a blank-eyed girl in a black crepe dress searching for a solitary space.

In the hall mirror, the rooms of the house appeared festive, and they were filled with convivial talk. Kate, so adorable at eighteen months, was at the centre of a group of older neighbours who patted her clumsily, like children themselves, in thrall to someone’s pet. This is how life is somewhere else, Sonia thought, or how it might have been.

Dan and Rob had vanished. To the barn, maybe, with some of the men?

How lovely it would be to be outdoors. Sonia slipped on her coat. Small groups of people lingered on the porch. She wandered among them. Stella, she found herself saying. Frances. Rose.

Then she was sitting on a kitchen chair in a corner of the porch, drinking tea with Eddie Mack. “My dear,” Eddie said, “it’s better for the girls to get on with their lives. It’s what they need to do.”

What had she said to elicit this? She could not think. Moments of her life kept disappearing even as she lived them.

Sonia watched Eddie doctor her tea with liquor from his pocket flask. The gesture he used, a casual splash and a neat little turn, was deeply familiar. For years she’d watched him amend her husband Max’s tea this way. Things were different now. Gradually, in the seven years since Max died, Eddie had converted Sonia into a replacement for his friend. And Sonia colluded with this. She listened when Eddie told her things. She let him come by whenever he wanted. They sat together. Sometimes they played cards.

He was older, but sometimes he depended on her like a child. Help me work this out, he’d say, and the issue might be personal or practical or something to do with the running of his farm. He could have used his own brain, but he didn’t bother if hers was available. He was like a cat, saving energy for the tasks he valued most.

But when he wanted to, he could exert enormous power.

Now she wanted to copy that strength. She sat with her wool coat open and her arms across her knees, leaning over her teacup like a man.

“They didn’t find her, Ed. How can we get on with things when they haven’t found her? We don’t know where she is. She could be anywhere. She could’ve run away.”

According to the police, Stella’s body was in the river, under ice that varied from two to eighteen inches thick and from smooth to slobby.

They had no proof of this at all.

Stella could have run away. Sonia had worked it out. To get to the village she would have needed a ride. The trip to Charlottetown took an hour more, but people went in all the time. If Stella could get to town, she could disappear. Hardly anyone knew them there.

But why would she do it? This was the part Sonia hadn’t been able to understand.

The world they lived in was from a history book, a place apart that neither strife nor progress had reached. Sonia heard news of wars in distant places and her children watched shows on television and listened to the Beatles on the radio, but none of these influences touched them deeply. Sonia had often been startled by change during her own childhood in Montreal. Living with her mother and her grandmother, who kept few secrets, she had been aware from a young age of adult concerns — political matters, domestic disagreement, strained finances. Her children knew a gentler reality. Their daily lives proceeded simply, governed by habits born of poverty but not desperate need. Frances chopped wood for the kitchen stove, Rose helped Sonia grow their food, Dan and Rob ran the farm, and they all worked so hard they fell asleep the minute they hit the bed. They bought clothes from the Eaton’s catalogue on those rare occasions they bought new clothes, but mostly they handed them down. They had plenty. They had good lives, lives they were comfortable with.

“My dear, she didn’t run away.” Eddie had his arms around Sonia now, and he was smoothing back her hair. His voice had grown unnaturally soft, as though he were trying to calm a frightened child.

“We have to find her, Ed.”

What could Eddie say? Sonia knew as well as he did that the ice and tides would scour out the river. Either Stella’s body would be caught up on the riverbank in spring or it would be carried out to sea.

Unless she had run away.

“My dear,” said Eddie, and he kissed the top of Sonia’s aching head.

She woke up in the night, remembering the service. She’d dreamed Stella was there, watching from the back of the church, then walking up the aisle and touching all the flowers. Such extravagant flowers, lilies and roses, astonishing in winter. Stella bent to take them in her arms.

It was nearly morning and Sonia’s light was on. She’d left it on all night.

At bedtime she had behaved childishly, complaining about the funeral. Memorial, Rose had corrected, not funeral.

Sonia ignored this. No word could change the terrible finality that pained her so hard that day.

“It isn’t right to have a funeral if your child isn’t dead,” she’d said. “No one knows for sure what happened.” She twisted the edges of the sheets around her hands like bandages, turning her fists into stiff white knots.

SIX

Stella ran away.

But Rose said, “Mum, Stella is drawn to water. She can’t help herself. Remember that seal?”

The week before she disappeared, Stella had been obsessed with a seal cow that came into the yard. The seal was lost, but it seemed miraculous to Stella, a massive sea creature on dry land. She’d crawled up from the river in the night, alternately rolling like a tipped pint of cream and pulling herself forward with her powerful flippers. You could see the track she’d made around the yard, a wide ribbon of packed snow, wavery and lustrous as a slug trail. She looked boneless, her tapered body fattest in the middle, her thick skin smooth and moistly shiny from a distance. Close up, you could see the fear in her big dark eyes.

Seeing that look was what made Sonia think of telephoning out for help. First she called Kip Creamer, the veterinarian in Montague. Then, at his suggestion, she called Clem Sweet, a biology professor at the university. Dr. Sweet said, “Get her in a truck and take her to the shore.” That made sense. Rob and Dan herded her to the truck and then lured her up a plywood ramp with a piece of salt cod on a string. Sonia watched her through the rear window of the cab, her liquid look of fear melting to entreaty, then dulling into hopelessness as they drove.

When the seal was in the yard, everyone came outdoors to look. Frances watched it intently, every bit the scientist she yearned to be. Rose crumpled her face in disgust or fear. “Get it away!” Stella, who’d come over from her own house, fixated on the oddness of seeing a water-loving animal on land. She kept laughing over that. “Poor thing, she’s out of her element!” Stella would say, and hoist baby Kate high into the air to look down at the seal. It was as though the circus had come around. No one got to work until late, and Stella grew giddy with the idea of creatures switching elements.

Sometimes it seemed Stella was entirely bereft of common sense. Why couldn’t she have been more careful? Why didn’t she test the ice? Why did she go down to the river in the first place? She was contrary — that was the problem. With Stella, everything had to be upside down and backwards. Sonia thought of smashing the ice, of it coming apart in her hands, of hauling Stella out and Stella wanting to climb in again. She’d been so obstinate as a child.

And the ice itself was perverse. Some of it was lolly, the police had said.

Lolly makes a shushing, roaring sound. Sonia knew from childhood. Soft ice, it’s called, but in fact it’s sharp, not soft at all. You would think it would be cold, but being in it’s warm, toasty warm. You can’t skate over it like sheet ice or swim in it like water. It’s sticky and surprisingly difficult to move through. It builds up on objects that are immersed in it. If it built up on the eyes it would cloud your vision. It’s a slobby, slushy, sludgy veil, and it runs much deeper than you would imagine.

The seal cow barked and bared her teeth when they stopped the truck beside the wharf. Rob and Dan let down the gate, and she drove at them so that they backed away, and then she flung herself from the bed of the truck before they had a chance to rig up the plywood ramp. They heard her muscular belly scrape across the snow as she flippered to the ice.

Stella’s belly was soft from having given birth to Kate, and looked deflated, like over-risen bread dough. It was the belly of a person who belonged at home, beside the oil stove, with her baby in her arms.

Sonia tried not to picture Stella slipping through the ice, but all she could see was how the jagged edges would have cut into Stella’s hands.

If only they’d been there, Rob and Dan could have saved her with some simple object from the truck — a rope or a board or a blanket.

The seal sped up when she reached the ice. She tipped her face toward the sky and bawled, as though to say, I’m home, this icy plane is home. Then, with a crash, she broke right through — and immediately grew graceful, as though her body had turned into water too.

SEVEN

When Sonia woke again, it was to the sound of Frances bickering with Rose. “Shhh,” Rose hissed. “You’ll wake up Kate!”

Sonia put on her dressing gown. Someone had brought the flowers from the church. The house was filled with them. Daffodils with curved leaves sharp as harrow teeth, blooms still tightly folded inside their dry brown paper wrappers. Lilies bright as saviours. Gaudy mixed bouquets. Sonia watched as Rose flitted from one bunch to another, smelling, touching. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder where these absurdly out-of-season flowers had come from, and why anyone would imagine they’d be worth the expense.

At the stove, Rose unwrapped the paper from a bunch of white narcissi, releasing an explosion of acrid stench. Frances snapped, “Forget it, Rose!”

Didn’t Rose see? Flowers weren’t going to help.

Against Rose’s protests, Sonia gathered the bouquets from their bottles and vases and lugged them dripping out behind the barn to the oil drum Dan burned garbage in.

For a moment she was tempted to touch the cold metal drum with her wet, bare hands. Her fingertips would stick, and she’d rip them away. Then, for a fraction of a second, a searing pain would relieve the anxiety, the dragging emptiness and the aches she could not seem to escape. But the relief wouldn’t last.

She could almost see the flowers shrivelling in the biting cold.

Stella had been passionate about the fragrance of flowers. Because of her damaged eyesight she liked to pretend that she could perform feats of extraordinary perception with her other senses. She would listen intently. And she could walk in the door and name the ingredients of a cooking meal. Pot roast with carrots and celery and summer savoury she’d announce. Cod with bread crumbs baked on it, and did someone just make tea? Sometimes she could say who had been to visit. Is that Mae’s face powder? Was Cece here, sopping bread in milk again?

Reminded that shutting out one sense intensifies the others, hopeful that in some way she might connect with her absent daughter, Sonia closed her eyes —

But the stink of daffodils and the metallic tang of cold was all she got.

When Sonia came back into the kitchen, her hands and face stiff with cold, Rose was setting out the breakfast things and the stove was spitting hard. Rose had crammed the firebox with birch. Sonia warmed her hands over the stove, then lifted the lid and stirred the fire until it settled.

“Sit down, Mum,” Rose said. She dished up eggs, made tea, laid out jam and butter, sliced a loaf of Mary Walt’s good bread for toast.

Frances sat too and they focused on their breakfast. “I’m going to clean the house,” Rose said. Sonia nodded and buttered and for a moment she felt relief. Yes, she thought. Work is the answer. An animal in harness has no past, only present. Life is easier that way.

The porch door slammed. Rob and Dan, coming in from the barn. Noisily, they kicked off their boots, and in Rose’s room, Kate woke up crying. Rose snapped her fingers. “Come on, Frances! We have a lot to do.” Sonia watched Rose turn to go to Kate, and her sons strode by, bright cheeks flaming and the bitter scent of frost falling from their clothes.

How she envied them their outdoor lives. She would have traded shovelling manure and milking cows for household chores. She would have bagged and stored grain and graded potatoes. She would have hauled and carried and sweated and built. She would have treasured those tasks for the escape they offered from the house, with its stifling, corrosive and unmovable burden of pain. But she knew the boys didn’t really want her in their barn.

And of course there was no escaping the pain, which followed her wherever she chose to go.

Later, the kitchen was warm and the only sound the mumbling of the fire. Kate lay curled on the couch, Rose beside her. Sonia stood at the sink with her hands immersed in oily dishwater, that barking seal slipping away, submerging again and again and again. The image chattered on her mind like a movie jammed in a broken film projector.

“Mum? Hello!” Rose snapped her fingers and waved her hands in front of Sonia’s face. “Mum. Hey. Where did you go?”

Sonia felt the lurch of panic. What was wrong?

February 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.

When the weather returned to normal, Rose wanted everyone to drag their disrupted lives back to normal too.

Rose said they should establish a routine for Kate. All along, the boys had kept to their daily schedules; the animals required food and care, so Rob and Dan had no choice in this. But Frances and Sonia had allowed themselves to become lost, Rose said. Who is responsible for Kate? she asked Frances, within Sonia’s hearing. Who’s taking over the chores Mum used to do? She spoke as if her mother wasn’t there. So far, Rose and Frances hadn’t worked these questions out. They simply stumbled in a haphazard manner from one moment to the next, allowing chaos to build up like snow around the house.

It was not possible to let things slide. Heat depended on splitting kindling and getting in wood. Meals required homemade bread and soup or beans or salt beef brought up from a barrel in the wellhouse, then thawed, rinsed off, drained and cooked. Someone had to gather eggs, start oatmeal porridge simmering on the stove, set the bread. Someone had to soak and wash the clothes and linens and all Kate’s things. These had to be put through the mangle, as it was so accurately called, and hung out on the line and then brought in to defrost and be ironed dry.

In addition to all this, Frances was missing school, and Rose had abandoned her correspondence course in secretarial.

Weeks of disorder had built up in the house before Rose spoke. Now she pointed out clothes and toys strewn around, Kate crying all the time, the boys complaining there was no tea, no food. Rob wanted clean thermal shirts and socks. They’d run out of butter, flour, salt. The floors were dirty, the towels musty, the porch awash in mud.

Recovery seemed impossible to Sonia, but Rose was more pragmatic. She made a list, assigning tasks and issuing orders her mother and sister weren’t always up to following.

EIGHT

We’ve grown apart from one another, Sonia thought, and our lives are so different from how they were before.

Even at night the boys were in the barn, never in the house. Frances became silent, and Rose cultivated a jangled, forced jollity that everyone but Kate ran from.

Most days, after cleaning up the breakfast things, Rose would lie on the kitchen couch and cuddle Kate. She’d sing a little ditty and twirl her finger on Kate’s small, fat palm.

Until they’d worked out some more permanent arrangement with Evvie, Sonia, Rose and Frances were supposed to share in looking after Kate. This was what Frances and Rose had decided. But the way it turned out, Rose managed all the daily baby care — diapers and feedings and crying jags — and she played with Kate too, or pretended to.

Even as they lolled on the couch, Rose kept her arm tensed between Kate’s tiny, mobile body and the edge. Kate didn’t notice that Rose was obsessively on guard. Her fat little fingers stuck out at all angles like starfish limbs and she laughed with her mouth opened wide.

Sometimes it seemed wrong to Sonia that Kate spent more time with Rose than anyone else, but mostly she felt relief. It was so long since she’d cared for a small child that she felt uncertain what to do — she could not be solely responsible. And it was apparent this arrangement was good for Rose. Caring for Kate filled some need she had, or salved some guilt.

March 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.

While Rose looked after Kate, Sonia used the phone to call the RCMP. What had they learned since Stella ran away? She called the train station, the taxi company in the city, the few friends Stella had in high school and hadn’t mentioned since, the city police, the hospitals.

Without these tasks, she had no reason to get up.

Yet sometimes she didn’t get up.

Sometimes she forgot her role and wandered like a ghost, not changing from her nightgown, not eating more than toast and tea, hardly speaking, even when addressed directly. Rose and Frances brought her meals on a tray. Eddie Mack came by, her neighbour Marina Cray, a few other ladies. Sonia didn’t get up for any of them. “She needs her rest,” she heard Marina say. “Just give her time.”

Loudly, Rose complained, “But that’s what we’ve been doing.”

Some days she was absent — she couldn’t help it. She was somewhere else, just as Rose had said.

NINE

Time passed. Sonia couldn’t say how much.

Her daughters milled around uncertainly, or made repetitive suggestions about getting on with things. They annoyed one another — she noticed this.

She noticed sound — too high, too low, too loud. Or no sound. Nothing, nothing, nothing, for hours on end. She noticed pain in her limbs, her chest. Her heart ached. Why did she have such intense physical pain?

She noticed the surfaces of things. Their flatness and lack of depth, the dullness of their colours.

She noticed the hardness of her bed, the dryness of toast, the tastelessness of tea.

She noticed quiet, quiet, quiet, like a raging noise. And the inescapability of the central question: Why?

“You have to get up, Mum,” Rose said. “You have to get outside.”

Was there some way in which this terrible grief was helpful?

Sonia leaned on the hope that it was healing, necessary, the way a scab is necessary to protect new tissue growing underneath.

Were they growing stronger? Did their hearts only appear to be wrecked beyond repair?

Sonia could not imagine ever feeling calm again. Her heart beat too fast. All the time she felt anxious and overwhelmed.

Rose screamed in the woodshed — not the house — so Kate wouldn’t be alarmed. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn you all to hell!

Sonia heard. Dan and Rob heard, though they pretended not to. Frances must have heard, from her room at the back of the house.

And what did the boys do, to express their pain?

They were hardly around, they barely spoke, so Sonia could only imagine.

What she remembers of those hellish weeks: Rose became absorbed in looking after Kate. Frances returned to school and poured herself into her studies. Rob and Dan wired the barn. Was this their way of moving on? Out there with their rolls of black, cloth-covered line, each with a pocket full of staples and a hammer in his hand. The deliberate way they’d have to work: selecting each staple by its rounded — not its double-pointed — end; carefully positioning it around the wire; hammering the staple without denting the wire, without piercing its fabric skin or copper core.

Less productively, Sonia huddled in her room — desperate, sleepless, lost to everyone. She felt as though she too had gone away.

She tried to imagine Stella coming home. What would bring her back?

But there was never any news, and Sonia could not imagine a way out of her dark, solitary cave.

Sometimes she felt tormented by a feeling of responsibility for Stella’s disappearance.

Had she paid enough attention to Stella?

In her memory, she turns her back on her daughter, annoyed (annoyed!) by the troubles in her life, made impatient by her constant need for help: Stella’s washer won’t start, her head aches, her bread won’t rise, a cupboard door keeps getting jammed, the flour bin has fallen apart. Small things bother Stella too much, tiny problems she could solve herself. Mum? she says, her voice pathetically low and mild, her expression pleading, tentative. Mum?

You are grown up, Sonia wants to remind her, married.

She’d wanted to deny her child. Again and again she’d turned away, ignored her pleas, pretended not to hear.

She’d come to believe Stella needed to learn how to help herself. It was the wrong approach. But in the chaos of the moment, she could not see far enough ahead.

All through those weeks, Sonia kept her bedroom door closed to contain the torment, to quiet the scrabbling in her mind. She was like a squirrel in a box trap — climbing the walls, smashing the lamps — or she was a nightie-clad wraith in a terrible race, chasing memory, fleeing guilt.

October 1939. Pointe d’Espoir, Quebec.

A sunless day — balmy, still, the world enclosed in colourless vapour as familiar and moderate as breath.

Sonia was picking cranberries in the clearing, marvelling at the extent of their chromatic range (vermilion, orange, yellow, celery, cream), and everywhere glistening beads of fallen fog (subtle, watery tints, berylline through glaucous grey), when suddenly out of the silence a motorboat drew up and cut its engine at the slip. After a time she saw her father’s hand lantern go bobbing down the cliffside path. She gathered her bowl of berries and headed back toward the house. Daniel would expect a meal to offer whomever he brought up from the river.

She’d lived with her father at his lighthouse station in Pointe d’Espoir, Quebec, since completing school in early spring. After fifteen years with her mother and sisters at her grandparents’ home in Montreal, only visiting her father on holidays, she asked for the chance to try out as assistant lighthouse keeper. Daniel promised he would teach her everything a keeper ought to know. Only after she moved in did she discover he had been humouring her with this promise. He did not reveal to the Department of Transport that she was living at the station. “DOT won’t pay for an assistant keeper at Pointe d’Espoir,” he said when she pressed him to explain. “It’s such a simple light to run.”

Though not simple enough for Sonia, apparently.

At first she didn’t care. She had her dyes and a supply of wool.

But then Max arrived, and everything changed.

The first time Sonia saw Max, she was taken with his sandy hair and brows, frosted sugar-white in places from sun. His pale blue eyes bored right into her. For a moment she was frightened of his gaze. Then she decided he was merely anxious, and not much older than she was — nineteen, maybe twenty. She looked more closely. His mouth was broad, and his smile as lively as a strand of kelp dancing on an August sea. He wore a hand-knit scarf and toque, an oiled slicker like her father’s, and underneath an expertly knitted, un-dyed sweater of a plain design, a worn blue flannel shirt. His clothing spoke of thrift and maternal care. Sonia asked who knitted for him. His mother made his things, he said. Her name was Nova Byrne MacAusland. Nova, Sonia thought, studying the sweater, I would like to meet you.

Daniel introduced Max carelessly to Sonia as a member of the crew of the lightvessel Brilliant, the floating beacon moored permanently in dangerous shallows opposite Cap-aux-Morts. Then he outlined a plan. He would take the motorboat downriver to repair a broken lamp on Brilliant; Max would remain behind to mind Daniel’s light.

In later years Sonia’s memory of the fury she felt then mellowed somewhat, but she never did forget. A fiery feeling like a blend of flame and tar, thick and sticky, burning hot, had filled her lungs. She saw black. She was assistant keeper. She was!

But there was no point in trying to discuss a thing with Daniel. There never had been. Even as a child she knew better than to ask her father twice for something. Maybe just hardened into No. Daniel’s decisions were his own, and they were always final.

She busied herself with domestic chores, stoking the wood stove and making chowder from cans of milk and clams. There was relief in familiar work, in slamming pots and sticks of wood around — and in testing the limits of Daniel’s temper. She could be as bloody-minded as her father, he would see.

She tried to listen as Max explained to Daniel the problem with the optic on the lightship. “Spray of fuel,” “line” and “spring” were the only words she heard. Every other sound was drowned out by the roar of anger and disappointment in her ears. Why would her father never trust her to do work she’d proved herself amply capable of? In wartime, women took on many more complex jobs than this one Sonia held informally. Soon, women the world over would assume significant responsibilities. Sonia knew this for a fact because she read the paper from Montreal, whenever her father or the supply truck driver remembered to bring it with him.

She burned the biscuits, but neither Max nor Daniel appeared to notice. While they ate, she swept the floor around them, banging their shins with the broom. Then she went upstairs to pack her father’s bag. “Only two days on the water,” he said happily when he came up. “All I really need is my slicker and a couple of pairs of dry wool socks!” He rubbed her back as she folded socks, and her anger began to melt away. Daniel adored an adventure; she could not begrudge him this rare chance to escape his station chores. She packed his Thermos, three apples from the cellar and the bar of chocolate she’d been saving from her mother’s latest care package. Her father would be fine, and she’d sort out Max MacAusland somehow.

When Daniel had gone, Max did something in the engine room while in the kitchen Sonia filled an old jam kettle with boiling water and powdered dye to soak a skein of wool. She stirred the mass with a driftwood stick, lifting it from the dye bath every thirty seconds to see what colour she’d achieved. She knew wool looked three shades darker wet than it would dry. She aimed for something close to navy, hoping to achieve a blue with both depth and light. When the dye had taken, she added vinegar as a mordant, then rinsed the wool in clear fresh water, rinsed, and rinsed again. She rolled it in an old piece of flannel to draw the water out. Slowly, carefully, she spread its heavy strands along a broomstick that hung from the rafters of the whistle house and left it there to dry.

Outside, the wind was up. It was colder now. What had her father taken on, going downriver in such changeable weather?

For supper she plucked and stewed the hen Daniel had killed that morning. She cooked cranberries with honey, boiled turnip and potatoes and opened a jar of pickles from the pantry.

“Do you always eat this well?” Max said when he was served.

Was that an accusation of some kind? “This is how we eat when I cook a hen.”

“On the ship,” he said, smiling as he ate his chicken, “we only have a hot plate, so it’s cans of stuff or nothing.”

Sonia poured the tea.

“You’re lucky here, you know,” he said. “On the ship — well, here you have — ”

She sighed. She looked out at the water.

Since leaving school, Max said, he’d been living aboard Brilliant. The primitive, crowded conditions (five other men worked Brilliant) and the decrepitude of the vessel with its coal-burning generator and its temperamental gas-fuelled lamps made life on board an especially monstrous kind of hell. Max wanted to get some experience on a station light, then find a station of his own.

He hoped, he admitted, for a recommendation from an older keeper, like Daniel Greer . . .

Of course you do, she thought.

She knew her father would never recommend her to DOT if he recommended this ambitious young man.

What Max wanted from lightkeeping was not what Sonia wanted. The solitude and the importance of the work appealed to her. No one needed pictures — not in the way they needed water, air or food — but if that lamp did not stay lit, fishermen would die.

Max only wanted a job. Almost any job would have sufficed. But lightkeeping was all he knew.

She closed her eyes and he began to enumerate the things he’d said he loved about the station (woods, house, food). She went to the oven for the biscuits, dumped them in their basket and sat down again.

“Would you like some butter?” In spite of the tea, her mouth felt dry as paper.

“It’s a lovely meal,” he said. “A very lovely meal.”

They ate in silence after that.

She left the table before her plate was clean, to get another stick of wood to brighten up the fire. The woodbox in the porch was empty, so she went out to the woodpile on the lee side of the house. By the time she made it back into the kitchen, Max had vanished into the tower again.

She spent the evening working near her bedroom window, bathed in intermittent light — coloured wool illuminated every twenty seconds by the turning of the lamp’s occulting lens.

The abstract picture she was making drew from skies she’d watched out the windows of the lighthouse tower, and from horizon lines she’d studied in all kinds of light. She’d traced lines on paper to record the play of shapes she liked, she’d meticulously prepared the dyes, she’d spun the wool herself, and now she threaded lengths of saturated colour onto a canvas frame she’d built. She knotted the wool in places, loosened it in others. She smoothed it to emphasize its sheen, or she encouraged its halo to flare out. She added one colour — another, another.

In this way, hours passed.

Sonia woke as usual at six. The morning was cold. She dressed and went straight downstairs to build up the fire in the kitchen stove and put water on to boil. Max was asleep on the kitchen couch, fully dressed, covered with his coat. He woke when she dropped the lifter on the stove. “Funny how you miss the pitch and roll,” he said, rubbing a hand across his eyes. “Feels like I barely got to sleep.”

She began to prepare a pot of tea, a plate of toast and boiled eggs. “Porridge?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She filled a bowl with oats from the pot on the back of the stove, added brown sugar and fresh cream.

“I could get used to this,” he said, grinning as he spooned his porridge up.

After breakfast, she went outside to do her chores. She started up the tower stairs. Then, halfway, she turned around, compelled by a vision of the jewel-like skein of cerulean lambswool hanging in the whistle house. What did it matter if she didn’t do her chores? Her father had put him in charge.

A ragged gust wrenched the door of the whistle house from her hand. She had to lean against it to push it closed. She looked around, collecting evidence the wind was up: whitecaps on the river, flattened weeds in the meadow, the big trees near the bank waving freely, as though trying to escape their roots.

She wondered, Is the wind this bad in Cap-aux-Morts?

Sonia worried about her father whenever he was away. Every trip downriver, it seemed to her, would be his last. Daniel Greer was a skilful mechanic and electrician, regularly called upon to do repairs at other stations. But on the water he was a nightmare — clumsy in the boat, terrible at navigation and prone to losing oars (or, if in a motorboat, forgetting to gas up). As soon as he had said he was required at Cap-aux-Morts, she’d felt sick. He would not come back. Sometimes she knew important things this way. She hoped they wouldn’t happen, but she hoped against a kind of certain knowledge, only so the inevitable wouldn’t disappoint as much. Already she missed her father’s whistle and his sandpapery singing voice. As she pumped up the air compressor, she counted to distract her mind. Then she oiled and polished the diaphone with a soft old chamois, collected the skein of sky blue wool and closed the whistle house, walked out to the little vented weather box in the clearing and read the wind and temperature gauges bolted to an iron post inside.

Max was passed out on the couch again when she came back into the kitchen. Had he not seen to the light after all? She turned around and ran up the tower stairs.

In the lantern room, she opened up the keeper’s log and made a note.

October 22. Visitor to station — Max MacAusland, off Lightvessel No. 2. Sky slightly overcast, storm cloud moving in from N. Wind N-NE. 38 degrees. Primed foghorn compressor, oiled piston on resonator, polished lens and —

Here she paused and looked around. The storm panes were rimed with salt spray. — washed storm panes, she wrote. Head keeper still away.

Taking up a linen cloth, she polished every prism of the lens. She fetched a bucket of water from the wellhouse to wash the heavy windowpanes and counted out the tower steps on her way back up. There were eighteen, a bearable number. Nearly every day her father said a little laughing prayer of thanks for the small stature of their tower, which rested on a cliff two hundred and eighty feet above the sea. Hauling gear up from the water was arduous work, but getting supplies to the station was not. Most came by truck from Montreal to neighbour Clément Dionne’s farm. M. Dionne helped Daniel and Sonia, loading forty-five-gallon drums of fuel and boxes of supplies onto the trailer he hauled wood in, then using his team of Clydesdales, Babette and Belle, to tow the trailer down the eleven-mile logging road that ended near their isolated station. For this trouble, and a barrel of beef, Daniel paid Dionne forty dollars a year. Sometimes M. Dionne came by with bottles of fresh cream and blocks of salted butter. He had a sideshow look: enormous shoulder muscles and a funny handlebar moustache. But he was kind as well as strong. If anything happened to Daniel, he would help.

Back downstairs, she collected the skein of wool she’d left in the porch, snuck past the sleeping man on her kitchen couch and climbed another eighteen steps, up to her attic workroom. Here, on a level with the lighthouse lamp, were all the colours she’d copied so carefully from life.

“Your fingers are blue!” Max had said when she passed his plate to him. “It’s not poison? This isn’t from the light?”

She shivered. From her mother she’d heard stories of the keepers’ wives on isolated stations who’d lost their minds — not from the isolation, but from the brain poison, mercury, which the husbands carried in their blood and passed into the bodies of their yielding wives.

But the optic at Pointe d’Espoir did not revolve in a mercury bath.

“What is this blue?” He touched her fingertips.

“Just colour.”

Later, she would wonder what prevented her from answering his question properly. Was it instinct? Or the voice of Mme Chevalier echoing in the art room? Don’t let anyone take this away from you, she used to say. People will try. They’ll say other things matter more. But, girls, this is not true! Art nourishes the soul. Without it, we cannot be complete.

Mme Chevalier had been her own person, like no one Sonia had ever met.

By supper, the wind had shifted again. She studied the sky and checked the gauges in the weather box. Every hour she climbed the tower stairs to look out over the river and make note of any changes in the log.

1 p.m. Wind direction N-NE. Fresh breeze. Gusts to 50 knots

2 p.m. Light rain. Water choppy.

3 p.m. Wind N. 40 knots, gusts to 60.

4 p.m. No change.

5 p.m. Wind 40 knots, N-NE. Gusts to 80. Brief hail. Water very rough. Lamp at St-Ange-sur-Mer in sight — visibility reduced. 33 degrees, temper-ature falling.

Whenever the ecclesiastical light at St-Ange-sur-Mer disappeared from view, Daniel started up the horn. She would have to do that soon.

Reheating meat from the bird she’d stewed the day before, she paused to wonder where Max had gone. Surely he wasn’t upstairs in their private family quarters, and she herself had been in and out of the lighthouse all day. That left the whistle house. But why would he be in the whistle house?

Then she realized she’d forgotten to start the horn. She pulled on her boots and jacket in a rush.

She found Max sitting on the concrete floor of the whistle house, surrounded by compressor engine parts. “I just flipped the switch to turn it on,” he said. “Nothing happened.”

“It’s fussy after it’s been oiled, but nothing’s broken — at least, nothing was broken.” Sonia pulled her jacket closed against the cold, and studied the parts laid out in lines across the floor. “Look, if you can get it back together inside twenty minutes, I won’t have to send a radio message out. Just come and get me when it’s fixed. I’ll start it this time!”

She turned and left. Transforming leftover chicken into dinner suddenly seemed an unimportant chore.

The foghorn blasted as she bent toward the stove. She felt its prolonged moan as a pressure in her chest. This close, you didn’t merely hear the warning: it became a part of you.

Max appeared a few minutes after the foghorn blew, grease-covered and grinning hard.

“You can wash up here,” she said. “Supper’s ready.” She poured warm kettle water over his hands, and he scrubbed with the yellow soap her mother regularly sent down from Montreal.

“Thank you,” he said. He sat on the couch. Then, right away, he jumped up and rummaged in his bag. “Would you like to share?” In his grease-stained hands he held a bottle of dark wine. Vin de table, France, the label read, in ornate script. No one in her family drank alcohol, so wine was an enticing mystery. And getting scarce, she’d heard, since the war in Europe had begun.

She had made a hash of potatoes fried with onions, gravy and chicken. Also a salad of Brussels sprouts dressed with vinegar and bacon. Later they could have cheese and apples from the cellar. While she set out plates, he opened the wine and poured it into teacups.

They talked and ate as they drank, but for Sonia it was the revelation of the bright-tasting wine that would stand out in her memory. That, and the devastation he enacted on her romantic picture of the lightship.

She’d seen the floating beacon glimmer on the water many times, on her way to town. She never thought white for danger, as a mariner would. She loved the way it shone, luminescence spreading out in concentric circles from the ship. It was brighter than the Christmas lights in Montreal.

“It isn’t pretty on board,” he said. “The ship’s a thousand years old, and the crew is a bunch of hooligans.”

She tipped her cup back. Only to be conversational, she asked their names.

“Huh.” He drew a breath. “Mathieu’s the oldest. Everyone calls him Goose. He’s worked on lightships for twenty years. He says he has a family in Montreal, but he never seems to visit them. On leave, he always heads straight for Rivière-du-Loup. Whatever he’s got going on there . . . Well, Goose is quite a character . . . ” He filled her cup. “Gilles is our fireman. He comes from Chicoutimi. You wouldn’t know he’s a Quebecker, his English is so good. Goose says Gilles was a Department of Transport bureaucrat who got caught dipping into the petty cash . . . René is six foot six, with straight black hair. It sticks out all over his head like a chimney brush. He’s from up near Chibougamau and speaks an incomprehensible joual, so we don’t talk much. Étienne works the engine room. He comes from Chibougamau also. I call him Mosquito because he whines.”

Sonia laughed.

“Maggot is a crazy anglo Montrealer. He used to pilot barges down the river, but one night he got into a brawl. He lost the fight and can’t see straight anymore. He shouldn’t be on a lightship, either, with that handicap, but he memorized the eye chart for his test . . . so . . . ”

It was her turn to speak, but she could not think of what to say. Was this catalogue of criminality Max’s life?

Of course it was. Of course these were the kind of men who worked on lightships. And Max was one of them. For a moment her brain throbbed like a hammered thumb. She was alone with this man.

How had he come to be working on that ship? And if it was so awful, why did he stay?

But she couldn’t articulate her questions. Her tongue was wool. Instead of a response, she decided, she’d simply smile.

He filled her cup.

Alone in her room, Sonia sipped the last of the delicious wine. She felt a pleasant whirling feeling. She looked out at the water. She could see whitecaps on the river where the lantern beam played across the waves. Soon it would be time for bed. She yawned. Lay down. Max MacAusland would see to the light . . .

The first thing Sonia knew when she woke up was that something had gone very wrong. She rubbed her eyes and listened. It was unusually quiet. The light inside her room was blue. Slowly it dawned on her that this was because the windows were iced over.

She stumbled into overalls, a flannel shirt and her warmest double-knit wool sweater.

In the kitchen, Max’s couch was empty, the fire almost out. She threw a handful of kindling and a birch stick on the failing fire, pulled on her jacket, boots and mitts.

She found Max in the lantern room, writing in the log. “That was a bad one, eh?” he said.

He shouldn’t be writing in my log, she thought, enraged.

Then she read his entry.

Gale-force winds overnight. Hurricane? Temp. 26 degrees at 8 a.m. Foghorn on all night. Scraped panes at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. Several station buildings damaged. Peapod boat smashed on slip. Windborne ice scraped paint off tower.

She looked at Max. His eyes were dull, his hair was lank. “Were you up all night?”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s my job.”

“Which buildings were damaged?”

“That rickety little one out back? I guess it’s gone.”

“The henhouse? Oh my God!”

“Do you mean to say you slept through all of that?”

“What do you mean you guess the henhouse is gone?”

“I mean, I never really noticed it was a henhouse. It’s definitely gone.”

She put the logbook on the shelf and went down the tower stairs. If the henhouse was gone, how had the lightship fared? Why was Max not worried about her father and the lightship crew? She wrenched open the tower door, slammed it closed. She walked around and behind the house, tracking snow as she went. The chicken coop was gone.

Instinctively, helplessly, she began to run. The mossy trail to the weather box no longer felt like a pillow underfoot. The ground was frozen in places. She picked up a small branch that had fallen across the path. The loss of the henhouse — not even a feather left — prompted a vision of all the eiderdown she’d gathered with her father on L’Île des Oeufs that spring. Three flour bags full: a fat handful out of every sea duck nest. Daniel had taken two dozen duck eggs, a dozen for them and a dozen for Clément Dionne. The bags of down had fetched fifteen dollars each.

Near the weather box, she slid on a patch of ice, righted herself, and saw again the snowy, empty space where the henhouse used to be. They had to radio out, she realized. They could send a message to the station at Cap-aux-Morts, across the river from Brilliant. She turned and strode back along the trail, toward the tower. How had she slept through such a storm? Her head ached. Her father was gone.

She couldn’t make the radio work. Her voice went out — at least, she thought it did — but no one spoke back. All she heard was interference. Perhaps the battery was dead? She unhooked it and connected the spare. This changed nothing.

Max walked in to find her slumped in front of the radio, tugging at her hair. “That isn’t going to work today,” he said. “The VHF antenna’s fallen down.”

Sonia stood. “Can we fix it?”

“Yes. But not without some wire rope.”

She threw her arms into the air. “So we’ll rig up something temporary.”

“I’ll look at it. Why don’t you get some breakfast?” He held out the small fir branch she had carried from the woods, wrapped, she saw now, with a length of the bright yarn she seemed always to have in her pocket.

“Is this yours?”

The smell of fir oil represented comfort and stability to Sonia. At Christmas her mother and sisters would come to the station from the home in Montreal that they shared with Grandma Murray. Daniel would chop a fir tree, Mairi and the girls would decorate it, and for a few days there would be laughter and conversation in the house. None of this would have been possible in Brighid Murray’s house. Nor would it ever be possible to sustain past the three or four carefree days of Christmas. Mairi almost couldn’t stand to stay that long. Even to Sonia, who didn’t want to see it, her mother’s antipathy toward the light station, and its single-minded keeper, was all too obvious.

She filled the porridge pot and set it on the stove. She picked up her mother’s wooden spoon and heard her father say, If you’re going to live life, expect loss. She dropped the spoon into the pot, slipped on her boots and ran back out to the engine room.

He turned around fast, surprised.

“Aren’t you desperate to know that the lightship survived the storm?” she demanded. “Aren’t you worried about your friends on board? I am worried about my father!” Her voice was high and pleading. It seemed to reverberate in her skull: a scary, foreign sound.

“Sonia . . . ” He sighed and set down the bent antenna and the pliers he’d been using. “I’ve been on board that lightship in worse blow-downs than this. The ship is anchored in four places. It would have bounced around on the water all night and made the crew feel sick, but I’m certain that’s the worst that happened. Don’t worry. We’ll send a message out when I get this set of tin sticks fixed.”

She sank against the concrete wall. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“I promise you.”

He fiddled with the radio antenna all morning long. Finally he got a message out to Malcolm Jeffrey, the keeper at Cap-aux-Morts, who said he would relay a message to Daniel Greer on Brilliant. Now they simply had to wait for a response.

Over supper, he plied her with questions about her life at school in Montreal and about her sisters. She allowed herself not to worry.

She closed her eyes and listened to his almost familiar voice, with its soothing, faintly Gaelic lilt, only slightly more pronounced than her father’s. All the lighthouse keepers in Quebec were Scottish, or of Scottish descent. She allowed this frivolous coincidence to reassure her.

Now she felt at rest somehow, released from the pressure of a burden she hadn’t realized she carried. This was just like when they’d drunk the wine. She believed it was an abdication of responsibility to relax when she had not yet heard from her father. But it felt good to relinquish this anxiety.

Daniel was okay: Max had promised her.

Max carried his plate to the sink and stopped to watch her as she cut a slice of ginger cake. She smiled. She couldn’t help it: he was leaning over her and grinning. She raised an eyebrow, and composed her mouth into a questioning crescent, but he said nothing. She smiled some more, like an idiot. She was an idiot. An abdicating idiot. She didn’t care. She looked at him. She looked away. When she looked back, his expression had changed. So confident a moment earlier, now it revealed a stormy interior battle between eagerness and doubt. “Have some ginger cake,” she said, stepping decisively outside the radiant sphere of energy their bodies suddenly seemed to generate.

When she came down into the kitchen at nine o’clock to make a cup of tea, she found him slumped on the couch with an old newspaper in his hand. He wasn’t reading. He looked fretful and concerned.

Why did I believe him, she wondered, just because he used the word promise?

But then he looked up, and smiled, and her fear dissolved again. She said, “Would you like some tea?” She wanted his company.

“Will you stay to drink it with me?”

“Of course I will.”

“Then I want tea.”

They sat together on the narrow, backless couch long past the time the tea grew cold. He described the pod of whales he’d seen from the tower gallery, awe enlivening his voice. “We rarely see whales as far downriver as Brilliant.”

She described the beached blue whale she’d seen the previous summer, its belly ridged like a bicycle tire. She had been amazed that such a majestic animal could look so homely on close inspection. He asked about her absent mother, and she explained that Mairi Greer preferred to live in town. He said that he would prefer to live in town himself. “In Montreal,” he clarified, “not Rivière-du-Loup . . . ” They leaned back on the couch and made up names for the characteristic of Brilliant’s light, which produced a sequence of one flash followed by ten seconds of darkness, four flashes, darkness, three flashes, and finally darkness again.

In town, anglophones called it the I Love You light, matching the numbers of the flash characteristic, 1-4-3, to the letters in the words — and playing off the name of nearby Cap-aux-Morts, which could sound like Cap-Amour to a careless anglo ear.

He said the crew on board the ship thought I Love You sickening, and preferred a saltier name. She said, “What name?”

He smiled and crossed his eyes. She laughed, and closed her own.

The soothing rhythm of his words, the captivating giddy-headedness she felt — it was delicious, this blind surrender. She shook away her mother’s voice, shrill inside her head: What you see — or do not wish to see — constitutes a choice.

When she finally slept that night, she felt she’d tumbled overboard. Bliss: her mind submerged — the world an ancient, lightless underwater cave.

All of Brilliant’s crew came back with Daniel in the morning. “Yes, she sank,” he said. “But not before I fixed her!” He whistled, he sang, he unearthed a bottle of fiery liquid from somewhere for the men. “My darling girl!” he said, hugging her. He’d had his adventure. He noticed nothing new.