TEN

March 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.

As the days lengthened, Sonia yearned for the pattern of her life to become more normal.

She began to understand that except for the pain she felt, the anxiety of not knowing — except for the crying spells and the black days and the frustration to which she privately gave vent (pulling her hair and screaming silently, the dry air scouring her throat; hammering her fists into her thighs until they throbbed so hard she was certain she’d bruised the bone) — except for wondering what she, Sonia, could — should — have done for her vanished daughter — she was fine, really.

They all were. The boys were too busy, Rose was overly controlling and Frances was worryingly quiet. But this was to be expected, wasn’t it? She told herself they managed.

Then Evvie came by.

Rose answered the door. Frances was ironing, and Sonia was rocking in the chair by the stove, rocking and trying to puzzle out an answer to the questions that plagued her. Where had Stella gone? Why?

Evvie stumbled in, and both girls turned pleading looks on Sonia, as if she would know what to do.

He’d been drinking. You could smell it, and you could see the glint of manic energy in his eyes.

“Sonia,” he said, and nodded. “I come to pick up Kate.”

For a moment no one spoke.

“Sonia,” Evvie said again, as though she were an idiot.

Frances lifted the heavy iron by its spiral handle and set it on the stove to heat. The ironing board was between her and him.

“Just a minute,” Rose said, and blocked his way.

That morning, Rose had insisted they were going to have to talk to Evvie, to get Kate’s things from him. They needed Kate’s high chair and crib, she said. What she meant was that she wanted to settle, once and forever, where Kate would live. But Sonia could not imagine having such a conversation with Evvie. Just wait, she’d said. But Rose didn’t want to wait. She stood glaring at Sonia, clutching Kate in her arms like a point she’d won. Rose had been ferocious then, but for all that earlier bravado she cowered now, her head bent, her shoulder curved around her heart.

“Sonia.” Evvie stepped forward again. He was nose to nose with Rose now.

“I’ll look in on her,” Sonia said. She wasn’t going to argue with Evvie. But she wasn’t going to give Kate over to him, drunk like that, either. Maybe if she left the room he would back down.

Sonia stood to leave.

Evvie swayed beside the table.

Frances gripped the handle of the iron as though she was prepared to use it on him.

Sonia walked down the hall. Kate was asleep in Rose’s bed. I’ll just wait, she thought. I’ll just give him a minute.

Rose appeared. “Mum, will you talk to him?”

Sonia walked back to the kitchen and looked at Evvie, now sitting in his barn coat and grubby boots, hunched over his knees on the far side of the couch beside the door.

Evvie stood. “I come to take my daughter home. Off your hands.”

Sonia nodded.

“No!” Rose screamed.

Evvie made a gesture like a shrug and turned to leave.

They watched the door slam shut. After a moment the lights of Evvie’s truck swung around the kitchen.

Rose tugged the mop across the dirty puddle his boots had left on the floor beside the kitchen couch and Sonia reversed her journey down the hall.

Rose followed her. “Mum, Evvie isn’t capable of taking care of Kate.”

“No, dear. But you can see he doesn’t want to.”

Evvie was driven, like a hungry animal. There was something he wanted, but it wasn’t Kate. For the life of her, Sonia could not imagine what it might be.

She’d seen Evvie lose his temper twice. Once over a trivial disagreement with Rose. The reason hadn’t even registered at the time. Rose had voiced some opinion and Evvie exploded. All she could remember after was the sudden ferocity of his rage and the miraculous way he’d calmed when Stella spoke to him.

The second time was after Stella stayed overnight with Kate. Sonia remembered every word because the moment had seemed, at first, like a turning point. Stella had finished with her tea and was dressing Kate to go home. Evvie had been wild, she agreed, but it was a new day, and now he’d be better. Frances was not convinced. “Just gather up Kate’s things and come back,” she said. Stella insisted she could handle Evvie, that he was gentle most of the time, it was only when he drank. She’d hoisted Kate in her arms. “He has his good points,” she said. “He isn’t that different from any of the other men around.”

Sonia was reluctant to get involved. Pushing Stella into things never worked. But Frances didn’t hesitate. “Wake up, Stella,” she said. “He’s a brute!”

That was when Evvie walked in. “A brute, eh?” At first he seemed wryly amused, even proud of this assessment. He winked at Sonia. Then rapidly, and without warning, his face changed its cast. Stella set Kate down and pinned Evvie’s arms at his sides, whispered to him in a soothing voice. The urgency she must have felt was hidden and, incredibly, again Evvie calmed.

A few times Sonia had mimicked Stella’s tactic. Evvie liked being spoken to softly. He’d relinquish his anger if you flattered and agreed with him. Sorry, Evvie, she’d said. You’re right.

But things were different now, with Stella gone.

Evvie’s visit lit a fire under Sonia. Stella was the only one who could control him. They needed her back. Sonia didn’t think this out. She just applied herself to the job she now saw she ought not to have abandoned, because no one else was going to do it. She sat at the table and picked up the telephone. Hello, this is Sonia MacAusland of Prospect. Can you help me?

The answers were always the same, and the rhythm of the dialing quickly became anodyne. But at least she was doing something. By the time Cece and Mae Ladner came over late that same day, she felt charged with energy, but baffled as to why.

Cece and Mae were Stella’s nearest neighbours. They’d always been good to her. Since Stella disappeared, Sonia had seen a lot of them.

Now she rested in their presence while Rose poured tea, and Mae inquired gently, How are you, Rose? How are you, Frances, dear? How is little Kate?

She listened to her daughters answer Mae’s questions with one part of her brain. With another part she watched Cece tip his teacup so a milky waterfall spilled onto his saucer. He tapped his cup on the edge of his saucer to release the drips, then rested the cup on his knee and brought the saucer to his mouth. “How are the boys?” Mae asked, and Cece supped his tea, slurping loudly from the saucer and sighing deeply.

When his tea was gone, Cece said, “I dropped some culverts off to Evvie for the lane to that new field he cleared, and he asked if I’d bring some things to you.” With his halting, old man’s hands, Cece described Kate’s crib and high chair, and Sonia saw that Mae had brought in two brown paper bags filled with baby things. One was stamped Roger’s Hardware. Pink wool and crocheted lace peeped out the top.

Cece stood and wiped his hands across his pants and flushed apologetically. “Them other things is in the truck.”

Rose held the door so Cece and Frances could carry in the high chair and the disassembled crib.

In this way it was settled. But why had Evvie agreed so readily?

While Rose and Frances began to put the crib together, Sonia sat down by the phone. She opened the phone book at the page headed with the letter C. In Rose’s room, she heard Frances say, “I think he pushed her through a hole in the ice . . . ”

Rose said, “Uh, huh.” She wasn’t listening to Frances, or she didn’t agree. Rose and Frances were born opposites.

Sonia put her finger on the page. Cantwell, Donald & Betty. Bristol. She heard what sounded like a bolt tumble to the floor. “Hey, Frances — ” Rose snapped. “Hold up your end.”

Then Sonia saw Kate toddling down the hall, and she heard Rose raise her voice again. “Why are you so determined to blame Evvie for Stella’s disappearance?”

Cantwell, Donald & Betty.

Frances changed her tack. “Okay, maybe he lured her onto the ice, and he let her walk where it was soft.”

Rose came into the hall and snatched Kate up in her arms.

Cantwell, Donald & Betty.

The scene Frances described seduced Sonia slowly. Evvie on the ice, calling out to Stella. Evvie angry. Evvie showing Stella the unsafe route across the ice. He wouldn’t even have had to push . . .

But, no. Stella had run away.

Rose said, “No.” Rose didn’t want things to be that way either. “No,” she said, and there was the sound of more hardware falling to the floor. “I don’t believe it. He’s a mean drunk, but he didn’t lure Stella. Stella fell. Frances, you’ve completely lost your sense.” Another bang. “Forget it, Frances.”

Sonia could understand Frances’s desperation. She felt desperate herself. But Frances was wrong. Stella had run away.

“Wah!” Kate said.

“Come on, Frances,” Rose begged, her voice steadier now, calculated to soothe Frances, to not alarm Kate. “We don’t know what happened. You have no proof. It was an accident. Let’s just forget.”

“For God’s sake! Stella could hardly see. Even if he didn’t push her, even if all he did was fail to lead her off the ice, isn’t it still his fault?”

Rose did not respond. She came out of the room with Kate, leaving Frances to finish assembling the crib.

Sonia turned back to the phone book. She put her finger down. Cantwell, Donald & Betty. She turned the crank on the phone and Mary Walt came on the line. “Switchboard,” Mary said, and Sonia pictured her in the little room beside the village post office. Sonia could see her sitting on a hardwood kitchen chair, alone in the closet-like room with a mug of tea beside her and a book in her hand. Sonia too had a mug of tea at hand. She and Mary were several miles apart, but in a way, Sonia thought, Mary kept her company.

Except in the last little while Mary had begun to speak impatiently. Reminded of this, Sonia became businesslike. “Bristol. Put me through,” she said, and read out Donald and Betty Cantwell’s telephone number.

“No, dear,” Betty Cantwell said, less than a minute later. “I’m sorry.”

A few days later, the RCMP came by to give a “preliminary report.” It was old Harry MacLeod and a skinny young fellow from up east who was training with him. Sonia emerged from her room — but only just.

She thought Harry looked slack and sad, all trembly belly and grey skin. His eyes had that opaque cast you sometimes see in people who are profoundly bored. He wasn’t bored, though. He was intent: still as oil, focused, waiting. He let the boy introduce himself.

Sonia shook her head in response. “You’re so young,” she said sadly, as though it were his lost life they’d come together to lament.

Harry and the boy took off their caps and bowed their heads. Then the boy straightened his back. “Mrs. MacAusland?” he said. He nodded at Sonia, though she had said nothing and had not changed her demeanour. He looked imploringly at her, quaking a little. He seemed to be waiting for her to deliver him from his obligation.

After a long moment, she nodded back at him.

“Yes,” he said.

Sonia waited. Yes, what?

Then, without warning, he spit out his message: “I’m sorry she must of went through the ice,” and he reached into the case he carried and pulled out Stella’s white wool hat with the bobble on it, the one Rose knit for her the same as Kate’s.

Harry MacLeod said, “We found this on the ice, Sonia. It looks like she went through. Her tracks led down there, and her husband says he saw her. We talked to him. I’m sorry. The case is closed. There’s nothing more we can do.”

Sonia looked to Harry and the boy for more, but apparently this was all they were prepared to say. No real explanation. Just, Stella drowned. Nothing more we can do.

She clenched her jaw and exhaled loudly. What incompetents they were! They didn’t care. They hadn’t really looked. They’d wasted all this time.

That hat wasn’t proof of anything. Stella could have lost it any time. Sonia hadn’t seen her wear it in ages.

Stella hadn’t drowned. She’d run away.

Sonia felt her heart speed up. No one understood how impossible it was that Stella could have drowned. That would mean she was gone. She could not be gone. In what kind of world was that possible?

Sonia reached for the door frame. Was she going to pass out? In front of her, Harry waited. Her vision cleared a little and she shook her head at him. He had a job to do.

She shook her head again, and Harry gripped the boy’s arm and locked eyes with her. “Sonia, people do it all the time,” he said. “Go through, I mean. You’d be amazed.”

She said nothing. She cut her eyes at Harry. “My daughter ran away. You were supposed to look for her. She’s a missing person. Did you call the hospitals, the train station, the ferry captains, police in Halifax and Montreal and Toronto? Did you call anyone?”

After a moment, Harry let the boy go and put his hat back on. “We are very sorry for your loss,” he said, his voice gentle but firm.

“You didn’t even try!” She shook her head in disgust. Harry was the one who should be sorry.

The minute they’d gone, Rose got the mop from the porch and scrubbed the dirty boot tracks they’d left behind.

Later, Sonia could hear Rose and Frances bickering in Rose’s room.

Frances was louder than usual. “Give me a break, Rose!” she said.

“Mum never cried. Not the day Stella vanished. Not since,” Rose said. “Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”

Rose was right, Sonia thought. She felt baffled and lost, flayed, in physical pain — but were these feelings grief?

“It hasn’t hit her yet,” Frances said.

“Uh, huh.” Rose had trouble understanding other people’s points of view. Wisely, Frances didn’t say another word.

It hasn’t hit her yet. What did that mean?

ELEVEN

The thing was that Sonia could understand why Stella would want to get away. She herself had wanted to run away, in the first years of her marriage. But where could she have gone? (She’d yearned for Surplus Island as soon as she left. But someone else had been installed as keeper there.)

Stella’s situation was different. Stella had gone away before. Sonia lifted the handset of the phone, wound the crank around. “Operator?” she heard, and recognized Annie Donnelly, from the village.

“Union Station, Toronto,” she said. “Could you put me through?”

She remembered the morning Stella came back from Toronto — nineteen years old and all grown up, after less than a year away.

No one had been expecting Stella, so her return was a shock. Her new appearance, too. She’d cut her hair and it was set in an unnaturally buoyant permanent wave. She walked in the door and struck a pose to show off this hair and the new car coat and shiny boots she wore. For a moment Sonia didn’t recognize her own daughter. Then Stella took off her coat and boots and sat down at the table, and finally Sonia could see her in the way this jittery Toronto woman touched the tips of her fingers to her brow. Her one bright eye danced around the room, its useless mate at rest.

“Frances!” Stella said. “Look at you. All grown up!” Stella embraced her sister, a new gesture, entirely at odds with the physically restrained girl everyone remembered. “I have books in my bag for you,” she said, turning away. “And, Rose, I bought the cutest blouse for you!”

Sonia set down cups and saucers and Stella said, “Mummy, I have something for you too.” She lifted her suitcase onto the kitchen couch and, with a flourish, released both metal clasps. Sonia wondered where her reserved, quiet daughter had gone, and would she ever understand this new person Stella had become?

Stella rifled through the good suitcase she’d borrowed ten months earlier, when she left the Island to look for work. Most of the bag’s contents were clothes, and the items she removed were nothing like the things she’d taken up there. Sonia recognized styles from the catalogue, skirts and blouses the old Stella would never have worn. Clothes too formal for Island life, or too prissy. Other things as well — a slip and nightie Eaton’s didn’t carry and a pair of fine leather gloves the colour of Moirs chocolate drops.

“Mummy, these are for you.” Stella held out the gloves, and Sonia felt her face harden. She had nowhere to wear such fancy gloves. And Stella had spent so much money!

“These are lovely, Stella. But you shouldn’t be so extravagant.”

“Mummy, try them on.”

Sonia slid one hand into a glove. Physically, Stella was her duplicate. The handsome glove fit perfectly.

“They’re beautiful, dear. Thank you.”

For Rose, Stella had a blouse made of creamy nylon with pink polka dots. It was tailored and stylishly short and it glimmered like the inside of a mussel shell.

Rose ran a finger along the row of transparent buttons. “Thank you, Stella.” No one else would have a blouse like it, she said.

Last, Stella pulled out two field guides, books Frances had asked her for.

“Oh, Stella!” Frances said, line drawings of birds and animals and fine Latin text leaping to life at her touch.

Stella smiled, and her face crumpled in a way that seemed familiar, finally. This was a relief, and it allowed Sonia the respite to wonder why she had come home.

Rose said, “I’m just going to check on the hens. I’ll be right back,” so Sonia went down the hall to look in on Kate. Of course Kate was asleep — Rose wouldn’t have stepped out otherwise. The pieces of Kate’s crib leaned against one wall, and Kate herself lay curled in the bed that, as a child, Rose had shared with Frances. As Sonia watched, she sighed and turned against the heavy blanket Rose had rolled into a bolster to prevent her falling out of bed. She flung an arm out, and suddenly it was clear to Sonia why Rose was not as close to Frances as Stella had been. The narrow bed was barely large enough for one spread-eagled child, let alone two sets of warring knees and elbows.

As the eldest girl, Stella had her own room, so she never fought with anyone.

Stella was home from Toronto for more than a week before anyone learned about Evvie. Evvie was also from the Island, but Stella had met him in Toronto.

Was that why she accepted him? Had the city of Toronto bestowed its magic on Evvie, and made him seem to shine with unearned promise?

Kate stirred in her sleep and Sonia watched her eyes fly open and fall shut again.

When she went to Toronto, Stella had seemed captivated by its possibilities. In her letters she’d described so much that was new: electric heat, coloured television, streetcars, elevators, going out, a million strangers, better clothes, a job she rode the streetcar to. But back at home the confidence she’d earned quickly vanished.

Sonia was sorry Stella let the interesting urban life she’d begun to establish simply slip away. People said Toronto was hot, noisy, busy, fast. But Stella had seemed to flourish there. She’d made friends; she mentioned them in her letters. On the Island she became meek and quiet and worn out again, neglecting her appearance, hiding in the house, and giving in to whatever Evvie asked.

She’d been injured in a haying accident when she was thirteen and lost the vision in one eye. Even with her glasses on, she spilled food on herself and bumped into things. More than once she poured tea directly onto the tablecloth beside the cup she’d set in place.

She said, When you lose one sense, the others compensate.

But Sonia could see no evidence of compensation. Compromise, maybe.

Maybe compromise was the reason Stella had settled so easily for Evvie, who, with his taut, neatly muscled limbs and narrow mouth, looked ungovernable: a potent form of trouble.

Evvie was a piece of work, and he made no effort to conceal the fact. Stella must have felt he was all she deserved.

TWELVE

By the end of the week, Sonia had reached the letter L. There were nineteen pages of names in their exchange. She was halfway through. She was about to ask for Lyall, Albert when Dan came into the kitchen. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand.

This is about Stella, Sonia thought, and set the telephone down.

But it was not.

“Mum. Can you help me?” Dan spread his papers on the table and Sonia recognized the forms for his Farm Credit application. She’d helped him fill them out already.

“I thought these were done.” She watched Dan frown and fidget with the pen in his hand.

“I want Evvie off the application, Mum,” he said.

On their own they did not qualify for an expansion grant. This was why Dan had asked Evvie to make a joint application. They could do this because they were family. It would give them more manpower and more equipment to work the additional land Dan wanted to buy. In theory, anyway, so long as Evvie did his part of the work. Six months ago Dan had explained, “We need the extra land, Mum, or we’ll never get ahead.” Now he wanted to erase Evvie and put Cece Ladner on the application instead. But Cece was old, and he could barely manage the work of his own small farm.

Sonia said, “Cece isn’t family.”

“Isn’t he? Distantly? A second cousin or something?”

Sonia shook her head.

“We could just say.”

“Hmmm.” Farm Credit sent inspectors around, and Sonia hated the idea of asking Cece to lie.

“Mum. There isn’t any other way.”

Sonia looked at the form. What did the fine print say? She’d been staring at the phone book for so long her vision was blurred. She rubbed her eyes.

Dan said, “It’s okay, Mum. I’ll ask Frances. She’s good at math.” He patted the kitchen cot. “Maybe you should lie down for a while.”

When she woke from her nap, Dan was gone. She found him in the barn, leaning against the horses’ stall, Frances with him, tapping a pencil against her teeth. Dan hated anything to do with math, but Frances loved it. She was in her glory. They had the pages of paperwork spread out on a plank of wood.

Frances gestured at a page. “Okay,” she said, “just put another zero there.”

“But I don’t have — ”

“Are you with me, Danny Boy? Just write the number. You don’t have any choice, unless you want to farm with Evvie.”

Dan hesitated.

“You could leave his name on, and just tell him how things are going to be.”

One of Sonia’s hands was tingling where she’d slept on it. She shook it out.

“Hi, Mum,” Frances said and grinned.

Dan made a mark on the paper. “Like hell I will,” he said.

And then something in him sprang away. Some filter, or his sense of restraint. “Evvie pushed Stella,” he said. “Or if he didn’t push her in, he might as well have.”

Frances stopped smiling.

Dan narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t hear him talk about that day.” He imitated Evvie: “It was bright enough out, and flat-arsed calm. Only an idiot wouldn’t a seen that hole in the ice.”

Then he was silent for a minute, waiting.

Sonia didn’t know what to say — couldn’t think — and Frances just stared at her brother.

“You know how Evvie is,” Dan said. “I think he pushed her to the point where she was willing to walk through the ice.”

They were all silent then.

Frances was still dressed for school in her black vinyl zip-up boots and duffle coat. She looked incongruous next to Dan in his flannel shirt and the wool-lined canvas vest he wore for work, beads of sweat gathered at his temples. Sonia couldn’t wrap her mind around the accusation Dan was making. She couldn’t understand it in the context of that familiar, homely place, with its animal smells, its gentle sounds. Frances had already said something similar. But coming from Dan, this assertion sounded more serious. Dan was her most moderate child.

Around them, cattle lowed.

She looked at her placid, loyal son who never criticized a soul, and all she could see was fury. Suddenly he reminded her of Evvie, who was often angry in this same explosive way.

“Oh, Dan,” she said. She thought, Please don’t lose it too.

Dan looked hard at her. “I swear to God. That’s what he said.” He threw a bale of hay toward Doll and Hellie, then kicked the bale open so the mares could eat, his muscles tensed and popping, face alight with rage.

“He was always cutting her down. Don’t you remember?” he demanded.

Again, he described the night he’d spent at the river, standing vigil near the place Stella’s tracks had disappeared and taking turns with Evvie to walk the ice and call her name. They’d searched the woods on snowshoes, skied up and down the river, calling, shouting themselves hoarse.

When it seemed that Stella wasn’t anywhere, they’d lit that fire on the bank. Rose had brought them Thermoses of tea. But Evvie had scorned the tea for rye.

Evvie had been drunk when he called Stella an idiot. What came to Dan now, though, was not the harshness of that word but rather Evvie’s clear specificity.

That hole in the ice, Evvie had said. As though he knew the hole was there, and precisely where it was.

That hole in the ice. Sonia repeated the phrase to herself. She focused on the words so closely they began to lose their meaning. She thought, Dan could be right about Evvie, but why would Stella let him do that to her?

Beside her, Frances went slack, her body slumped, her eyes glazed.

Sonia could picture Stella on the ice, and Evvie beside her, goading or pushing her, reaching out with a fist or a shoving, flat hand. Stella too frozen with fear to run.

But things didn’t happen that way, did they? Not really.

The idea was ludicrous. That anyone could be so evil.

She thought, We all want answers badly and we’re all just trying to bully though.

“No, Dan,” she said. She left her children and went inside and opened the phone book and found the letter L.

THIRTEEN

“Take a break from the phone,” Mary Walt said. “Rest for a few hours, and then I’ll put another call through.”

Away from the phone, Sonia didn’t know what to do. She wandered the house. Frances was at school, and Rose was out somewhere with Kate. She washed the few dishes on the counter. She took out the broom. She put it back. Finally she opened her bottom bureau drawer and took out the photo album.

Nowhere in the album were there pictures of the years before the children. There were several formal portraits: Sonia’s parents being married in Montreal, Max’s mother at a spinning wheel and Max’s father beside a little boat. Aunt Lil as a pale young woman, gussied up and gleaming.

But of Max and Sonia together, or of Sonia in her adult life before the children, there was nothing.

Most of the pictures had come from Lil. Sonia had taken only a few. In the best of these — the clearest, truest image — Stella stood between Dan and Max, holding baby Rose. Rob and Frances hadn’t yet been born, and their now decrepit truck, in front of which they’d lined up, was then almost new.

Sonia held the photo up to the light to study Stella, skinny and severe and proud, wearing a checked cotton dress and braids, and holding her baby sister in her arms. Beside her, Dan looked wild and grubby, like any little boy. Before Sonia clicked the shutter, Max — in his overalls, with his dirty blond, sticking-up hair and hesitant, lopsided smile — had laid an arm across his daughter’s shoulder, and Rose, whom Kate so resembled, had squirmed and reached out for the camera Sonia held.

Want dat! she’d said. Sonia could clearly remember. Want dat! had been Rose’s favourite phrase for years.

Stella had never wanted things. Stella at six had been insubstantial, a wraithlike assemblage of three component parts: pale skin, a stripy shirt and stringy hair.

At least, this was what Sonia remembered.

But now Sonia could see that the girl in this photograph didn’t look like the daughter she remembered. Holding Rose, she looked as strong as a new fence post. And calm too, as though she could easily set Rose down and walk away, whenever the squirming and the wanting became too much.

If only there were a picture of Stella as a baby, with her father holding her — or of silent Max alone, as Dan liked to be alone — or of the ice on the ocean off Surplus Island, piled up onshore the way the ice rafted onto the riverbank at the end of winter.

Sonia imagined photos that would explain the absence she felt, an emptiness her life with Max had not solved. His departure either.

Max’s heart had given out when he was thirty-seven. After that, she didn’t think. She was overwhelmed just trying to maintain the farm he’d run. The children, too. Rose and Dan had worked like dogs at first, Rose helping in the house and Dan taking over most of his father’s daily chores. Rose had been twelve and Dan fourteen. They’d given up what remained of their childhood in order to work the farm — in order to survive.

Eddie Mack had asked, at the wake for Max, did they need help, and Dan said confidently, We don’t. Sonia loved her son unreasonably in that moment. But the work had not been easy after Max was gone. It changed them all.

Rose helped run the household, and she became obsessed with order and with rules of every kind. Frances and Rob, too young to do as much as their older siblings, became for a time wild and spoiled things, not liable to think of other people’s needs. Stella, almost sixteen when her father died, was hardest hit, escape all she ever seemed to think of. When I go to Toronto, she would say, as though merely uttering this incantation could change her life. Sonia watched them all for signs of loss. She tried to make up on Sundays for the hours she spent out in the barn and fields through the week. But she felt despairing, so much of the time, and she was sure her moods affected them.

Memories of Max come to her in unguarded moments, and as she saw him bend to pull on his rubber boots or shrug into his work clothes — lifting shoulders over-muscled from carrying bales of hay and bags of oats, pushing machinery and pulling animals — she felt regret. She’d hardly known him. Oh, she knew his gestures, and she knew what he had made of the moments of his life. But that was all, and in the end it hadn’t been enough to bridge the distance between them.

How much had changed? And how much was still the same? Without a picture, it was impossible to know.

Something had happened to Stella as a teenager. After the accident, when for so long she wasn’t able to see very much at all, Stella had retreated. She became less able, stopped trying to do things on her own, needed to be looked after instead of looking after others. Sonia’s opinion was that before she lost an eye Stella did too much looking-after, as Rose did now. Competence could be a form of weakness. How Sonia wished her daughter had been able to find a balance between doing things for others and living for herself. But she never did. There had been that period of revelling in her loss, when she lay in bed, her bandaged face dark and puffy, recuperating from the accident that took half her eyesight and — though it needn’t have — her confidence. Sonia tried to get Stella moving, tried not to indulge her. But Stella wanted indulgence — and she got it from Rose, then still a child, and eager to be helpful.

For weeks Rose waited on her sister. Then, after, there was that acquiescence Sonia couldn’t bear, that sense Stella seemed to have that she was a less important person.

Thinking about her daughter’s self-denial could still exasperate Sonia.

Max had been compassionate with Stella in the first few days, generous with the comfort and encouragement she craved. But just as in the period after her birth, only a short time passed before he reverted to his usual inattentive way.

Maybe they’d all been inattentive. No wonder she left.

FOURTEEN

Sonia slept and woke, slept and woke, dreams and memories standing in for human contact. Someone brought her food. Tea, she drank cold.

Everything was cold.

She remembered how cold she’d been, going out to Surplus light with Max that first winter.

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

They were still new to the Island then, renting an apartment in Charlottetown for the winter months, and with just one summer of solo lightkeeping experience behind them.

He’d taken her out by horse and sleigh, and they surfed the roads like waves, skimming turns banked high after a winter of bad storms. It had been a cold, astonishingly bright day. Every surface — fields and sky — shocked white.

Her goal had been to catalogue and report any damage to the lighthouse from onshore winds, or from a storm surge that had destroyed wharves up and down the north shore. But the trip had worked out differently than she’d expected. Instead of examining damaged equipment and noting parts to order for repair — there was no need since the station had hardly been touched — she’d witnessed damage she couldn’t fix, or even fairly mourn.

That day there had been fishing boats on the water — far out, where the ice pans were breaking up. Sonia had studied them through the telescope in the light tower. It was her first winter on the Island, so she had never seen the seal hunt. The quantity of blood on the ice came as a gruesome surprise, as had the soundless violence of the blows the fishermen dealt the ice. Sonia couldn’t see the white seal pups she knew were lying wherever the sealers struck. But she understood that what she saw was fishermen smashing skulls and skinning carcasses with knives.

Red bloomed on white as far as the eye could see, and for the first time Sonia understood how separate the fishery was from her role in watching over it. She’d felt a distance then, both from the light it was her duty to maintain eight months a year and from the fishermen for whom she performed the role of guardian.

Max hadn’t understood. When he saw the hunt was on, he looked away, as he always looked away from events he could not endure. This was the first winter of their life together, during which, for no reason Sonia could fathom, they’d grown apart.

She was mystified by her marriage, which turned out to be so different from her expectations. Max did not say I love you, as she understood husbands were supposed to. He barely looked at her. His silence could be scalding. His rages, too. After a time she felt as though in some essential way she’d disappeared.

All that night, she dreamed of violence. In her mind she didn’t blame the fishermen, whose survival depended on the harvest of seal pelts. Life required death; she understood that much about the hunt.

No, it wasn’t the hunt. Something else about that journey troubled her.

It was that moment Max looked away. Her realization that he saw what he wanted to see, and did not trouble himself to wonder about the hidden depths of life — or about the people around him. He didn’t see her, and he wasn’t interested in trying to understand.

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

Max returned one rainy Saturday toting sacks of summer vegetables— carrots, peas, Swiss chard, green and yellow beans, new potatoes — a bundle of recent newspapers, a pint of cream and a pail of raspberries from Lil’s garden. Because the rain had made the causeway soft, he’d parked his truck on the mainland and walked across the swollen sand. Sonia was napping when he crept in. She woke to see him standing over her in the limpid gleam of that wet afternoon, eyes alight, freckles standing out against his tan, hair slicked back — shades darker, dripping rain from its curling ends. She hauled herself upright and tried to focus. His arm had healed, though it was apparent now that there would be a scar. He sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. Haying would resume as soon as the rain stopped and the fields dried out. “One day!” he said. That was all he’d spare. Sonia marvelled at how tightly wound he seemed, as though anxious to get past this one day off and back to work. He stroked her hand. She closed her eyes and thought: I remember you.

Her first few days with Max had been heady, joyful days. She was seventeen and careless. She had been sure she was the thing that he was smitten with. It was only after her father had helped him to secure this position — lightkeeper of Surplus Station — that she began to wonder if he’d confused her with the means to get away from a job he hated. His manner changed. He grew distant. He rarely spoke. And even before he took up his late uncle’s farm, leaving Surplus Station in her care, she understood that the bond she’d imagined between them had broken somehow. If it had ever been there.

It was hard to believe they’d known each other eighteen months. They’d been apart more than half of that.

For a short time, they’d been happy. Gratitude can look like love, easily enough. She was convinced by little things: his ability to repair any broken thing; the few stories he told; the way he studied her, amazed. But living together demands more than mutual illusions.

In the chaotic days before their move from Quebec to Prince Edward Island, she made several errors. Ceding decisions to him was one. Leaving her dyes and equipment and supply of wools behind was another. Without a creative outlet she soon lost track of who she was. Daniel had warned: You won’t have time for those pictures with Max to fuss over and cook for. Even in that moment she knew her father’s advice was horribly misguided. But something about the state of being wed and moving with a man to a foreign place had stripped her of her status as a sentient being. Your hobby, Daniel said, takes too much time. And Max, who had seemed at first to understand how much colour and line meant to her, had not disagreed. How foolish she had been. She left everything — brushes and paints and dyes, even her first small scissors and wooden knitting needles, treasured since childhood — behind. To Max and Daniel, this was evidence of womanly commitment. By giving up the many hours she spent dyeing wool and making pictures, she’d freed herself to focus on Max’s lighthouse work, and on Max himself.

She bitterly regretted those losses now. It had been a year and a half since she’d created anything of significance with her hands. Occasionally, making entries in the station logbook, she’d find her pencil moving of its own accord, sketching an image of the horizon line or a group of lowering clouds, all she could see from the station tower. She always stopped herself, rubbed the illustration out.

What point was there in drawing what she could not reproduce in colour?

Even now that Max was living elsewhere, she had no intention of trying to retrieve her things. Surely her father would send whatever she asked for in the mail, but she did not ask. Pride kept her silent. She felt resentment roil in her as Max drew his hand across her thigh, as he kissed her neck toward the back, where her hairline met her collar. Pete, she thought, and closed her eyes. Her body loosened its hold on rage. “Sonia,” Max said softly. Pete, she thought. His familiar hands were everywhere. She leaned; she pulled him back against the bed. Pete.

“Sonia?”

She squeezed her eyes tight. Vivid puce and orange shards struck like lightning on the scrim inside her brain. She pushed against his shoulders, and he broke away.

The rain had stopped and the sun was out. They were on the sandy lane off the shore road, loading the truck with eelgrass for Lil’s garden, when Pete appeared. He’d seen the vehicle, he said. He’d come down to check on Max’s arm.

Max pulled back his sleeve to display the scar. “You done good work, Doc.”

“Good, good. Excellent. You look after yourself, now.” He turned and headed back inland without specifically acknowledging Sonia.

After Max had gone, the weather changed again. Thunderheads began to mass against the white clouds to the west. The sky grew dark. Sonia inhaled the astringent tang of approaching rain and felt the prickle of hair lifting off her bare arms as she walked. Piercing expressions of agony — the cries of seagulls — and the strafing attacks of terns drew her attention so that she almost didn’t see the small red fox that crossed her path, trotting fast in a rough zigzag from tide line to dune. When she did see him, she stopped. He held his head high, his jaw stretched wide to hold his prize, a limp, buff-coloured bird, its head suspended like a plumb bob from its broken neck. He looked at once victorious, brave and cruel. He, she thought. But it could just as easily have been a female fox. Probably it was, in fact: a vixen with a pair of kits to feed.

Still, she regretted the death of the dear, harmless bird, as pale as sand. It had been a piping plover, the skittish shorebird with the mournful cry. Ghost bird, people called it, for its faint colouring and its habit of invisibility.

It wasn’t invisible now. She marvelled that a creature so adept at disappearing could look so obvious and plain in death.

As the rain began, she turned and strode toward the station. It was time to get to work, to light the lantern for the night and make a list of the tasks she’d left aside all summer. It turned out her father was right: she was a lousy lighthouse keeper. No better, really, than Harold Pyke, her predecessor, who’d left dead flies to rot on all the windowsills. Some of the things she hadn’t done: paint the tower inside and out, repair the motor in the lifeboat (which moaned and coughed and complained of death), create an inventory of station equipment and compile a list of necessary supplies, send an order off to DOT. This last was very late — the supply boat was due to pass the station in six weeks’ time.

She kicked at the dampening sand as she walked, dislodging clots of kelp and eelgrass from the plane surface of the beach. Recently it seemed her days all blurred together. How many miles had she walked on this bloody island where there was nothing distracting or enlivening to do?

Now she determined to submerge herself in work. Work was as good a cure as any for the mess she’d made of things. Pete would go back to Montreal in a few weeks, perhaps never to return, and soon, Max said, they’d give up the lighthouse posting to concentrate on farming. Sonia had tried to argue with this, but Max was like her father — he’d decided, and that was that.

Because Sonia dreaded the idea of moving to Max’s landlocked little farm, she’d made a decision of her own: she’d declare herself to DOT and ask them to keep her on. With the number of men heading off to Europe now, it was just possible they’d have no option but to say yes. Dear Sirs, she’d write, Please permit me to explain —

No. She couldn’t sound that weak.

Sir: I am writing to inform you of the situation at Light Station No. 17, Surplus Island —

Could she say that Max had left? No. He could be charged for having left the light. She’d have to get around that part somehow.

She shivered in the sudden breeze and unhooked the door of the lighthouse tower. The wind was really picking up. Maybe she should close the lantern windows just in case.

After the storm, Sonia examined Surplus Island and found it changed.

Several sandbars had disappeared. Three massive rocks she’d never seen lay exposed in a deepened channel on the island’s western edge. She stared at these, astounded.

The world had shifted all around.

She saw objects in the distance and began to walk toward them. Solid black shapes eerily backlit by the sun. Be positive, she told herself, praying none were bodies. Be prepared to witness mystery, not loss.

Loss was always a possibility, but so far she’d been spared. No missing boats or fishermen. No beached whales. Instead, she’d felt relieved and amazed at the objects she found thrown up on the beach. When the sea was rough, sugar kelp and jellyfish littered the foreshore — also crab shells, dead lobsters, shells of mussels, limpets, starfish — sometimes a stingray — sometimes manmade objects. Several times she’d found glass spheres the size of rutabagas tied with twine made of supple, grassy stuff; often there was driftwood and pieces of knotted line; once there had been a hand lantern, its globe miraculously intact; once a biscuit tin with a picture of King George VI on it; once a good canvas bucket. Today — she could see the black shapes clearly now — there were lobster pots unmoored by the storm.

As she walked, she pulled at the pots scattered amongst the wrack along the shore. She tied three together in a train and dragged them to the station, and then went out again and again, the heavy traps rasping the sand with deafening force, until at last she had seventeen lobster pots stacked neatly against the woodshed. She sat on her stone front step. She could hear the wind and the waves again. What bliss the quiet was! Even in near silence there was so much to hear. The sough of the wind in the marram grass. The laughing of a gull. A tractor coughing on the shore road.

The stranger walked halfway around the island before he saw the wall of pots Sonia had salvaged, now drying in the sun. Poor man! she thought, noticing his weary gait.

“I knew they washed up somewheres,” he said, resting a proprietary hand on a damaged trap. He lifted the hand and held it out to her. “Grenfell Hillyard.”

“Sonia.” She offered him a glass of cold tea.

He ignored the offer, shook his head sadly. “It was good of you folks to drag them pots back here for me,” he said. Against his deeply lined, sun-darkened skin, his pale blue eyes were riveting. The irises, struck with sun, seemed faceted like gems. How lovely, Sonia thought — the brilliant contrast of white and beryl, the various dull reds and browns of his cracked, dry lips. His mouth opened. He was smiling, laughing at himself, changing his mind. “Thank you, dear. I’d love that drink,” he said.

She left him on the step while she went to get the jar of tea she’d sunk into the surf to cool.

She poured them each a glass and cut two slices from a lemon she’d been saving in the cellar.

“Oh, will you look at that!” he said. “My God, you’re good!” He took a long drink. “You know, I thought I’d have to drag those pots the length of the island myself, and here you folks have gone and done it for me!” He glanced around. She could see that he was about to ask for Max. She wondered what she’d say.

But he did not ask. Instead, he drained his glass in a single draft, exhaled vocally like a child, then reached for her drink, still untouched in her hand. “My land,” he said, “that’s good tea.”

They sat together on the rip-rap barrier that breasted the waves in front of the lighthouse tower’s concrete base. He was in no hurry. He wanted to wait until the tide was high enough to float his pots across the causeway. He said he came out after every storm to look for lost traps cast onshore. He sighed and sipped from his second glass of tea. He caught her eye and said, “Your husband’s into town for the day, now, is he?” And she nodded, looking away, reluctant to lie even by omission to this soft-spoken, gentle man.

“I’ve been fishing off here since 1917,” he said.

She did the math — twenty-four years on the water — but she couldn’t begin to guess his age. His face was weathered, but his hair was not completely grey. He could be anywhere from forty-five to sixty.

“Back then,” he said, “the fish were so thick this place deserved its name. Surplus Island.” He spoke the word longingly, the way you would say a lover’s name.

All this time she’d believed the island was surplus goods — used up and no longer wanted — that this was why it was uninhabited and how it had earned its name. Unconsciously she’d transferred this slur against the island and the light to herself, its keeper.

Grenfell Hillyard was gazing out to sea. “You could never get rich off fish, of course, but it was good fishing here, twenty, twenty-five years ago. Too many blinks now,” he said. And then, seeing Sonia’s look of incomprehension, he added, “The little ones, too small to keep.”

Blink. The word suggested those small fish that swam flashing through the nearshore shallows. Illusory creatures. She tried to imagine the good days: men upending bushel baskets full of fish onto their boat decks, silvery scales becoming coins of light as they fell. It wasn’t difficult to picture fishing boats weighed down with bulging nets, seals gorging themselves under the ice, hordes of mergansers, cormorants and herons (beaked demons of the nearshore) stabbing the shallow water — and the fish vanishing like passenger pigeons.

But of course all this was impossible. The ocean was full of fish. “The boats are so far out on the water now,” she said. “I can see them from the tower. But even with my binoculars they’re tiny specks.”

“Yes.” He smiled gently. Perhaps like Sonia he knew how surprisingly little you could see from atop a lighthouse tower.

“What happened to the fish inshore?”

Grenfell Hillyard shrugged. “It was mostly lobsters we got here. Like all creatures, lobsters move around. They decide for themselves where they want to live. And shorelines change.” He talked about wave action, storm history and the configuration of the dunes. “I remember when those dunes were twice that high and there was a hundred feet of land in front of this lighthouse tower. That’s why there’s no point in building a break like this.” He got up from the rip-rap barrier and set down his glass. “You might as well spit on a fire in a barn full of straw.”

Island stone wore away. Sandy beaches moved. After an especially fierce storm the shoreline might not look familiar anymore. But the human mind would adapt.

Grenfell Hillyard began to walk away.

“You cannot hold a thing like water back,” he said. “It will cut the earth right out from under you.”

FIFTEEN

March 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.

Sonia called train stations all over the Maritimes, RCMP detachments in cities and small towns, operators in the city of Toronto. She called the ferries and the hospitals, both Protestant and Catholic.

Everyone said, I’m sorry, dear. I don’t think so. No. In some part of her mind Sonia understood these answers weren’t going to change. But she couldn’t imagine what else she might do.

The frustration she felt was a physical torment. Her heart was knotted, yet it raced. Her lungs felt compressed, as though her body had been tightly bound. She longed for release, or escape.

But from what? From the need to search for Stella? But who would do it if she didn’t?

Late one night when she put down the phone, she heard Rose’s voice say, Mum, you have to get outside, and she slipped away from the house.

Snow, deep on the ground, necessitated snowshoes, so she laced on Dan’s, taking them down from where he kept them, on a spike hammered into the back wall of the porch. The night air felt good to Sonia, cool and sharp inside her lungs. She breathed deeply, and the sudden pain invigorated her. She stepped briskly away from the house and yard, her lungs full of air so cold it seemed a gaseous form of frost. After so long inside, the idea of this vast, quiet dark was giddy-making.

Near the woods, she turned her flashlight on. The moon was faint, and clouds hovered all around it. As she strode, sinking slightly in the slumpy snow, her yellow flashlight beam bobbed ahead, illuminating tree trunks shaggy with old man’s beard and great spread mounds of ground yew iced like cake. In the wintry dark, her own familiar woods seemed alien, the shriek and gasp of tree limbs as they moved, an eerie chorus. But Sonia had nothing to be afraid of. What could be worse than the losses she’d already suffered? She was like a superhero from one of Rob’s comic books: so freakishly damaged that she was immune to ordinary pain.

She strode half blind through the dark woods, smashing small, buried shrubs and young trees with Dan’s big snowshoes. The snow was dense, sticky stuff. She sank into it, and it clung to the snowshoes. Walking through it required muscle, but she felt glad to use her body vigorously again. She’d spent too many days inside, idle days in bed or in her wicker chair. What she wanted now, desperately, was action.

A twig snapped beneath her foot and part of it flew up into her face. Startled, she stopped and looked around.

How had this happened? Without meaning to, she’d stomped her way to the river. She was only a few hundred yards from the place where Stella had supposedly disappeared, and she felt alarm at the sight of the frozen river. When had she last been here? In her imagination the ice was clear and solid. Not in reality. Even in the dark, Sonia could see that the river had begun to change. Slabs of ice had rafted onshore, and open water was clearly visible in the centre of the river, where the current ran deepest. On the opposite bank, less than a hundred feet away, snow and ice had melted enough to reveal a stand of broken cattails and bent-over rushes, remnants of the vanished year.

It’s almost spring, Sonia thought. I’ve slept the winter away.

She made her way along the riverbank. Her flashlight had gone out, but some clouds had drifted away from the moon, so there was enough light to see by. Where the jagged ice floes piled on the bank made snowshoeing difficult, she walked on the frozen river. The edge still held, in most places.

Once, she stopped to adjust the straps around her boots and heard a breath of sound. Another time, she stopped to listen: a fox or a rabbit was travelling through the woods nearby.

Then, without warning, Dan’s dog, Buddy, appeared beside her on the ice. He danced on and around the snowshoes. How had he got loose? Without realizing it, Sonia herself must have let the old dog out of the house.

“Go home, boy! Go on!”

But Buddy stayed until snow began to fall in fat, bright flakes, and Sonia turned back, heading along the river toward her farm. By the time she reached the house, the wind had come up and the heavily falling snow swirled everywhere in a disorienting tempest.

She paused to rest by the paper birches that bordered the farm, and Buddy raced ahead, inflamed by the unearthly screams of an ermine hunting near the road. Silly old pup, she thought. Weasels slink around, they hide in crevices. They squeeze themselves into places dogs just can’t fit.

She slowed her steps as she approached the house. She wanted to stay outside where the air was fresh and there was only the snow and the cold to think about.

It was Rose who noticed the dog was missing. Rose, because Kate wanted to play horsey with him.

“He’ll turn up,” Dan said. “He’s probably chasing rabbits in the woods.”

But Buddy didn’t turn up. And it snowed so heavily overnight and all the next day that there were no tracks to follow when, finally, an insistent desire to look for Buddy kept Dan from his work.

Sonia watched him put on his boots. She stood with her shoulders hunched, her arms across her chest. No, she thought. Not this too. The feeling was urgent, but she kept quiet because Kate was beside her.

Please, not anything else.

SIXTEEN

There was no break in the weather. The snow that started the night Buddy disappeared continued to fall. Plows were out every day, creating cuttings that built up along the roads almost to the height of the telephone lines. By the time a week had passed, everyone had given up on Buddy. Rose and Rob and Dan turned away from each other, toward the work they used to hide their suffering. Frances focused on studying for exams at school.

The old dog was a trooper, but out in the cold without food and water for so long, he must certainly have perished.

Sonia retreated to her room again. For a few days she was visited regularly by Rob — the youngest and the most affected by Buddy’s disappearance. Buddy had been Max’s dog, then Dan’s, but it was Rob he followed everywhere, and Rob’s bed he slept on every night.

“Mum,” Rob said whenever he came into Sonia’s room, “can I get you anything?” He didn’t ask for comfort or consolation of any kind. But Sonia understood that this newly solicitous behaviour was Rob’s way of reaching out.

“I don’t need anything, dear,” she’d say. “Sit with me awhile, if you like.”

Rob would sit on the end of Sonia’s bed, near her wicker chair. They would be silent together in the murky room. Then Rob would leave, closing the door softly after him.

One shadowy late afternoon, Rob’s face took on a childish cast, and Sonia was reminded of his distress over the stuffed bear he’d lost. She’d felt terrible, sure that she herself had misplaced the bear, mixing it up with the laundry, perhaps. She had promised to help look for the bear, or make a new one, whatever it took. “It can’t be a new one!” Rob had wailed. “It can only be him!” He’d burst into tears, and Max had laid his hand down hard on the table. “Be a man!” he said. “Sonia, you baby him!”

Why had she not defended Rob? Protected him better?

Thinking of this, she began to weep. Rob patted her shoulder awkwardly for only a moment before escaping. After that, he stayed away.

Sonia understood she’d failed him. But what could she have done? The loss of Buddy was almost nothing to her. She refused to think of the dog, and she never admitted she’d likely been the one who let him out.

SEVENTEEN

April 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.

The day the snow stopped falling and began to melt instead, Dan shovelled out the lane. Sonia watched him from the kitchen as she filled the sink. He dug as though possessed, as though he might find gold rather than shale under all that snow, as though he had no other work to do. He dug in order to tame his fury. Ever since he’d spoken about Evvie on the ice, he’d been enraged. It was wrong that Evvie was free while they mourned Stella. And what about Kate? he said. It was wrong, too, that Sonia remained tormented by the notion Stella had run away.

Sonia felt touched by Dan’s concern for her. But his thinking was muddled. How many times had she explained? She wasn’t tormented by the idea Stella ran away; she was impatient for Stella to return.

Dan shovelled, and snow piled up beside him. As Sonia watched, her feeling of incompetence grew. She’d failed at helping Dan.

Meanwhile, Rose announced she was going into town. With Ray, she said, and sighed dramatically.

This was Sonia’s fault too.

Ray Vermeer had come into their lives the previous fall. Frances found his wallet when she was fishing with Mart Decoursey and Lyman Cray. The wallet had been underwater. Lyman slipped on it when he got out to haul the boat. You could see it clear as anything, Frances said, a neat rectangle among rounded slabs of sandstone, completely out of place in the silt on the river bottom.

Raymond Francis Vermeer, the licence read. The leather wallet couldn’t have been in the water long: it was only slightly swollen and the dollar bills it contained were good as new. Besides the licence there was no other identification, only two water-ghosted photographs, whose subjects — a woman in a fifties updo and a stylish new car — remained, despite their blurred and scrofulous images, insistent.

Right in front of Mart and Frances, Lyman pocketed the money. Frances took the wallet and the licence home. Two hours later she picked up the phone and asked the operator for Vermeer, in Charlottetown.

It was that easy. The operator rang a number and Ray came on the line. He arranged to collect the wallet the following Saturday. He was grateful for her thoughtfulness. Prim as a schoolteacher, Frances said later, not a bit like his real self.

Ray claimed he was a teacher, but he was nothing of the kind. Dressed for fishing when he stopped by the house that Saturday, he’d hit it off with Dan, who was up from the barn for morning tea when Ray’s late-model Chevy pulled in the lane. Ray slurped the tea Sonia poured, clattered his cup, swept biscuit crumbs to the floor.

Several days later, Ray telephoned to ask Dan and Frances to go fishing. Frances said no. After a week or so, he called again. On and off, he called all winter, dropping Dan’s name from the invitations. No, she would say, and hang up. But Ray was persistent. Duck hunting? Grouse hunting? Ice fishing? A movie? A walk? A skate?

When Frances stopped answering the telephone, Ray replaced her with Rose. How lucky for him their voices were so much the same, he said. As if Frances and Rose were interchangeable.

One day Sonia answered, then slammed the phone down.

Rose immediately picked up the phone and called Ray.

I said, Is your daughter there? Ray explained, and she hung up on me.

My sister is gone, Rose said. You’d better not call again. Then she hung up on him. “I’m sorry, Mum,” she said, explaining this.

But Ray was not the kind to quit. Somehow, over the course of several weeks, he wormed his way into Rose’s life.

And now Rose was entranced by Ray. While Sonia washed dishes, out the window Dan dug into the packed snow. At the kitchen table, Kate tried to peel the paper wrappers off her crayons. But Rose simply sat, lazy and thinking of nothing but this man Sonia didn’t trust. Ray, she sighed.

And from beside her came the parrot sigh of Kate, so focused on her crayons she would not look up or speak. Sonia felt choked — her heart shredded by the sight of that pile of worm-shaped paper labels and the gleam on Kate’s tiny, perfect face, her lips pursed in concentration.

Stella had once looked just the same.

“Mum,” Rose said then, “do you know Ray’s going to take me dancing at the Rollaway Club?”

Sonia turned and saw the hope in Rose’s eyes.

He’d talked to her about a job at the telephone company in town, Rose said. Of course, she couldn’t take a job like that and still look after Kate, but wasn’t it sweet he had ideas for her? He was so thoughtful, she said.

Sonia wanted to remind Rose that she knew very little about Ray. They’d been talking on the telephone every two or three days for several weeks, but they hadn’t met in person and he’d asked so many questions, she’d had no time to ask her own. She said, “Ask him where he comes from, and who his people are. Who was that woman in his wallet photo? What does he do for a living, and why won’t he say?”

But Rose was focused on his looks. She’d refused to allow Frances to describe him. “You don’t like him. You’ll spoil it.” She had an idea he was tall, probably Dan’s height — with straight dark hair and a healthy, ruddy complexion. She felt he was wiry: muscular but slim. She decided this based on the way he spoke. There was always a lot of energy in his voice, she said, and he never wasted any time.

Sonia wished she could set her daughter straight: Broad, not tall. Wavy hair, greased black. Fanatical about his own interests. Impatient. Loud.

But Rose would not hear a word against Ray. She preferred her imagined version of him to what anyone else might say. She preferred his mystery. Soon there’d be an end to that. Ray had promised to pick her up on Friday and take her into town for the evening. Rose had asked Frances and Sonia to watch Kate so she could go. Of course they agreed, but thinking about this planned evening made Sonia feel guilty and negligent somehow.

Once, much earlier, Ray had asked Frances to describe Rose. Does she look like her sister? And Frances — distracted by his slick manner, forgetting somehow that he’d only met Dan and herself — had wondered, Which sister?

Mum! she’d wailed, telling this story. There’s only Rose now. And Sonia understood a little better what Frances felt she had lost.

“Help!” Kate said, startling Sonia and almost falling as she climbed backwards off her chair, bits of crayon paper scattering like confetti. She tugged at Rose’s skirt, then climbed into her lap. “Draw!” she commanded, and for a few minutes, until Kate became engrossed again, Rose distracted her with sketches of candy-coloured cows eating lilac grass under an ingratiating, smiley face sun.

And then Dan was in the porch, leaning across the threshold. “Hey!” he croaked, as if he’d lost his voice. “Help!” Then he was gone.

Sonia let the dishcloth slide into the sink, slipped on her boots and jacket and followed him.

Near the mailbox he kept hearing something. “Listen,” he pleaded. “Where is it coming from?”

She listened. Maybe she heard a moan. She wasn’t sure. But Dan needed her to be sure. And she needed to help him. She’d already failed Rob and Rose.

“Please, Mum,” he said.

Maybe all of this had been too hard on Dan.

He bore his doubt and pain in silence. His role as eldest male was to protect everyone else, to run the farm and to bear up. That’s how he seemed to see it. It’s what he’d been doing since his father died. For years he’d gone to school all day then worked through the afternoon and evenings, as Rob did now. He’d worked in the fields every summer and all through harvesting and planting seasons without the benefit of whatever was going on in school. Somehow he’d graduated. But looking at him now, Sonia thought she could see the wear on his face.

“Do you hear it, Mum?”

She couldn’t hear anything. But Dan needed her to help him, so she guessed. “Dig there,” she said, pointing to the near edge of the ditch where the snow had been packed all winter by the snowplow into a giant mound. This will keep him busy, she reasoned, and he’ll work the tension out of his body.

As Dan put his back into the heavy snow, she thought of Wile E. Coyote, foolish and ever hopeful, gamely wielding an ACME digging tool against insuperable odds.

But when she listened again, there was definitely a moan, or a whimper.

She took a turn with the shovel, then swallowed her racing breath while Dan dug.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, Dan revealed a blue hole in the snow, a small cold cave with something alive inside it. Rrrrr. Dan threw the shovel down.

Before he could even bend toward the hole, a weak growl and a moan resolved into a picture of Buddy in the culvert underneath the lane. And then the look on Dan’s face: an impenetrable expression comprising reverence and hope and desperation.

She hadn’t seen Dan’s heart exposed this way since childhood.

“Don’t worry, boy,” Dan said. He fell onto his stomach in the snow and, reaching down, tugged Buddy’s stiff and emaciated body back into the light.

Dan carried Buddy into the house and they examined him more carefully. It was difficult to recognize the dog at first, his body was so wasted, his coat so dull and matted. His eyes were closed. He was unbelievably cold. His nose felt chapped. Was he alive? Dan detected a moist wisp of breath, or imagined that he did. “Lay him here,” Rose said, opening the oven door, taking charge. “Get a blanket from the closet in the hall and lay it on him.”

Kate left her crayons for this new excitement. “Dog?” she said. She reached with her small pink hand toward a paw that seemed entirely made up of bone and sinew.

Buddy growled weakly.

“No!” Rose said. Then, more gently, “Dog is sick.”

Kate flung herself across the room and hid her face in the pillow on the couch.

Sonia could see she was hurt, but in the chaos of that moment the dog seemed more important. She felt ashamed of this decision later. It was the same kind of emotional triage by which she’d so failed Stella. All Kate needed was a bit of attention, and to be included. One of us could have gone to her, Sonia thought. I could have.

Dan came back with a grey wool blanket and Rose said, “All right. I’m going to make some baby formula. That’s what we’ll feed him until he gets his strength back.”

Dan patted Buddy, and Rose punched two holes in a can of milk.

“How about that, Rose?” he said. “How about that, eh? It’s a miracle.”

Soon the odour of dog was rising in the warm kitchen and it seemed to Sonia that everyone would smell it, and that when they did they would look at Buddy and think of Stella.

It was a miracle the dog survived, but it had been so much longer since Stella disappeared. Two miracles was too much to hope for.

EIGHTEEN

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

Now Sonia devoted her days to the chores she’d let slide all summer: scraping, painting, scrubbing, greasing, washing, oiling, mending, beating, airing. She scoured the tower and the house. She canned jam and vegetables, put up pickles. She tried to fix the lifeboat, failed, spent the better part of an hour sending a message to Malpeque Harbour to hire Grenfell Hillyard, who got it working in an afternoon. She oiled a crateful of extra parts supplied by DOT (some duplicates, some meant for machinery no longer in evidence at Surplus Station). She brought the lighthouse up to inspection standard, and then she stayed awake each night, twitchy with doubt and indecision. She could have slept. Her only nightly obligations were to light the lamp at dusk and extinguish it at dawn and to listen to “Instructions for Lightkeepers.” She had managed this since she’d arrived, carrying an alarm clock to her bedside and listening in the dark at 11:30 p.m. and 3:30 a.m. for the by-now-familiar message: “Instruction A — A for Apples — is to be carried out.” She’d become accustomed to getting the rest she needed in four-hour increments.

But now she could not seem to rest.

After weeks of staying up all night, sleep deprived and unhinged by solitude, she began to believe she craved the dark. Several times she became dizzy in the sun, and daylight itself began to assume a hallucinogenic quality.

Every morning before she doused the light, she paused to observe the progress of dawn. The spectacle was compelling, yet she couldn’t fathom why. There was really nothing to it — just that shimmering with a glare beneath it, and then the brilliant, full-on glare itself.

When Pete returned at last, she was asleep in bed at noon. She woke to the unfamiliar sounds of cooking in her kitchen, someone banging the kettle around and opening a cupboard door. She came down and found him with a jar of her raspberry jam in one hand, a teaspoon in the other. He’d made toast and tea and fried an egg for each of them. Turning her gaze from the stove, she caught a glimpse of unfamiliar colour. He’d set the table. The pot of silver spoons was in the middle of the table, next to a water glass with vivid fuchsia beach pea blossoms in it. There were napkins, cups and saucers, knives and forks on either side of the plates. He beamed beside the table he’d set for her.

His feet were bare, and he’d tracked sand across her newly waxed and polished floor. A spill of crystals glinted on the dull, dark wood. The sand was lustrous — in contrast to the floorboards she’d lavished with attention, which remained (she now saw) utterly, stubbornly dull.

She wondered why he’d come. She wondered if she cared. When would she learn to take control of this backwards life she lived? Damn it, why had she bothered to wax and polish that wrecked old floor?

Gripping the jam and the spoon together in one hand, he pulled out a chair and held it for her.

Obediently, she sat.

Without speaking, he dished up the eggs and toast and poured the tea. She thought of Max, meals she’d given him. This awkward silence seemed similar.

Pete cooked eggs so they were crispy at the edges, soft and yielding in the centre. His toast was the bright brown of caramel all over, and he’d sliced it neatly into fingers.

He took two small bowls from the cupboard and set one at each place and sat down at the table with her. He twisted the screw band off the jam jar and lifted away its bubbled green glass cap. He used his butter knife to ease out the disc of wax with which she’d sealed the jam. This he set on the edge of his plate. He stirred the jam and spooned a little into each of their dishes. He licked his spoon and set it down and looked at her.

But suddenly she was too woozy to eat. “Excuse me,” she said, and got up carefully and went out the door.

Was it the smell of the eggs? That he’d opened her new jam?

By the time she’d walked a few paces in the breeze, she was fine. It was just the surprise of seeing him, the fact that she was not yet fully awake, that her kitchen was stuffy from having been closed up overnight. It had been unbearably hot and muggy for days. It was eighty-three on the thermostat, the air as still as soup.

She climbed over the breakwater and bent toward the surf. She splashed salt water in her hands and ran her wet palms up and down both arms. That felt better. She wet her hands again and touched them to her face. She could go back inside now. She’d be fine.

She came inside with white sand clinging to her own bare feet. So much for the floors. But what could you expect, really, living in such a place? All the work she’d done was — how had Grenfell Hillyard put it? — like spitting into the face of a raging fire.

He stroked her wet arms and took away the greasy egg. He gave her a clean plate. As she spooned ruby jam on toast, he covered her sandy feet with his own.

It was too difficult to eat.

He began to explain himself, and she lifted her cup of lukewarm tea and drank to his words (lies and excuses).

Cy had kept him busy. There was a disease in the calves on three neighbouring farms. His mother had been ill, so it hadn’t seemed right to sneak away.

Then the feeble truth: his mother had noticed his absence the night he’d slept on the floor of the lighthouse. Someone had seen him crossing the causeway with his bicycle and told her and she’d guessed where he was. She hadn’t been pleased.

Unless Pete’s mother was very different from other Island women, it would be impossible to count the number of people to whom she’d told a version of Pete’s story. This explained the reception Sonia had received at the Proffit farm a few weeks earlier when she’d gone across intending to negotiate a price for firewood.

She’d found Marg Proffit in her flower garden. Marg had glossy straight black hair that she wore pinned in a bun at the back of her head. She was a handsome woman, but that afternoon she had looked dull as a mouse among the glories of her garden. Sonia drank in its colours: tall, deepwater blue larkspur, impossibly dark orange lilies, phlox both red and white; the sweet, almost artificial pink of musk mallow and the clear pale lemon of a tiny day lily. If there had been a way to burn the colours onto her retinas, she would have done it. But she couldn’t even paint a picture. She had no watercolours or dyes; she had given up all that.

She turned away.

A proper married woman would have a home and a garden of her own to tend, she thought. She would wear a look of peace, like Marg.

“Sonia? Is something wrong, my dear?”

A proper married woman would express concern for others.

With a small pair of scissors she took from her pocket, Marg began to cut her flowers.

Sonia followed her as she assembled a bouquet and bound the stems together with a piece of string from her pocket. “For you,” Marg said with a gentle smile. This was pity, Sonia realized. But she found she didn’t mind — the flowers were so lovely.

Marg ducked through her open porch door and emerged a moment later with a damp rag in her hand. This she wrapped around the cut ends of the bouquet. “I set eggs and cream aside for you in the cellar,” she said. “Now why don’t you choose what you’d like from the cold room in the storage barn? Georgie’s out there, he’ll give you a hand.”

Sonia made her way slowly along the path that led from Marg’s garden to the barn. The path was made of flat pieces of Island stone set neatly level with the earth, but weeds thrived between each stone just as they did throughout Marg’s lush jungle of a garden. Everything about the Proffit farm was like this: rampant, carefree and disordered. In the garden there were tangles of hedge bindweed; amongst the grass, a rusting collection of broken equipment, mounds of wood slabs; hillocks made of tumbled birch logs (the very wood she hoped to buy for winter) were hedged all around with thistle; on the paths, roving wild gangs of fowl; and everywhere — in spite of the Proffits’ apparent inattention — an overabundance of ripe fruits and vegetables and tall green growth. How Sonia admired George and Marg’s capacity to grow what they needed. How full and serene their life here seemed. And how different it was from her own, which was ruled by the clock, the light and the stringent regulations of the DOT.

In the barn, George was standing with his hands stuffed in his pockets, rocking on his heels and speaking softly with another man. Sonia had noticed a truck in the yard and assumed it belonged to another customer for produce or a neighbouring farmer. But this man did not look like he was buying vegetables. He certainly wasn’t asking for advice on balky cows. If anything, he was giving it. Sonia could see from their stances and the way they glanced her way that these two men were friends and social equals, respectful of each other, and familiar enough to trade intimacies. This was the kind of relationship her father had had with their neighbour Clément Dionne. They were almost as close as women. M. Dionne knew more about the failure of her parents’ marriage than she did, just as Daniel no doubt knew about whatever troubles M. Dionne had confided. She hoped one day to have a friend like that. There had been girls at school she’d liked enough to share her time with, but no one she’d considered close enough to confide deeply in. Briefly she’d felt close to Max’s mother, who knit so beautifully. But Nova MacAusland grew ill with croup before Max and Sonia married, and she died a short while later. Max had moved away; Pete kept disappearing. Was she deficient in some aspect of character essential to friendship?

George said something to the other man and clapped him on the back. They laughed quietly together for a moment while they studied the dirt on their boots. Then simultaneously they looked at Sonia. “Come over, dear,” George said, waving vigorously. “I’ll help you find something to eat.”

George stored his vegetables in covered crates and large jute bags in a cool, dark corner of the barn. It was just a corner with a partial wall, but he referred to the space as his “cold room,” and he liked to take out the vegetables himself and present them one by one to Sonia. She always allowed a generous length of time for buying vegetables. There was a ritual to these meetings, which began and ended with a handshake.

She held her hand out now, but instead of taking it, George put his arm around the other man and said, “Sonia, you know Cy McRae.”

A chill ran down her spine. She did know that name. But how?

Then it came to her. Cy McRae was Pete’s employer.

He wasn’t anything like she’d expected. Pete had described a gentle, soft-spoken man and she’d imagined a placid grandfatherly figure, small and stout perhaps, with wavy, greying hair. The real Cy McRae was tall, sharp-featured, wiry, vibrantly alert.

“We haven’t met,” she said. She offered her hand. His grip was firm and he looked into her eyes in a steady, interested way.

George did not say, Cy, this is Sonia MacAusland. This failure of courtesy told her that George had already spoken her name to Cy. It said plainly that she was the object of interest here. She felt cornered, thought: run.

Cy said, “So you keep the light?”

“Yes.”

“Must be quiet, living out there.”

“It’s quiet. I like it.”

“So, you’re all alone out there? You manage all the equipment, the foghorn, the light in the tower?”

“It’s not so difficult, really.”

“And you’re on your own out there,” repeated George, who knew damn well she was, and why.

She said nothing.

“Where is your husband, anyway?”

She hated him! She would never come to his farm again! She’d buy food and firewood somewhere else!

“I mean, he shouldn’t have left you, dear. And for what? To farm. It’s a job for fools.” Here he laughed, gestured all around. “There’s better ways to earn your bread.” His chuckle turned into a grimace of self-deprecation, and for a long moment Cy bestowed on George what must have been meant as a sympathetic smile.

“Too dry this year, too many sick cattle around,” George added, and Cy nodded his head in agreement.

Then they both turned back to Sonia, and Cy spoke: “Do you mind being on your own there, dear?”

“No.” She’d answered this question already.

“Things were probably better years ago, when more people lived down on the shore,” he offered.

“Yup,” said George.

“You know, years ago there was a big community living on the sandhills up in Freeland,” Cy said, all history teacher and grandiosity. “At least a hundred people moved out to those shanties and cabins every summer, and the lighthouse keeper was the centre of all that. I had to go up a few times, to look after the horses that worked the moss.”

“I had a cousin, Claretta, that ran a lobster cannery up there,” George said, stepping closer to Cy. “It was quite a place . . . Cy! Remember Ace Walfield?”

“One time I helped a woman up there give birth,” Cy said. “There was no doctor anywhere around . . . ”

“Every evening there would be a time,” George said.

“ . . . the laughing and crying! And those flimsy shacks, with the wind whistling through them, and sand sifting between the boards . . . ”

The two men were in separate worlds of memory now.

“I can hear Danny Adams put the bow to the fiddle,” George said, and began to sing: “My mummy told me if I was goodie, that she would buy me a rubber dolly. / My auntie told her I kissed a soldier, now she won’t buy me a rubber dolly. / Ohhh . . .”

“Hmmmm,” Cy chimed in, and George took a mouth organ from the breast pocket of his overalls and began to play.

The sound George made was rich and deep and vibrant, but Cy had a sharp, wavery voice, too high for the song.

George sang, his voice low and mock solemn, and with his mouth organ he made the sound of clapping hands.

Cy slapped his knee. “Lay the leather to the hardwood!” Again they laughed.

Then George turned back to Sonia and assumed a solemn expression. “Ah, you missed them times, dear.” In the sudden quiet he looked sincerely sorry, but Cy waved a hand through the humid air.

“It wasn’t anything. You can’t go around regretting what you haven’t known.”

While George sorted through his vegetables, Cy rattled on about what he’d seen and the wisdom experience had imparted. Sonia listened grudgingly. Pete had described Cy as a talker, but he hadn’t mentioned this didactic streak. The worst thing was that he brought out the native bossiness in George.

“Take some of these beets,” George said. “They’re a decent size now. You’ll not be sorry.” She hated cooking beets once they’d grown past the tender baby stage, but George was determined to force them on her. “I’ll tell you what, take all these. That’ll do you for a while.”

“George,” said Cy, “she’ll not eat those beets in a month of Sundays.” He turned to her. “Because you’re by yourself now, dear, aren’t you?”

Why were they so stuck on this question?

“Maybe you have visitors sometimes,” George said. “A person wants to have their cellar stocked just in case.” He peered around Cy to look at her, a sly look on his face, the bag of beets dangling open from his hand.

Both men waited, but she did not respond.

“You know,” said Cy, “it’s natural to need the company of other folks. A solitary life can be lonesome. A person can go a little loony, start making bad decisions. Take that Harold Pyke, whose post you took over at the lighthouse.”

“He used to visit me,” George said.

“Yes, and he kept company with Mary Gormley after old Hew died. Then Mary died herself. After that he broke down, I guess.”

“But nobody blamed him. A person needs companionship.”

What were they saying? They thought she was crazy from living alone?

“Let me help you with those things, dear.” Cy lifted two jute sacks half full of produce. With the sacks in his hands, he began to walk out of the barn. She followed him.

At the door of the barn, he turned around. “I guess the difference is, Mary wasn’t married anymore.”

Beside her, George began to nod.

“Pete talks about you,” Cy said quietly. Gently, he touched her hand, and she looked down and saw that she’d crushed the stems of Marg’s bouquet. “Pete’s a good man,” he continued. “But he’s leaving in a week or two, and I’d hate to see you two young people hurt.”

So this was the point they wanted to make.

She felt shamed by the baldness of Cy’s statement. He held out the sacks of vegetables and she took them from him. How presumptuous he was! What did he know of her relationship with Max? Was Cy the reason Pete had not been back to see her in so long? Had he spoken to Pete in this same insinuating way? Perhaps he had been even more blunt with Pete: Love is blind, but the neighbours aren’t. Har, har.

She felt her eyes well as she walked away with the bags slung over her shoulder, beets like rocks slamming into the soft part of her back. She did not stop in at the house for the eggs and cream Marg had said she’d set aside.

In her dream that night, she was a part of the crowd at the sandhills. She belonged there, among the shanties like tents with crevices everywhere that let in the air and the sand, among the folding tables, camp beds, portable stoves, and the galvanized tubs used to wash people, clothes, linens and dishes. There was condensed milk in cans, not fresh. Possessions hung from nails in the studs of the walls and life was lived in open view of all. It was a life apart but dense with other people. Close like an ant colony: collaborative, but fractious too. Because that’s how it is when people are together. Passion overtakes reason and they do things to harm one another. They love and they lash out. On rainy days there would be games of cribbage and forty-fives. On mild evenings there would be a co-operative supper in the cookhouse followed by a dance. And then after the dance there would always be a fight.

But she would have the sense to leave before the dance got rough. And she would walk along the shore where the waves lapped softly on the sand. And Pete would be waiting for her, taking her hand, strolling with her in the moonlight through the gentle surf.

Then Pete would say her name, and she would wake.

“Sonia?”

He touched her hands, which she held wrapped around her cooling tea.

“You don’t have to eat that toast if you’re not hungry. I only made it as a way to keep busy until you got up. I came to see you — not to cook.”

She shook her head. “It’s delicious.”

He wrapped his big hands around her small ones. This felt suffocating. She pulled her own away.

“I’m sorry not to have come back before now. My classes start next week. I have to leave tomorrow.”

So what was the point of coming back? She wondered if he ever thought before he spoke.

“Let’s spend the day together. Let’s have a nice time. Friendship should be about the time you spend, not something else.”

Not what people say, he meant.

They walked down to the shore in the manner of summer visitors, holding hands, dressed in bathing clothes and lugging a blanket and hats and Pete’s pack, which they’d filled with food. She was determined to enjoy his company this one last day. She tried not to think, He’s leaving, but rather, He’s here now.

This was what she had been hungry for, she realized. In his absence, all the hues of her life had been greyed out.

First they swam, the water so sharply cold it stung. Then they raced up and down the beach to calm the chill that burned their skin. They sank onto their blanket on the sand and let the weak, late summer sun do its best to dry and warm them in their clammy suits. They ate the bread and cheese he’d brought, and he talked about the classes he would attend when he returned to Montreal. He would begin to train in surgery this year, he said, and learn to find his way around the hospital. She listened, nodding, asking questions, but not volunteering any of her own plans for the fall. Finally he fell silent, and she simply gazed at him. There was nothing she could say about her own plans that would meet with his approval. She knew that now. “You can’t stay here,” he’d said when she’d suggested spending the winter at the station. It wasn’t safe, he argued, and of course he was right. In November the station would be boarded up for the winter, and the road would be closed when the snow came.

He said he didn’t like the idea of her going to the farm to live with Max. But she and Max were married and that was the thing she had to do, he implied.

Of course, this was true. Whenever she’d talked of this subject, though, attempting to argue a way out of the cage she’d built, Pete became tense. “I could go back to Montreal too,” she’d offered once, and he’d held his breath, said, “Oh!” — and then immediately retreated. “But . . . I don’t want to be responsible . . . ”

Whenever she tried to parse the meaning of this, she came up against a wall of doubt.

Pete would be her friend, but he would not be responsible.

Whatever that meant.

So she said nothing. Instead, she turned gently away, and for a time they drowsed in the sun, which was warmer now, but distant — not like the bright, strong sun they’d enjoyed those spring and early summer days when nothing had come between them and Pete had seemed to Sonia to become a part of her.

She woke because the wind was up, blowing sand around, the sand scraping her exposed skin. Beside her Pete lay asleep. She touched his shoulder and he woke. “It’s late.” If he was going to leave on the train in the morning, he would have to cross the causeway before the tide came in.

They went back to the station house, and he followed her upstairs for towels — somehow they had forgotten them earlier — and when she turned with the towels in her arms, he caught hold of her by the shoulders and kissed her.

They had never kissed. It had been easy to deny themselves this — she was married, wasn’t she?

It had been easy for Sonia because simultaneously she thought, married — and saw Max’s bloodied arm.

But now Pete’s mouth on hers was like a powerful form of light, erasing everything — Max, respectability, rules.

“Sonia — ” He took the towels from her and squeezed her arms and seemed to be turning some thought over in his mind.

But then he discarded whatever it was he was about to say and simply bent to unbutton the shirt she’d put on over her swimsuit. She allowed this, as she allowed him to pull the straps of her heavy black suit down over her arms and the suit itself down past her hips and to the floor. She stepped out of it. From her feet when she lifted them a smattering of sand drifted down onto the pale painted floor. She turned her face to his. Taking hold of her hands, he stepped away, to look at all of her.

And in an instant she saw his face collapse in shock and then contort in anger — or disappointment, or some mixture of the two — and she remembered what it was she had been trying so hard to shut out of her mind.

“When?” he demanded. “How far along are you, Sonia?”

Through the thick double layers of her swimming suit you could not see the swelling in her belly for what it was, she supposed. But Pete was a doctor and knew the meaning of the shape like a large pear where normally only the formless, level plane of belly ought to be.

“Have you seen a doctor, or a midwife? Why are you still working? My God, Sonia, you shouldn’t be here alone. All those stairs. What if you fell? It’s so unsafe.”

This was his professional voice. She had lost him now, she realized. And it was her own fault. She picked up a towel to use as a covering and sat down on her bed.

“It was the end of April,” she said. “Max followed me here, and I tried to make him go back to the farm, but we fought and . . . I was confused . . . This was long before I met you . . . ”

She could hear the incoherence in her voice, which came through the bones of her head sounding distant and cold, like the voice of the waves at the onset of winter when they were thick with the intention of ice.

“Never mind . . . ” he said.

He was crying, or she was. He sat down behind her on the bed and wrapped his arms around her and around the towel and held her fiercely and pressed his mouth into the back of her neck. “Promise me you’ll leave the station. At least for the winter. You should be in a warmer, sheltered place.”

Did she actually speak? In her mind she nodded her head in agreement with this request. But in reality? Afterward, she could never remember.