It was Rose’s idea to go through Stella’s house while Evvie wasn’t there. “Evvie has no right to Stella’s things,” Rose said. “And who knows what we might find.” She seemed overeager, but Sonia didn’t argue.
The house was dark. Rose went in first and Sonia followed, carrying boxes she’d brought from the Co-op. There was no place to set these down. The porch smelled of engine oil and dirt and the sweet funk of decay, as from apples kept warm too long. On the floor were muddy boots and coveralls, a crate filled with greasy tractor parts, piles of junk, including the broken back and legs of a kitchen chair, towers of empty beer bottle cases and bags of baby things that Evvie should have brought over for Kate. Rose opened one of the bags and lifted out a miniature wool sweater that might have fit Kate months ago but wouldn’t now. Sonia ran a finger across the windowsill and gathered a pile of grime.
“For the love of God!” Rose stormed, snatching a newspaper off a toppling stack. “Here. We’ll put our boots on this, over by the stove.” It seemed a fruitless gesture. The paper was cleaner than the floor.
In the kitchen, Sonia opened curtains and turned on lights. She closed cupboard doors that stood ajar, their contents emptied in a jumble on the counter. Where to start? The sink was full of greasy plates smeared with beans and egg, the table a mass of newspapers, empty mugs, a shiny Massey Ferguson flyer and a pile of unopened mail. Rose began to go through this, sorting out the bills, stopping when she came across a letter addressed to Stella.
The house felt damp, so Rose built a fire in the stove and Sonia went through the rooms flinging curtains back and raising windows to let in air. There were dirty clothes in piles on the floor, empty liquor bottles underneath the bed — no food in the cupboards, no soap in the bathroom, no way to tell that anyone had cared for the place at all. It was a mercy Kate hadn’t been there.
Rose said, “We have to find evidence. The Mounties will only hold him for so long without it.”
They needed to find some fact or object that would establish reasonable suspicion of guilt. This was how an RCMP officer from Montague put the thing to Sonia when he phoned to say that Evvie had been charged. What? Sonia had said, confused by his insistence. But he would say no more.
After this exchange, she had felt to blame somehow. Why, and what for, she didn’t know. She hadn’t wanted to ask too many questions, so she tried to get Dan to probe for information, but Dan refused. “Let them do their job,” he said. Evvie had been gone a week by then.
Rob, who’d been silent all along, spoke that day. He was delighted the police had picked Evvie up. “I told them,” he said.
Rob had taken against Evvie back in the fall. When crop prices had been so low, Dan asked Evvie to join the farm — the family farm that was supposed to be Dan’s and Rob’s alone. Dan had argued they needed to expand — to take on more acreage or buy more animals. But expanding would require manpower. It was too much for Dan and Rob to handle by themselves.
“Dan thinks the farm belongs to him, so he just barrels ahead and makes decisions like Dad used to,” Rob complained. “No one pays attention to me!”
This wasn’t true, but Rob was away at school most days. It was understandable Dan didn’t always consult with him.
Rob told the police that Evvie beat Stella. No, he hadn’t actually witnessed this, he admitted, but he was certain it was true.
Sonia wondered if Rob had been paying attention where she had not.
Dan shook his head in disgust. “That was a dumb thing to do, Rob. The police are going to give him the benefit of the doubt — and they’ll look at us like the guilty parties if we keep after them with speculation. We need evidence, real proof.”
The way Rob flinched, it was clear he understood his mistake.
Dan narrowed his eyes. “What exactly did you say?”
Rob straightened up so he could look Dan in the eye. Dan was the solid one, but skinny Rob was just as tall. “I told them the way he treated her,” Rob said. “I told them it didn’t matter if he pushed her through the ice or not. The way he treated her, he drove her to it.”
Dan said nothing for a moment. Then he shook his head again. He spoke sadly, softly. “That isn’t proof.”
But Rob’s words, He drove her to it, were the ones that mattered. They echoed on the air like a hammered bell.
Sonia pulled clothes from drawers and began to fold them while Rose set out boxes to hold Stella’s things.
“Rose,” Sonia ventured, “why do you think Rob — ”
But Rose did not want to talk. “Who knows why Rob does anything,” she snapped.
Years ago Sonia would have reprimanded her daughter for this unkindness. But how could she now?
One day not long after Stella’s disappearance, exhausted by Rose’s constant bossing, Sonia had gone looking for her sons in the barn. Let me help you, she’d planned to say. But what she really wanted was some clue to their calm demeanour, some way to suppress the ache she felt. She heard them in the cow barn and sidled in.
“Would you look at that?” Rob said. Laughing, he plucked an egg from a bale of hay — he seemed carefree, buoyant.
One of the bantam hens must have gotten out. Rob held its little egg up to the light and grinned. Sonia thought, He’s still so young. Oblivious and innocent as a girl.
But then, as Rob turned, his delicate features flattened out. “All right, Dan?” he said.
Dan was crying. Sonia hadn’t noticed. He wiped a sleeve across his face. “Ummm,” he said, nodding slowly.
Rob dipped his head in Dan’s direction — a vague, unclassifiable gesture, not quite a nod — and resumed untying bales of hay. Alarmed by this display of reserve, Sonia moved to comfort Dan. He noticed her then — they both did, and startled like cats. Instead of moving forward, she slunk back.
It was understandable that they were skittish creatures, after all they’d been through.
“Mum!” Rose said now in her demanding voice. “Look.” She gestured at a gaping dresser drawer. Inside were Stella’s things.
All the clothes Evvie brought over had come from Stella’s closet. He’d insisted he brought all her things to the house yet he hadn’t bothered to empty the dresser containing Stella’s sweaters and socks. Now Sonia wondered why he had refused everyone access to her room, her things and any clues she might have left as to where she’d gone. Presumably the police had looked, but they hadn’t been much good, had they?
From the lowest drawer, Rose had removed the makings of a quilt — scraps of old wool fabric cut into simple squares, a card of needles, a length of batting and a roll of muslin. Under this was Stella’s diary and a bundle of letters.
Most of the letters were from a girl Stella had met in Toronto, now a wife and mother named Jane Czenzi.
The thought flashed in her mind: Stella must be staying with Jane! Then she remembered being tackled in the woods. Again she experienced the feeling of her body being smashed into and thrown down, by Evvie or by Max.
No, Stella had not run away. She had not left Kate.
“Oh,” Sonia said. She felt her body collapse. The certainty of what had happened getting through, a hard shove in the diaphragm.
Stella hadn’t run away and she didn’t throw herself into the river.
Leaving would not have occurred to her because she’d had no choice, not any more than Sonia ever had.
Rose said, “We didn’t think to let Jane know.”
The woods were dark. The ground was cold.
“Mum?”
Sonia willed herself to get up from where she lay, half on top of an angular rock. The woods swam all around.
“Mum!”
She willed herself back into Stella’s bedroom with Rose.
Rose said, “The letter we found downstairs must be from Jane.”
Sonia pictured the pile of mail on the kitchen table, the letter Rose had extracted from it. She nodded at her pragmatic daughter.
“I’ll write to Jane,” Rose volunteered.
They looked through the room again, but found nothing else. No evidence. No hint of what the police might need to establish “reasonable suspicion of guilt.”
Then Sonia couldn’t help but wonder, What else has he taken? What else has he kept? Stella’s life a puzzle she felt desperate to solve.
He’d taken Stella’s confidence as a mother; the peace of mind she deserved to have, but never did; that vibrancy she’d discovered in Toronto and then lost.
He’d taken Kate’s entire childhood.
More difficult than the question of what he’d taken was why he’d done it. How could he? How could anyone?
But there was no way to make sense of the brutality of Evvie’s mind, hard as she might try.
Perhaps if she’d tried earlier. Instead, she and everyone colluded with the fiction that Evvie was harmless. From the start they understood that so long as they appeased him, he’d stay calm. It became a reflex.
Sonia realized now that she had looked right past the most obvious things. Our compliance operates like a visual illusion, she decided, and the picture deceives unless we question it. The ease of status quo is seductive. And the mind is too accommodating, indulgent, untrustworthy.
All this, Evvie had in his favour.
Sonia filled the firebox then sat in her rocking chair with Stella’s diary in her lap.
Rose began to unpack the boxes of things they’d brought, sorting them into piles on the cot. She shook her head at the diary. “Don’t even tell me, okay?”
But Sonia wanted to read it. She wanted to know what Stella had been thinking.
When she was a little girl, Stella wrote stories about the drawings she made. Sonia had marvelled at this. For her, the drawing was itself the point. But Stella appended to every picture she made its own vivid explanation, or a fantastic description, set down in line after line of earnest schoolgirl printing.
Just like those lines beneath her pictures, the diary was a living thing, a part of Stella, a trace she’d left behind.
Sonia opened it — and the sudden shock of her daughter’s hand, alive on the page.
She closed it quickly.
Stella’s diary offered privileged access to Stella’s mind. Sonia felt simultaneously compelled and warned away, as by potentially scalding information. Until she read the diary, she was free to imagine what it held. The danger was that fantasy might be overtaken by reality.
It was an ordinary blank book like any you could buy at the grocery store. A cheap cover, embossed with the words My Daily Journal, enclosing a hundred wide-ruled pages. Stella would have picked it up on one of her weekly shopping trips, setting it in the cart beside her eggs and cans of beans. Sonia could see the diary in the cart, and Stella’s hand reaching toward it, as though to wipe a film of dust from its lightly padded surface. She could see the diary in Stella’s hand. She fanned it open in her own. There was no question — the handwriting was Stella’s. Big looping letters wavered up and down the page; Stella had not been able to see the faint blue lines on the paper.
Rose held up a tiny knitted sweater and turned to Sonia. “Mum, do you remember when Katie was born?”
Stella’s sadness had always distressed Sonia, but never so much as the day Stella gave birth to Kate. “I can’t!” Stella had said, pushing newborn Kate away. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
Sonia’s irritation was with herself — that she couldn’t help her daughter, that she didn’t know how.
Rose had simply been baffled by Stella’s behaviour.
Rose was astonished by the miracle of Kate, absent one minute, present the next. Her plum-shaped face more beautiful, Rose said, than anything she’d ever seen. She couldn’t fathom Stella’s despair.
“Do you remember, Mum,” Rose said again, “how sad she was when Kate was born?”
Sonia remembered. But now she was thinking about what Evvie had said. She doesn’t even know how to look after it.
And she was wondering about what else he might have said or done.
What she wondered was, Why didn’t I see what was going on?
But what was there to see? Hiding bottles in the woodshed, yelling when someone poured them out — many men did this. The criticism, berating, insistence — these were familiar too.
It’s only because she’s gone that we care, Rose had said after the funeral. What this meant to Sonia now was that if Stella hadn’t disappeared, no one would have thought twice about Evvie’s behaviour.
Rose said, “Mum?”
Sonia nodded mechanically, sickened suddenly by this new idea.
It’s only because she’s gone that we care.
She turned to Rose. “Stella was a difficult person,” she said. “Sometimes you could reach her, and sometimes you couldn’t.”
Rose sat on the couch among the piles of clothes. She said, “Remember the time Lil complained of tarnish on her ‘silver photos’?”
Sonia had seen Lil’s daguerreotypes, stiffly posed pictures of relatives on Lil’s mother’s side of the family, wealthy folk who lived in Boston and sent parcels back every Christmas for Lil’s mother when she was a girl, an entire family of fairy godmothers.
Lil had worried aloud that the images were fading, and young Stella had offered brightly: I’ll clean them for you.
Stella polished those pictures with silver cleaning paste, applying the thick, acrid stuff to all the pictures at once, efficient in the way Lil was when she cleaned her silver cutlery and tea service. Stella had watched Lil smear polishing paste on all her silver, rub the pieces with a scrap of flannel, rinse them in a pan of water, wash them all to remove the residue of the foul paste, and dry them carefully to make them shine. Stella loved to watch this operation, so different from the way it was conducted at home. Sonia used toothpaste or salt and half a lemon — neither of which really did the job, Stella complained.
Of course, when Stella “polished” them, Lil’s pictures came as clean as brand new mirrors. Lil found Stella staring into them when she walked into the kitchen. All her precious images erased.
Sonia imagined Stella’s feeling then as the sickening thrill of dropping down a narrow shaft — the dark strength of that guilt and failure.
Sonia opened Stella’s diary at random. At the bottom of a page, under the heading Other Mistakes I’ve Made, Stella had written Evvie’s name. Below this, a few indiscernible words had been repeatedly stroked out.
Sonia put her finger on the unreadable words, touched the pencilled gashes Stella had made.
“Well,” she said, leaning away a little, rubbing her eyes, irritated from reading in the dim light.
“I guess we’d better get to work,” Rose said. “Dan will be wanting his supper. And I have a blouse to iron for tomorrow.” She stood and picked up one of the piles of Stella’s clothes.
Evvie was worse for Stella than we realized, Sonia thought, but was he any different, really, than Ray or Dan or even Rob, who always believed that they were right and that life should proceed according to their plans? Maybe the only difference was that Evvie was angrier.
He wasn’t different from Max, either. Max who insisted that they were going to do this or that thing, and when, and never imagined that Sonia might have another idea. Max who always convinced Sonia to disregard her own instincts and pile in with whatever scheme he’d cooked up. Moving to the Island. Starting a mixed farm.
And like a fool, she’d gone along.
Max had strong opinions about the world and how it worked. Opinions that were completely unlike Sonia’s own and surprised her every time.
Why had she ever found this enthralling?
I was too easily swayed by what he said, she thought. Too ready to follow.
Pasted on one page, a clipping from the newspaper’s Island History column:
Henry sick and cross last night, got no sleep, up half the night with him. What a blessing to have children when you come to think of it.
— Lemuel Vickerson, Aug. 11, 1868
And below this, in Stella’s hand: Kate is one year old today.
On the next page Stella had written, It’s lucky Rose has so much time off school.
But Rose had never had time off school. She’d been skipping school in order to look after Kate.
How had Stella never realized, all that time?
Rose has been a marvellous help with Kate the past few weeks.
Sonia turned the page.
Kate looks like Rose, but Kate is not extraordinary. Kate is exhausting to me. How I hate it that I feel this way.
Sonia understood how Stella felt.
The young are beautiful, Lil said once, because they have so few regrets.
Sonia thought, Lil was right: I am not beautiful; I am no longer young; and I feel tortured by regret.
Then, she’d said — too flippantly — Lil, you are so wise.
Lil had waved her away. I heard it on the radio, she said.
Rose was carrying boxes down the hall. She brushed by Sonia, pointedly ignoring both her mother and the diary.
Sonia thought, What Rose has that neither Frances nor I do is certainty. It lends a kind of glow.
Evidently Rose believed that secrets were incendiary, and none more so than whatever might be written in Stella’s diary.
Rose maintained that people would say anything on the telephone. She complained that some days her work was a torrent of personal revelations. After all, she said, what is Switchboard but other people’s secrets?
She hated that, she said.
Sonia wondered, What is it that Rose so desperately doesn’t want to know?
After supper, when the kitchen was empty, Sonia read farther:
What I love about my poor eyesight is the quiet. It’s so restful without glasses. So much gets filtered out, so many distractions and demands.
It’s true some things look strange. The lamp in the living room with its corset-shaped shade catches me off guard. It’s like a person coming through the door. The gateleg table is a calf with knobbly knees. Several times I’ve caught myself wondering how it stands up on its own, why it doesn’t collapse into a pile of fresh straw. The geraniums in the window wave to me. My pincushion is a fuzzy ball I want to pet. Evvie moves so fast he scares me. Kate is a romping dog.
But then I put my glasses on and the world transforms again.
Vision isn’t everything. I smell bread long before I see it, hear the crackle of the crust when it cools, feel the sharp pain when I accidentally touch the oven rack or a hot pan on the stove. Laundry is the same — the bitter smell of soda and the sweet freshness of the soap. Sometimes sound and smell and touch are more important than a picture in the mind.
But when the picture’s blurry is when it’s most interesting anyway. Seeing light, shape, movement and colour is seeing possibility — it’s seeing a flexible world that can become whatever you most need it to be.
I love it when the thing I want to see turns out to be the thing I really see. But that’s so rare, it almost never happens. Once last winter, walking along the edge of the woods and hearing chickadees, I saw a blur on a hanging branch and wished it were a chickadee that’d stay until I reached her. It was, and she stayed! So I got to see a bird close up. Close enough, anyway.
More often I imagine things are other than they are and I am disappointed when I get close. Most things are ordinary, when you get right up to them.
Sonia thought, Kate is a romping dog . . . vision is possibility: my daughter was an artist. She saw what I struggle to see.
How could Stella see this way, Sonia wondered, and still believe that anything in life was mundane?
Stella saw only one blurry, off-centre version of everything. Sonia thought, No wonder she sometimes seemed confused.
People think that light’s essential to good vision, but the opposite is true. Without my glasses, I see best in subdued light. Bright, glary light is too harsh, makes me want to turn away.
With perfect vision, I’d be trapped in the ordinary truth of the world, imprisoned in a banal reality I couldn’t bear and wouldn’t have the strength of character to change. This way, I can allow myself imagination, fantasy.
Rose and Frances did not remember Stella’s accident, but Sonia knew they could remember what others had said about it, stories people told, and stories from Stella herself. What Sonia most remembered was the emptiness in those stories, which were always incomplete, their central incident left out.
How, exactly, had Stella been hurt? Who was to blame? Stella never said.
What Sonia wanted to remember was how Stella had reacted to her loss of sight.
How had she responded when her bandages were removed? To the months of healing and renegotiation?
She wanted to clarify for herself how Stella was different, after. Stella’s own description of her experience was so different from Sonia’s memory of it.
How little we understand each other, she thought.
Sonia covered her eyes with her hands. A quick panic rose. She fought it down.
She could hear the sounds of the house — the faint ticking of floor ties against wooden beams, an insubstantial sigh (wind caught indoors, like breath on a grand scale). There was the smell of clothes from the boxes Rose had unpacked, with their mingled burdens of soap and mustiness and wear, and there were the smells of the kitchen around her. The closeness and warmth of the enveloping dark (as if losing one’s sight increased the ambient temperature).
She squeezed her eyes shut and put her hands out and began to move around the kitchen, aiming for the hall. She felt for something to grasp onto. She tripped on the fringed edge of the rug and stumbled down the hall, where the walls on either side were near enough to afford a sense of edge. Her hand caught something sharp, there was a scraping sound, and her eyes flew open. She’d hit the corner of a picture frame. She closed her eyes and pressed her hands against them.
Was this what Stella saw inside her damaged eye? The opposite of dark: a grey-red wall that refused to settle down, its surface frantic with exploding sparks and restless, floating blotches.
A senseless image of life, Sonia thought. At the same time, true.
The way she started was by painting swaths of blue on a cut-open canvas bag she’d secured to strips of lath. The paint was left over from a metal fence Dan installed at the end of a marshy field. She’d thinned it with turpentine and now she applied it with big, broad strokes, sweeping her arm forward in an imitation of a wave. She wasn’t sure yet what she’d do when the paint dried. But as she swept the wide-bristle brush across the nubbly canvas, she thought of sand and sun and all she’d lost. Evvie came to mind, the engineer of so much sorrow. She scrubbed harder with the brush. She dipped into the can of paint and pushed more blue into the canvas. She laid her brush down. She picked it up again and shook it hard toward the canvas. Lines of blue guttered out.
Rage, she thought. Rage. It was what he expressed. She said it, and the sound of the word embodied her own emotion. I am enraged.
She opened her mouth and screamed the place still.
So that was how it felt to act on a violent impulse.
But why bother? The act was briefly satisfying, then meaningless.
She’d asked Marina, Why did he do it? And Marina just shook her head. You will go crazy trying to answer that question.
She threw the brush at a wall.
Over supper that night, Dan reported that while “you were swanning around” — here he nodded to indicate Frances frivolously at school, Rose frivolously at work, and Sonia doing God knows what, covered in spatters of blue — “meanwhile,” he said, his voice tight with disapproval, “the RCMP let Evvie go.”
You can make a telephone call, they’d said. Ask somebody to drive you home.
So Evvie had called Dan, since Dan was going to farm with him. This was what Evvie had said.
“Yeah, I’m gettin’ out,” he said. “Kin ya come and pick me up?”
Dan had told him: No. Now Dan glared around the table.
Rose said, “And this is our fault how?”
Dan shook his head, disgusted again.
Rose pursed her lips.
Then Dan did something rare. He said, “I’m sorry, Rose. Of course it’s not your fault.”
Sonia thought, But why did they let Evvie go? Isn’t he guilty? Was I wrong?
After supper, Sonia washed dishes and watched through the open kitchen window as Dan set his fist down hard on the bonnet of Evvie’s pickup. “Tell me what you did,” he said. In a whiny, sarcastic voice — a cruel imitation of Evvie’s — he said, “That hole in the ice. Stupid bitch.” Then he slammed his fist again.
Dan roared at Evvie that he was going to farm alone but that Evvie would have to sign any forms that came from the Farm Credit because now that Dan was into this he had to keep on going.
Evvie stared, said nothing.
Dan kept on. “And if you think there’s any effing way I’ll farm with you, you’re damn well Jesus fucking wrong!”
Evvie’s scalded look seemed to give Dan pause for the briefest fraction of a second. Then he kept on. “Get out!” he roared. “Get the hell — ” He waved his hand listlessly.
Evvie was still standing by his truck, as though by waiting there he might effect some change in Dan, and Dan would become himself again.
“Get out!” Dan warned again, and Sonia imagined Stella soothing Evvie the way she used to, calming him with her mild, thoughtfully inflected voice.
Evvie stumbled past Dan and climbed into his truck. Stella’s voice was now an imaginary counterpoint in Sonia’s mind: Never mind, dear. It’s not important. Never mind, never mind . . .
Evvie mumbled, “Helluva kick in the guts.” He put the truck in gear and turned to back out of the lane.
“Get the fuck — ” Dan slammed his hand down on the hood of the truck.
Evvie wheeled around and slammed the transmission into park and got back out of the truck. He came at Dan, fists raised.
Dan was ready for him, icily calm now. “You murdered my sister,” Dan said.
“The hell I did! Is that what you all think?” Evvie turned and glared at Sonia in the open window. “Stella wanted to fall through. You didn’t live with her! She was a misery. I never saw anybody so miserable.”
Dan said, “You made her unhappy.”
“I never made her anything. She did it to herself.” Evvie started to walk away, but then he turned around again. “I’ll tell you something else. I miss her more than you all do!”
This remark was so unexpected, it silenced even Dan.
Frances could not remember Stella’s face. “Mum,” she said, “tell me what Stella looked like.”
Sonia said faces were too complex for memory. “Who can remember what any person looks like? Would you remember my face, if I walked out of the room? You have to stop dwelling on this, Frances,” she said. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”
Later, it dawned on Sonia that her response had been harsh. She went looking for Frances, and finally found her in the barn, sitting on a hay bale beside a litter of kittens that had just been born. Sonia reached under the sleeping barn cat and picked up one of her tiny babies.
“Stella had brown hair,” she said. “Long, stringy hair that she let hang or pulled into an untidy knot. Her eyes were grey and her mouth was deeply red compared to the paleness of her skin. She wore her glasses on top of her head — so she didn’t have to see, I think. Her one eye looked straight ahead.”
This feature, the injured eye, was impossible to forget. But the rest — the hair, the colours — would not coalesce into an image in Sonia’s mind. No wonder Frances couldn’t conjure it.
Sonia said, “Remember how she always wore her clothes too big?”
Then she felt a sudden seepage of remorse and gratitude. Frances had been right in the first place — it was important to try — but faces were too complex for memory. At least, Stella’s face was too complex. Or Stella herself was.
Surely this was something to be thankful for. Didn’t it mean that Stella had lived a full life, brief and troubled as it was?
Then the heat of the late summer came on. Frances helped Rob and Dan bale the last of the hay, made jam or pickles with Sonia. Rose increased her hours at work, taking the truck when Dan didn’t need it, catching a ride with one neighbour or another when she could. At night she sat with Kate and Sonia on the old swing in the grove, sipping cool tea with lemon and recounting the events of her day. For Sonia the surprise of these moments was their ease — Rose’s relaxed state after work, Kate’s calm and the feeling of normalcy this all brought. She longed for it to last. Of course it couldn’t.
Rose was on her dinner break one sweltering late August day when she saw Ray with the woman from his wallet photo.
She’d heard about Chevette Gallant from Dan back in the spring. “Evvie’s met her,” Dan had said over supper, as though this fact would mean something to Rose.
Rose had decided not to believe in the existence of Chevette Gallant. But now here she was — an actual person — walking arm in arm with Ray along a downtown street.
“Chevette Gallant is Ray’s ex-wife,” Dan said. “She’s Catholic, and she’s divorced. You know that can’t be good. A Catholic woman doesn’t get divorced unless the man is really bad to her.”
Recently, Dan had become more direct. “Rose, you need to drop this Ray. You need to do it now.”
Rose had stopped calling Ray, but he persisted in telephoning her. This morning he had called to ask her out for a drink after work. She said no.
“But do you see,” Rose marvelled to Frances and Sonia, “he must have turned right around and called her.”
On the street, Ray wrapped his arm around Chevette Gallant, who Rose could see was dressed beautifully and shod in swell new pumps, her glossy hair caught in an elegant upswept do. Even from the back Rose could tell the woman’s sense of style was exceptionally fine. She had made herself look beautiful for Ray.
So why, she wondered, does he keep calling me?
Frances had shown Rose the photographs in Ray’s wallet after she found it in the river. The automobile and the woman with the updo.
“Chevette Vermeer,” Frances said when Dan brought her up. “That would have been her married name. Gallant must be the name she’d had before. Either that or she’s gotten married again.”
This Rose doubted, having watched Ray kiss her on the street.
“You should confront him,” Frances said.
But Rose didn’t want to.
“She had streaks in her hair like Holly Golightly,” Rose said.
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Frances explained for Sonia’s benefit. Sonia had never seen Rose’s favourite film.
“This takes the fun out of that movie,” Rose complained.
Frances shook her head. “Rose, that movie was never fun. It was sad. What did you think?”
“Thank goodness I didn’t agree to meet him,” Rose said. “Serial marrier. No-good lech.”
She would never see or speak to Ray Vermeer again, she said. She was determined now.
But Sonia could see from her face that there was something bitter in the knowledge that now she really was alone, and Sonia didn’t know what to say or do to ease that ache.
Marina said, “You have to let them make their own mistakes, but you have to know when to step in too. You’re doing a good job. Sonia, do you hear me?”
Sonia nodded.
“This Ray Vermeer sounds like bad news, as the young people say. How can you help Rose see that? We women have to stick together.”
Sonia nodded again, without looking at Marina. How could she help Rose see? She didn’t have a clue.
“And how are you doing, dear?”
“Grain is good this year. The boys are pleased.”
Marina levelled her cool, assessing gaze.
Sonia could not say that she felt most worried about Frances, who was passionate like her but in love with science rather than art. She could not admit that she was afraid Frances was lost. Not lost in the way Stella had been, in gloom, but profoundly lost in grief. What did you do, to help a child out of that?
Marina said, “Sonia, remember this: you are as mysterious to your children as they are to you. But you still have to solve your own life if you want to be of any help to them.”
All that humid summer, Rose came and went like haze. Frances and Sonia looked after Kate. Rose’s appearances at home were brief and insubstantial, and Sonia began to feel that she was fading from their lives. She seemed detached, as if she’d developed a protective carapace. After Ray she hardly spoke about herself, except in relation to her job at Island Telephones. With its rigid rules of conduct and electric buzz of energy, the sociability of the other operators and the fiercely solitary, mechanical focus required by the work itself, the job was a perfect fit for Rose.
The idea of connecting and reconnecting to that humming apparatus gave Sonia chills, but Frances said she envied Rose her smart new clothes and daily experience of urban life. She envied Rose the languid evenings she sometimes spent in town, staying over at another operator’s apartment after work. She felt sure she’d never have a life like that.
When university started in September, Frances was supposed to live in town, in a room Dan had found, and her life at home would end. But Frances complained she didn’t know how to begin. Sonia helped her pack her books and mend some of her clothes. None of this helped, Frances said. None of it made the move away more real.
Rose had gone, but something inside Frances would not let her leave.
In Rose’s absence, Sonia began to notice how many things Rose knew that Frances and even Sonia herself did not: how to find a job, how to get to town every day, how to carry on.
From listening on the switchboard, Rose knew the true meaning of the things people were given to say, how they hurt each other, and how they made it up again. Rose was smart in ways that Sonia would never be. But her intelligence came packaged with an insidious form of misery: the sorrow that derives from understanding all too well how human beings fail each other.
Love plus knowledge added up to loss. Sonia understood how this calculation worked. What she wanted was to know how to add things up a different way.
One day in the mailbox there was a paper-wrapped box with the label P. Cope, O.D.
My glasses? Sonia thought. The woman from his office kept calling to make appointments for her fitting, but Sonia had cancelled these appointments twice.
She opened the parcel. It was not glasses. It was a little box of paints and a tiny brush. Scrawled across the box, For Sonia. Love, Pete.
The paint set was impossible to resist. For days on end she did nothing but draw pencil sketches and fill them in with colour.
My God, she’d say, and Pete’s hand on her face, his lips on her own.
The little sketches piled up.
But the pictures would not behave as she wanted them to.
She squinted at them in the light, and the images were fine, but they would not come alive.
She tried fields, woods, the bark of different trees, vistas of shorelines drawn from memory.
She remembered from childhood the confidence she’d felt in her ability to make art, even in the absence of objective proof. She remembered restlessness — and certainty too.
She remembered how she felt when an image formed and how she felt before that, when an inchoate emotion grabbed her by the throat.
She thought of letting the paint set go and adding wool to her blue canvas, felting and fraying it, working in strips of an old silk tie of her father’s, a luminous, smoky grey like the sky on the shore before dawn. She could work with the silk’s reflectivity. She knew how to manipulate its planes of light. But what would such a picture mean, if anything?
What she wanted was to convey emotion in an image. She wanted to make a picture that would come alive.
She laid out dinner — slices of ham with mustard relish, baked beans, brown bread — then impulsively she began again. She heaped a dinner plate, sketched it quickly, filling in the pattern on the plate, the multitude of beans, the bright chaos of the relish and the scratchy rectangle of toast. Max’s plate had always been piled high like this. It was a habit, even now, to make her portion and her children’s smaller. I work hard all day, he’d explained when Dan had challenged him as a child. Why is Dad’s supper bigger than mine?
She picked up her paint set and a jar of water. No colour in the box was bright enough for the lurid relish.
She made it blue instead.
After the enforced regularity of meals with Max — five on the dot — she’d abandoned all sense of schedule for years. She’d had no choice. How busy they’d been! In agony on the couch one night, legs and arms throbbing from exhaustion, she’d raised her head to the touch of a hand on her shoulder — Eddie, over for a game of cards. This is too much for you, he’d said. I’m gonna come over tomorrow and get in the hay.
Despite the exhaustion of doing so many jobs at once through those first years alone, she’d felt a continual sense of relief. It’s hard for you, him gone, Eddie had said. But it wasn’t hard Max was gone: Max being gone was easy. Before, she’d put her life aside for Max, she’d shushed the kids and changed her own behaviour in a thousand different ways. Once, Dan complained that Sonia let Max bully her and why didn’t she stand up to him? But how do you stand up to someone who smashes his fist through walls and screams and wrecks things? He was Jekyll and Hyde, destructive one night, charming the next. Sonia didn’t want money wagered during card games, but he did it anyway. Grinning as he hid it and bringing it out when she left the room. Frances and Dan saw. Anyone can put something over on someone else if they want to. Anyone can betray another person’s trust.
No, it wasn’t hard that Max was gone. Only the physical work was hard.
All Max ever wanted was to escape the lightship. He hadn’t known what he wanted to go to. And that wish to get away was not enough to make a life.
The dinner plate was glowing like a hot coal in her hand. This was not what she wanted. It was a painting with emotion, yes, but it was not emotion she wanted to revisit.
She threw it in the fire and took the others to the window. Sweet scenes of land and sky and shore. But flat. Every one blurry or out of focus.
The next eye appointment, the one she hadn’t cancelled yet, was in mid-September. This time, she would have to go.
Sonia bent to tuck Kate into bed and something leered at the window. Evvie’s face.
She blinked away the image and bent to kiss Kate on the forehead. Then she stood, and there was Evvie, glaring.
She thought, He’s haunting us now?
She had both expected and dreaded his appearance. But now that he was here, she understood how unprepared she was. She could do nothing, say nothing, felt frozen in place.
Frances came into the room and unlocked the moment.
How pathetic he was with his permanent sneer and unwashed hair, she said. She looked him in the eye as she moved toward the window and she closed the curtains in his face.
Evvie has no right, her ferocious whisper.
It struck Sonia that Evvie had been sleepwalking since Stella disappeared, and for some reason he wasn’t anymore.
If he wanted Kate back, she would make it good and clear they would not give her to him.
She imagined a reunion, the father saying Hi there, little baked potato. And the daughter singing Dadda! She thought, two together, the storybook line Kate loved so much that went with a picture of a lion and a zebra holding hands.
He would catch her in his arms, or she would come running to him, pushing her new glasses up on her nose, like her mother whom Evvie claimed he missed, no matter what anyone else believed.
But none of this was ever going to happen.
Evvie was not that gentle father. Kate ran from the room whenever he appeared.
Later, Sonia would learn that Evvie had been drinking heavily for weeks.
The police refused to investigate further. “We questioned him,” they said.
This seemed insane. Even kind-hearted Cece and Mae thought so. “I think Dan’s right,” Cece pronounced the next day, kicking at an imaginary clump of grass with his boot. “I think Evvie might have did it.”
Still, there was no proof.
Rose stayed in town often now. Dan veered between rage and uncertainty. It was unsettling to see Dan doubt himself, and Sonia could not begin to make out what was wrong with Frances.
She called Marina, and Marina said, “It’s hard to know what Evvie wants.”
“He complained no one has any time for him. He said he misses her. He misses Stella.”
“Hmmm. When was this?”
“Dan laid into him after he got out of jail, and that’s how he responded. What did he imagine it would be like without her?”
“Now, Sonia, we don’t know what happened. We don’t know he planned to hurt her. Tell me again about him looking at Kate.”
“I was putting Kate to bed in Rose’s room. Evvie was at the window. But, Marina, he wasn’t looking at Kate. He was looking at me.”
“Oh.” Marina was silent for a moment. Then, in her thoughtful way, she said, “Yes. That makes sense. Because you were closer to Stella than anyone.”
This was what the police had said. We can’t prove anything, so you’ll have to be vigilant, dear. Now she understood what they’d meant: we can’t charge him, so you have to watch out for what he might do.
“Be careful, dear,” Marina said, but all Sonia could focus on was the softness in her voice as she’d explained, You were closer to Stella than anyone.
This was what Sonia so needed to hear. You were closer to Stella than anyone.
That Marina saw this meant everything.
Lyman came by the next morning.
He refused to come in. From the doorstep he nodded at Sonia and said, “Come for a walk with me, Frances.”
It was barely nine o’clock. Frances was tucking bread dough into buttered pans. She clapped her hands to get the flour off, looked them over, shook her head. No, she said. But Lyman took a step inside. “Come on, Frances. It’s Saturday.”
So she changed her mind. “Oh, all right. Mum, can I go?”
“Sure,” Sonia said. Why not? A walk was an ordinary, harmless activity. Surely even Lyman couldn’t turn a simple walk into trouble.
Frances told the story later.
Lyman led her toward the river. Our familiar haunt, as Frances used to think of it.
At first, she said, she’d felt glad to be out rambling with him. But when Lyman turned toward the river, she thought of Stella. The river wasn’t theirs anymore.
No, she said when she realized where he was taking her. She stopped.
Lyman pulled her by the arm. He was angry, and for an instant, Frances said, she didn’t recognize his voice. Come on, he said, and hauled on her arm. She dug in her heels. He hauled again, and then he let her go and began to cry.
Frances didn’t want to go down to the river. She didn’t want to see the river, or hear it move, or smell its rotting smell, she said.
But she couldn’t stand to see Lyman cry.
He led her through the woods, along a narrow path only fishermen and hunters used. Frances had to wrestle branches out of her face and stretch to leap over swampy spots. Finally Lyman paused at a narrow opening where some willows had been trampled down. See there, he said, and he pointed to Stella’s glasses, caught in the mud, amongst the trash at the river’s edge.
Dan called the police, and Rose took a day off work to sit with Sonia and Frances while the RCMP sent a boat and dragger out, to search the river one last time. But they found nothing else, and in some important way that failure caused Stella’s presence in Sonia’s mind to become, for a time, not less but more intense.
Frances began tearing her room apart. Organizing, she called it. For university.
She pulled things out of drawers with a fury that troubled Sonia. She flung sweaters like an actor in a movie that had been speeded up.
Sonia said, “I’ll miss you, Frances,” and Frances replied without turning around, “Will you really?”
Sweaters fell together on the bed like toppled blocks and Frances pulled blouses and skirts off their hangers and threw them into the pile.
Then without warning she sank to the floor of her messy room, folded her legs beneath her body and collapsed.
When Rose came home twenty minutes later, Frances was still crumpled in a ball, her face closed like a fist, the skin puffed and red and rubbed with grime.
“Frances?” Rose knelt on the floor. The glazed look in Frances’s eyes was frightening. “Mum, what happened?”
Sonia left Frances with Rose and went to get a damp, warm washcloth to wipe her daughter’s face. Then together she and Rose cleared off the bed and tucked Frances into it.
The next morning, Frances looked like herself. But she wanted to talk about Stella.
“I had a dream,” she said. “Stella in a white skirt, twirling like the ballerina in a music box. She spun like this. She was going skating.”
Rose said, “But we never went out when there was softness in the ice.”
Frances frowned. “It was an accident,” she said.
“Okay — ” Rose said, her voice barely a whisper.
As children, they’d skated on the river every evening for weeks on end, Sonia with them. They soared, or believed they did.
The winter wind sandpapering our faces, Sonia remembered, and the river holding us up.
Every year they waited impatiently, from the day someone spotted the first skim of ice, or heard the music of its forming, a tinkling like chimes.
Sonia had seen this happen once, the current bringing to the riverbank small circles of ice — circles, and oddly shaped fragments that wished to be circles — delicate, glassy discs no larger than the palm of a child’s hand. She thought of them as hands — a thousand hands joining to form the sturdy surface she and her children would skate on.
The sound was marvellous, more deliberate than chimes, less random — an aural artwork, if art could be a product of nature. Rose and Stella were with her, and heard the music too.
“Do you remember — ” Rose said now. “Frances. Do you remember skating?”
But Frances was still in another world. “She could soar.”
It had been a day to soar. But instead Stella drowned. Was that what was wrong with Frances: she finally understood that Stella had drowned?
Sonia pictured Stella on the ice. She saw her glasses, caught in the mud, where Lyman had found them.
Rose sat thinking of what to say. Sonia knew Rose believed that she could gentle Frances out of this, as she had ordered the household and mothered Kate. This was the thing Rose was good at.
“Frances” — Rose took her hand — “come with me.”
But Frances would not let Rose lead her to a safer place.
Sonia thought, We are separating. All of us. We are spinning apart.
She could feel it happening.
Frances said, “Evvie said, I done it and I’m not sorry.”
Sonia thought, Yesterday it was an accident.
What Frances said could be true. But Frances still had that glazed look in her eyes. And as far as Sonia knew, she had not spoken to Evvie.
“Mum,” Frances said.
Sonia nodded. She made her daughter a cup of tea.
Then, a week or so later, Eddie Mack came over with a pile of mail. He sat on the kitchen couch. His face was white.
“Everett isn’t home,” he said. “I don’t think he’s been there in a while.” He set a small bundle of letters on the edge of the table. “This bunch was sticking out of the box.” Then he held one out to Sonia. “I found this in the house.”
It was an oil bill, still sealed into its envelope. Sonia turned it over. On the back, in Evvie’s scrawl, three soul-destroying lines: Kate. I didn’t mean to hurt her. You be a good girl.
Sonia kept reading the words until the envelope fell from her hand.
Eddie folded his body around hers.
Sonia said, “Kate can’t ever see this.”
It was an incomprehensible legacy.
Sonia and Dan took the oil bill in to the RCMP. A burly officer with a squint eye only gazed at Dan and said, “Would you like to report the disappearance?”
Dan got a fierce look on his face. “Do I want you to find him? No!”
Of course, the police couldn’t charge Evvie if they couldn’t find him.
On the drive home Dan said, “But they weren’t going to charge him anyway.”
They’d released him. It seemed the case was closed.
To Dan, it didn’t matter whether Evvie pushed Stella or raged and shouted at her until she leapt. To the RCMP, it did. “We questioned him,” they said, again and again. “There is no evidence he harmed her physically.”
There was no evidence of Evvie himself, either. That was the one good thing: Evvie was gone.
September 1965. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
The clouds had taken on a careless look. The fields were spent. The cellar and the woodshed full. Sonia had established a simple routine for Kate: breakfast at dawn, bedtime at dusk, a quiet time after main meals and a nap in between. Kate followed her, copying what she did, most of the day. With Rose’s help, Frances had settled into a room in town and was attending classes at the university every day. Rose continued to travel back and forth so she could spend evenings and weekends with Kate. Dan handled a heroic portion of the farm work, arguing Rob needed to concentrate on school now he was in grade eleven. Rob was relieved to be released. To Sonia, Rob looked more confident and Dan serene, not overworked. Everyone seemed calmer.
One evening, Sonia watched from a distance as Dan began to build a fire. Beside him, a pile of brush he’d cleared in order to widen the headland of a field.
The sky behind Dan smouldered in layers of dusky colour, and the trees and the fields were grey. She watched as he piled stuff — layers of twigs and fine dry grass, birch twigs first and then mounds of brush. She imagined the sky as paint on canvas, small twigs and grass woven into the cloth.
Soon it would rain. The fire would burn hot briefly, and then the rain would put it out. The rain would wash the land. Wash things clean, and create a sense of starting over.
Sonia craved a sense of starting over.
Dan piled branches. Soon he would throw a match and watch the flames creep through the dry grass base he’d made, wait to ensure it caught, listen for the satisfying roar of ignition . . .
She watched him pat his pockets for a matchbox, and she could see her father in the gesture.
Beyond the old hedgerow, the stubble field began to glow.
When he was done watching his fire, Dan would look back at the house. He would see the yellow light, and maybe he would hear Kate laugh. There was a chill in the air, but a window would be open because of the heat from the stove.
As he got closer to the house, he would hear music from the radio, and a smell of biscuits and baking beans would take over from his brush fire.
The house would look warm and inviting. Kate would shriek and giggle, and Rose and Sonia would laugh the way they used to.
Dan would, too.
She watched Dan touch a match to the dry grass. His fire started. He stepped away from it.
She saw the bark of the trees (like raw fleece licked with wet black paint) and Dan’s piled sticks, now so dark against his fire’s leaping flames. She saw the lighted sky.
The strength of Dan’s good fire and the glory of the world behind it: a vivid, unexpected benediction.
She thought of Rose, in the house with Kate, and of Rob and Frances. All they’d overcome.
She smelled the fire. The sky burned brighter. She thought to get Rose and Kate — they should see this spectacle —
But it was too late already. The light had begun to change.
She tried to focus on the meal they’d share when Dan came into the house and for a brief moment they were together — all except Frances, who was in town.
— and except Stella.
Dan was throwing fragments of paper into the fire. Glittering ribbons and shards turned in the uneven light. She walked toward him.
“Farm Credit application,” he said as she approached.
He stirred the fire and Sonia realized what this meant. “But how will you expand?”
Cece and Grover Hurry and Eddie Mack would expand co-operatively with him, Dan said. That way they wouldn’t need Farm Credit. “It was Eddie’s idea.”
“That’s good, dear. That’s good. Come in, now. Supper’s ready.”
Halfway back to the house, she turned to look at the fire, at the picture she’d seen or imagined.
But she couldn’t focus. She told herself she would do better the next day, and then she shuttered her mind and went into the kitchen and blindly let Rose take over, as she knew Rose would.
The second time she found herself in Peter Cope’s optometry office, Sonia was prepared. She had a bag of knitting, in case she had to wait. She was no longer bothered by the starkness of the place. She knew what lay behind the inner door. Pete wasn’t going to catch her off guard. They didn’t know each other anymore, if they ever had.
“My dear,” he said, opening the inner door.
She looked around. Apart from the inert and habitually silent woman who sat beside the telephone, the office was deserted. She picked up her bag.
“How are you?” he said.
She preceded him toward the examination room, his question a live thing between them. How was she? She couldn’t tell. Good manners demanded an answer. But to Pete she could neither lie politely nor tell the truth: I’m baffled. You baffle me. I’ve just lost one daughter and my other two are leaving home. Violent memories haunt me. I don’t know what I think anymore . . .
This time, the room was brightly lit. Blackout curtains had been drawn away from the windows. She sat in a chair he held out for her, positioned beside his impossibly cluttered desk. “I’m so glad to see you — ” He bent and captured her face in both his hands.
She reared back in the chair.
He pulled away, but it was too late. His breach had destroyed her carefully constructed facade of calm.
“You know — ” She stopped, unsure of what to say.
“Sonia, I’m sorry.”
He didn’t look sorry. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to let him be in charge anymore. “You know,” she said, “I just came here to get my glasses. I just want to see well enough to draw properly, that’s all.” The heat of his hands still burned her face. She rubbed her cheeks hard and the sensation fell away.
What had made her think she could get through this visit? What delusion?
“I’m sorry, Sonia. I keep thinking I remember you. I do remember your beautiful drawings. But I keep forgetting how much time has passed. Forgive me, please.”
He held the glasses out to her and she put them on. Delicately, he touched the corners of the frames, then lifted the glasses clear away.
He took them into a corner of the room. She could hear the clink of metal. A tapping sound. A little hammer, maybe, or a percussive mechanism of some kind. The next moment he was leaning over her again, breathing sweetly, sweeping her hair aside in order to set the glasses in place, their unfamiliar weight pressing on her ears and across the bridge of her nose.
“How does that feel? Just take a moment to decide.” He put a hand on her shoulder.
If there had been a way to run . . . but she wanted the glasses desperately. She wanted to see. She wanted to see as clearly as her children could.
Why did he imagine he knew her? The difference between his way of looking at the world and hers was profound.
Twenty-five years ago, he’d believed in observing one’s commitments and she’d believed in taking leaps of faith. She could imagine following another path, and he, obviously, could not.
She had been willing to go to Montreal. He had not been able to imagine her in his life. Or, not her and Stella both.
On his face that last day at the station, she’d seen her future roll out before her, and it was lonely, full of bitterness and regret. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it, his expression said.
But why should she feel regret? The question tore at her. Regret arises from misguided choice, but she’d never had a choice.
She moved to the farm with Max because Pete left. Without her lighthouse posting, she could imagine nothing else.
He leaned forward again, peering into her eyes. “How does that feel?”
The way he leaned toward her, reaching for her glasses, urging her to speak, seemingly torn between wanting to take the glasses away to adjust them again and wanting to leave them with her.
How does that feel? She had no idea how the glasses felt. She could barely focus on the question, so startled was she by the weight of the frames on her face, his hand on her shoulder, his voice in her ear.
He waited.
She opened her eyes — all this time she’d had them closed! — and how fiercely sharp things were.
Complexity overwhelmed her. The room, which had been soft and harmless, full of rounded shapes and muted colour, now throbbed with detail. Angles grew from other angles, objects leered: clutter, books, machines, optometric tools, empty paper lunch bags, books on shelves, and photographs — so many photographs. One jumped out: that photo from the shore. Huh.
She looked away and saw her own lined hands.
She felt a pain.
Stella should have seen like this.
Her eyes blurred again.
She reached for the glasses, tore them off, swiped at her face.
Glasses wouldn’t have helped Stella. Her eye had been destroyed.
Sonia could still see the blood, how it had welled up, the black look of it, and then how it remained caked in places on her face, even after Max brought her back from town. That accident had been Max’s fault, the loose bolt a result of his carelessness with the mower. Or it had been her fault — the fight they’d had that morning all her doing, he said, and that fight the reason Max had started haying without looking over his machine. She’d tried to punish him, as she had so many mornings, for the way she woke — lonely, full of bitterness and regret.
So, what happened to Stella was not Max’s fault. It was hers.
She put her glasses on again and the room came clear, all Pete’s clutter and his machines. That photograph.
She hadn’t seen it right away. But now it astonished her, her younger self suddenly more real than the person she’d become.
“So when your daughters were here — ” He spoke in a whisper, hesitant, perhaps, to disrupt her visual exploration of the room, or to alarm her with talk when she was already so overwhelmed by what she saw.
“They’re fine young women, Sonia. Beautiful and — ”
He was still leaning toward her, clumsily trying to bridge the distance between them with this gift of words.
“Rose seems capable and clear-eyed, and Frances is exceptionally observant and bright . . . and your little granddaughter . . . so feisty! You should be proud.”
Tentatively, he smiled.
Then — of course — there was more.
“Your oldest daughter — ” he said, hesitating, leaving a deliberate conversational space for her to fill.
He wanted news of Stella. He was like Rose, who so often behaved more like her mother than her child — pushing, prying, saying ever so carefully in her relentless way, Some people want to talk about the person they’ve lost.
But she did not want to talk. Wasn’t it enough she’d turned up here a second time?
“Your daughter — ” What happened? Why?
Pete’s unasked questions had such power.
If there had been a way to go back in time, Sonia might have done it. She’d had no idea how to nurture the baby she’d been saddled with, as she thought of Stella then. Years later, watching Stella make mistakes with Kate, the missing thing had come to Sonia, unasked for, and she finally understood where she had failed. Stella was impatient — afraid, it seemed, that Kate would steal her days, suck up what little energy she had. Sonia tried to tell her to relax: Sleep when she sleeps. Forget about the life you had before. Things will soon get easier.
But Stella rejected this advice and turned aside just at the moment when, Sonia thought, she most needed help.
A scalding from the kettle one day frightened Stella, and finally she did call down to Sonia’s house for help. Please, Mum, can you look after Kate this afternoon? I’m hurt, she’d said, and Sonia flew to her, afraid of God knows what.
The skin of Stella’s forearm was pink and smooth, chafed by the steam so that it looked almost new, like Kate’s.
Sonia wanted to help. But in Stella’s eyes: nothing but reproach.
Stella winced when Sonia dressed the arm, and she went to bed without a word. Later, when the arm still hurt, Stella was angry — not grateful as Sonia thought she should be. Take another Aspirin, dear, Sonia had suggested, and was immediately sorry. From her earlier life she knew the magnitude of pain that could be caused by a burn.
September 1941. Surplus Island, Malpeque Bay, Prince Edward Island.
One cloudless Sunday, Sonia abandoned her lighthouse for the beach and lolled all afternoon among the marram-covered dunes. She felt she was being self-indulgent, but allowed herself to sleep for hours in the sun.
Pete was gone by then, and she was in a listless state, neglecting the light, ignoring as many of her duties as she could.
Soon Max would come to take her away, he’d said.
She was hardly awake when the air began to cool and an airplane buzzed overhead. She recognized the sound of it from her aircraft identification training just as it banked too steeply for its turn. A Harvard flight trainer out of Summerside.
The plane crashed behind the dunes, then exploded. Both the pilot and the flight instructor died. Sonia felt petrified with shame because she’d been sleeping on the sand instead of standing in her lighthouse when those men burned.
Of course, her being awake would not have changed the outcome.
Stella’s burn was not Sonia’s fault. Neither was that horrific crash. Why did she feel responsible? What failing did these moments stand for?
August 1941. Surplus Island, Malpeque Bay, Prince Edward Island.
The letter arrived in late summer, when Sonia was busy with chores. Her initial response was simple dismay at its predictably condescending tone.
Your part in Canada’s Home Front Detection Corps, she read. Your essential role. As if she needed another. Serve your country as you go about your daily tasks.
German submarines had been spotted in the Gulf, and German soldiers might at that very moment be landing undetected in soundless rubber boats. The threat was in the sky as well. Look. Watch.
As if this wasn’t what she did all day.
They wanted her to be able to identify specific kinds of planes. Proceed to RCAF Station Summerside for instruction in aircraft identification. You will see actual airplanes on the ground. Of course the letter was addressed to Max, but everyone around knew she was the keeper of Surplus Station. Also in the envelope: a newsletter titled The Observer that offered a helpful column of instructions on how to use the telephone. You and Your Telephone, it read. Make your report slowly and directly into the mouthpiece — your lips not more than half an inch away. There was more — a cardboard compass she didn’t need, a logbook with a place in it to indicate the type of engine on each plane she saw. A list of names: Mosquito, Harvard, Anson . . .
At Identification Day, she met Grenfell Hillyard, fired up with enthusiasm over his own essential role.
“The military don’t know what’s out there, do they? Shells could be falling on us before they’d have a clue. But we fishermen know. We can tell the difference between a whale and a submarine. We can see a plane before it gets to land. Even in the fog, we can recognize a foreign boat by the sound it makes. Even in the dark!”
He cocked his head, leaned in to Sonia as though to impart an especially crucial fact. “It’s dangerous at night, my dear. We have to open a hatch in the deck and shine a light out of it so our own boys can see who we are. But if Jerry’s up there, he’ll spot us just like that. Our only hope is to know the sound he makes.”
He looked old, suddenly. She took his arm, patting it as they walked toward the lecture room.
The aircraft identification lessons were to be followed by a movie and a dance. “Stay,” said Grenfell. “I’ll buy you something cold to drink.”
Sonia didn’t need persuading. Marg Proffit would light the lamp, so she needn’t be in any hurry to drive back. In fact, she’d rather never have to drive again — on the way, she’d almost rolled George’s cantankerous truck on the Blue Shank Road.
Max! she’d cried when she’d got the truck stopped, her heart pounding in her ears — driving the one thing he was really good at —
The movie was The Philadelphia Story. Sonia sat beside Grenfell, drunk on one beer, and scenes swept over her in waves. Handsome Jimmy Stewart smirking like a fox, and Katharine Hepburn in her elegant, drape-y, mannish trousers.
After, on the dance floor, Sonia wished she looked like Hepburn. She’d changed out of her keeper’s gear, but her faded and crumpled summer dress was the opposite of elegant.
It didn’t matter. The airmen and the women from town were buoyant, and the room spun with life. Grenfell danced with her once then drifted away, saying she should dance with men her own age. “Smile, my dear. Those pilots have their eye on you.” He winked, and she turned toward the sea of air force serge — but like a sailor lost for land, her eyes sought only the civilians in the room.
The nearest one was Pete.
“What are you doing here?” He gripped her arm, his mouth a hard, set line, his eyes a dark, saturated blue. She was instantly aware of his intensity, an aspect of the fiercely charged connection they had formed.
Momentarily unsure, she began to step away.
He took her hands. “I didn’t think I’d see you again!”
Then there was a flash of light and she went blind. Someone had snapped a photo of a serviceman nearby. “Hey!” the man shouted.
It dawned on Sonia then that photographs record aspects of life she’d believed invisible to others, and for the first time she saw herself as an observer would.
Pete enfolding her and his shock giving way to something so gentle she could not give it a name.
This was the photograph she most wanted. That moment of realization, pure and untarnished.
September 1965. Route 6, Winsloe to Rustico, Prince Edward Island.
The drive from town grew kaleidoscopic as Pete increased their speed, but for Sonia the world transformed itself continuously even when the car slowed down. Seeing, finally, after so many years, was a revelation. She felt vertiginous and awed, overwhelmed, yet helpless to stop looking. She wanted to rip her glasses off her face — and to impress them on her skull. She wanted to laugh, to scream. Vistas like this were what she’d drawn and painted all those years ago.
With every mile, she felt more whole. A part of her that had been hollowed out grew full. Beside her, Pete drove and grinned, and she felt consumed by an urge she didn’t understand — a product of joy or grief, or an amalgam of the two.
Laughter kept catching in her throat.
She didn’t want the drive to stop. Pete was confident behind the wheel, not impatient like Dan and Rose. She gave herself over to the views unfolding beyond the windshield of the car — the colour of the trees, the clarity of the light, the pale blue sky with its wisps of pure white cloud (mares’ tails, foretelling rain) — and to the intensity of the smooth new asphalt road, its deep blackness and the corresponding brilliance of its sunflower yellow central stripe. Oh, don’t stop, she thought when the car began to slow.
Pete pulled over onto the edge of a narrow red shale road, resplendent woods all around.
He was asking her a question. She tore her eyes from the trees to look at him. “Thank you,” she said, taking the bread and cheese he held out. “How delicious.”
She chewed slowly. Never had such simple food tasted so complex. Store-bought bread and ordinary cheddar. Thick swipes of butter. He would have made this lunch that morning before he went to work. She tried to picture him slicing the cheese and spreading butter on the bread — performing this simple act of domesticity. Would he look at the bread? Would he see it? Or would he have his mind on other things? A patient whose care he’d attend to that day, perhaps, or a misty morning scene out his kitchen window?
Was there a window in his kitchen? Did he “camp,” as a bachelor might, at a rented apartment in town — or did he live in a house outside of town, and care for it in a deliberate way? What she knew about him now could fit on the head of a pin.
And what she knew would be her downfall, or her saving grace. Because she was caught now, caught again: she could feel it.
“Do you remember when we came here?”
They were at the place where the road to Reilly’s Shore began. Of course she remembered.
“Do you remember that long drive we took — it seemed like a long drive then! — on my bike?”
She remembered how they’d thrown the bicycle down at the end of the road and walked out to the beach, marvelling at the sugar sand and the whipped-up surf — as if they hadn’t spent an entire summer looking at those same things.
“I remember lifting you up in my arms.” He closed his eyes. “And setting you down at the edge of the surf . . . ” He opened his eyes.
He was looking at her, but in a way it seemed he was looking through her — through her, to the girl she’d been when they met.
“I remember letting you go, and then running to catch up with you again . . . ”
In some important way, he wasn’t real. He’d made her see. But he wasn’t real in the way Max had been real, simultaneously chaining himself
to, and struggling against, the incessant demands of farm life and the needs of the children. She had hated Max’s anger and ambivalence, but he was real.
Was Pete real?
Sometimes you could reach another person, she decided now, and sometimes you couldn’t.
Pete had left her when she needed him. He couldn’t be relied upon any more than those soap opera men Rose had briefly adored, whose promises fell apart from one Friday afternoon to the next.
“At school that fall,” he said, “I slept for hours in the mornings. I couldn’t figure out how to get up. It was as though I had a disease, but if I had to name it, it was just misery. Whenever I thought back to you, here on the Island . . .Well, I lost a year that way.”
He reached for the wax paper wrapping from the sandwich he’d given her.
But I am better now, and I am over you. That was the subtext of this rehearsed-sounding speech, she decided.
He crumpled the paper. “But I’m better now.” He actually smiled as he said it.
The drive began with scrubby woods, mostly alder with its dangling catkins and disordered willow. Then they came through an open area where a wooden bridge spanned the narrow space between two halves of an hourglass lake. Next, mature deciduous woods — a partridge sprang, panicked, in front of the car — then scrub again, with diverging tracks through woods and field. Finally, stunted spruce, wild rose, bayberry and rushes. And then the dunes themselves with their swaying, sword-sharp blanket of marram grass, waving silvery green in the weak fall light.
He parked the car and she tried to focus as he told the story of a recent patient, sent to Toronto for treatment — the success of the woman’s surgery and the subsequent challenge of understanding what she saw. She’d been blind most of her life. Pete struggled to teach her how to see. She was like a child, he said, thrilled with each new discovery, but facing an impossibly long learning curve.
“Just think of things you’ve seen,” he said. “How hard they would be to explain.”
What had she seen? She couldn’t think.
She closed her eyes, and unexpectedly Rose emerged, pinning ice-coated clothes to a line strung over the stove, frowning and complaining: I thought it would be fine. Usually when they brag up a storm, it doesn’t come to anything.
Then, herself at the sink, filling a quart bottle with tea and wrapping it in layers of newspaper for the boys out digging potatoes in the unseasonable cold.
Taking their tea out to them. The clear, fluting call of a jay and a murder of crows massing on the dug-up field.
The digger going by: a dull roar and clatter over which a haphazard arrangement of squeaks and squeals rode like foam on waves. Max driving the tractor that hauled it. The awkward way he held his body, alert for a misplaced note in the seeming dissonance, any sign of breakdown.
Or Max beside the tractor, broken down, silence all around, and the explosion of his rage when he couldn’t fix whatever had gone wrong.
Pete’s still, patient silence beside her now, against these violent sounds that made such vivid pictures.
In the distance, the faint pop-pop of hunters’ guns — like toys, harmless-sounding. But the next day all the water birds would be gone.
The look of light on water, spangled, glinting seaward.
Or water glassy calm, what Grenfell Hillyard called all starched and ironed.
Then her boys gobbling the squares and cheese biscuits she’d made. Unwrapping the bottle of tea from its insulating blanket of newspaper, laughing as they read a crazy headline: Preacher talks to God, gets reply.
In the hedgerow, all the leaves gone off the trees, next year’s buds already formed at their tips — that expectant look.
The crows, that deceitful, gilded day, scolding from the porch roof while she hung clothes out on the line, insisting to her that something had gone awry. How she’d ignored their message out of selfishness; she’d felt so calm — for once — so contented, in that abnormal winter heat.
And then Evvie slamming in the door, indignant. Isn’t Stella here?
Pete, looking at her now, an unfathomable expression on his face and his hands blanching on the steering wheel.
For a while he talked and she listened. His brother, Paul, had been killed eighteen months earlier in a fishing accident.
“One time when he was little he ran away,” Pete said. “He was eight or nine, a skinny, sickly child, and too much babied by our mother. That was in the summer of ’31, the night of that terrible storm — do you remember that storm? — three boats wrecked at Savage Harbour.”
She didn’t remember, but she nodded because he seemed to need her to.
“My mother’d heard him talk about the woods, and that was where we found him, curled up against the base of a sugar pine . . . ”
Sugar pine. Her memory offered the smell of candy floss at the plowing match — the rides and the quilts and the aisles of beribboned flowers and pie and jam — and two-year-old Stella chattering to the laying hens in the poultry display barn.
“Afterward . . . ” he drawled, hesitating, aware he’d lost her attention.
She tried to focus. He had to tell his story. His little brother, Paul.
“Afterward?” she said.
He took her hand, held it for a moment, gently let it go.
“He’d filled a sack with bread and apples. He had our father’s Thermos, full of milk. He had his pocketknife and a blanket and a compass and he knew enough to tell the neighbours where he was headed. How incapable we thought he was and how well prepared he’d actually been! He planned his adventure like a four-star general. It was why we never worried later when he went out on the water . . . ”
And then Stella alone by the exotic chicken cages, cooing and pushing her hand through the wire to pat their fancy feathered heads.
An interfering older lady tried to scoop her up. “This one has no mother,” she complained, grabbing for Stella’s minute starfish hand.
Several minutes passed in silence. Then something ordinary occurred to her: Pete was sad.
This felt like a revelation, though of course it was nothing of the kind. It was an observation she ought to have made earlier. He’d been paying attention to her. Why not she to him?
She had been too focused on her own persistent grief.
She forced herself to take his hand and she said the thing she now realized she felt. “I’m so sorry about your brother Paul.”
At the shore, new after so many years away, sound exploded against Sonia’s skin. Not only could she see as never before, she could smell and taste the sea. The moist, forgiving, fragrant air. The heaviness of the salt-laden water as it fell across her feet. The endless, swelling skin of the ocean. Its sonorous rhythm as it folded inward: a deep roar, a crash, a hiss and then the gentle sweeping sound as one fallen and flattened wave smoothed itself across another. Roar, crash, hiss, sweep . . . that simple, unvarying repetition. Necklaces of seaweed wrapped her bare feet. Bending, she gathered one to take back home. She opened her arms to the whipped-up spray, the settling, smattering waves.
Pete took her glasses off her face and dried them on his shirt. She didn’t want to leave the water, but he was insistent. “You’re getting the full tour.” He led her to his car and turned it around, toward the paved shore road.
Out of nowhere — his voice too loud, overcompensating for the growl of rubber on asphalt, the rough-voiced engine, wind — he began to suggest that he could spend more time with her.
And her instant, instinctive response: a dismissive laugh. Was it really so easy? she wondered. Someone could just hand you a new life on a plate?
She felt amazed by the power and immediacy of her anger. And yet something in his gesture was captivating. This reaching toward her.
For a moment, imagining a return to that summer idyll they’d shared, she felt a weight in her body lift away. As though a bird had taken flight inside her chest.
And then the memory of how he’d left her, further anger, and the realization that she now had the power to affect his choice — his life.
How seductive it was, this feeling of being in control. She hadn’t experienced it since those early days at her father’s light, when for a morning or an afternoon Daniel would leave her in charge of the entire station. . . . It was tempting to grasp the opportunity. After a lifetime without choice, was it not her turn to be in charge?
Surely it was her turn. Resentment roiled up for a moment. But then he stopped the car — she turned to look at him — and when she looked, she saw such concern.
Again, that feeling like a lifting and her anger fell away.
He’d changed. She could see that now. He noticed more. His pretension was gone and that treasured sense of specialness because he was a medical student at McGill. Gone too the hurt she’d sensed that summer after he left medical school; apparently those wounds had healed. He was calmer. Certainly he seemed more compassionate, more attentive, more interested in other people. These were welcome developments.
All of this he must have learned from hardship or disappointment, just as she’d learned about life by living so unhappily with Max and from the constant work of raising their children and managing the farm after he was gone. She’d come to love her solitude, but she knew that to be alone after a long relationship was not the same as to be alone from the first. Shared experience changed a person.
Did they have anything in common anymore? Was there any point of connection, after all that had happened?
He drove without looking at her.
She looked around, marvelling first at the remarkable clarity of everything, then noticing where they were. He’d taken her to the light. At least, to where the light had been.
The tide road was gone. It was possible to see what remained of Surplus Island, but it would take a boat to get there now. Dredging for a harbour up the coast had caused a shift in currents that created a channel where the sandbar had been. Wave action had worn the land away.
She couldn’t believe how much the lighthouse tower had broken down. The house and buildings were gone, hauled to Malpeque Harbour to be used as fishermen’s sheds. The beacon had been decommissioned, replaced by a skeleton tower on a nearby cliff. There was a nest on the old gallery; Pete had seen a heron using it.
He held the door of his car open. She got in again, and as the air began to cool, they drove farther west.
“I want you to see the most beautiful place,” he said.
This was what their friendship had been based on: Pete looked at her island and saw it for her. He looked at Max, and she saw her husband for the first time, his distance and lack of devotion.
Pete looked at her too. What did he see?
So this was the famous sandhills: bleak, nothing left of the community that had thrived so briefly, nothing now but sand and sea. How lonesome it felt. And yet, how tranquil.
Together, they surveyed the dunes and the ocean. Sonia looked without her glasses and then with them on. Laughing, they tried to count the layered lines that made up the sea, the sky, the land.
There were a hundred, or a thousand.
He said, “With those glasses, your pictures will be different now.”
She thought of the hours — years, it sometimes seemed — she’d spent staring out of lighthouse towers at lines like these — at this same sea — willing a distant shadow, or a hint of a shadow, to resolve into a vessel of some kind.
Pete began to build a fire.
The lights from his car’s high beams lit the marram grass on the bank and a stretch of sand, gilding Pete too as he worked.
A picnic supper and a bundle of wood in the trunk of the car testified to a certain premeditation. She didn’t care. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been away from home like this. Had there ever been a time?
He tended their fire. He said, “Soon it will rain.”
She said, “We should get back. My children will worry.”
And he said, “No.” He’d told Dan he’d drive her back, it didn’t matter how late.
For the briefest moment, she felt betrayed by Dan for accepting this.
But the feeling of her feet in the cool, damp sand, and the contrasting heat of the fire Pete had built. Pete saying, It will keep us warm.
The night around them. That blanket of dark, enclosing what anyone could see was a ridiculously small portion of illumination and warmth.
In the parked car, gazing at the distant remains of the fire, she began to reconsider what had happened. His arms around her.
The last time she’d seen him at Surplus Station, she’d expected something. A commitment — not just yearning, not just a broken promise. How vast a gap there was between what she’d needed then — or what she’d thought she needed — and what he’d been able to provide.
“Tell me about her.”
“Do you want to hear?”
He nodded, and the thought came: Stella had been preoccupied by something. With Sonia it had been wool, colour, luminosity, line and shape — the work that Max and her children took her away from. But for Stella it was something else. Some absence.
She saw Stella in her kitchen, holding newborn Kate. Evvie was there, his spirits high. Do you like my baby girl? Isn’t she something? As though Kate were a prize he’d won. Kate cried inconsolably, and Stella stood by looking scalded, bereft, unsure of what to do.
You could hold her differently. Like this, Sonia thought of saying now. But what had she said then? What help had she been?
“My brother Paul,” Pete said, and she realized he had not told as much of that story as he wanted to.
“My brother dying was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said. He hesitated, wondering, Sonia understood, about the wisdom of telling a story that so closely echoed the pain of her own. She felt her mouth open, seemingly of its own accord, but there was nothing she could say.
“I don’t mean to compare his death to Stella’s,” he said. “They’re not the same.”
Sonia nodded. They were not the same.
“But, you know, an interesting thing happens to your other relationships when someone close to you dies.”
She looked at him, waited. What could he possibly say that would make any of this better? Why was he probing a wound that had not even begun to heal?
“I know they’re not the same,” he continued. “Because as hard as Paul’s death was on me, it was a thousand times harder on my mother.”
Sonia nodded, turned to gaze out at the sea. The idea that a mother might mourn a child was hardly profound. Or was he saying, even more obviously, that she and his mother had an experience in common?
“This might seem self-evident to you,” he said, his voice now sharp, hard. “But it wasn’t obvious to me. Until Paul’s funeral, I hadn’t seen my mother for almost twenty years.”
She turned to look at him.
“I was angry with her,” he said clearly.
She waited, curious, a little stunned. Pete so rarely expressed a negative emotion. She remembered how wild Max had been when he interrupted them in the lighthouse kitchen. And how tenderly Pete examined Max’s weeping, damaged arm. How gentle he had been with Max, in spite of everything. How patient.
“You remember,” he said. “She didn’t want me to see you. She made me promise not to visit you, not to come between you and Max. She chased me back to Montreal a week before school went in, and she worried more about what the neighbours would say than what I wanted.”
Sonia remembered what Cy and George had plainly told her: He’s leaving soon. You’ll both get hurt. She remembered Pete’s discovery of her pregnancy, and his sudden distance, that instant chill.
“It was weak of me to give in to her,” he said now. “I should have given in to you.”
Given in. But that wouldn’t have been any better, would it?
Of course, there was no way it could have worked. He wasn’t Stella’s father; Max was.
So there was no way, was there?
A hateful sound — animal.
Weasels scream murder to distract their prey. She’d heard one once, around the time Buddy disappeared. Its cries were terrifying. If that’s how they sound ordinarily, she’d wondered, what became of their voices when they themselves were trapped?
His arms were so tight. She could hardly breathe. She couldn’t see. Everywhere was velvet blackness except that one faint pinpoint of flame-orange light.
Far away, it sounded like, some poor creature wept.
The louder the sound grew, the tighter his arms squeezed.
This hurt. She wanted to tell him. But she found she couldn’t speak.
And she didn’t want to be let go.
The realization calmed her, and she took a breath. She said, “It hurts.”
“I know . . . Everything will be okay.”
Okay? She tested the word in her mind.
It was meaningless.
She closed her eyes. His arms were still like bands around her chest, that tight.
Stella, she thought.
I’m so sorry.
And finally something taut inside her, something like a string, or a line, let go —
On the sandhills, the tender blue light that sometimes follows dusk sloped slowly into black before, eventually, it was replaced by the more stable blue that suffuses the sky at dawn. In the close dark, in the moments between their talk, Sonia began to wonder if she and Pete could replay what had happened and make it happen all a different way. In her sleep-deprived, exhilarated state, she wanted to believe that they could.
And that made all the difference. Because belief and wanting, it turned out, that combination, was what had been missing from her life all along.
After that hard year, everything changed. Rob and Dan expanded the farm and metamorphosed into serious businessmen. Kate lived with Sonia and Pete. Lyman got his electrical ticket and moved out west. The used car lot Ray Vermeer had been working at ballooned into something like a fairground, and somehow he bought into it. Someone built a Dairy Queen in town, the first fast-food joint on what eventually became a glittering, two-mile-long strip of grease. It would be another twenty years before the Purity Dairy counter closed as a result, but this was the beginning of the end of all that, too.
August 1986. Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.
Stella reappeared the year Kate turned twenty-three. Not in some Toronto bedsit as — all those years ago — Sonia had hoped she would, but in Kate herself: stringy-haired, long-limbed, wan, intense, but mercifully not despairing in the way her mother had been.
Kate struggled some. At school she tried pure science, and for a while she floundered. But she was training now to be a large animal veterinarian, encouraged by Pete and Sonia, happily working with the creatures she had loved so dearly as a little girl.
Rose took Frances, Kate and Sonia out the day the Purity closed up shop. Rose was pregnant that summer, a scandalous single CA on the cusp of forty, but definitively in charge, and finally at ease. She wore a blue polyester maternity suit with a bow tie blouse — and a gentle smirk. With her good government job, she was easily able to afford this indiscretion of which no one had had the imagination to think her capable.
Reconciling Rose’s new life with her old one required of Sonia an extraordinary mind shift: she had to accept that all along she’d had no idea who her middle daughter wanted to become. But she had no trouble admiring the result.
At the Purity counter on its last day, Sonia and her girls sipped chocolate shakes and reminisced. Kate was home from school in Calgary. Rose laughed at Frances’s indecision: should she stay on the Island in the fall or finally move away?
While Rose and Kate nudged Frances along, Sonia silently hoped that Frances would find the courage to act. But she didn’t interfere. Marina’s voice echoed in her head: All you can do is solve your own life.
None of the women needed to speak the question branded on their brains: What would Stella do? Over the years they’d absorbed her story and fashioned from it something they could call their own. Their lives were made of Stella’s life the way a wave is made of sea.
December 2000. Prospect, Prince Edward Island.
Christmas, and Frances claimed to experience a sense of peace unimaginable in the city. “No Sunday shopping! Thank God,” she said.
“And get this,” Kate cheered. “No Internet for twenty miles!”
Kate had brought her boyfriend, a man she met at a stable in Calgary. “He’s a geologist, but he loves horses the way I do.”
Kate missed her horse. “We should go coasting,” she declared. “Let’s all go!”
All meaning Kate and her guy, Rob, Dan and his wife Lisa, Rose and her daughter Lily, Sonia, Frances and Pete.
It was a ridiculous plan. Pete took medication for chronic arthritis. Physically, Sonia was slowing down. She was seventy-eight. But no one said boo.
Rose made a Thermos of tea. In the hayloft, Rob found the sleds they’d used as children and he waxed the runners.
Lily rubbed her mittens together as though to make sparks. “Oh!” she predicted, “we’ll fly!”
As Sonia pushed off, she realized she’d forgotten the sensation of flying downhill. It was like submerging: being pulled down and borne up at the same time.
She watched her middle-aged sons coast like boys, decades falling from their faces, snow in their greying hair. The deep sound of their laughter and the gentle way they teased Kate’s young guy.
When Dan said, “I guess we’d better head her home,” Frances said she was carried straight to childhood, to the sensation of fingers and toes so cold they burned, to the comforting animal smell of mittens drying above the stove, to basins of warm water for chilblained feet, and to the silly, speculative games with which they passed the time as they waited for relief. Where will you go? Whom will you marry? What do you want to be?
How incredible to be reminded of that casual proximity, she said, that ease I never take for granted anymore.
Sonia looked at her children and grandchildren, alive with delight and sensitive to the vanishing moment. She looked at Pete. All she had.
For an instant, soaring down that hill, a powerful feeling had displaced her grief.
Lily raced to Sonia, skidded to a stop. “Grandma, look!” She clapped her mittens together, igniting sparklers of snow and ice that were bright and hot and cool at once.
Yes, thought Sonia, look at this moment. In Lily’s eyes, it was ablaze with colour.
Most of the characters and settings in this novel are invented. But the summer community on the sandhills at Freeland, Prince Edward Island, was real, as were two of its inhabitants, Ace Walfield and Danny Adams. Alan Graham’s historical essay “A Light on the Sandhills,” published in The Island Magazine in 1981, inspired my imagined version of that place.
Lemuel Vickerson is also a historical person. Thank you to Fred Vickerson for permission to quote from Lemuel’s diary.
Two books were especially helpful: Lighthouse Legacies by Chris Mills (Nimbus Publishing, 2006) and B . . . was for Butter and Enemy Craft by Evelyn M. Richardson (Petheric Press, 1976).
Excerpts from Rules and Instructions for the Guidance of Lightkeepers and of Engineers in Charge of Fog Alarms in the Dominion of Canada are from the fifth edition, published by the Government Printing Bureau in 1912. I am grateful to Dan Conlin of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic for finding a copy of this document.
The epigraph is from Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches by Cornelia Dean (Columbia University Press, 1999).
The title leapt out of the manuscript after I read Anne Compton’s interview with Brent MacLaine in Meetings with Maritime Poets.
An early version of the novel’s opening appeared in Riddle Fence. Thank you to Managing Editor Mark Callanan.
For essential support that sustained me and my children during the writing of this novel, I am grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Prince Edward Island Council of the Arts and the Woodcock Fund of the Writers’ Trust of Canada.
I am indebted to many individuals without whom this novel would not exist. Thank you to Chris Mills and Dr. Elizabeth Lai for sharing their expertise in lightkeeping and optometry. Thank you to Michael Cox, Mark Foss, Moyette Gibbons and Laura Kieley for feedback. Catherine Bush, Richard Cumyn and Margot Livesey set their own fine work aside in order to read mine and I am deeply grateful for their generosity and encouragement. Thank you to Denise Bukowski. Thank you to Goose Lane Editions, especially Susanne Alexander, Sabine Campbell, Akoulina Connell, Jaye Haworth, Corey Redekop, Julie Scriver and John Sweet. Bethany Gibson, Goose Lane’s incisive and intuitive fiction editor, helped the novel become its best self, and I am grateful to her for a joyful and gratifying collaboration. For kindness in support of the novelist, as well as the novel, thank you to Greg Collins, Catherine Hennigar-Shuh and Anna-Lisa Jones. Thank you to my family, especially Anne Compton, Ben Compton, Judy Compton, Pamela Compton and Ralph Compton.