Even with the lighthouse requiring all of her and Ben’s attention and with tourist season heavy upon them, Nicolas and Katherine managed to find time to plan an August wedding. Fancy invitations went out in the mail, and catalogs of wedding finery piled up around Katherine’s favorite chair.
Nicolas surprised everyone by rolling up his sleeves and doing an excellent job, not with the lighthouse, which he rarely visited, but with the running of the resort. He donned his khaki shorts, a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Robertson’s Resort,” and seemed utterly content. Moriah even came upon him once as he hung freshly laundered sheets on the line. To her astonishment, the man was whistling.
In the evenings, when Moriah came back to the lodge, she noticed her aunt was softening into a younger-looking, much happier version of herself. Katherine’s expression was no longer that of stoic acceptance. Instead, she smiled more often, her eyes lit up at the smallest things, and Moriah had heard her humming as she cooked. Moriah knew that Nicolas was the cause of that new happiness, and she was grateful.
In spite of the upset Moriah had experienced earlier, her days now fell into a seamless rhythm and routine as she, Ben, and the crew worked together. Stone upon stone, bracings and chisels and rock dust, roof trusses and fresh new flooring, it was exhilarating to see her dream coming together.
Moriah loved the feeling of straining her muscles to the maximum each day alongside the company of the workmen, eating a quick sandwich with her back braced against the shady side of the cottage, then swigging down the icy water from the newly restored well and outdoor hand pump. Ben often came to sit beside her in the shade of the cottage for a few minutes to figure out some small challenge that might have arisen. She appreciated the fact that he respected and valued her opinions. Then, they would swing back into the task at hand, renewed.
It was the happiest she had ever been in her life.
Each day, some satisfying portion of the restoration was accomplished. Each evening after supper, Moriah stood in a hot shower, soaking her sore muscles. Then, she would put on clean clothes and meet Ben, who always waited for her on the back-porch swing. They’d spend at least an hour each night in the privacy of the swing, talking about their day, planning the next. It was the best part of the day.
Later, Moriah would crawl into bed, exhausted. Each morning, she awoke looking forward to the day with eager anticipation. Much of that eagerness was in looking forward to seeing how much they would accomplish that day, but some of it was knowing she would get to see Ben again.
Neither of them spoke about what would happen when the summer ended. They were careful with each other, holding back, determined to continue to maintain their friendship, knowing that saying too much too soon could destroy it.
No matter how early she rose, however, Ben was always in the lodge’s great room a bit earlier, working on his translation. He insisted he was so used to working in a village with a dozen children underfoot that he felt lonely working in his cabin.
Neither Nicolas nor Katherine brought up all that had been said the day of her nightmare out at the lighthouse, the day of the thunderstorm. Everyone skirted around the issue, avoiding it, all four of them almost too busy to breathe. They had no time to delve into the issue, so they left it alone. They all seemed content to wait for her to bring it up if she wanted to, and she chose not to.
After the restoration of the lighthouse was accomplished, after the last guest had left, after she had buttoned up the cottages and prepared them for winter, then she and Katherine would have months to sort things out. Winter often felt never-ending this far north. There would be plenty of time then to talk.
For now, she was grateful they left the subject alone. Now that she understood the reasons Katherine had fabricated a different reality for her all these years, she craved time to sort things out in her mind, especially since bits of memories kept trickling into her conscious, triggered by simple, everyday things.
One day at the work site, while wiping her forehead with the blue-patterned work handkerchief she kept in her pocket, she abruptly had an image of her mother in the jungle, tying her hair up off her neck with one exactly like it.
A child’s wooden toy left on the path in front of the cabins suddenly dredged up a picture of Petras whittling out clumsy little tigers and monkeys for her and the other children in the village.
But images of the massacre kept creeping in, too. Her child’s impressionable mind had apparently taken a photographic snapshot of those moments and then tucked that snapshot away until she was old enough to look at it. She could now recall, with accuracy, even the clothes her parents had been wearing.
She dealt with this hodge-podge of rediscovered mental pictures the best she could. Sometimes, while she worked, she fit pieces together in her mind, making new discoveries every day. Many things made sense to her now.
For the first time, she understood why she had always struggled with a low-grade sadness, so different from the other children growing up on the island. For the first time, she realized that, along with the four lives that had been taken during the massacre, four other innocent lives had been nearly destroyed. The trauma wasn’t hers alone. Ben, Katherine, and Nicolas had suffered, also.
Ben had pieced together a life by devoting himself to the very tribe where his father had met his death. But even Ben was not entirely whole. He still mourned the father he had come to love so much.
Katherine had sacrificed marrying the man she loved and her dream of becoming a doctor in order to care for a damaged niece. Moriah now realized just how seldom she had ever seen her aunt smile. She suspected that competent, wise Katherine had been as sad as Moriah, until Nicolas, with all his faults, stepped in.
And Nicolas. Ah, Nicolas. A gifted medical student when his mother died, he had given up his dream of becoming a surgeon by incomprehensibly taking on his mother’s profession of obstetrics, a specialty Moriah felt certain he was emotionally ill-suited for. She found herself wondering, sometimes, if his hasty and poorly chosen marriage might have been the worst fate of them all.
Then, there was herself. Moriah wished she could go back in time, take the silent little girl she had once been, and hold her in her arms. Her heart swelled with pity for that little girl, pity for all of them, crippled, yet in their own way, valiant. They had all tried so hard to put the pieces back together and make lives for themselves.
As Moriah’s hands sawed and hammered, her mind imagined their separate lives integrated into a jigsaw puzzle, scattered onto the floor by Chief Moawa’s violent hand. Then, she imagined God patiently picking up the pieces, one by one, placing them all together—here, right now, on this island, fitting their lives together so they could finally heal.
She realized, now, part of her initial attraction to Ben was based on what had happened in that jungle village. Petras was her friend when she was a little girl. He made toys for her. Along with the other adults, he had watched out for her. She felt safe with Petras.
There had been something familiar about Ben from the moment she saw him striding up the hill after their fishing trip. And she was right. Those familiar broad shoulders, that unruly red hair, those stonemason hands had once, long ago, deliberately stood between her and death.
Just like she had felt safe with his father when she was a child, she felt safe with Ben now. She tried very hard not to think about the vacuum he would leave in her heart the day he left.