Hepzibah’s face seemed to relax, and a smirk crawled across it. “You want to tell her, Gar?” Her voice was cold, but it was clear she was enjoying May’s confusion.
“Tell me what?” May shouted.
“You’re not mine.” Hepzibah said quietly, looking down at a medical journal she had been reading.
“What do you mean? I—I—don’t understand.”
“I did not give birth to you.”
“What?” May’s chin trembled, and her mouth seemed to have trouble forming the single word.
“Do you honestly think that this poor failing body of mine could ever give birth to a child, let alone one as — as” — Hepzibah struggled to say the words — “as healthy as you, as strong, as robust as you!” She spoke this last part as if it were the vilest imprecation.
“Wh-where did I come from?” May looked at her father. “Who’s Polly?” She was nearly staggering as she stood. It felt as if the ground beneath her were shaking. If these two were not her parents, who were? She was caught in a firestorm of confusing emotions—rejection and yet an odd sense of relief. She could accept Hepzibah not loving her. She probably never had. But she couldn’t bear the thought of losing Gar.
Her father stood up, and although he was still lame, it was the most erect she had seen him since before the shipwreck. He walked directly over to Hepzibah and spoke. “It is not just me. I am not the only one who could not forget Polly. You couldn’t either, Zeeba. You!”
“Down the coast, he always told me,” Hepzibah sneered. “Found you down the coast.”
“I don’t understand this. Not at all. Someone please explain where I come from?”
Gar limped over to May and put his arm around her. “A woman, a young woman, not Polly. It couldn’t be. I had been engaged to Polly but she died ten years before you were ever born. But she” — he nodded at Zeeba—“never got over the fact she wasn’t first choice.”
“That ain’t true, Gar, and you know it!”
“It is true, Hepzibah. You’re so eaten up with jealousy over a dead woman you can’t do simple figuring. You know when I walked in here with May it was 1883. You know Polly died in 1873. How the devil could she be Polly’s?” May gasped.
“The devil—exactly!” Hepzibah’s eyes gleamed, and she turned her head slowly toward May. “I always knew there was something unnatural about that girl.”
“What?” May’s voice was tight with alarm. “You think …” But it was as if the words evaporated.
“You’ll never know what I think … think of you or him.” Zeeba jerked her head toward Gar but kept her eyes clamped on May. Gar stepped to the side, as if to protect her from Zeeba’s glare.
“You listen to me, May. A woman down toward Crockett Cove, past Winter Harbor, was your mother. She died giving birth. There weren’t no one to care for you. I offered to take you back here. I thought it would please Zeeba.” He paused and cupped her chin lightly in his hand. “And it has pleased me deeply.”
“B-b-but,” May stammered. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words that screamed in her mind. You’re not my real father. She felt a dark hole opening up in her. It was as if she were missing her core. She swayed slightly and put a hand on the back of a chair to steady herself. “What happened to the father?” May asked.
“Yes, what happened?” Hepzibah said in a flat voice.
Now Gar turned and looked at Hepzibah. “Your mother has had this notion that I am your father. But it ain’t so, May. And I am sorry. For truly I would love to be your real father. I love you as if I were.”
May moved away from the chair and then back to where her father stood. Taking her father’s face in both her hands she said, “No, Pa, you love me better than my so-called real father, for he left. You love me like a true father.”
There were teardrops trembling in the rims of his eyes. In the glistening wetness she saw the sphere that held her own reflection—her own quivering face. Was Gar no part of her? Did she belong to no one? May felt as if she were sliding off a cliff and was tumbling in a free fall through that dark nothingness of her missing center. She shut her eyes tight for several seconds as if anticipating the impact.
In those seemingly endless seconds the image of the small door came to her. She had not thought of that tiny closet in the watch room but once or twice since the morning after the shipwreck. She had no idea where the key was and had more or less given up on trying to find it. But now she was certain that the secret of her birth was hidden in the closet that Gar kept so carefully locked all these years.
She vowed to find that key, no matter what. Her father could still barely make it up the stairs. She spent more time than ever alone in the watch room. She might never have such an opportunity again. For the first time she thought of her father’s infirmity as a blessing.
8
A VISITOR
MAY WAS HALFWAY UP THE STAIRS to the watch room to search for the key to the closet when she heard a sharp rap on the door. “Who’s that?” Hepzibah said, half rising from her rocker.
“I’ll get it,” she heard her father say. Then seconds later, Gar called up the winding stairs, “Someone here to see you, May.” “Me?”
“Yep. That fellow Rudd from the night of the storm.”
Now of all times?
“All right. Tell him I’ll be out in a minute, Pa.”
She quickly slipped into her bedroom and went to the mirror set on her bureau. She was a mess. The incredible revelations minutes before had left their mark on her. She repinned her hair. It didn’t help much. Her skin was all blotchy, but the blotches were in the wrong places. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes were rimmed with dim lavender circles! She pinched her cheeks to get some color in them, took a deep breath, and tried to look composed as she walked to the front door of the lighthouse.
Rudd Sawyer leaned against the jamb, filling the frame. He radiated an unassailable confidence, almost a sense of ownership. If someone didn’t know better, he might have thought Rudd was the proprietor of the lighthouse and even the entire island.
May hadn’t realized quite how tall he was or how broad his shoulders were. With the warmer weather he wasn’t wearing a jacket. His collar was open and his sleeves were rolled up. His forearms had curls of hair slightly lighter than the hair on his head. His fingers tapped the doorjamb casually as if to suggest he’d been waiting a while, maybe too long.
“Hello, May.”
“Rudd!”
“None other.” A wide smile cut his face. “Does there have to be a shipwreck to see you again?”
“Oh—oh—oh, no, of course not.” She was dying to get up to the watch room. As handsome as he was, Rudd constituted a distraction more than anything else.
“You gonna invite me in?”
“Uh … well, no. But … we could take a walk.” She could not let this young man come into the lighthouse, not with her mother glaring away. And certainly not after what had just transpired. In the scant minutes between Hepzibah’s revelation and the time Rudd had knocked on the door, May’s whole world had changed. There had hardly been a moment to recover. She might not even want to recover if it meant trying to make amends with Zeeba. Zeeba! In her mind she had just called her mother Zeeba. She had done this without even thinking.
She now heard Zeeba calling out from her bedroom. “Who’s that at the door, May? Who’s there?” May did not reply but merely turned to Rudd and said, “Come along, we can walk down to the beach.”
A few minutes later they were standing on a small crescent of sand looking out to sea. “They don’t look fierce at all, do they, in this calm?” Rudd nodded toward The Bones.
“It’s nearly high tide. In another quarter of an hour you won’t be able to see them,” she said. It seemed amazing to her that she was speaking to him almost normally. She had the strange sensation that she had stepped out of her own body and was walking along beside it on the beach, watching herself listen, talk, and nod or shake her head at the right times.
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“Did the new chimney come in yet?” he asked.
“Not supposed to come in until tomorrow to the chandlery.”
“Well, then, if you pick it up you can come to the dance.” He flashed her a quick smile.
“What dance?”
“Dance at the Odd Fellows Hall. They used to call it the end of the line gale dance.”
“What?” May tipped her head and looked at him questioningly. He was really asking her to a dance? She suddenly realized that her mouth was hanging open. She must look utterly stupid. But he wasn’t looking at her mouth.
“Do you know how green your eyes are?”
“No! I don’t make a habit of looking at myself in a mirror all day long.” She ducked her chin down. What kind of question was that?
“Well, they are.”
“What’s an end of the line gale dance?” May asked without meeting Rudd’s eyes.
“Line gales—you know what they are.”
“Yes, they come in March, around the time of the equinox.”
“Equinox—my, my.” He raised one eyebrow a bit as if he were impressed, but she was sure she caught a glint of something close to mockery in his eyes.
“What do you mean, ‘my, my’? There’s nothing ‘my, my’ about the equinox. It’s when the sun crosses the equator and the length of days equals the nights,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You must have a lot of book learning.”
“I read, but I also know how much kerosene we burn in the lantern room. Less and less after the spring equinox.” She paused, then added, “That’s not book learning. That’s just living.”
He looked at her and laughed. “Well, it’s the end of March, almost April, and those line gales are usually finished by then. So they have a celebration. How about doing a bit of living?”
May smiled to herself. “A bit of living.” It sounded good. A bit of living as opposed to a bit of slow asphyxiation by Hepzibah. Am I starting to hate her? May wondered. She looked at Rudd and grinned broadly. “Oh, I’m all for that. All for living.” She blushed. Did she seem too eager? She wanted to tease him a bit. Didn’t girls sometimes do that?
“But maybe they should delay the dance,” May said, and kicked a stone with the toe of her shoe.
“Why?”
“Just to be on the safe side,” she replied.
“Just to be on the safe side? What are you talking about?” Rudd laughed.
“You don’t want to jinx it by having the dance too soon. Have it in May, when you know the line gales are over.” She wished she didn’t sound so serious. She wished she didn’t state facts so stolidly. But she had no gift for light, flirtatious conversation. This was what came from being sealed up in a lighthouse.
“But there’s a May Day dance in May, and of course you have to come to that one. I mean, May being your name and all. And another one in June.”
May tossed a beach pebble into the surf. “But I don’t want to jinx anything. I don’t want a line squall driving a ship onto The Bones.”
“Oh, I think except for that storm last month you’ve done pretty well out here on Egg Rock. I’d say you got Saint Anthony keeping an eye on you.”
An image flashed in May’s mind: the slightly tipped carved figure of the saint on that night of her father’s accident. Was it possible that this was where the key to the small closet had been hidden?
May jumped up.
“I have to go, Rudd. Just remembered that I haven’t trimmed the wicks … and — and —”
“Will you come to the dance?”
She was about to say she had to ask her mother, but then she remembered that Zeeba wasn’t her mother. What did she care what Zeeba thought? She would never forget how Zeeba’s eyes had gleamed when she had spat out those three words “the devil—exactly!” If she was a horrid girl she might as well start acting like one, and going to the dance without permission would constitute colossal disobedience. “Yes, I’ll come! But I can’t get home too late.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll get Gus’s skiff, the one I got to get out here today, and sail you there and back.”
“Gus?”
“Gus Bridges, captain of the Sea Hound. I’m working for him now.”
“You’re not with Captain Haskell anymore?”
“Not for now. He just lobsters. I like going offshore for sword. Whole different game.” His eyes glittered fiercely. “Going after swordfish—now, that’s fishing!
And that’s where the money is! Catching the big ones.”
“Oh,” May said. For some reason she found his words unsettling. “Well, I really have to go,” she said, thinking of the little closet in the watch room. She felt as if it were waiting for her.
9
THE KEY
THE FIGURE OF SAINT ANTHONY was exactly as she remembered, tipped slightly to one side. And now as she stood just beneath it, between the Fresnel lens and the panel that separated the two east-facing windows, she could see something else she had never noticed. There was a faint seam in the panel. When she reached up and took down the Saint Anthony figure she saw that there was the outline of a rectangle with a tiny hole in the center. She narrowed her eyes. The hole was no bigger in diameter than an embroidery needle. She took out a hairpin and stuck it into the hole, wiggled it a bit, then gave a gentle tug. The rectangle came out and behind it hung a brass key. This is it! she thought. She took the key, and even just holding it gave her a thrill. Yet as she crept down the ladder, the fluttering in her stomach hardened into a knot. Gar had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide the key. What could be the reason for all the secrecy?
She reached the service area and scurried over to the small closet. She fit the key into the keyhole, then turned it, praying that the door wouldn’t creak. It did not but seemed to glide open with very little effort on her part. A wonderful fragrance floated from the dark shadows of the closet. It reminded her of something, something she had forgotten entirely.
She had been barely conscious of squeezing her eyes shut when she first opened the small door and inhaled the wonderful rimy sea smell. Now she was almost afraid to open them, but she did and peered inside. There was a chest. It looked like an ordinary sea chest, but then she noticed the carving of three small mermaids on the front. Carefully she pulled the chest from the closet. She did not want to make any noise. She ran her hand over the letters carved on the lid of the chest—HMS Resolute. It must be British, May thought. HMS stood for Her Majesty’s Ship.
May ran her hand over the carving of the three mermaids. As she traced over their tails with her finger, May felt a rush of feelings — a strange sort of peacefulness as if something had been found, and yet a deep pang of loss—something gone, irretrievably gone. She was engulfed by an impenetrable isolation, a feeling of being cut off from everything she had ever known or trusted and yet at the same time connected to something vital, hauntingly familiar, and intensely intimate.
Cautiously she lifted the lid of the sea chest and found herself peering into a disappointing emptiness. She was not sure what she had expected, but despite its depth there were only a few articles. A neatly folded, tattered-looking gray blanket, a piece torn from a newspaper, a yellow envelope addressed to Mr. Edgar Plum, and a folded navigational chart.
The emptiness of the chest shocked her, embarrassed her, mocked her hopes. These paltry articles seemed like shabby relics of the Plums’ mundane lighthouse existence. How could they offer clues into the great mystery that she felt at the very center of her being?
May took out the gray blanket first and pressed it to her nose. It was as if she were inhaling the scent that came from the very heart of the sea. Yet there was another scent there. Something warm and almost milky. She had not realized it, but tears had begun to roll down her face. She carefully unfolded the blanket. It had several holes and in many other places it had begun to unravel. She was just about to ask herself why anyone would keep such a thing when she spotted a red glint enmeshed in the threads of one fray
ed patch. She took the same hairpin she had used before and plucked at the bright red thread. “But it’s not a thread!” she whispered to herself. It was hair. Her own hair, yet it was infinitely softer. Baby hair! Was this the blanket her father had brought her back in from her dead mother down the coast? It must be. But why would he keep it locked away? Her face was wet with tears. “Why, Pa? Why?” she whispered to herself, and rocked back and forth, clutching the blanket.
Reluctantly she set the blanket back in the chest just as she had found it and took out the letter, dated June 20, 1883. The return address was the Revenue Cutter Service.
Dear Mr. Plum,
In regard to your inquiry concerning the latitude and longitude of the sinking of the HMS Resolute, we do not have a precise position but we do have coordinates for wreckage from the vessel that was found drifting in a north and easterly direction. Some spars were picked up some months after the storm by the Revenue Service cutter George P. Marshall at 41°36’ N and 70°36’ W on April 19, 1883. An overturned lifeboat was found south of Martha’s Vineyard, April 30 of this year by the fishing sloop Abigail out of Nantucket. Sundry wooden fragments believed to be from the ship have continued to be found over the summer. No bodies have as yet been recovered. It is doubtful that they would this long after the disaster. The HMS Resolute was commanded by Captain Walter Lawrence of the Admiralty, a distinguished officer in Her Majesty’s service for over fifteen years.
At this time I have no more information. Perhaps by autumn, when the northeasters begin to blow, more information shall be yielded. Please feel free to write again.
Most sincerely yours, Lieutenant Michael Ramsey, Newport, RI Station of the United States Revenue Cutter Service
May read the letter again, staring down at the words on the page, and wondered why Gar had written. Why did he want to know where the Resolute had sunk? Carefully, May replaced the letter, then reached in for the chart. When she unfolded it she realized that there were two charts. One depicted Georges Bank and the Nantucket Shoals. The second chart went from Boston Light to Cape Ann: the coastline south of Maine. She saw faint pencil markings. There was an ? and a question mark on the first chart near a region in the Nantucket Shoals called Cultivator Shoals at 41°20’ N and 68°12’ W. She brought the chart closer and squinted. May was not ignorant of navigational charts. She understood that the tiny numbers marked the depths in fathoms and that the direction and the average velocities of currents were indicated by the purple arrows. Someone had drawn lines extending out from these arrows as if to suggest a continuation of a current.
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