by Joan Clark
At first she was conscious of the time and the necessity of returning to the island, but in spite of moving every board and tool and broken piece of furniture in the barn, she couldn’t find the net. The attic, she thought, it must be in the attic, and up the narrow stairs she thumped and into the room that was now lighter inside than out because she had forgotten to switch off the lights. As she searched through the clutter, she cast her imagination back to when she was floating over the golden brown sand and the urgency to find the net ebbed away. She picked up the brush and, squeezing out yellow ochre and mixing it with brown, began painting an undersea world honeyed with sunlight. Her intention was to do one painting, and only one painting. Watercolours had to be executed quickly if the colours were to be fresh and clean and she would be done in a jiffy and back on the island before the children finished their picnic. But as she worked on the painting, she remembered the seagrass, how it undulated when her body swam above it and she did a second painting to capture the sensation. She remembered the deep blue green of the lobsters with their specklings of red and did a third watercolour trying to duplicate the mottled colour. The images came thick and fast and she wanted to paint all night. She continued painting and finished three more water-colours before she noticed it was dark outside the window and remembered, The children! She had forgotten the children! They were on an island and couldn’t swim! Down the attic steps she went and from there out into the night, not stopping to hunt for the flashlight but running down the drive and across the road. She got in the boat and began rowing toward the island beneath a rising moon, calling all the while, “Mama’s coming! Mama’s coming!” her heart thumping wildly when there was no reply to her calls. Where were they? Couldn’t they see her in the moonlight? Didn’t they know she was coming? She continued rowing and calling, crossing the silver path until she came to the island and went ashore.
PART III
TEN
MORANNA NEVER CARVES CHILDREN although she could easily include them in the scenes she assembles on the veranda every summer. Before the tourist season is underway, she arranges her carvings in what she imagines are dioramas—a group of clansmen listening to the prophecies of the Brahan Seer, crofters gathered around Catherine’s chair watching her roof burn, Pioneer Big Ian and Henrietta standing on the Sydney wharf, their bundled goods beside them. One hundred and sixty-five years ago, Moranna’s great-great-grandmother walked off the ship holding a three-year-old and a babe in arms. Yet in the immigration diorama, the children are missing. Their absence is not an oversight and Moranna knows small carvings would be easier to sell than large ones—many of her prospective buyers resist paying more than a hundred dollars for, as one tourist put it, “a block of wood.” Even so, she can’t bring herself to carve children. If she carved them, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from thinking about the whereabouts of her lost children, and she would wonder, as she has countless times before, if there was any way of finding them and, if there was, whether they would want to be found. For this reason she has never carved Alexie and Annabelle, the twelve-year-old daughters of Big Ian and Henrietta, who froze to death in a raging blizzard their first winter in Cape North—this was before the pioneer family learned to tie a rope around their waists before venturing out in a snowstorm.
After her daughters were stolen from her by the Witch Lorene, Moranna lost track of their whereabouts, but years later she stumbled upon two crusts of bread. The first was a London byline of Duncan’s she read in the newspaper, the second the interview she watched on Lottie’s television when Duncan mentioned in passing that after leaving Toronto, he studied at Columbia University in New York before moving to Britain. The first crust was stale, Duncan having already mentioned the move to Britain in a letter he sent Moranna five years after he left her. She assumes her children grew up in Britain, but she doesn’t know for sure and, now that they’re grown, has no idea where her daughters are: they could be anywhere in the world.
Although she hasn’t seen them all these years, her daughters occupy her waking and sleeping thoughts and no matter what she’s thinking, they are there, offstage, ghostly shapes hovering in the wings. Are they waiting for the prompter’s cue before they make an appearance, or are they waiting for instructions from the director? And who is the director? Once upon a time, Moranna thought the Witch was the director, but surely by now she is too old to wield much authority and has doubtless passed it on to her son.
Because she never stops thinking of her daughters, when Murdoch drives to Baddeck in late January to deliver one of the boxes of Florida oranges the Rotary sells every year as a fundraiser, Moranna asks a question she’s asked dozens of times before. Does he have any news of Bonnie and Brianna? Since he and Davina have recently returned from spending a month with Ginger, she thinks there might be a scrap of news about her children, a tiny crumb dropped along the path. After all, Ginger and her daughters had been childhood friends.
Removing his boots, Murdoch sits in a rocker with his jacket on, hands clasped between his knees. “You know I don’t have any news of the girls. If I did I’d tell you.” He speaks with the weary forbearance of someone who has been asked the same question many times before. His daughter lost touch with her cousins a long time ago. “Ginger’s not very good at keeping up with family,” Murdoch says. The fact is weeks can go by without them hearing a peep from Ginger, even by e-mail. Although he will never admit it to Davina, he sometimes thinks that as an only child, Ginger is determined to maintain her distance from her parents in order to discourage any possible dependence on her.
If Moranna were in contact with her daughters, he might be able to talk frankly to her about his own daughter. He might be able to tell her about Ginger’s generosity, how she’d insisted he and Davina take the bedroom with the Mount Rundle view; the sumptuous Christmas dinner she’d treated them to at the Banff Springs Hotel; the gift certificate she’d given them to a fancy spa where he and Davina pampered themselves with bath oils and massages. But apart from Moranna’s inquiry about her daughters, the subject of Ginger is taboo, along with Christmas and his wife. Murdoch never mentions Davina if it can be avoided, just as he now tries to shift his sister’s thoughts away from her daughters by commenting on the weather. Glancing out the window at the falling snow, he grumbles, “I hate snow.”
“I like it,” Moranna retorts. Disappointment has made her contrary and argumentative. “Snow makes everything fresh and clean.”
“Until it turns to slush.”
“It covers the ugliness.”
Murdoch doesn’t ask what ugliness she’s referring to. “Yeah, and makes the roads slippery,” he says. When she doesn’t reply, he gets up and pulls on his boots. “I’ll be heading on home now before the road gets too bad.” He’s irked that she hasn’t asked him to remove his jacket or offered him food—having driven all this way, he would have enjoyed a slice of her bread. He’s also annoyed that she’s made no attempt to detain him and seems to want him to go. But of course that’s his sister all over, one minute fawning over him and the next minute eager for him to leave even though he’s driven all the way to Baddeck to bring her a box of oranges.
Driving home, Murdoch tries to remember the last time Moranna gave him a gift. He can’t remember her giving him a single thing except a carving she once insisted he take home. It was a crude chunk of wood that was supposed to resemble a dead ancestor but looked more like an enormous toad. Davina hated it on sight and told him to get rid of it. Taking it outside, he put the carving beneath the lilac bush and when he noticed its disappearance some months later, he knew Davina must have burnt it in the fireplace when he wasn’t around. He didn’t ask where it had gone, not because he wanted to keep the ugly thing but because the fact that it had been destroyed without his permission aroused in him a feeling of mild betrayal.
Moranna is relieved that Murdoch’s visit was short. It was kind of him to bring the oranges, but he became so testy and irritable when she inquired if there was any news
of her daughters that she could hardly wait for him to leave. She and her brother have never been able to discuss why her children were taken away without him blaming her. How many times has Murdoch told her that she is her own worst enemy? As far as he’s concerned, everything that happened after she left the children on Kidston Island was the result of that mistake. Once the children had been brought back and were safe and sound in bed, she had tried to explain how she happened to leave them, but Murdoch wouldn’t listen and had said terrible things to her. Since then she’s tried many times to give her version of the event without success, and the subject now lurks beneath the surface like an explosive device they are at pains to avoid.
Of course she knows leaving the little girls on Kidston Island was a grievous error, but did it need to become an irreversible mistake? She has admitted her mistake over and over to herself. She left the children on the island because, swept up in a burst of creative ambition, she forgot them. But she didn’t forget them on purpose, as Murdoch seems to think. After the incident, he railed on and on, accusing her of being an unreliable mother and a danger to her children. She concedes that she was unreliable, but rejects the idea she was a danger to her children. She’s heard of dangerous mothers drowning their children in bathtub water, smothering them with pillows, setting them on fire, bashing in their heads with a rock. She wasn’t that kind of mother and not once did she wilfully hurt her children. She forgot them, yes, but she never meant them harm. Far from it. She never harmed so much as a hair on their heads—Moranna has never considered sneaking into the children’s room in the middle of the night to snip off their hair as harmful.
Two young men, Ivy League guests at Beinn Breagh and expert sailors, rescued the children. Not that sailing expertise was required to complete the rescue, for the night was clear and the water calm. The men had been partying aboard the Marlene, one of the luxury sailboats anchored in Baddeck Harbour, and were rowing past Kidston Island when they heard the children’s cries. Going ashore they found one little tyke—it was Brianna—asleep on a blanket and two others holding hands and crying their hearts out. No sign of a grown-up or a boat. It took some coaxing to get the older one to explain that her aunt had brought them to the island for a picnic and while they were eating left in the boat and never returned. “She’s drownded,” the girl blubbered and the other one joined in. The men rowed the children to Beinn Breagh and carried them up to the rambling house where they were taken into the kitchen and made cocoa and toast while the police were called.
While Constable Kennedy was on his way to Beinn Breagh, Moranna was on the island, running along the beach, calling into the woods and over the moonlit water before stumbling across the rocks to the lighthouse, thinking the children might have sought shelter there. She took a hard look at the swamp and was relieved there was absolutely no evidence to suggest that the little girls had been anywhere near it. In fact, the footprints on the moonlit beach were the only sign they had been on the island at all. The blanket and towels and the picnic basket were gone, the mermaid sisters vanished into thin air.
Moranna rowed back to the dock in a frenzy, and tearing across the road and into the house, she telephoned the Mounties. “My children are missing!” she shouted. “They’ve been kidnapped from Kidston Island!”
“The children were rescued from the island an hour ago and taken to Beinn Breagh,” the police officer said calmly. “They’re with Constable Kennedy. I’ll call him now and tell him you’re home. He tried to contact you a while ago.”
“I was out searching.”
“But you’re home now.”
“Of course I’m home. Tell him to hurry.”
The constable took his time returning the children. He had never been inside the Beinn Breagh house, and wanted to stay longer. The little girls had stopped crying and were now munching gingersnaps Elsie May Grosvenor, who was none other than Alexander Graham Bell’s daughter, had found in the pantry. A real lady she was, an old woman woken from sleep at one o’clock in the morning, sitting in her nightclothes and slippers, as gracious as if she had invited the little girls for tea, her arm around the littlest one who had woken up and was now as fresh as a daisy. What kind of a mother would leave such cute little girls by themselves on an island in the dark of night? She didn’t deserve such sweet children. At least the mother hadn’t met with foul play, which meant they wouldn’t have to drag the lake for her body in the morning. Ginger, the red-headed one, lived in Sydney Mines. She didn’t know her telephone number, but the constable got it through Information and called her parents, letting the telephone ring a long time until the father answered in a groggy voice. He woke up pretty quick when the constable explained the call. Said he’d be in Baddeck within the hour.
When Murdoch and Davina stormed into the farmhouse shortly after two, they immediately looked for Ginger. “Where is she?” Davina said.
“Upstairs in bed with Bonnie and Brianna.”
The three little girls, worn out from the misadventure, had fallen asleep as soon as Moranna put them to bed in the middle bedroom. Davina dashed upstairs and that was the last Moranna saw of her. But Murdoch remained in the kitchen and, after the Mountie left, gave Moranna a piece of his mind. She knew he was still angry at her for missing his wedding, but nevertheless tried to explain. She told Murdoch she had come back to the house for the fishing net and got caught up in painting illustrations.
“In the middle of the night? Why don’t you paint in the daytime like a normal person?”
She told him that when a painting took over her imagination, she forgot whether it was day or night.
“How could you forget three little children? Children must be kept safe, Moranna, and leaving them on the island all night because you forgot put their lives at risk. They could have drowned.”
“They didn’t drown and it wasn’t all night. It was only a few hours, three at the most.”
“According to the constable it was close to six.”
“How would he know?” Moranna said, which infuriated Murdoch even more. His sister didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of the situation.
“You are an unreliable mother and a danger to your children.”
There was more of the same, a lot more, but Moranna stopped listening—she always stopped listening when she was being criticized. Her brother’s wrath had deflated the high she’d been riding and she was falling headlong into an abyss, falling so fast she was unable to hold on to one single thought on her way down. Slogging up the attic stairs, she flopped onto the bed and resigned herself to the oblivion of sleep.
Late next morning she woke to the smell of pancakes. Someone had opened her bedroom door and the smell had wafted all the way up to the attic. Apart from identifying the smell, her mind was as empty as air, and she lay unmoving beneath the faded quilt. Gradually, she identified the sounds: a slamming door, her father’s voice, her children’s laughter, which didn’t come from downstairs but through the open window. She continued to lie there until she heard a wasp at the window and, turning her head sideways, saw it crawl through a hole in the screen. She was afraid of wasps, having been badly stung as a child, and flinging back the quilt stumbled out of the room, completely unaware that she was wearing yesterday’s clothes. Hurrying down the creaking attic stairs, she crawled into her children’s rumpled bed and willed herself to sleep. Only sleep could carry her away to a place where she was in limbo, disconnected from reality and from the demands and responsibilities of everyday life.
“Good afternoon, Moranna,” her father said from the bedroom doorway. Ian had heard her coming down the attic stairs. “Are you hungry?”
Avoiding the question, she asked if the children were safe. She remembered Murdoch saying they must be kept safe.
“They’re safe. They’re outside with Paula.”
Ah yes, Paula.
She turned and looked at her father, but she didn’t notice the haggard face or the red-rimmed eyes. And she didn’t hear the belligerence in her voic
e when she demanded to know what he was doing here.
“I came to Baddeck to see what was needed after the incident on Kidston Island last night.”
The incident on Kidston Island. The constable brought the children home. She had forgotten them but now they were here. She could hear them playing outside.
“Murdoch suggested Edwina and I stay here awhile.”
“Murdoch can fuck himself.”
Ian flinched. It was a shock to hear his daughter speak profanely, and against her brother too. Although he would have preferred to deny it, Ian admitted that Murdoch had probably been right when he said Moranna had flipped her lid, but he objected to his cruel comment that she had always been crazy. Ian acknowledged Moranna had been an unusual child, a girl who had grown into a nonconformist, someone who marched to her own tune, but he resisted labelling her crazy. The most he would admit at this point was the possibility that she was having a breakdown. As far as he could see, Moranna loved her daughters as much as Murdoch loved Ginger and he was mystified that she had left them alone on the island. Instinctively, he felt she knew she had made a terrible and dangerous mistake and rather than face it had taken to her bed. He had no idea what he could do to get her to leave it except to encourage her to come downstairs and eat.
“I came up here to ask if you’d like some of Edwina’s pancakes,” he said. “There’s still some of that maple syrup you and Duncan brought from Ontario.”