The Island Girls: A heartbreaking historical novel

by Noelle Harrison

  Emer

  29th September 2011

  The train had been nearly empty, apart from those obviously going to Salem. A goth couple in black leathers, piercings and tattoos, and three girls dressed in witches’ hats and beautiful corseted dresses. Each hat was decorated differently – one with garlands of dark purple flowers, the second with tiny black spiders and glittering webs, and the third with tiny orange pumpkins. Emer had slid into her own row of red leatherette seats, and stared out of the window as they pulled out of North Station. It had been a wet and windy fall day, the edges of Boston grey and dreary as they travelled north. As the ticket inspector approached her, Emer couldn’t help noticing she had a green shamrock attached to her ticket machine.

  ‘Irish?’ Emer asked her. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the girl said, though her accent was strong Bostonian. She had inky-black hair, which fell out of a lopsided ponytail upon which her inspector’s cap was perched at an angle. Emer longed to neaten it up, braid the shiny black tail of it, or tuck it into her cap. She had braided Orla’s hair the day before she’d died. Just how she’d done it when they were little girls. The way their mam had taught her. Orla’s red hair had always had a will of its own. Emer remembered how frustrated she would get trying to tame her sister’s wild curls. Orla would laugh at her, not really caring how she looked. The braids never lasted the day in school, and by the time they were both home for their dinner, Orla’s unruly locks would have broken free. But after the chemo, when all Orla’s hair grew back, it was different. No longer curly, but straight and thick. It was darker, too. And though she had tried to escape Emer’s hairbrush when they were little, after her hair had returned, Orla had asked Emer to constantly brush it. Once braided, Orla’s hair had gleamed the same shade as glossy chestnuts.

  Emer’s phone vibrated in her pocket as the train pulled into Salem. She pulled it out, knowing instinctively it was Lars. It was usually at this time of day they’d eat lunch together if they could. She was tempted to take the phone out of her pocket, tell him she was in Salem. A place he’d said he’d take her one day. But the phone remained buzzing on the palm of her hand, because she didn’t know how to speak to Lars now it had been so many weeks. Finally, the phone stopped. She slipped it back into her coat pocket, feeling even more confused. Why couldn’t she be clear and tell him it was over for good? The phone buzzed in her pocket to indicate he’d left a message, but she didn’t trust herself to listen to it yet.

  It began to rain as she left the train station at Salem. She followed the three witches, walking downtown until she stood outside a shop selling an assortment of books, witches’ hats, wands, sage, incense, crystal balls, tarot cards and all sorts of other New Age paraphernalia.

  Her interview was conducted in the store, in the curtained-off tarot reader’s corner by Susannah’s niece, Lynsey de Luna. Lynsey was beautiful, tall and willowy with dyed red hair, pale skin and black kohled eyes. She was wearing a long purple velvet dress and black lace fingerless gloves, with a white quartz pendant hung on a chain around her neck.

  ‘Thank you for coming all the way from Boston,’ Lynsey said. ‘I know you’ll be fine. You’re Cancer, right? With Virgo ascending?’

  Emer had no idea what Virgo ascending meant, but she confirmed yes, she was a Cancerian. Orla had been into all the star signs, but Emer had never believed in any of it, no matter how much her sister tried to convince her otherwise.

  ‘Cancer and Virgo: the perfect combination for a caregiver.’ Lynsey nodded sagely. ‘But my sister insisted I check you out in person,’ she said. ‘Rebecca’s in the UK. She can’t make the trip right now. She really wanted to come over and be with our aunt since she got the prognosis, but Rebecca’s a lecturer. It’s the beginning of a new semester, so difficult for her to get away. And I’ve got a business to run.’ Lynsey spread her arms to take in the whole circumference of the reader’s tent.

  ‘When Aunt Susannah told us she had cancer, I tried to persuade her to come to Salem so I could mind her, but she hates it here.’ Lynsey gave a short mirthless laugh. ‘My aunt calls Salem a tasteless theme park. She says it’s making money on the back of an historic tragedy.’ Lynsey sighed. ‘But you know, I think it’s neat Salem isn’t just a museum, but a place for people like me to feel normal.’

  Lynsey picked up her deck of tarot cards and began to shuffle them.

  ‘Rebecca did all the right things. Went to college. Studied hard. She’s a professor now. My aunt’s pride and joy! Now, when it comes to me – well, I did it all wrong. Dropped out. Travelled. A free spirit and mystic.’ Lynsey pulled out one tarot card and placed it on the table. The image was of a dancing fool skipping off the edge of a cliff, a merry smile on his face. ‘See, that’s me.’ She smiled. ‘The eternal Fool!’

  There was an awkward pause. Lynsey picked up the card and put it back in the deck, before placing the cards face down in front of her. ‘So back to you, Emer, and what you’ll need to do for my aunt Susannah. She’s made the decision not to have radiation or chemo. Your role is to strictly manage her care.’

  ‘Did she not want treatment?’ Emer had asked.

  ‘She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which as you know is a terminal prognosis. Susannah was of course offered chemo to prolong her life…’ Lynsey’s voice cracked as she gazed down at the deck of cards, her expression concealed. ‘But she said she wanted to live her life to the full as long as she could. No matter how much we tried to persuade her otherwise, she refused to have chemo.’

  Lynsey looked up. Behind the bravado, Emer detected sadness. She’d seen it many times before in the hospital.

  ‘And now it’s too late anyways,’ Lynsey said. ‘So you’ll be helping with pain management.’

  ‘That’s no problem,’ Emer had said. ‘I used to work on an oncology ward.’

  Lynsey looked her in the eye again. ‘That must have been tough.’

  ‘You get used to it,’ Emer said, looking away as her stomach cramped from the lie.

  After the interview, Emer wandered around Salem on her own. Anything other than return to the desolation of Orla and Ethan’s house in Quincy. She had said she’d help her brother-in-law pack up, but she wasn’t ready to put her sister’s life into boxes yet.

  Without meaning to, she found herself sitting down at the table of another tarot card reader. She’d never had her cards read before. Always thought it rubbish, and yet here she was, clutching at anything to help her make sense of the mess she’d made of things.

  It was dark by the time she came out of her reading. The rain had got heavier, and she had to run across the street, diving into a bar. Her head was swimming with the imagery of the tarot cards and what the reader had said to her. She needed a drink.

  Taking a big gulp of her cider mimosa, she savoured the cinnamon rim around the top of the glass. She adored the taste of cinnamon. The first time she’d gone for coffee with Lars, they’d shared a cinnamon roll and he’d told her about the ones his mother made back in Norway. The taste of the cinnamon drink brought him back to her. The name he had called the buns was beautiful – skillingsboner. It sounded soft and full, like the buns themselves. She remembered his phone message from earlier. She’d still not listened to it. She took out her phone and dialled voicemail.

  ‘Hey, Emer, it’s Lars.’ She could hear his nervousness in the pause. ‘Please call back. Let me know you’re okay. I’m worried.’

  Emer hovered her fingers over the phone. If she called him back now, he’d persuade her to go see him when she got back to Boston. She’d be swept up again in her emotions. Ever since Orla had died, she couldn’t think straight. All she wanted was to get away from her old life, and the guilt. Lars was part of the guilt, no matter how much she wished he wasn’t.

  Emer cradled her drink as she sat at the bar and people-watched. She had expected Salem to be a tacky tourist trap, and it was to a certain extent, but she also liked the fact it seemed to be a place which welcomed the different.
In Salem, you could let your inner goth go wild, and no one would bat an eye. It felt like the most liberated place she’d been to so far in the three years she’d been living in the States.

  She tried to remember what cards she’d got in her reading. There was the Death card. Well, obviously there would be death in her reading – but this was in the future, not the past. The reader had explained it meant change and new beginnings rather than an end. There was also the Queen of Cups, which was supposed to be her, and two Kings. A conflict of some sort. She didn’t like that. And last of all, the Devil came up, too. It was all a bit of a hazy mess. Now, what did the Devil mean again? Orla had had a deck of tarot cards. Used to bring them out at dinner parties to read for friends.

  ‘It’s a bit of fun,’ Orla had reassured Emer. ‘Not to be taken too seriously.’

  Emer’s tarot reader had been a girl about the same age as herself. Why hadn’t Emer asked Lynsey de Luna to read her cards? She’d probably have done it for free. But then she didn’t want her new employer to know too much about her. She needed this job, not just because she was flat broke, but because she needed to go somewhere she had never been before. Not Ireland, not Boston. Somewhere new, where Orla’s imprint didn’t exist.

  Emer’s reader had looked her in the eyes, and given her a warning. ‘Be careful,’ she’d said to her.

  Had the girl been a charlatan or the real thing? Was Emer’s journey to the island going to change her forever?

  Susannah

  November 1953

  There had been Olsens on Vinalhaven since they first came from Sweden to work in the granite quarries in the 1800s. Susannah loved looking through the boxes of all the pictures her mother kept under her bed. Black and white photographs of her great-great-grandparents’ wedding back in Sweden. Her father’s great-grandfather, Karl, had arrived on the island from Jonköping in the mid-1800s with his wife, Greta. He had been a master sculptor and was immediately employed by one of the granite quarries to carve huge sculptures, commissioned and sent all over America. Greta had worked in the netting factory, making horse nets with big tassels to keep the flies away from the horses. Work in the quarries had dried up at the turn of the century, forcing Karl’s son – Susannah’s grandfather – to take to the sea and become a lobsterman like most of the men on Vinalhaven. However, the Olsen women had continued to work in the netting factory until it closed down in the 1920s.

  Susannah’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, had also worked in the netting factory, side by side with her father’s mother. The two women had been firm friends, and it was through this connection Susannah’s parents had met.

  Susannah pulled the box out all the way and opened up the lid. She took out the stack of old photographs. She knew them all by heart, but even so she laid them out on the wooden floor. There was the old wedding picture in Sweden, and one of her grandparents’ wedding in Vinalhaven, on the steps of the old church. One of her favourites was the picture of all the women who worked in the netting factory. Three rows of serious faces all dressed in black. She loved to think about the stories of all those women. Had they all grown up in Vinalhaven? Did they have dreams and desires beyond the island? Had any of those women managed to escape to the world outside of Maine?

  She sifted through the photos and found what she was really looking for. The picture of her dad in his American army uniform. He looked so pleased with himself. A big smile plastered on his face, with his officer’s cap on top of his slicked-back hair. Had he really been so happy to go off to war? Or was it to escape the island? She imagined all the places he’d got to see before he met his end in Italy. She had been five, Kate four, when their father had died. Her memories of him from before the war were hazy, but she remembered those hallowed times when he had read to them at night. He had given her a love of books. Susannah stared at her father’s face. She sought in this photograph an understanding of who she was.

  It had been snowing, the day their mother had received the telegram. The day before Thanksgiving, and their mother had been cooking in preparation for her husband’s family’s annual visit. Every time Susannah smelt or tasted pecan pie, its sweetness brought back the sound of their mother’s cry. A long, low wail, like a wounded animal. Terrifying in its depth. A sound neither she nor Kate had ever heard their mother make before.

  Their mother had run out of the house, snow falling as she plunged through white drifts towards the sea. Kate had been terrified.

  ‘What’s wrong with Mom?’ she’d asked Susannah, her small face white with shock, tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘It’s something to do with Daddy,’ Susannah said to her sister, picking up the telegram. She had not been reading for long and grasped at the words. ‘I think he’s dead,’ she whispered, her heart feeling big and huge in her chest. It had never occurred to her that her father might never come back from the war. ‘He was killed.’

  But Kate wasn’t listening. She had followed their mother out into the garden, slipping along the trail her mother had made through the snow in her house shoes. Susannah watched Kate go to their mother, and pull on her arm. Bring her back from the brink of her despair. Their mother turned to Kate, bent down and scooped her up. Held her tight to her chest. Susannah watched her mother and sister together in loss, their mother clinging onto her child to stop herself from walking into the icy sea. The two of them shaking with cold and grief, yet still not turning back into the house and their new reality. Susannah didn’t know why she hadn’t joined them. But she held back, with her forehead pressed to the chill windowpane, feeling outside of her family, tears trailing down her cheeks. Why had God taken her father from her?

  It had been almost nine years since that terrible day. The very worst day in her life by far. She had woken this Saturday morning to a white world, the first snows of the winter. Always, it reminded her of her father’s death. The whole morning, she’d been aching to dig out the box of photographs and find his picture. She was afraid that one day she would forget what he looked like. Already, he had become a shadowy memory.

  Susannah heard her mother calling up to her from down below. She’d gone upstairs to sweep the floors and get her mother’s new glasses. Her mother hated wearing them, but she needed them when she laced.

  Susannah put the photograph back in the box and shoved it under her mother’s bed. She picked the glasses up from her mother’s dressing table.

  Downstairs, her mother and Kate were both sitting either side of the lacing stand, working on net bags for pool tables. The table was in the window for the best light. Outside it had stopped snowing and the sun had come out, sparkling on the snow and illuminating the room. Her mother had a big order to fulfil and she and Kate had been working away since the early morning, while Susannah had cleaned the whole house.

  ‘How come it takes you twice as long as your sister to sweep upstairs, young lady?’

  ‘I was looking so long for your glasses,’ Susannah lied.

  ‘You know right well I always leave them on my dressing table,’ her mother said, not believing a word. ‘Were you daydreaming again in one of your books?’

  ‘I read,’ Susannah snapped. ‘That’s not daydreaming.’

  Kate gave her a warning look, but Susannah was annoyed. Why did her mother always try to stop her from reading? ‘I’ve homework to do for school on Monday,’ Susannah said. ‘I don’t have any more time to do chores!’

  Their mother stopped lacing and gave Susannah an icy stare. ‘Well, it will have to wait,’ she said. ‘We have to finish this, as well as attaching the taffy lacing to Mary Carver’s dress.’ She stood up from the lacing stand and put down her shuttle. ‘In fact, you can take over for now, and help your sister finish these bags off while I finish off the dress,’ she said. ‘Luckily it doesn’t take any great skill.’

  ‘I can’t, I’ve homework to do, I told you,’ Susannah said defiantly.

  ‘You are trying my patience, young lady,’ their mother said. ‘If we don’t get these jobs don
e, we don’t eat – or do you think reading your books will feed us?’

  ‘Come on, Susie.’ Kate tried to diffuse the tension between their mother and Susannah. ‘It won’t take us long.’

  Susannah reluctantly sat down at the lacing stand.

  ‘Why can’t you knuckle down like your sister?’ her mother said as she pinned the taffy lace to the cuffs of the wedding dress. ‘Learn useful skills, so you’ll find a good husband who could provide for you and a family.’

  ‘The idea of having a baby makes me feel sick,’ Susannah declared, slamming the shuttle through the yarn.

  ‘Oh, you don’t mean that, Susie,’ Kate said, looking shocked. ‘I can’t wait to be a mother. I want at least one of each. A boy and a girl.’

  ‘Your father and I planned to fill this house with children,’ their mother said, her voice sad. ‘Ronald always wanted a son to follow in his footsteps.’

  Her mother’s words hurt Susannah’s feelings. Had she not been enough for her father because she was a girl? Why were daughters of less value than sons?

  ‘That’s why you girls need to be good in the house, because we’ve no man to take care of us now,’ their mother said.