Wolfe Island

  I didn’t say anything for a minute at least. What would I say, what would I ask? Is there any news? Has she been found? Your baby sister? If she had not told me, she’d heard no news, they were both lost to her. I did think hard about her sister. Finally, I said, ‘I heard that Alejandra wasn’t your name.’

  ‘Doree?’ When I nodded, she said, ‘That’s right, it wasn’t. But it is my name now. I don’t want the old one. I’m sorry I can’t tell you. Safer. Out there on Wolfe Island I thought we were safe, for a while I felt that. That was the first I knew what safe felt like. I thought it was like, do you have enough food and water, have you got some place to go, a home, you know? Do the people there care about you . . . love you, I mean? All that.’

  ‘Yeah. I used to feel like that,’ I said.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Not exactly. I can live like this. The old feeling is gone. This is the best I can do. That’s all. But Hart is around. I’m lucky really.’

  ‘Yes. I am lucky too.’

  I looked at Alejandra’s eyes then, the little turn at the outer corner, that thing she shared with her mother. There was one more secret.

  Some months after my vagabond journey I had made up my mind to go see Josh’s father, Lionel Starkweather. I had learned his name and what he said he was, which was a lie. I had only to ask Claudie to get Lionel Starkweather’s address. I wanted to write him a letter, I said. Claudie didn’t know I’d shot his son, of course, or about the other things, or she might have answered differently. I wanted to look him in the eye and tell him the truth.

  I thought a lot about what I’d say on the drive to his town: how he’d caused the death of one of the best people I ever knew, and destroyed a family, how things have a way of catching up, as Luis said. It was almost two hundred miles, so I had plenty of time for ruminations. I had my gun with me and I hadn’t ruled out using it if he raised something against me.

  Calverton was a beautiful town, grander than Blackwater. Even the poorer parts were tidy, the yards neat and mown. It was strange to think of Cat spending her growing years here, going to school with Josh, meeting Luis, her life changing direction because of her parents’ aspirations.

  Lionel Starkweather’s house was a lovely thing, a three-storey clapboard with a circular drive, and twin copper beeches out front. I expected a maid or perhaps his wife to answer the door, but it was Lionel Starkweather himself. He was much like his photographs: tall and not quite running to fat – handsome, I suppose, in his navy cashmere sweater.

  He stood in the doorway, remote and puzzled. ‘Can I help?’

  The million ways I could have answered that question . . . ‘I’m Kitty Hawke,’ I said. ‘Claudia Hawke’s mother, Catalina Hawke’s grandmother, your granddaughter Treasure Hawke’s great-grandmother.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ He looked to the side then and I heard a small peeping voice: ‘Papa, Papa,’ and a wee girl with black hair ran from somewhere and wrapped her arms about his legs. He scooped her into his arms. ‘Selina,’ he said, and now she put one arm comfortably around his neck and faced me like a queen. I would know those eyes anywhere. I was thinking very fast.

  ‘How old is she? Two and a half? I know her sister. I knew her brother, who, by the way, I know you had—’

  He looked to the side again.

  ‘Stay there.’ I patted my pocket so he knew what I carried with me.

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘I certainly do.’ That old dangerous calm had descended on me.

  He leaned forward and in a hissing voice said, ‘I said you don’t know. She’s mine too. My daughter, do you understand?’

  I felt winded and took a breath in, when I could, and out, and spoke: ‘So you raped her mother, let her go to jail and took her daughter. No wonder Josh is a screw-up. That poor kid. Can’t believe I said that.’

  His face twisted. ‘Call it what you want. You don’t know. I kept her safe until other people got involved. She gave me the baby so she had a chance. Understand that. Her choice. We’ve adopted her. She’s ours now.’

  ‘What a hero. God, it would be embarrassing if people knew.’

  ‘I know the other one’s alive.’

  ‘Her sister, you mean? You never even knew her name, did you?’

  He looked pained at that. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I wanted to look you in the face and call you out, tell you about the boy – your daughter’s brother, think about that why don’t you? – you tried to trap and then had murdered.’

  He lifted his hand to Selina’s head and pressed it against his shoulder, covering her ear.

  ‘Not nice to hear that word, is it? He was really something, but you would never understand it. I suppose you’d say you were doing your job.’ He glared and curled his fist, the way I’d seen Josh do more than once. What a sorry thing he, Lionel Starkweather was. ‘You’re hardly a person.’

  He was recovering by then and he brushed it off. ‘You wouldn’t understand. You leave us alone and I’ll leave your family alone. Got that?’

  ‘You get this, Lionel Starkweather: I wouldn’t trust you for anything. I knew that before I got here. I’ve got all this recorded, and the minute I leave here I’m making copies – I’ll send one now – and I’m putting one in a bank, one with my lawyers. If any of my family gets as much as a scratch, you know what I’ll do, and I’ll make sure your daughter here knows someday about what sort of man you are.’

  Chapter 28

  We went out the next day, it being as fine and still as any other I have experienced, if not as warm. The algal blooms had died and the water had turned old-fashioned blue: taut, brimful, sequined. The main shore smudged then faded to nothing. Alejandra was quiet and held herself in a small tight ball, occasionally scratching at the peeling red paint of the boat’s edge with a thumbnail and picking it out of her nail when a shard caught and looking around and back down at her fingernail.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve only made this journey once before.’

  ‘I should have thought.’

  ‘It was my idea. I should have thought.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to happen. Hardly a thing to see. Maybe nothing by now. We had a storm a couple of weeks back.’ But I knew she wasn’t seeing what was happening now. She wasn’t in this time or even in this place. She was roaming inside, a place that is vast beyond reckoning.

  Alejandra said, ‘I think about it. Why is that?’

  An osprey hovered, watching the water with its fierce gaze, turning its head, tilting, feeling the air with its subtle wings.

  I said, ‘I always wondered. I carried a gun; you knew I used it. How do you trust a killer?’ I wasn’t asking a question, or not one of Alejandra, but she answered anyway.

  ‘Some killers you trust; some you don’t. That’s all. I knew killers before you. My father and mother were wanted. That’s all I can say about them. I heard of other killers, plenty of them.’ She didn’t say it to shock. She didn’t even look at me. ‘Not story-heard. Actual people. So-and-so’s brother: that sort of thing. It’s not what you do, it’s why. That’s always true.’

  ‘You look at it one way that man was protecting his friend’s place.’

  She made a sound of disgust. ‘He was nothing, a liar, lying to himself about that. He was scaring a woman and a bunch of kids without a home to puff himself up. Probably made his day, up to then.’

  ‘I don’t know why I did it. I shouldn’t have. I’d do it again. I know I would. I can’t remember it right. It might be I’m the liar. I wrote it down but I don’t know if it was true, what I wrote.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean it’s a lie if it happened different. The way you feel is true. I think it is. What did you write?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll show you sometime.’

  ‘I don’t remember it either. Just Girl. Blood. Afterwards. I thought
as long as you were there we’d be okay. I knew what you were. I didn’t know before that man came to the island what you would do for us. I wish I’d known earlier. It might have made a difference. I wished you’d killed Josh.’ Her voice brightened. ‘I remember the makings room. A lot.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I loved that room.’

  ‘Me too.’

  She shook her head irritably. ‘I don’t mean like I love chocolate, or pesto. Or – or dogs. I mean that place . . . it made me, you know? It put me together, it held me together. If I feel bad I go to that room. Even now – still. A shrink told me this once: “Shut the door,” she said. “Leave the world outside. It doesn’t belong in there. It’s for you – and if you want to invite anyone in that’s up to you. You’ve got the handle.”’ She paused and looked at me kindly. ‘She was speaking metaphorically. Obviously it was your room. I know that.’

  ‘It’s okay. I never minded sharing,’ and at her small smile and twitched brow I added, ‘after the first little while, I mean.’

  ‘It’s kind of a knack. I do what she said: open the door, go inside and sit at the bench. Girl’s there at my feet and her fur is soft. It’s warm. I push my toes in. There’s her heartbeat, her stomach is rumbling, you’re humming your tune.’ Her voice was a soft pulse.

  ‘What tune would that be?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never heard it anywhere else.’

  ‘I didn’t know I did that.’

  ‘Like this,’ and she hummed along for a bit.

  ‘Oh, Song of Wolfe.’ I sang a line or two and Alejandra hummed an accompaniment.

  ‘I feel it now. I’m feeling it.’ She was so surprised that it sounded in her voice and her eyes were wide, wide open. ‘Sing some more, Kitty.’

  I sang it through to the end.

  ‘I didn’t know the words. Or I forgot them – you’ll have to teach me.’ She hummed a little.

  We were quiet again and everything was so clear and calm that looking up I half expected to see reflected an old skiff and two women gliding along the cornflower sky, looking overboard deeper into the heavens.

  A speck of an island, low and flat, came into view with nothing on it but a yellow-sand beach and sparse grasses and a tall red-brick chimney very bright in the sun, its long black shadow flung aside like a fallen tree. ‘Shakers Island,’ I said. Another time I might stop in and poke around for things I could use, that might have been washed up since I was last there, which would be quite a few years before.

  Alejandra turned her head towards it and away like it was nothing more than a wrapper blowing along a street. She said, ‘Sometimes at night I wake up after a bad dream. I go in there again. I open the collections drawers. I look at all the things, the shells, the bottles, do my drawings, keep my lists. The smell of tomatoes coming in. Girl is at the door and we’re safe, you and me. You know?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Nothing can touch me. No one.’

  ‘Well who would, honey, out there?’

  She didn’t answer.

  We came towards Wolfe, which I could tell from the water and the distance we had travelled, and then by the sight of my house still standing, flat and bright and shabby against the sky and the water, a distance off still. I shifted course towards it and slowed, looking over the side and ahead for jetties and drowned buildings. The water was bright as tin and made my eyes sting. Alejandra was on the verge of saying something and paused more than once and took breath again and frowned. ‘That’s . . . is that . . .?’

  ‘Wolfe. My house. The last one standing. My father always said it would be. It drove Mrs Beaufort crazy. I wish he were here to see it. He loved to be right.’

  ‘My God.’ Her eyes moved along, though there wasn’t much to halt her gaze: a few hummocks, a sweep of golden grey marshland run through with water and dead tree trunks poking up. Presently, we saw buildings slumped to water or grass, as if they’d paused, exhausted, and lacked the will to rise again. I lined myself up with some posts and piles and came in over what I judged was the dock landing – its slats failing and falling away, swaying deeper into the dark like living things.

  Off to one side was a pile of tarnished timbers. ‘Your old home,’ I said. ‘Shipleys. See the little bit of green – the porch floor?’

  Alejandra stared at it without expression. ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Recognise it?’

  She shook her head, no, but kept looking like she hoped something would remind her.

  I turned the engine off and pulled the motor clear. It was quiet but for the muffled sound and feel of water slopping through wood, timbers bumping hollowly underwater, at the movement of our boat maybe, the smallest movements taking effect in the body of water, a feeling as much as a sound. That was all and it was eerie, as if something other than us was alive there or had only recently departed. I took hold of the oars and we kept on slowly – the sound the oars made and the drip and scoop of water an intrusion – until we came to a tall post and a pile of timbers and sheet metal with CRAB H in large capitals the colour of dried blood staring at the sky, and half fallen into water its pair: OUSE.

  ‘The street should start about here,’ I said. Sure enough, the white pebbles of pathways silted greenish led from the dark line of submerged asphalt on both sides and close beneath us. I poked an oar down until it hit bottom, no more than the depth of the paddle. A salty mossy pungency lifted. Alejandra stared, her eyes very black, gripping the boat’s side like the whole world was dissolving and only this vessel would save her.

  ‘Kitty.’ Her voice was a choked thing.

  ‘What, honey? It’s okay. Just things have got drowned is all. Not you, though. You’re okay. I’m here. I’ll look after you. Like I did before. Oh, don’t sweetheart, don’t.’

  She began to pant in soft distress and she shut her eyes. The boat scraped the bottom and shuddered and would go no further.

  ‘We’ll have to walk now. Can you walk?’ I said. ‘Can you get out? You’ll feel better when we get to the house, inside, or we can go back if you want?’ She didn’t speak and her eyes remained tight closed. I took off my boots and rolled my jeans as high as they would go and stepped out of the boat knee deep into that cold Wolfe water. The smell of it rose sharp and salt and the faint movement of water was like icy breaths on my legs. The boat came free. I pulled it a few more feet along and took hold of Alejandra’s hand and held it tight between mine, the side of the boat between us, like a pregnant belly. She was shaking, but I smoothed her hand and made a few sounds and words and she opened her eyes and let me help her with her shoes and jeans and I took her hand to help her out.

  She flinched at the water, the gritty feeling of the road, its silty surface like sodden fur – it was as if her balance had gone – and for a moment she wouldn’t let go. ‘Sorry, Kitty. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Not to worry. We’re here now. We’re on our own – no one else here.’

  She released my hand and waited while I tied the boat to a rusted light pole. We sloshed towards the house, moving carefully, feeling along with our feet and coming upon rocks, more drowned wood, branches and so forth. A mouldering smell of wet wood and plaster grew stronger as we came to the house. The porch railings sagged and the stairs hung loose as a busted jaw. We pulled ourselves up gingerly. The raw edges of the rotted timbers crumbled a little in our hands but took our weight. The porch was strewn with storm wrack – seaweed and plastic bottles and bags and a dead bird or two spilling more plastic – piled up against one of the old petunia pots.

  I shoved the door. Evidently people had visited since I collected my boat boy and the Watermen and other things. Books – their pages speckled and buckled with damp – and the remaining furniture and so on had been thrown about. Wallpaper hung off the walls in sheets and the ceiling hung in swags. I
t was a shock, but not one it seemed worth remarking on. It had happened to every other house on the island, invisibly it seemed, and mine was no different; left to itself nature is impartial, and without witness people are impartial. I picked up three books and stacked them to one side, but they were so buckled not even those few would lie flat. And they smelled mouldy, which is unpleasant in a book. There was a bigger shock than this chaos. The house stopped past the stairs, as if a meat cleaver had cut clean through. The back wall had gone. Beyond were the island, the marshes, everything trying to rush inside it seemed. It was a beautiful view, I will say that, the framework of the house shaping an enormous picture, more focused for its framing, but it took some of my breath and all of my attention. A corner of my mind wondered about setting it to rights and restoring the missing wall. Alejandra shook the stair post and rail and, when it held, started up the stairs. I followed.

  At the top was the landing and the two front rooms facing east and south, the vast sky where the two back rooms and half the garret had fallen away, and the little window facing north-east where I used to look over the dock and Cat’s house. The window was cloudy, the salt dust settled in the waves of the old slumped glass. I wouldn’t have minded saving it, but I didn’t have the tools. You can’t save everything, try as you might, except in memory if you’re lucky.

  We moved from window to window. Looking north: the boat had settled like a tethered horse swaying gently at the nose, the rubble of fallen buildings surrounded by water, the great sweep of saltmarsh, an eagle on a dead tree, an egret as still and white as candle drippings, gannets – all stark with a queer dimension from this elevation. South and west were the sparse drifts of drowned meadows and encroaching sea, the old excavator rearing from the water, Stillwater flattened as if by giant wave, and the broken thread of the marsh walk still trying to stitch the island together.

  Alejandra came to my side. She heaved the window up and a sweet light breeze hit us, shivering our hair. It was like looking out at the end of civilisation and being there, standing within its last remnant and knowing the strange wonder of it and knowing it was not my world any longer.