He tested the sawteeth with his thumb. “There were six men trapped down there. Three came out alive—my father among them—and three were carried out dead. Another fellow—I can’t remember his name—he should have been with them, but he wasn’t. That morning he’d woken up and decided that he wouldn’t go down in the mine that day. And he never went down again.”
“Who could blame him?” asked Hannah.
“It’s not the point,” said Murray. “He came to believe that he
was
down there, that seven men went down to the mine. He believed that the explosion left him trapped and dying. He could see it, you understand; he could see himself buried in rubble, and he could hear himself screaming for help. And this is what he decided.” Murray pulled the file through his fingers and wiped off a silvery sludge. He moved the chain along, and started filing again. “Salvador, that was his name. He was a huge man. He decided that he had begged God not to let him die, to give him another chance if he made himself a better man. And he came to believe that God had answered the prayer, and when he woke up that morning and didn’t go to work it was because time had been set back to keep him from dying.”
Hannah didn’t speak for a moment, and then she laughed with a nervous giggle. “Good heavens,” she said.
“Well,” said Murray. “My father said that Salvador was a lazy sod who didn’t go to work two days out of every month at any rate. He said, and I remember this very clearly”—Murray held up the file like a wand—“he said, ‘Och, he wasna the only one beggin’ for mercy then, but time didna go backwards for us.’ ”
Squid dug her toes in the grass. “Did your dad go back to work?” she asked.
“For a while,” said Murray. “Don’t do that, Squid; you’ll make holes.”
She rolled lazily onto her back. “So, what does this have to do with Alastair?”
“Och, don’t you see?” he said. “What a person thinks of things isn’t worth a tinker’s dam. Surely there’s no fathoming the ways of the world, so why bother trying? It’s living that matters. It’s life that’s important.”
He put down the file and pushed away the saw. He stood up and said, “I think I’ll tell that story to Alastair. Where has he gone, do you think?”
“To the beach,” said Squid. “He just sits by the water.”
Murray started off. “Wait,” said Hannah. “Did Salvador become a better man?”
“Och, he was a pain in the neck after that. He was nutty as a fruitcake.”
September 20
. Dad came down to the beach and told me a
story. I didn’t see much point to it. But I felt sorry for him, the
way that he’s worried about me, and I went with him back to
the house.
Squid remembers how Murray glowed as he came up the boardwalk with Alastair. She remembers being so glad to see her brother that she laughed and shouted out, “Well, look who’s alive.”
He came trudging behind Murray, his hair even wilder than usual.
“We thought you were dead,” cried Squid. “We were scared to go look.”
Hannah shot her an awful stare that stunned her into silence.
Alastair stared at them, his face all drawn and ghastly. “I’m sorry if I worried you,” he said. “I felt like being alone.”
Squid turned from face to face. “Isn’t anyone going to ask him what he’s been doing?”
“I’m sure if Alastair wants to tell us that, he’ll do so in his own good time,” said Hannah primly. Then Murray clapped his hands and shouted, “Right! Let’s break into teams for a badminton game.”
They played all afternoon, the men against the girls. Alastair stumbled about, swatting at the air, and they laughed and laughed together.
Then winter settled in, and it was much like all the winters before. They worked and they played, and Murray lectured on animals, but Alastair was never quite the same. They would catch him sometimes just staring at the sea, watching the waves, standing alone on a rock as the tide rose around him.
Squid turns through the pages.
December 3
. Mom and Dad look at me in funny ways,
watching me all the time. They look at me with that sort of
squint they use at birthdays, when a balloon is blown so big it’s
just about to pop.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just want to crawl
into a burrow, like an auklet or an otter, and stay there and
never come out.
chapter twelve
IN MIDAFTERNOON, HANNAH SETS A LUNCH on the lawn. Sockeye salmon, spread in thick swaths on the toast, is nearly the color of raspberries. On half the slices, it’s speckled with relish, tiny chunks of green and yellow mixed the way that Squid would do it, in her childhood. In those days Squid called it puke. “Let’s have puke sandwiches,” she would say, much to Murray’s disgust.
Hannah stands, looking down, pleased with the colors on Murray’s perfect grass, her bright yellow plates crowded with carrots and green peppers and wedges—like smiles— of red tomato. It’s the sort of thing Alastair would have noticed, and commented on, sometimes pecking a kiss on her cheek. “Looks great, Mom,” he would tell her.
But Murray, of course, doesn’t notice. He comes with Tatiana toddling along at his heels. He keeps looking back. “There’s a good girl. Och, you’re a wee little walker.” They sit together, and Murray pulls one plate toward him.
“Where’s Squid?” asks Hannah.
“She’s coming,” he says. “She told me so—shouting through the door of the small house. She wouldn’t let me in.”
“Maybe she’s changing.”
“Let’s hope so,” says Murray, only half to himself. He takes a carrot from the plate and offers it to Tatiana. She shakes her head, pulling away. She does the same with the peppers, the same with the toast. “You have to eat,” he tells her. “You want to grow up big and strong, you have to eat, little Tat.”
He does funny things with the food, things he hasn’t done since Squid was two years old. He turns the carrots into airplanes, zooming them high, puttering with his lips the sound of propellers. Jets would be too advanced for Murray. “Open the hangar,” he says.
Tatiana’s eyes follow the carrots, crossing comically as they whiz past her nose. But she doesn’t eat. She only watches the carrots, and gazes at Murray.
She has taken to him in such a powerful way that Hannah feels frightened. Someone has to be hurt in the end, and if it isn’t Murray it will be this odd little girl, as fragile as a soap bubble. Hannah turns away, feeling lonely there beside them.
But suddenly, Tatiana laughs. Murray has carrot sticks stuffed in his nostrils, a coil of green pepper coming out from his mouth like a snake’s tongue. He’s holding tomato slices over his eyebrows, and underneath he looks so happy, so young, so much like a boy in his bush of bright hair.
Hannah almost wishes that Squid would stay on the island, that she would abandon her “really neat guy” and settle on Lizzie again. She wants to ask Murray what he thinks; the words are right in her mouth:
Oh, Murray,
wouldn’t it be nice if she stayed?
But she won’t let them out, and she feels wicked for that. She feels old and bitter, ugly inside.
Squid has put on a dress that bares her shoulders and arms, and most of her legs. She announces herself with a shout, then comes over the grass like a nymph from a mist. Her feet, without shoes, seem to walk on only the tips of the stems, and her dress floats all around her like rippling steam.
It seems impossible that she was once seven years old, coming home all covered in burrs. Somehow, inside her, is the child who played at soldiers with skunk cabbage heads for grenades, who crawled into otter dens to see what was there, and stood on her head like a barnacle. How had they made her this way? How, on a rock in the middle of nowhere, had they taught her to be a lady?
Her arms swing wide, her head tosses and sways. But ten yards away she starts to run, and there’s the girl again. She skips over the grass, laughing with delight. She sees the plates and says, “Oh, boy. Puke for lunch. I haven’t had puke in years.”
“Och,” says Murray.
She folds herself onto the grass. She takes two slices of toast.
“Tat won’t eat,” says Murray.
“No wonder.” Squid holds her palm under her mouth, catching the globs of sockeye and relish that ooze from the sides of the bread. “You haven’t cut her toast into fingers.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” says Hannah. “A child that age.”
But Murray says, “So that’s the trick, is it?” And he lifts his hip from the grass to take out his knife. He opens the blade and patiently slices the toast into strips.
At last the child eats, finger after finger. And Murray methodically cuts up the carrots and cuts up the peppers. Tatiana hums to herself, rocking on the grass.
The ravens come, one then two, and half a dozen. They flutter down on wings that whistle, then stand nearby, black and shiny, waiting there like butlers. They cock their heads and utter warbly croaks through open beaks, and Hannah tosses toast toward them.
“They don’t often come as close as this anymore,” says Murray. He turns his head away, covering his mouth with a hand, picking at his big teeth with a fingernail.
“Alastair would have them feeding from his hand,” says Hannah. And then she stops, seeing the look on her daughter’s face.
Murray doesn’t notice; he’s staring at the sea. “I think the whale’s out there,” he says.
They all turn to look, out past the tower, off to the south. They watch and wait, and then a spout appears, a little jet of fog. And a black shape rises from the water, bulges up and sinks again.
The sun is not as bright as it was an hour ago. High, hazy clouds are moving in from the west. The sea is a brilliant blue, rolling with a gentle swell. And the whale’s nearly a mile offshore, huffing breaths over that flat, heaving plain. They see his back, and once his flukes. He’s swimming toward the island.
Even Tatiana stands to watch him. A hand on Murray’s shoulder, she stretches up to see.
“We should row out there,” says Murray.
“Yes,” says Squid. She straightens out her gold-tanned legs.
“Wait,” says Hannah. “We’ve got the food. The dishes.” She’s still nervous at the thought of being too close to whales in a small and aging boat. She wishes that Murray would go, and Tatiana, that Squid would stay to talk things out, to finish what they’ve started. But already the dishes are being gathered and Squid is on her feet.
Tatiana seems to have sensed adventure, and her sweet little face is bright with pleasure.
The boat has sat so long at the edge of the forest that it’s filled with old, dead leaves and pinkish crab shells brought there by the otters. Murray tips it onto its side and hammers on the bottom to knock away debris. He drags it down to the water and they climb into their favorite places, Squid—with Tat—in front, Hannah in the little seat that faces Murray.
Even now his arm muscles ripple and bulge as he rows, his calves swell with the motion. He pulls on the oars with a steady, thumping rhythm, driving the boat across the lagoon, out through the gap and past the mooring buoy. The blades of the oars make whirlpools in the water, a trail of them like footprints.
Through the glass at her feet, Hannah sees a forest of kelp drop to a blue darkness. An orange jellyfish rolls by, tendrils stirred by the oars. Years ago, Murray would have stopped here. “The jellyfish,” he would have said. “A mindless simpleton with no sense of direction. He hardly knows up from down.”
But now he keeps rowing. His face takes on a reddish brightness. His cheeks puff out, and he glances over his shoulder to see how far he has to go.
Hannah stares at the glass. She doesn’t want to look at Almost Nothing Atoll and keeps her head down until she feels the boat lift on a swell, and knows they’ve gone past the tower. She consoles herself with a thought: It won’t be a long trip. They’ve got the weathers to do at half past three.
From the bow comes Squid’s shout. “She blows!”
“Where-away?” says Murray, sweat on his forehead.
How easily they’ve slipped back through the years.
“Straight ahead, Dad.”
Murray keeps rowing. The oars thud and creak as the boat rises sluggishly up, then wallows back down.
“A bit to the left,” says Squid. “Oh! She blows!”
Tatiana wriggles around, trying to stand up. “Sit still!” says Squid. Then, “Flukes up! She’s sounding.”
It takes a moment for the noise to come across the water: the slap of a tail; the rush of water. Murray stops rowing. He pulls the oars from the rowlocks and lays them on the seats. It could be half an hour before the whale rises again.
“Whale,” says Tat, in that odd little voice.
“Hush.” Squid touches her arm.
“Whale,” says Tat, insistent.
And the boat vibrates.
There’s a sound coming up through the wood and the frames, a creak like door hinges. Then another, as though someone has tossed sand at the planking. Squid drops her hand into the water. Hannah swallows her fear; they’ve done this before, she remembers.
“I can feel it,” says Squid. “I can feel it!” And again Hannah hears the sound of tossing sand.
So the whale has found them. Its sonar washes over the boat. Somewhere below this empty sea, a thing fifty feet long is turning toward them.
The sound loudens and quickens. In their sockets, the oarlocks vibrate. And then, close alongside, the whale comes sliding from the sea. A mound of brownish skin, bumps and warts. It rises up in silence, slow and majestic. The crack of a mouth, the blowholes on a sculptured base. They open, and the breath comes out, warm and fetid, mist rising in a cloud, raining down. The sound is a hollow clap. And the whale arches, higher than their heads, arches as the water pours off, gliding forward and down, its hump of a fin showing before it sinks again under the swells.
The wave rocks the boat.
“Holy shit,” says Squid. Hannah sees Murray wince.
The sound fades. Way off by the island, the whale spouts again. But nobody moves; nobody can.
Tatiana turns her bright, squinted eyes right toward Hannah. Her grin puffs up her cheeks like a squirrel’s. She claps her hands together, then slams them to her chest. And suddenly she squeals.
It’s a hooting, mournful sound—a wonderful sound. And it comes back to her through the thin bottom of Murray’s boat, this caroling of bubbles and bells, this magical singing of whales.
Hannah stares at the glass floor of a boat that’s more than a decade old. An eye: a huge, bulging eye. It’s what she expects to see on the other side, an eye full of the blues and greens of the oceans, a pupil deep as an abyss.
And now it’s what she
wants
to see. She wants to see it pass below the boat, fifty feet of it rolling from back to belly, its graceful fins flapping like wings, a trail of bubbles floating up to pop against the glass.
But she sees only water.
They sit for a long time. The clouds slowly thicken, paling the sun. Then Murray, without a word, jams the oars into place. The blades sweep around in long, lazy arcs. And he rows the boat home with tears on his cheeks.
There hasn’t been a humpback near the island since the autumn that Alastair died. Murray and Hannah and Squid rowed out to see them; Squid shouted, “She blows!” And the songs of the whales tickled the boat. Alastair wasn’t there; he was off by himself in the kayak.
There were two whales and they swam close together, so close their flippers must have touched. They came to the surface together, the sound of their breaths making only one clap. For Hannah, the whales made her think of Alastair and Squid, the way they used to be but no longer were.
The humpbacks stayed much longer than usual. They arrived, that year, in the summer, moved on for a while, and returned. Whenever he saw them, Alastair would take his flute and his notebook and paddle off in the kayak.
Often she saw him, either wedged in that long narrow boat or sprawled on the rocks of Almost Nothing Atoll. Not once in that time did she try to go after him. But Murray did. And Alastair climbed into the kayak and— pretending not to see—went off chasing the whales.
But one afternoon he didn’t go after them. Hannah was in the kitchen when he stopped at the big house instead. Murray was putting new putty around the huge front window. Hannah heard them talking.
“Dad?” said Alastair. “Do you think whales have a language?”
There was a tap as Murray put his putty knife onto the sill. The porch shook as he crossed it; she imagined that they sat on the steps.
“Language is very complex,” Murray said. “It implies words, and structure. I’m sure whales communicate, but I doubt you’d call it a language.”
Alastair said, “I think that it is.”
“Oh?” said Murray.
“I’ve heard them. Even without the hydrophone. The kayak, it’s like a sound chamber. I’ve heard them talk to each other.”
Murray grunted. “You’ve heard them make sounds to each other,” he said.
“No, it’s more than that.” There was an anguish in Alastair’s voice. “Dad, I’d like to study it.”
“Good,” said Murray. “We’ll order some books. Just give me some titles and—”
“Not from books, Dad.” He was frustrated now. “I’d need a spectrograph, hydrophones. A sound editor.”
“We can get those things.”
“I’d want to be where the whales are.”
“Oh,” said Murray. “Oh, I see.”
“I’ll let you off here,” says Murray. Already he’s nudging the boat up to the base of the concrete steps. “No sense in you walking clear over the island.”
Squid laughs. “Too hard to row?” she asks.
“Well, there is that,” he says. “But, och, if you like—”
“No,” says Hannah. “This is fine.” He’s sweating now, but too proud to say he’s had enough. She reaches out for the step, clutching at seaweed and kelp. Murray pushes with the oars, holding the boat in place, and she clambers out. Without her weight, the boat tips forward.
“Hey!” says Squid.
Hannah holds the transom in place. “Come on, Tatiana,” she says. “We’re going to go up the stairs.”
But Tatiana won’t move. When Squid picks her up by the waist, she clings to the bow, kicking her feet.
“Stop that!” says Squid. “You’re making a scene.”
“She’s rocking the boat, right enough,” says Murray. He steadies it with sweeps of the oars as Squid wrestles behind him with Tatiana. “Och, just leave the wee thing; she’s no bother to me.”
“Fine!” says Squid. “You
stay
here,” she tells Tat, instantly mad. She clambers past Murray, stepping over the oars. In her hurry she uses his head for a handhold, scrunching it sideways. She doesn’t look back but goes straight up the stairs, glowering at Hannah as she passes.