The Darkhouse
Copyright © 2016 Barbara Radecki
This edition copyright © 2016 Dancing Cat Books,
an imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1.800.893.5777.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Radecki, Barbara, author
The darkhouse / Barbara Radecki.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77086-478-8 (paperback). — ISBN 978-1-77086-483-2 (html)
1. Title.
PS8635.A3365D37 2016 JC813’.6 C2016-904406-8
C2016-904407-6
Cover art: Stefanie Ayoub
Interior text design: Tannice Goddard, bookstopress.com
Printed and bound in Canada.
Manufactured by Friesens in Altona, Manitoba, Canada in September, 2016.
This book is printed on 100% post-consumer waste recycled paper.
Dancing Cat Books
An imprint of Cormorant Books Inc.
10 St. Mary Street, Suite 615, Toronto, Ontario, M4Y 1P9
www.dancingcatbooks.com
www.cormorantbooks.com
To my lighthouses
Philippe, Stefanie, Michele
Even in the day, the lighthouse light pierces the sky. It finds me at my bedroom window, then flings itself over the ocean. Like it’s saying, “Over there, that’s the way off the island.”
The island is the only place I’ve ever known. It has a proper name, but everyone just calls it the island, the way you say The Ocean, The World, The Universe. My father hid me here when I was a baby because my mother is crazy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Seagulls in the sky.
He hurt you yesterday. Aidie comes up behind me. She cuddles the stuffed mouse she always carries.
“No, he didn’t.”
Yes. She points at my wrist. It still hurts, doesn’t it?
I touch my wrist, smoothing the skin that circles the bones. “Nothing happened.” I hide my hand behind my back. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Aidie taps the nose of her stuffed mouse to my cheek like it’s giving me a kiss. It’s her favorite toy from when I was little. A ripped-up old thing. A real thing.
The ache of wanting what I can’t have throbs like blood.
I bundle up against the cold spring wind and climb on my bike.
My father, as always when he’s home, is preoccupied in his lab in the backyard. For the first time I notice how small and rundown and ugly the lab is. How it’s really just a shed like most people have in their backyards, wood so worn it doesn’t have paint left on it, gouges everywhere like a giant wildcat came by and used it as a scratching post to sharpen its nails.
Jonah calls his science “experimental evolution” and his latest experiment the “critical attachment theory.” For ten years, he’s been working with voles that he collected from around the island. Breeding solitary creatures to pair bond, to rely completely on each other, even to retrieve food as a pair. Ten years of me watching him disappear into his lab to breed and nurture and modify the behavior of tiny rodents. Me modifying too — little girl, older girl, teenager, six, eleven, sixteen. I was never that interesting to him.
I don’t give last looks at the house as I pedal away, but feel it at my back, perched in the clearing. A crow on a branch.
The lightkeeper’s house has been here for over two hundred years. Built and rebuilt a dozen times for the men who watched over the sea. Two stories, shingled sides, windows mostly shuttered behind someone else’s curtains. It can only be reached by a long road from town that runs through a wood so thick the tangled branches press against it like a cage.
Just before Keele’s Landing, the road emerges from the wood and opens up onto the Roberts’ fields and the whole island spreads out like a map on a table. West Island is the populated side, although people say it’s a small population compared to most places: just over a hundred people. East Island is the wild side, nothing on it except Jonah and me, the house we live in, and the lighthouse. When I push my bike down the slope, East Island disappears so smoothly under my wheels it’s like the ground is being pulled away.
The island is isolated from the rest of the world, accessible only by ferry and only during the warm months when there’s no ice on the strait. It’s May now, which means the ferry has started to run again, which means we’re only a month or two from the tourists coming.
Jonah doesn’t like me talking to the tourists. He says they’ll corrupt my way of thinking. I used to talk to them when he wasn’t looking or when he was taking the ferry back and forth. But no one warned me that one day I’d hold myself back. That a loneliness would grow around me so powerful it would change who I am. Wanting to be like them, to be like someone, like anyone, and knowing I never will be.
Last summer, a tourist found me sitting on the rocks, sketching in a notepad — a nonsense game I play with myself where I take random words and weave them into drawings. She wasn’t much older than me, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and was here with her family. I hid my work from her, but she wasn’t looking at me. She’d picked up small flat stones and was trying to skip them across the water.
I imagined what it would be like to be her friend. Both of us teasing each other and laughing like I’d seen her doing with her little brother in front of Peg’s Diner. I imagined going to a real school with her. Hanging out.
“It’s so lonely here,” she said after a while.
I flinched, but she didn’t notice.
“Only old people,” she said. I’d never thought of it before. She was right — everyone on the island is old, except me and Jonah. Retired fishers, farmers, crafters. Any young people — their children — moved away long ago, before I got here. The few shops still left, like the people, are also fading away.
“Pretty soon they’ll all be dead,” she said. One after the other, her stones skidded on the surface and sank. “What’re you going to do? Stay here all alone?” She looked at me, but I couldn’t answer.
My life like a katydid: one moment a leaf like any other, the next a predatory insect.
I arrive at Peg’s Diner. It faces the pier where the MV Founder’s Spirit is docked. Jonah will arrive soon to take it out. He captains the ferry from the beginning of May until the end of October, four runs a day, one each way in the morning and one each way in the afternoon.
In front of the diner, Peg bangs a doormat against the stoop. Dust spins around her and makes her look like a fairy in a cloud. So delicate and tiny, Peg is the one person on the island I do worry will die.
When she sees me, she drops the mat to wave. I wave back and roll past her to leave my bike near the FoodMart where later I’ll pick up groceries for dinner. The FoodMart used to be the island’s general store — “a real bustling place,” they tell me — but now it’s a dull supply depot. A meeting place of goods brought in from the mainland, clean and new during the summer months, then gathering dust over the winter until, one by one, they get bought and taken to our homes. You can make a whole story in your head about the chosen ones, the ones left behind.
I’ve spent almost every day of my life in Peg’s Diner, Peg giving me lessons according to Jonah’s schedule. Because I’m the only child on the island, there isn’t a school. There used to be a schoolhouse that used to be a church, but when the last of the island kids grew up and left, they turned it into a dance hall. No one went to that, either, so now it’s boarded up.
Because Jonah is gone so much of each day on the ferry runs, or too busy with his science during the winter months, he asked Peg to teach me. She was required to keep a very strict schedule and teach only courses with factual answers. Grammar 9:00–10:00 a.m., Math 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m., Geography 1:00–2:00 p.m.
I’m not allowed to read fiction, not allowed to watch tv. Jonah wants my mind diligent and sharp, not dulled by the troubles of imaginary people. He might be alarmed to find so many stories rooted and growing in my head.
I loved learning with Peg. She has an amazing memory and always turned plain facts into adventures and fairy tales. But now she says that, unless I’m interested in medicine, she doesn’t have any more to offer me. I wish I were interested in medicine. Or in any of Jonah’s hundred books on Darwin or evolution or animal behavior.
Instead, Peg sneaks me musty copies of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Far from the Madding Crowd, Moby Dick, that I read and re-read. Mostly I stare into the sky, up twisting trees, through tumbling fields of hay, out the diner window, across the ocean, and dream of some other life, the one I might’ve had if things had been different, the one I might have if I were an emperor, an archeologist, a ghost. I love the island and everyone on it, but that doesn’t stop me wondering what else is out there. Jonah is right: imagination is distraction.
Peg takes my hand. “C’mon, love, let’s have a nice cup of tea.” All island problems are solved with a nice cup of tea.
The diner was built a long time ago, during the “busy years.” Light shines through the wide windows, even on an overcast day, and reflects off chrome trim and bright turquoise vinyl. When Peg pulls me inside, everyone smiles and waves.
Doris, by the coffeemaker, touches up her lipstick in the back of a spoon. “You look like you could use a nice cup of tea, sweetheart.” She blows me a red-rimmed kiss.
Randy tips his cap at me from the grill and keeps scrubbing it for the lunch rush that will come after the truckers arrive from the mainland on the morning ferry and finish their deliveries.
John Woolit waves from one booth, Mr. and Mrs. Roberts from another. They’re waiting for the mail to come, for the latest edition newspaper. It’s been a long winter without paper news.
Tourists always ask why we don’t have computers, Internet, cell service. The islanders answer that our landlines work fine, and if those go down, Mr. O’Reardon has a satellite phone for emergencies. There isn’t a house without a shortwave radio. Besides, the telecommunications companies don’t consider us worth the expense of their technology. And we say we wouldn’t use it anyway.
I can’t miss what I never had.
Jonah’s van appears on the dock and he parks it and heads to the Spirit. There isn’t a single vehicle waiting to cross to the mainland this morning. Doris says that the older the islanders get, the less they want to go anywhere. As for me, I’m not allowed to go. Never have been. It’s too dangerous when you have a crazy mother on the loose.
A moment later, Hesperos, Jonah’s chief mate, ambles up and climbs onto the boat. Even though he’s a small man, under five feet, he has the deepest voice of anyone I know. Not a true islander, Hesp spends the winter months on the mainland. I guess he’s Jonah’s best friend because they spend so much time together on the bridge. I imagine them sharing deep talk as the ferry plows across the ocean, or laughing together at some ridiculous joke, or toasting each other for a job well done. Although there’s no sign of that at the end of each workday when they arrive back and go their separate ways.
“We no longer need each other to survive,” Jonah says about people. “The tribal bonds have been broken. If we’re not diligent, this will be the last genetic marker in human evolution. It means we will die out.” That’s why he’s so fixated on his vole experiment. To prevent us from dying out.
Year after year, he sends his hypothesis to scientific journals. All he wants is to get published. Getting published means he’s a real scientist. Respectable. Right. Except the journals keep rejecting him. He doesn’t tell me this, but I’ve seen the letters singe and curl to ash when he burns them in the sink.
I plunk myself into an empty booth by the front window and watch the Spirit chug out of the pier and into the sea. Waves crest and froth off the hull. Like it, I start to sail into the distance. Dreaming of other places, other lives. Floating up and away like the burst head of a dandelion.
By the time the Spirit returns, I’ve moved outside to the lower pier. The sun is out and has warmed the day enough to warrant a lazy stretch by the water. I stare into the milky sky. Nothing in it of any significance. How much nothingness can a mind take before it turns into red island rock?
I hardly pay attention as Jonah eases the Spirit back home, lulled by its gentle thud against the pier bumpers. The ferry grinds to a stop, and soon after I hear the metal clang of Hesperos coming down the stairs from the bridge. He lowers the ramp that connects the boat to the dock. I count the rumble of four delivery trucks and three cars — fresh supplies from the mainland and a few old friends coming to lend a hand to our lobster catchers.
I don’t hear Jonah leaving the bridge. He usually goes back to the house between runs to eat lunch so he can check on his voles and scribble in his journals. I usually stay in Keele’s Landing. I prefer Randy’s hamburgers or homemade split pea soups or grilled cheeses over our cans of pork and beans or SpaghettiOs.
The Spirit pings and purrs into silence. A decent lullaby for an afternoon nap. I blink my eyes closed, half-wondering if the cold air will make me sick like Peg always warns.
But then a different sound alerts me. Like a live wire dropped to my chest, it spins an electrical charge through my whole body.
Jonah says not to believe in premonitions or hunches or omens. Doris says, “Always trust your instincts.” Jonah says there’s only one instinct: the instinct to survive.
I sit up to understand it better. It’s the echo of footsteps walking the Spirit from stern to stem. Not the usual booted clomp of the men I know. The rhythm is lighter, less steady, as if the walker isn’t sure where he wants to go.
It can’t be a tourist coming to visit. Tourists never visit the island so early in the season when it’s still so cold. And they don’t come on foot. The harbor on the mainland is said to be far from any town, so people always arrive by car.
Superstition makes me crouch on the ladder connecting the lower pier to ground level. I sneak a peek over the edge, and a shaft of sunlight blinds me. It leaves the impression of a shadowed figure drifting off the boat and onto the road. A long coat skims its legs and flares in a gust of wind. The figure stops to cast a look about the whole of Keele’s Landing.
It’s a woman. By herself. A woman who doesn’t know the island. Who might not know anyone here. Who seems to be looking for something.
It used to be that every time a woman came to the island by herself, Aidie would insist she was my mother. I tried to be skeptical when Aidie played her game, but if a woman arrived who had a certain look and was a certain age, the suggestion didn’t seem impossible. Maybe my mother had gotten better. Doris talks about how her husband was an alcoholic but kicked the bottle right before he died. And Peg has mentioned how some of her island patients had to overcome “depression” or “hormonal imbalance.”
Maybe my mother missed me. Maybe she’d searched the whole country, stopping at nothing, until she found m
e.
When I was eight, nine, ten, I secretly hoped that she’d show up one day. But there comes a time, as Peg says, when we must accept that the sea is the sea and always will be.
The woman walks toward the FoodMart and slowly scans the sur-roundings. With the light silhouetting her, I can’t see her face or true coloring. After a few minutes, she walks in the other direction, passing the ferry.
Hesperos closes and locks the ramp. He approaches the woman and asks her a question, which I can’t hear. She shakes her head, and Hesp smiles and salutes her in a comic way, then ambles off to have lunch with the fishermen.
It’s always been Hesp’s job to deal with the passengers, and Jonah likes it that way, so there is a possibility — if Jonah was distracted or busy — that he never saw the woman boarding or disembarking. Jonah’s van still sits by the pier, and I wonder what’s delaying him.
The woman walks down the road that leads either to my house or to the rest of the island. I very quickly scramble down the short ladder and back along the lower pier to the escarpment below the FoodMart. When I turn to look again, the woman has arrived at the edge of town. She stops at the split in the road.
One road leads to the rest of the island. The other goes right to my house.
She doesn’t move for a long time, but stares into the distance.
Jonah always says that with experiments there are results you expect and results you don’t expect. In order to eliminate the extraneous, you have to investigate all the data, even the most unlikely. You have to believe it’s possible that the impossible has just happened.
As I watch her linger, an urge overwhelms me. I want to follow her. To run up and introduce myself. Something I never do. Not anymore. Not since I was ten. But then she turns and heads to Peg’s. She opens the door and steps inside. I run as fast as I can toward the diner and have to stop myself from barreling through the door. I pause, take a breath, and walk through it like a regular, unremarkable person.