The Darkhouse Read online

  I say, sincere, normal, “So, did you bring your wife home to meet us?”

  Scotty contemplates the ocean again. After a swallow, he says, “We split up.”

  “Oh,” I say. Barely a word, mostly a sound.

  “It’s all right. It wasn’t working.” He shrugs. “Can’t say I didn’t give it my all.”

  Then he smiles. Light from inside him shines on me like a lighthouse, and everything brooding in me floods out. My body, my head, everything illuminates.

  I say, not smiling but feeling it swell, “I’m sorry, Scotty.”

  “It’s all right, kiddo.” He gives another laugh. “It’s all good.”

  “Well, that’s good.” I give a laugh too, and it comes out like his. He checks the ground and bobs his head. Like him, I bob my head.

  He aims his thumb behind him. “I gotta help Dad with the lobster traps.” He bobs his head again, then says, “Hey, you wanna come? Yours are always the luckiest traps of the season.” He says it with a wink, like we both know it’s a worn-out line meant for a kid.

  And I want to go with him. But there’s a woman on her way to the lighthouse, and I still don’t know who she is or what she wants. I say, “I have to go home for a bit. Rain check?”

  He leans back on his heels and gives me his best smile, which is any of them. “For sure. Cool. See you later then.”

  “Cool. See you later,” I say, my own smile heating me up. Scotty wheels around and walks down the road the other way, and I watch him, hoping he’ll glance back one more time.

  Jonah says in science a coincidence is called “a law of the universe.” Without the coincidence of everything being in exactly the right place in the right way, the universe would be dead.

  I pedal up the road as fast as I can. Even though I should still have the advantage, the woman is nowhere in sight.

  A picture of a mother I imagined long ago comes to me unbidden. Her eyes lighting up when she sees me. Her pulling my head in to lean against her neck. A mother who is always there.

  Marlie Luellen could be just another tourist. Someone who doesn’t belong here. Someone irrelevant to me. Or she could be here for some terrible reason, some wretched purpose hidden under softness and jackrabbit eyes. Or it could be something else. Something she’s uncertain about, something that scares her. She looked scared. And that’s something I can understand.

  I urge my bike on, not worried the way I should be, but hopeful the way I want to be. The hill pushes at my feet. The faster I try to go, the slower I move.

  No one is at the house. Wind swishes through the dead grasses and scratches bare branches against the windows. I see it the way Marlie might see it: an old forgotten place, windows like black holes, peeling paint, no garden. Nowhere a person would want to live.

  I drop my bike at the front stoop and notice my greasy hands and smeared jeans. I check with the house, weighing if I should use up more minutes to change and get clean.

  A tapping sound comes from my bedroom window, and I look up. Aidie is tapping the glass, her finger like a bird or insect, fluttering to get out. Her face barely clears the ledge, but I can see she’s tied up with excitement.

  Already I feel better.

  In the beginning when my reflection was the only child I knew, Aidie looked exactly like me. She dressed like me and grew like I did. When I realized she wasn’t real and never would be, she didn’t disappear, but only stopped growing with me. I expected that one day she wouldn’t be there anymore when I looked for her, but that’s not what happened. Instead she became more vivid: her hair grew darker and is sometimes braided, one tooth developed a tiny chip, and a dot of a mole showed up under her right eye.

  I tried to forget her as I got older, but I never could. I tried to banish her, but she wouldn’t go. No matter what I do or how I think, she never goes away. Sometimes I wonder if I’m as crazy as my mother.

  I decide to make myself presentable and so I run inside. Upstairs in the bathroom, I wash my hands and face. Dirt trickles off me into the basin and slithers down the drain.

  You have to find her. Aidie’s voice echoes from my bedroom. The tourist, I mean.

  “I know that’s who you mean, Aidie.” I scrub the wetness off with a towel and rearrange my scattered hair. “I’m going to look for her right now.”

  I run across the hall and into my room, pulling off my dirty clothes. Aidie sits cross-legged on her pillow in my closet, cuddling her little stuffed mouse. I reach over her to grab my favorite pink hooded sweatshirt and white jeans.

  Hesperos does all my shopping for me on the mainland — Jonah gives him money, and Hesp goes to the mall in Moncton and stocks me up for the year. Doris says that because Hesp has so many girlfriends to help him, he has very good taste. She also says that he sure knows how to stretch a dollar. The white jeans are too precious to wear any old day, so I usually save them for special occasions like someone’s birthday.

  She came for you, Aidie says.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. It’s never what we think.”

  She could be someone’s mother.

  “Her name is Marlie Luellen. And she has much darker hair than me, and darker eyes.” I raise an eyebrow at Aidie. “So I think you’re stretching it a bit.”

  Not everyone looks like their mothers.

  I’ve flipped through photo albums in people’s houses, I’ve seen their pictures, and Aidie is right — not every kid looks like their parents. It’s just that I’ve pictured my mother for so long, her blue eyes and fine brown hair have become real to me. They can’t just change on a whim.

  Jonah once said she was very beautiful.

  Jonah doesn’t talk about my mother because the memories make him sick and angry. But there are some things he must tell, mostly because the islanders made him tell it. So my story about my mother is strung together with small, rare knots of facts and long garlands of fantasy.

  The facts are these: when I was very young, just a few months old, my mother kicked Jonah out and told him to go away. Broken-hearted and thinking he had no choice, he left my mother and me behind. But he had it in his mind that if he found a wonderful, quiet place, he’d convince her to join him, and we’d begin a new life and she’d be happy again. He found the island and befriended the islanders and got the lightkeeper’s job. Everyone said that because Jonah kept so much to himself in those early days, only coming to Keele’s Landing to stock up on provisions, they didn’t know he’d left behind a troubled marriage. But eight months later, in late June after my first birthday, just when the weather was getting really warm, he became “despondent” is the word Peg uses. He came into town every day for a week, but he wouldn’t talk to anyone. Then one day he took his van, drove onto the ferry that Henry Jasper was still captaining, and went across to the mainland. Didn’t tell anyone where he was going or why.

  A week later, he came back with me. Everyone was so smitten with me, so excited, they hardly got the details of what had happened. But Jonah told them bits and pieces. How when my mother had kicked him out the year before, he hadn’t known how sick she was. That all through the winter, stuck on the island, he’d had a bad feeling. That it was killing him to know I was alone and vulnerable with her. That he’d made a terrible mistake and wasn’t sure how to fix it. So in June he went back to convince my mother to come to the island, and she went into the most terrible rage he’d ever seen. She confessed to awful crimes, broke meaningful things, and scratched and clawed at him until he thought he was going to die. Peg said he was so shaken he wouldn’t even let her dress his wounds. He said my mother had threatened to kill him, threatened to kill me, and then she ran away. Ran away before my father could get her “the help she needed.” He was scared for our lives and left the town they’d lived in to bring me here. To safety. To quiet. To goodness.

  She is beautiful and bright, Aidie sings. She has terrible rages. She ran away. No one knows what she might do.

  The words always repeat in my mind, like a song no one wa
nts to sing. Beautiful, terrible, away, beautiful, terrible, away.

  I crouch in front of Aidie. “What if she wants to hurt me?”

  What if she’s better now and wants to protect you?

  “By keeping away?”

  Yes. Until she knows it’s safe.

  “You’re a shameless dreamer.”

  What if she’s ready to take you off the island and bring you to the world?

  “No, it’s impossible. Besides, her name is wrong.”

  Aidie takes my hands. Maybe she lied about her name.

  “Why would she lie?”

  To keep you safe until she knows what to do.

  “No, Aidie. Remember what Jonah says.”

  That scientists have to watch they don’t bend their data to fit their hypothesis.

  “Exactly. We don’t know anything about her.”

  Aidie smiles. We will. She closes her eyes and her cheeks bud pink. She’s so beautiful.

  “Okay, enough,” I say, readying myself to go.

  Aidie reaches up and smoothes the hair around my face. I want you to look as beautiful as her.

  “We both know that’s impossible.”

  I can try.

  “Yes.” The silky feel of her hands soothes me. I stand up and do a quick twirl. “How do I look?”

  Like someone’s daughter.

  I giggle like a much younger person. Like having a mother should turn me into a child.

  Aidie sticks out her hand. I have something for her. Inside the curl of her fingers is her stuffed mouse.

  We always promised to tell the truth. “That’s pretty ugly, Aidie.”

  Aidie pushes the mouse toward me. It doesn’t matter.

  I don’t want to, but I take the mouse and stuff it in my pocket. “You’re very sweet, Aidie.”

  Aidie lays her head on the pillow and smiles at me. Her smile gives me the courage to carry on.

  Marlie Luellen’s eyes are closed and she lies on the ground under the lighthouse at the very edge of the cliff. If she rolls over, she’ll go right over the edge. The lighthouse looks like a sentry keeping guard, or a bystander waiting for the worst to happen.

  I run to her and crouch on the ground and touch her cheek. Her face is so peaceful, her body so relaxed, she could be taking a nap. But she’s out cold.

  As carefully as I can, I wrestle my hands under her arms. She moans, and her head lolls. I tighten my grip and yank on her arms, but her body weighs more than I expect. The very real possibility of dropping her, her body plummeting to the sea and splintering on the jagged rocks, is too terrible to imagine and gives me strength I don’t have.

  I manage to drag her several feet away from the edge, from the lighthouse. Red dust eddies around us and makes me want to cough.

  I settle her in a safe spot and cradle her head in my lap. The sun disappears behind some clouds, and I feel the cold for the first time. It’s very quiet. The wind has died, the birds have stopped calling, and the waves at the bottom of the cliffs sound very distant.

  Strands of hair stick to Marlie’s eyelashes and inside her mouth. I stroke it off her face and into order. It’s as thick and soft as a blanket.

  What feels like hours later — because it’s so quiet and cold — Marlie flutters her eyes open. They don’t see me, but search the haze of clouds and stop on the smothered sun. After a few moments, her lips part and she sucks in some air.

  Words are in her mouth: I can see her tongue curving to form them. “I wanted to see the light,” she finally says. “Just once.” Her voice is faint, and I nod to encourage her. “You never loved me.”

  “I do.” It comes out before I can think.

  “I didn’t see it. I never see it.” Water gathers on her bottom eyelids. “I’m so stupid.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I wanted the baby.”

  The word shocks me. I say, as loudly as I dare, “The baby?”

  Marlie’s eyes shift over, and she seems to properly see me for the first time. Her pupils contract into tiny spots, each like a period at the end of a sentence. When she speaks again, her voice is changed. “Where am I?”

  I smile at her like a mother. “With me. Gemma.”

  “Gemma?”

  “I think you fainted.”

  “Fainted?” She closes her eyes, and a tear drops off her lashes. She says, “I guess I missed.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  She nods. “From the diner.”

  “Yes, from the diner.”

  “Gemma.” She looks directly at me and reaches her hand up. Very slowly, she strokes the whole length of my hair. Goosebumps pop up all over my skin. She says, “I’m sorry.”

  Everything inside me goes still. “It’s okay.”

  Her eyebrows rut together and she closes her eyes.

  I long to lay my head beside hers and also close my eyes. “We should go back to the house,” I say, trying to remember what Peg would prescribe for a faint. “You should rest where it’s warm.”

  Marlie’s fear rises and wanes and rises again, and I can scent it like an animal. “No,” she says. “I really need to go back.”

  “In case it makes a difference,” I offer, “my father isn’t home.”

  Marlie winces.

  “You need to get warm,” I say, desperate to keep her.

  After a long moment, she says, “Okay.”

  I drop her purse on the living room couch — it’s as heavy as a baby — and head straight for the kitchen. Marlie follows slowly behind me. My white jeans and pink sweatshirt are ruined — dusted with red from crouching on the ground by the lighthouse.

  I run water from the tap into a glass. “Faints are usually from bad blood flow or dehydration,” I say, imitating Peg. “You should drink some water.” I hand her the glass.

  “Thank you.” She gulps the water down quickly. The soft glug-ging of her pharynx defeats me. It’s such an intimate sound, like I’m seeing a very private side of her and I should feel humble and unworthy.

  “You have a nice house,” she says.

  “Do I?” I wish I spent more time cleaning this morning.

  “Yes. It’s very cozy.”

  I repeat the word in my head: cozy. Almost another language. “Thank you.”

  She wipes her mouth. “Are you alone?”

  I wonder if she thinks I’m too young to be alone. There’s never been a stranger to the island who’s guessed my real age, always putting me younger by enough years to make me and everyone laugh. If someone was looking for a girl almost sixteen, they might not see her.

  “Jonah,” I say, “my dad, he runs the ferry between the island and the mainland. When you were on it, you might have seen him?” I wait for her reaction, but she doesn’t have one.

  She doesn’t take her eyes off me. “And your mom?”

  The question nooses my neck. If, like Aidie says, she’s protecting me by pretending she doesn’t know me, how long will it be before she reveals herself? And if she’s here to do wrong, if everything she’s doing now is a show, how long will it be before she attacks?

  “I don’t have a mom.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “She’s not dead.” The thought alarms me. The only possibility I never considered. “She ran off when I was a baby.”

  “Oh.” She tries to hold my gaze, but I look away. I guess it’s better to have a crazy mom than a dead one.

  I check the time. The afternoon ferry would have left already. I say, “You missed the last ferry of the day.”

  She doesn’t respond, but stares into the empty bottom of her glass. I take it from her and put it into the sink. I lean against the counter to steady myself. With my back to her, I say, “I don’t know what you want to do, but visitors always stay at Peg’s B&B.”

  “Oh,” she says, and then she says it again, “Oh, oh,” and her eyes roll back and her knees bend in. I run to catch her, and she leans on me as I lead her to the couch in the living room. Her body is cool and soft, bu
t very heavy. “Sorry, Gemma,” she says again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You need to rest.” I guide her down to the couch and pick up her feet one by one and pull off her soft suede boots and ease her legs onto the couch so she can lie down, then I cover her with the wool blanket.

  She watches me closely and says, “Thank you.” She shivers and burrows under the blanket. Her eyes blink closed.

  “I’ll make you some tea,” I say, going back to the kitchen. “That’ll warm you.”

  But when I come back with the tea, Marlie is asleep.

  I remember Aidie’s old mouse and pull it from my pocket. I lay it on the blanket close to Marlie’s head where I can feel the warm certainty of her breath.

  I flick on the light in the back room. Stacks of cardboard boxes line the walls. I’m not supposed to look into the boxes, but over the years, I’ve opened each one. They’re filled with ordinary things, items we’ve both grown out of, like textbooks Jonah never reads or toys and clothes I’m too old for.

  Every now and then, I’ll pull something out of a box and turn it over, hoping that maybe it holds some news of my mother. Nothing is quite as lonely as squeezing an old wooden spoon and expecting words to fly out that will answer your questions.

  In the furthest corner is a box I find curious. Experiment LLB is written in black marker on one corner. The only thing in it is a baby blanket, bright green and printed with cartoon frogs, with a clear plastic soother clipped to one edge. I always wonder why the blanket isn’t with all my other baby things but in this one box, on its own. I’ve never heard Jonah speak of Experiment LLB, and never seen it written on any of his many journals. Not that this means anything, but it’s a question.

  For the millionth time, I open the box and hold the green frog blanket to my chest. Even though I’m too old to take comfort, it feels lovely to rub the soft cotton on my chin.

  After a long while, I repack it and put the box exactly where it’s supposed to be. Next I do what I came here to do: check the old fold-out cot. Despite its faded mattress, it might be comfortable enough for Marlie.