Free The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Iain Lawrence Page B

the bristles, flinging drops of paint. It smacked on the back of Alastair’s head and ricocheted onto the grass. And still he didn’t look up. He flinched when it hit him, then went on painting. There was a streak of white in his hair, a spray of white across the green of lawn.
    Squid turned and sprinted off. She ran across the grass, past the whirligigs, past Gomorrah, down through the forest on the humps of the boardwalk. And she slowed to a walk when the futility struck her; she could only run in a circle and get back where she’d started.
    It was true. She
was
a freak. They were all freaks, every one. But what difference would it make, so long as they stayed together? They
had
to stay together, but Alastair was desperate to be gone.

chapter five
    IN THE KITCHEN OF THE BIG HOUSE, HANNAH unpacks the boxes as Murray brings them in. She is fondling the fresh crisp lettuce, gloating over tomatoes. It’s been nearly a month since she held a banana, and she squeezes one gently. She holds it like a mustache below her nose to smell the smell of bananas.
    The back door opens again. Murray kicks off his shoes on the porch, then barges backward into the kitchen. He’s bent by the weight of a box, turning to set it on the table.
    “Go slowly,” says Hannah. He’s puffing. “Ask Squid to give you a hand.”
    “I can do it,” he says. “Nothing I haven’t done a thousand times before.”
    He puts down the box and he leans his weight on the table.
    “At least sit for a minute,” she says. “Have a cup of tea.”
    He shakes his head. “The wee one hasn’t eaten.”
    “There’s plenty here,” she says, but already Murray’s on
    There are steaks and pork chops, a roast of lamb. They’re wrapped in brown paper stained with blood. She lifts them out and stacks them on her arm. She takes them to the freezer, down a trail that’s worn in the white linoleum.
    At the bottom of the box she finds a tin that’s flat and heavy. Without a thought, just by habit, she takes a chair to push the tin to the back of the highest shelf, behind the oven cleaner and ammonia. Then, leaning across the gap, her hand braced on the cupboard door, it occurs to Hannah that she hasn’t done this in years, though once she did it every month. And she climbs down from the chair still holding the tin.
    When Murray comes in she’s clicking her fingernail against the narrow key soldered to its back.
    “This is the end of it,” says Murray. With his hip he pushes the door shut. He lets his box slide to the table. “Eggs in here. Mind you don’t break them.”
    “Murray?” she says. “What possessed you to buy oysters?”
    He stares at the tin, at the chair, at the cleaning cupboard with its door hanging open. “Oh,” he says. “I don’t know.”
    “I started to hide them,” she says. “I was thinking— Murray, you haven’t bought oysters in years.”
    They were Squid’s favorite food; she could go through a tin in a minute, picking the oysters out with her fingers, slurping the juice until it dribbled down her chin. Every Christmas there was a tin of oysters in her stocking.
    Then Murray, in his daily lectures on biology, chose mussels as his subject. They grew on the steep-sided shore to the south, in clusters on the reefs. He tore a big one free and said, “Gather round.” He always said “Gather round” to start it off. Squid was six or seven.
    Hannah, Squid, and Alastair sat on rocks as sharp as nails. “This is the byssus,” said Murray, spreading with his fingers the cottony threads that held the mussel to its rock. “It’s spun by a gland in the animal’s foot. He lashes himself in place, like Ulysses to his mast.”
    He turned the shell in his hand. It was a California mussel, nearly eight inches long. He pointed out the scars along the shell, like patches of white on its deep purple back. “This fellow,” he said, “has had some sort of an accident. He might have been whacked by a log.” The scars were deep,