May: Daughters of the Sea #2 (6 page)

Lucius Holmes shook his head.
Not exactly,
he thought, but it made a strange kind of sense. There was just one flaw in the peculiar statement — Hepzibah had used the wrong word. It was not grief that had to be fed, it was anger. There was a dreadful logic that drove this woman. She had spent her youth serving invalids—her mother and her grandmother.
And when they died it became her turn. She did not seek love, she did not seek a companion but a caregiver. And this logic could be passed down from generation to generation, just like a hereditary disease. There was truly someone to save here and it was not Hepzibah Plum. It was May. He did not want May Plum to become the next victim.

“Folks were taken by surprise when she had May.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, she was old for one thing, and they’d been married quite a while, and her being frail as she is with all her complications. It was a pretty bad winter and all, so they hadn’t gotten into town. Anyhow, come spring they show up with little May. She was born, they said, at a time when there was no way a doctor could go out there to help Zeeba, but she seemed to do fine.”

Lucius Holmes fell silent and looked as Egg Rock receded. He could still see the young girl’s figure on
the promontory, and even from this distance he could feel her yearning. She could have been a figurehead stretching out from the bow of a sailing vessel, cutting the wind, at one with the rhythms of the sea, a dancer on the cresting waves.

T
HE DAYS HAD BRIGHTENED
and the seas had calmed. There was at last a true hint of the coming spring in the air, but in the month or so since the disaster on The Bones, May’s life had become as monotonous and as dreary as the darkest days of winter. Her mother had let her go to school only one day. Her excuse was that until May’s father had recovered enough to climb the stairs they could not risk her going ashore. Edgar had protested vigorously to no avail. It was true that he was still quite lame, but he argued that this was no reason why May shouldn’t be allowed to go to school.

They were having one such quarrel now. “But, Mother,” May said in response to her father’s
pleas and Zeeba’s refusal. “Even Doctor Holmes said a girl needs to get out.”

“Yes, and he told me that I needed fresh air and look where we live! The man’s a durned fool. And that medicine he sent out on the mail boat ain’t worth the bottle it came in. We don’t need another disaster here like the ship that fetched up on The Bones. We’ll lose the lighthouse—and then where will we go? We’re poor. Your father drinks.”

“He has not had a drop since that night, Mother, and you know it!” May screamed. She had never shouted like this at Zeeba. It felt as if she had unleashed a great gale from deep inside her that had been brewing for years.

Hepzibah looked at her daughter with shock, and then quickly her face darkened. Anger rose in her like a coiled viper. “You horrid girl! Where did you come from? Where did he get you?” She turned to Gar. “You—you—couldn’t ever forget Polly, could you?”

“What are you talking about?” May looked at her mother and then at her father.

“Don’t, Zeeba! Don’t!” her father blurted out as he collapsed into his chair.

“Don’t what? What is she saying, Pa?” She felt something crack inside her. “Where did I come from?” She turned her head again toward Zeeba. “You’re my mother!”

Hepzibah’s face seemed to relax, and a smirk crawled across it. “You want to tell her, Gar?” Her voice was cold, but it was clear she was enjoying May’s confusion.

“Tell me what?” May shouted.

“You’re not mine.” Hepzibah said quietly, looking down at a medical journal she had been reading.

“What do you mean? I—I—don’t understand.”

“I did not give birth to you.”

“What?” May’s chin trembled, and her mouth seemed to have trouble forming the single word.

“Do you honestly think that this poor failing body of mine could ever give birth to a child, let alone one as — as” — Hepzibah struggled to say the words — “as healthy as you, as strong, as robust as you!” She spoke this last part as if it were the vilest imprecation.

“Wh-where did I come from?” May looked at her father. “Who’s Polly?” She was nearly staggering
as she stood. It felt as if the ground beneath her were shaking. If these two were not her parents, who were? She was caught in a firestorm of confusing emotions—rejection and yet an odd sense of relief. She could accept Hepzibah not loving her. She probably never had. But she couldn’t bear the thought of losing Gar.

Her father stood up, and although he was still lame, it was the most erect she had seen him since before the shipwreck. He walked directly over to Hepzibah and spoke. “It is not just me. I am not the only one who could not forget Polly. You couldn’t either, Zeeba. You!”

“Down the coast, he always told me,” Hepzibah sneered. “Found you down the coast.”

“I don’t understand this. Not at all. Someone please explain where I come from?”

Gar limped over to May and put his arm around her. “A woman, a young woman, not Polly. It couldn’t be. I had been engaged to Polly but she died ten years before you were ever born. But she” — he nodded at Zeeba—“never got over the fact she wasn’t first choice.”

“That ain’t true, Gar, and you know it!”

“It is true, Hepzibah. You’re so eaten up with jealousy over a dead woman you can’t do simple figuring. You know when I walked in here with May it was 1883. You know Polly died in 1873. How the devil could she be Polly’s?” May gasped.

“The devil—exactly!” Hepzibah’s eyes gleamed, and she turned her head slowly toward May. “I always knew there was something unnatural about that girl.”

“What?” May’s voice was tight with alarm. “You think …” But it was as if the words evaporated.

“You’ll never know what I think … think of you or him.” Zeeba jerked her head toward Gar but kept her eyes clamped on May. Gar stepped to the side, as if to protect her from Zeeba’s glare.

“You listen to me, May. A woman down toward Crockett Cove, past Winter Harbor, was your mother. She died giving birth. There weren’t no one to care for you. I offered to take you back here. I thought it would please Zeeba.” He paused and cupped her chin lightly in his hand. “And it has pleased me deeply.”

“B-b-but,” May stammered. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words that screamed in her mind.
You’re not my real father.
She felt a dark hole opening up in her. It was as if she were missing her core. She swayed slightly and put a hand on the back of a chair to steady herself. “What happened to the father?” May asked.

“Yes, what happened?” Hepzibah said in a flat voice.

Now Gar turned and looked at Hepzibah. “Your mother has had this notion that I am your father. But it ain’t so, May. And I am sorry. For truly I would love to be your real father. I love you as if I were.”

May moved away from the chair and then back to where her father stood. Taking her father’s face in both her hands she said, “No, Pa, you love me better than my so-called real father, for he left. You love me like a true father.”

There were teardrops trembling in the rims of his eyes. In the glistening wetness she saw the sphere that held her own reflection—her own quivering face. Was Gar no part of her? Did she belong to no one? May felt as if she were sliding off a cliff and was
tumbling in a free fall through that dark nothingness of her missing center. She shut her eyes tight for several seconds as if anticipating the impact.

In those seemingly endless seconds the image of the small door came to her. She had not thought of that tiny closet in the watch room but once or twice since the morning after the shipwreck. She had no idea where the key was and had more or less given up on trying to find it. But now she was certain that the secret of her birth was hidden in the closet that Gar kept so carefully locked all these years.

She vowed to find that key, no matter what. Her father could still barely make it up the stairs. She spent more time than ever alone in the watch room. She might never have such an opportunity again. For the first time she thought of her father’s infirmity as a blessing.

M
AY WAS HALFWAY UP THE STAIRS
to the watch room to search for the key to the closet when she heard a sharp rap on the door. “Who’s that?” Hepzibah said, half rising from her rocker.

“I’ll get it,” she heard her father say. Then seconds later, Gar called up the winding stairs, “Someone here to see you, May.” “Me?”

“Yep. That fellow Rudd from the night of the storm.”

Now of all times?

“All right. Tell him I’ll be out in a minute, Pa.”

She quickly slipped into her bedroom and went to the mirror set on her bureau. She was a mess. The
incredible revelations minutes before had left their mark on her. She repinned her hair. It didn’t help much. Her skin was all blotchy, but the blotches were in the wrong places. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes were rimmed with dim lavender circles! She pinched her cheeks to get some color in them, took a deep breath, and tried to look composed as she walked to the front door of the lighthouse.

Rudd Sawyer leaned against the jamb, filling the frame. He radiated an unassailable confidence, almost a sense of ownership. If someone didn’t know better, he might have thought Rudd was the proprietor of the lighthouse and even the entire island.

May hadn’t realized quite how tall he was or how broad his shoulders were. With the warmer weather he wasn’t wearing a jacket. His collar was open and his sleeves were rolled up. His forearms had curls of hair slightly lighter than the hair on his head. His fingers tapped the doorjamb casually as if to suggest he’d been waiting a while, maybe too long.

“Hello, May.”

“Rudd!”

“None other.” A wide smile cut his face. “Does there have to be a shipwreck to see you again?”

“Oh—oh—oh, no, of course not.” She was dying to get up to the watch room. As handsome as he was, Rudd constituted a distraction more than anything else.

“You gonna invite me in?”

“Uh … well, no. But … we could take a walk.” She could not let this young man come into the lighthouse, not with her mother glaring away. And certainly not after what had just transpired. In the scant minutes between Hepzibah’s revelation and the time Rudd had knocked on the door, May’s whole world had changed. There had hardly been a moment to recover. She might not even
want
to recover if it meant trying to make amends with Zeeba.
Zeeba!
In her mind she had just called her mother Zeeba. She had done this without even thinking.

She now heard Zeeba calling out from her bedroom. “Who’s that at the door, May? Who’s there?” May did not reply but merely turned to Rudd
and said, “Come along, we can walk down to the beach.”

A few minutes later they were standing on a small crescent of sand looking out to sea. “They don’t look fierce at all, do they, in this calm?” Rudd nodded toward The Bones.

“It’s nearly high tide. In another quarter of an hour you won’t be able to see them,” she said. It seemed amazing to her that she was speaking to him almost normally. She had the strange sensation that she had stepped out of her own body and was walking along beside it on the beach, watching herself listen, talk, and nod or shake her head at the right times.

“Did the new chimney come in yet?” he asked.

“Not supposed to come in until tomorrow to the chandlery.”

“Well, then, if you pick it up you can come to the dance.” He flashed her a quick smile.

“What dance?”

“Dance at the Odd Fellows Hall. They used to call it the end of the line gale dance.”

“What?” May tipped her head and looked at him questioningly. He was really asking her to a dance? She suddenly realized that her mouth was hanging open. She must look utterly stupid. But he wasn’t looking at her mouth.

“Do you know how green your eyes are?”

“No! I don’t make a habit of looking at myself in a mirror all day long.” She ducked her chin down. What kind of question was that?

“Well, they are.”

“What’s an end of the line gale dance?” May asked without meeting Rudd’s eyes.

“Line gales—you know what they are.”

“Yes, they come in March, around the time of the equinox.”

“Equinox—my, my.” He raised one eyebrow a bit as if he were impressed, but she was sure she caught a glint of something close to mockery in his eyes.

“What do you mean, ‘my, my’? There’s nothing ‘my, my’ about the equinox. It’s when the sun crosses
the equator and the length of days equals the nights,” she said matter-of-factly.

“You must have a lot of book learning.”

“I read, but I also know how much kerosene we burn in the lantern room. Less and less after the spring equinox.” She paused, then added, “That’s not book learning. That’s just living.”

He looked at her and laughed. “Well, it’s the end of March, almost April, and those line gales are usually finished by then. So they have a celebration. How about doing a bit of living?”

May smiled to herself.
“A bit of living.”
It sounded good. A bit of living as opposed to a bit of slow asphyxiation by Hepzibah.
Am I starting to hate her?
May wondered. She looked at Rudd and grinned broadly. “Oh, I’m all for that. All for living.” She blushed. Did she seem too eager? She wanted to tease him a bit. Didn’t girls sometimes do that?

“But maybe they should delay the dance,” May said, and kicked a stone with the toe of her shoe.

“Why?”

“Just to be on the safe side,” she replied.

“Just to be on the safe side? What are you talking about?” Rudd laughed.

“You don’t want to jinx it by having the dance too soon. Have it in May, when you know the line gales are over.” She wished she didn’t sound so serious. She wished she didn’t state facts so stolidly. But she had no gift for light, flirtatious conversation. This was what came from being sealed up in a lighthouse.