“Listen, we’re gonna get through this,” Peter said, grim around the mouth.
Rosemay’s head drooped slowly, as if she hadn’t the strength to hold it up any longer.
“He came, and took her away. Like the old days of lordship, you see. A privilege of those who ruled.”
Echo didn’t see much of Kincairn Island that night when they arrived. The seven-mile ferry trip left her so sick and sore from heaving she couldn’t fully straighten up once they docked at the fishermen’s quay. There were few lights in the clutter of a town occupying a small cove. A steady wind stung her ears on the short ride cross island by Land Rover to the house facing two thousand miles of open ocean.
A sleeping pill knocked her out for eight hours.
At first light the cry of gulls and waves booming on the rocks a hundred feet below her bedroom windows woke her up. She had a hot shower in the recently updated bathroom. Some eyedrops got the red out. By then she thought she could handle a cup of black coffee. Outside her room she found a flight of stairs to the first-floor rear of the house. Kitchen noises below. John Ransome was an early riser; she heard him talking to someone.
The kitchen also had gone through a recent renovation. But the architect hadn’t disturbed quaint and mostly charming old features: a hearth for baking in one corner, hand-hewn oak beams overhead.
“Good morning,” John Ransome said. “Looks as if you got your color back.”
“I think I owe you an apology,” Echo mumbled.
“For getting sick on the ferry? Everybody does until they get used to it. The fumes from that old diesel banger are partly to blame. How about breakfast? Ciera just baked a batch of her cinnamon scones.”
“Coffeecoffeecoffee,” Echo pleaded.
Ciera was a woman in her sixties, olive-skinned, with tragic dark eyes. She brought the coffeepot to the table.
“Good morning,” Echo said to her. “I’m Echo.”
The woman cocked her head as if she hadn’t heard correctly.
“It’s just a—a nickname. I was baptized Mary Catherine.”
“I like Mary Catherine,” Ransome said. He was smiling. “So why don’t we call you by your baptismal name while you’re here.”
“Okay,” Echo said, with a glance at him. It wasn’t a big thing; nicknames were childish anyway. But she felt a slight psychic disturbance. As if, in banishing “Echo,” he had begun to invent the person whom he really wanted to paint, and to live within a relationship that he firmly controlled.
Foolish, Echo thought. I know who I am.
The rocky path to the Kincairn lighthouse, where Ransome had his studio, took them three hundred yards through scruffy stunted hemlock and blueberry barrens, across lichen-gilded rock, thin earth, and frost-heaves. At intervals the path wended close to the high-tide line. Too close for Echo’s peace of mind, although she tried not to appear nervous. Kincairn Island, about eight and a half crooked miles by three miles wide with a high, forested spine, was only a granitic pebble confronting a mighty ocean, blue on this October morning beneath a lightly cobwebbed sky.
“The light is fantastic,” she said to Ransome.
“That’s why I’m here, in preference to Cascais or Corfu for instance. Clear winter mornings are the best.
The town is on the leeside of the island facing Penobscot. There’s a Catholic church, by the way, that the diocese will probably close soon, or Unitarian for those who prefer Religion Lite.”
“Who else lives here?” Echo asked, blinking salt spume from her eyelashes. The tide was in, wind from the southeast.
“About a hundred forty permanent residents, average age fifty-five. The economy is lobsters. Period. At the turn of the century Kincairn was a lively summer community, but most of the old saltbox cottages are gone; the rest belong to locals.”
“And you own the island?”
“The original deed was recorded in 1794. You doing okay, Mary Catherine?”
The ledge they were crossing was only about fifty feet above the breakers and a snaggle of rocks close to shore.
“I get a little nervous . . . this close.”
“Don’t you swim?”
“Only in pools. The ocean—I nearly drowned on a beach in New Jersey. I was five. The waves that morning were nothing, a couple of feet high. I had my back to the water, playing with my pail and shovel.
All of a sudden there was a huge wave, out of nowhere, that caught everybody by surprise.”
“Rogue wave. We get them too. My parents were sailing off the light, just beyond that nav buoy out there, when a big one capsized their boat. They never had a chance.”
“Good Lord. When was this?”
“Twenty-eight years ago.” The path took a turn uphill, and the lighthouse loomed in front of them. “I’m a strong swimmer. Very cold water doesn’t seem to get to me as quickly as other people. When I was nineteen—and heavily under the influence of Lord Byron—I swam the Hellespont. So I’ve often wondered—” He paused and looked out to sea. “If I had been with my mother and father that day, could I have saved them?”
“You must miss them very much.”
“No. I don’t.”
After a few moments he looked around at her, as if her gaze had made him uncomfortable.
“Is that a terrible thing to say?”
“I guess I— I don’t understand it. Did you love your parents?”
“No. Is that unusual?”
“I don’t think so. Were they abusive?”
“Physically? No. They just left me alone most of the time, as if I didn’t exist. I don’t know if there’s a name for that kind of pain.”
His smile, a little dreary, suggested that they leave the topic alone. They walked on to the lighthouse, brilliantly white on the highest point of the headland. Ransome had remodeled it, to considerable outrage from purists, he’d said, installing a modern, airport-style beacon atop what was now his studio.
“I saw what it cost you,” Ransome said, “to leave your mother—your life. I’d like to think that it wasn’t only for the money.”
“Least of all. I’m a painter. I came to learn from you.”
He nodded, gratified, and touched her shoulder.
“Well. Shall we have a look at where we’ll both be working, Mary Catherine?”
Peter didn’t waste a lot of time taking on a load at the reception following his sister Siobhan’s wedding to the software salesman from Valley Stream. Too much drinking gave him the mopes, followed by a tendency to take almost anything said to him the wrong way.
“What’ve you heard from Echo?” a first cousin named Fitz said to him.
Peter looked at Fitz and had another swallow of his Irish in lieu of making conversation. Fitz glanced at Peter’s cousin Rob Flaherty, who said, “Six tickets to the Rangers tonight, Petey. Good seats.”
Fitz said, “That’s two for Rob and his girl, two for me and Colleen, and I was thinkin’— you remember Mary Mahan, don’t you?”
Peter said ungraciously, “I don’t feel like goin’ to the Rangers, and you don’t need to be fixin’ me up, Fitz.” His bow tie was hanging limp and there was fire on his forehead and cheekbones. A drop of sweat fell unnoticed from his chin into his glass. He raised the glass again.
Rob Flaherty said with a grin, ‘You remind me of a lovesick camel, Petey. What you’re needin’ is a mercy hump.”
Peter grimaced hostilely. “What I need is another drink.”
“Mary’s had a thing for you, how long?”
“She’s my mom’s godchild, asshole.”
Fitz let the belligerence slide. “Well, you know. It don’t exactly count as a mortal sin.”
“Leave it, Fitz.”
“Sure. Okay. But that is exceptional pussy you’re givin’ your back to. I can testify.”
Rob said impatiently, “Ah, let him sit here and get squashed. Echo must’ve tied a knot in his dick before she left town with her artist friend.”
Peter was out of his chair with a cocked fist before Fitz could step between them. Rob had reach on Peter and jabbed him just hard enough in the mouth to send him backwards, falling against another of the tables ringing the dance floor, scarcely disturbing a mute couple like goggle-eyed blowfish, drunk on senescence.
Pete’s mom saw the altercation taking shape and left her partner on the dance floor. She took Peter gently by an elbow, smiled at the other boys, telling them with a motion of her elegantly coiffed head to move along. She dumped ice out of a glass onto a napkin.
“Dance with your old ma, Peter.”
Somewhat shamefaced, he allowed himself to be led to the dance floor, holding ice knotted in the napkin to his lower lip.
“It’s twice already this month I see you too much in drink.”
“It’s a wedding, Ma.” He put the napkin in a pocket of his tux jacket.
“I’m thinking it’s time you get a grip on yourself,” Kate said as they danced to a slow beat. “You don’t hear from Echo?”