fly here and bring their dollars and yens. Dollars and yens — that’s all that matters nowadays. Perhaps a Swiss franc or two. But the Swiss are not so easily amazed. Remember, they were the shrewd bastards could keep the Nazis from coming over the mountains and disrupting their quiet little lives.”
And so, Sylvie was certain, the whales would come back this year as every other. They would return for her because she cared for the island and she cared deeply for them. And now there would be no more men in her life, but there would be sea creatures and clear, sunny, squint-eyed mornings like this to last a person through her winter, snug in memories.
Chapter Four
Lonely without whales, Sylvie craved womantalk. Words to fill empty spaces in her life, chinks in the walls. Kit Lawson would do. It was a Saturday, schoolteacher’s day off, and Kit would be alone now that her dope-growing young man was gone off to rehab or jail. Sylvie hoped it wasn’t terrible punishment. He’d been a cheerful lad, seemed to care about the bees and the soil conditions. Understood rotting kelp and seaweed, was willing to learn all the tricks of gardening on an island like this. She hoped his motivation had not just been profit.
Kit lived in a large one-room house with a loft area for a bedroom. Once a fisherman’s house, it was a dream come true for her. “When I first set foot in here,” she told Sylvie,“this place reeked of authenticity. I asked Ned where the toilet was, and he asked if I needed to pee or do the other. I said I just had to pee, and he pointed to a little piece of one-inch black plastic pipe in the wall. I looked at it, then through the window, and saw it went outside and emptied into a little stream that grew ferns and cress. Ned had never encountered the problem of a woman having to take a pee in his old house, owned up to it, said it’d been a lonely several years. Then he built a first-rate outhouse. I had to tell him it had to be away from any watercourse. He said women were funny creatures, but he built it where I wanted it all the same. Built it like he was building a dory. Only certain materials, certain types of spruce wood he cut himself. Enough timber in it to withstand a gale. Guess he didn’t want me to come to harm if I was inside one day and a hurricane happened. Men are funny creatures.”
“Men are,” Sylvie said.“Men certainly are.”
“Sylvie?”
“Yes.” Sylvie had a dreamy look on her face. Talking about how funny men are as creatures.
“Sylvie, do you know there is something about this place.”
“The house?”
“No, not Ned’s house, although I think it is special too, but the island. Do you think there is something indefinable about this island. I felt it the first day I arrived.”
Sylvie worried through the pockets in her loose skirt looking for a handkerchief. “Oh, my dear. Something, yes. Not everyone can feel it, but you can, can you?”
“There’s doubt in your voice, like you think I’m teasing. It’s because I’m from away, right?”
“People from away don’t always understand. Lord, many people who grew up here don’t even understand.”
“But I do.”
“I believe that.”
“It’s not just the land,” Kit said.“It’s the sky, too. Everything is much clearer. Clearer up in the sky and space above this island, too. Last night I had my telescope focussed on the moon, on a place on the moon called the Bay of Rainbows.”
“You’re lying to an old woman. There’s no place on the moon called the Bay of Rainbows.”
“No lies. There is.” Kit picked up, of all things, a teacher’s pointing stick and went over to the wall where hung a big, round, blue saucer of a map. The moon. She pointed to a place and read it off: “Bay of Rainbows, just north of the Sea of Rains.”
Sylvie was hamstrung. Felt like a little girl in school again. “So there it is,” she said, as if the universe was a stranger place than she had ever thought, something like a fairy tale complete with astronomers sitting on mountaintops coming up with exotic names for places on the moon.
“Sylvie, I saw a bright light there as I was looking at the Bay of Rainbows. A flash.”
“Moonmen?”
“No, I think not. Another asteroid on impact.”
“That’s what all the craters are about, I suppose. A wounded old thing, the moon is, isn’t it?” She felt a kind of kinship there. All her men dying, belligerent asteroids battering the face of the moon in the night.
“Wounded indeed. Look at that sorry old girl.” Perfectly natural that the moon must be feminine. Not a man in the moon at all. Wounded old girl. A couple of million years old. Up there hanging over the earth. No atmosphere to help ward off chunks of rock gamming about in space.
“I’ve never felt closer to the moon than I do on this island. Back in Massachusetts, back when I taught in Boston, I sat on my rooftop and the moon kept me sane when I felt like I was going crazy.”
“Some people used to say the full moon made you crazy. Women especially, our blood all controlled by the movement of the moon, our periods and all that.”
“Oh, women are tidal, for sure. I’m certain of that. Back then in Boston, I always found myself looking at the big crater called the Sea of Crises — Mare Crisium. Everything in my life seemed in perpetual crisis. Men at my door in the night trying to bust through seven locks to steal my TV set. Children in my classroom, high as killer kites on crack cocaine. Air sick as the sea and all the while noise, noise, noise. I’d sit up there on a clear night in my lawn chair on the roof camped out on the Sea of Crises. Thought that was what life was all about.”
Sylvie felt slightly dizzy suddenly. The mention of children did it to her. Sylvie had never had any children. Not exactly the way she had planned it. Husbands were like children sometimes. But she knew it wasn’t the same. But there were plenty of other people’s children out there in the world. Without family, sometimes Sylvie felt totally and hopelessly alone. Not often. But sometimes. It was like she had moved to the moon, camped out in a lawn chair in the sea of whatever — Sea of Sylvie Alone. “What about the children?”
“The ones back in the city?”
“Yes. Did you try to help them?”
“Yes. I did.” Kit had suddenly lost her enthusiasm for the geography of earth’s satellite. “And almost died trying. Every time I got involved, it would be the parents or brothers or some guy selling the stuff who came at me and threatened me to stay clear. I tried and tried until I realized it was killing me. If I’d stayed I would have gone after one of them, the big dealers, would have gone after him with a can of gasoline in the night and burned him to hell.”
Sylvie wanted to ask if she was so dead set against men selling drugs to her students, how did she end up with a guy growing weed on this island. But she kept her thoughts to herself. Knew it was part of life’s complications. Nothing simple, clear cut, ever. The idea of children stoned out on something called crack cocaine filled her with a big pool of sadness in the very centre of her being, made her feel ancient.
“The island restored me,” Kit said.“The island children too. So polite. Call me ‘miss’ all the time. The one-room schoolhouse. Boys in big rubber boots. The
