The Painting Read online

  My Nan’s family were lighthouse keepers at that lighthouse for about a hundred years, and my great-granddad, Poppy Morrow, was the last keeper there. Mom used to stay there summers when she was growing up, and she loved it more than anywhere on earth. That’s what she told us, again and again, on those long rides home in the dark.

  Crooked Head Lighthouse is about two hours south of St. John’s. The lighthouse and the town were named for the huge twisted headland that looms over the bay. But in Newfoundland, crooked also means bad-tempered, and that’s how I see this place. Gloomy and cranky and out of sorts. Like me.

  I didn’t always hate it. Nan used to come along sometimes on my mother’s painting expeditions and take Annie and me to the lighthouse for picnics. No one had lived there since the light was automated a few years before, and Annie and I would run all over the house, exploring. There were still some sticks of furniture left behind, a few old dishes, some books. We would sit on an orange plaid car blanket, high above the water with our sandwiches, watching the whales jump and the gannets soar over the snappy whitecaps, and Nan would tell us stories about growing up at the lighthouse.

  Summer picnics at the lighthouse were one thing. Living there all year round was another thing altogether. I later found out that my mother had been working on moving there for more than a year. She was determined, and she wangled her way through several government departments until she finally got permission to rent the lighthouse keeper’s house at Crooked Head.

  Annie died in June. Mom and I moved into the lighthouse in September. I left everything familiar behind in St. John’s—our house, my school, my friends, Nan. And Annie.

  ANNIE

  THE MORE I SAW of the painting, the more I admired the artist—the brushwork and colors were brilliantly done. But I think it was the gloomy, haunting mood that got under my skin. I asked Mom if we could go to Newfoundland someday, but she got mad and said she never wanted to set foot in that godforsaken place again.

  I had to make do with looking at the painting every day, trying to imagine what it was like to live in that stormy, barren landscape. I did countless studies in my sketchbook. That must be why I dreamed about it. The painting got inside my head. Then I got inside the painting. It had all seemed so real.

  Nothing seemed real when I woke up the day after my mother’s accident. The house still had that strange, too-quiet feeling that made me feel as if the whole world was holding its breath. It was a big effort just to sit up, and I felt a tightness in my chest, like a weight was pressing on it. I slowly made my way down to the kitchen, feeling like I was moving through thick mud.

  Dad was sitting at the table drinking coffee and stirring a bowl of milk and corn flakes. It was all mushy, as if he’d been stirring it for a long time.

  He looked up at me.

  “There’s been no change,” he said.

  I sat down opposite my father, gazing at the sodden corn flakes in his bowl. They had an interesting texture—a lumpy orange swirled in white.

  “Annie,” said Dad sharply. I looked up. “You should eat.”

  I dragged myself to a standing position again and went to the counter to make some toast. When it popped out of the toaster, I put peanut butter and marmalade on it and sat down again. This was my favorite breakfast, but today it looked like something alien. I couldn’t imagine eating it.

  Dad poured me some juice. Then there was a commotion at the front door and Magda blew in.

  Magda used to be my nanny, but then when I started school, she became our housekeeper instead. She comes by our place in the afternoons, doing laundry and housework and making me supper when Mom and Dad aren’t home. She’s Irish and worked in a hotel in Dublin until she got sick of it and immigrated to Canada. She tells me stories about all the rich people who stayed in the hotel and the strange things they did.

  “Here I am,” she said, plopping down her purse on the counter and reaching for the apron hanging on the back of the door. “The streetcar took forever. Would you believe it, the driver got off at Queen and Leslie to go get himself a coffee and left us all sitting there like a bunch of silly sheep, and a line of cars piling up behind us beeping and carrying on. Shall I make some muffins now, Annie? How about peanut butter and chocolate chip?”

  She started hauling flour and baking soda and muffin tins out of cupboards.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I felt like everything was off-kilter. “How come you’re here in the morning, Magda?” I asked.

  “I asked her to come,” said Dad, pushing himself away from the table and standing up. “I don’t think you should go to school today, and I have to go and see your mother.”

  “Can I come?” I asked.

  He and Magda exchanged looks.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  They exchanged looks again. I didn’t like that. How bad was she? Covered in bandages?

  Blood? But they would have cleaned that up by now.

  “Maybe you can come in a day or two. Once she’s stabilized.”

  I had an image of Mom lying in a hospital bed, swinging through the air, back and forth, like a pendulum. Once it stopped, she would be stabilized. Then I could go.

  CLAIRE

  THE CROOKED HEAD LIGHTHOUSE stood alone on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, nearly completely surrounded by water. Its only connection to the shore was that two-mile strip of land with a rough road that was impassable when it froze over in the winter or flooded in the spring. When we moved in, the keeper’s house had been abandoned for a long time. Some of the windows were broken and the roof leaked.

  Mom hired a man from the village to come and help her replace the windows and patch the roof. He was a large man named Ed, with a mustache and a big, friendly smile. He had a wife and three small children at home, and he couldn’t understand what my mother was doing out there in that woebegone house with no man. He told her that at least once a week. My mother would laugh, but after he left she’d shake her head and say, “Newfoundland men are the most hidebound chauvinists in the world.” When I asked her what a chauvinist was, she said it was a man who thought men were better than women, and that no woman was complete without a husband.

  “Which is nonsense,” she said. “Ed and his pals don’t know what to think of a woman like me.”

  My mother liked to do things for herself. She got Ed to teach her how to frame up a window, shingle a roof and tape drywall. He brought in loads of firewood in his truck, and Mom taught me how to stack it in the porch. She made me haul heavy buckets of water from the well down the hill every day and pour it into the water barrel in the porch.

  In those early days, we had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. We used candles and kerosene lamps and there was a makeshift toilet (a wooden box with a toilet seat and a pail underneath) in a cold little closet off the hall and a smelly outhouse round the back. Yuck. That’s all I can say about that. Yuck.

  I missed St. John’s. My bedroom. My friends. The toilet.

  ANNIE

  MY DREAM OF THE lighthouse stayed with me all that strange, silent day. Magda bustled around in the kitchen, baking the muffins and a chocolate cake and tuna casserole for supper—all my favorite foods. She’d check on me every once in a while, offer me food, talk my ears off for a few minutes, and then leave me alone again. I left my door open so I could hear the reassuring sound of her rattling dishes and muttering to herself, but it was just a tiny ripple in the growing silence of the house.

  I went into my parents’ bedroom. I opened the closet, ran my hands over Mom’s skirts and jackets, her silky blouses. Looked at the neat row of shoes on the floor. Buried my head in her blue sweater, hanging on a hook on the door of her closet. It smelled like her.

  Dad phoned a couple of times and talked to Magda, then me. No change.

  And still the dream was there, hovering. The lighthouse. The moonlight on the ocean. Claire.

  After lunch I sat on the bed, staring at the painting. The artist had
signed her name in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting: Maisie King. Who was she? Why did Mom have her painting?

  I could almost hear the silence in the house, the walls pressing in around me. I had that same heavy feeling in my chest that I’d felt when I woke up. It was a hot day, and all the windows were open, but there wasn’t a breath of wind.

  Suddenly I couldn’t bear it anymore. I was halfway down the front steps when Magda caught up with me.

  “Where are you off to?” she called.

  “Library,” I threw over my shoulder, and fled.

  CLAIRE

  CROOKED HEAD IS haunted. I know it.

  We moved into the lighthouse in September, just in time for the fall storms. One tropical storm after another made its way north and hurled itself at Crooked Head Lighthouse. The wind howled and roared around the house, which shook and rattled as if it was going to pick up and fly away over the Atlantic Ocean, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.

  We had two daybeds in the kitchen, one against each wall, where we slept, warm and dry. I would lie awake for hours, listening to the wind. It never screeched that way in St. John’s. Sometimes it sounded like a human voice, rising and falling, shrieking, sobbing.

  I made the mistake of talking to Ed about the wind one day when he was fixing holes in the walls of the room upstairs that was going to be my bedroom. He told me about the Old Hollies—the ghosts of all the people who had died in shipwrecks along this stretch of coast, before the lighthouse was built.

  “You can still hear them screaming in the wind, begging for help,” he said, shaking his head. “A terrible thing, a shipwreck. All those lives lost.”

  That night I was awake longer than ever, shivering in my bed while the wind moaned. I was convinced that a horde of ship-wrecked ghosts was flying around the house, trying to get in. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that Annie was among them, calling my name, pleading with me to open the door. I woke up screaming her name.

  My mother was not impressed when she found out what Ed had been telling me.

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts, Claire,” she said. “Annie’s gone. The wind is just the wind and Ed is a superstitious Neanderthal.”

  Mom told him not to tell me any more ghost stories, but he just laughed and winked at me.

  It’s not just Ed. My very first week at school, Mary Tizzard and Joan Crocker cornered me at recess and told me that Crooked Head Lighthouse was haunted by Isaac Morrow, an old man with scraggly white hair and no teeth, my great-great-great-grandfather, who died out there years ago. They said he sat on people’s feet in the middle of the night. I tried not to look scared, but I don’t think it worked because after that they came up with ghost stories nearly every week about ghosts that lurked all along my lonely route home: in the little woods where the road dipped out of sight, along the stony beach, on Pebble Island out in the bay.

  From then on I walked the gauntlet of fear on the way to and from school. I kept my eyes peeled for phantom dogs running along the beach and skeletons clattering over the rocks by the causeway. I was continuously glancing over my shoulder, convinced that I was being followed by shadowy figures floating along the path behind me.

  It was all very well for my mother to say there was no such thing as ghosts, but if that were true, I’d never see Annie again. So I believed all the ghost stories people told me and just prayed that I wouldn’t encounter any ghosts.

  Except for Annie.

  ANNIE

  OUR LOCAL LIBRARY is one of my favorite places, and it’s just three blocks away from our house, so I go there a lot. It is about a hundred years old; it stands at the edge of a park and has a big table set in front of a soaring window that reaches up two stories and looks out onto the park.

  I went to the shelves where the art books were and combed through them quickly. I found one called Newfoundland Artists and carried it over to the table by the window.

  She was right there, in the index, under K. Pages 250 to 262. I flipped through the book, trying hard not to be distracted by the amazing paintings along the way. Ships, whales, endless seascapes, cliffs, jellybean-colored houses up a hill. Was this the cold and rainy Newfoundland Mom couldn’t wait to get away from?

  The very first painting under Maisie King was the one that hung on my bedroom wall. Road to Crooked Head Lighthouse was printed underneath it. On the opposite page was some text and a photograph of the artist. She had curly white hair clustered around her face, blue eyes, a big mouth and a straight nose.

  As I gazed at her, her eyes seemed to sparkle and her mouth to twitch, as if she was about to burst out laughing. I closed my eyes for a moment, then looked again. She hadn’t moved. I turned the page.

  The painting on the next page was of the lighthouse again, but from the other side, as if the artist was in a boat just off the rocks, looking up at it. The lighthouse towered overhead, with the keeper’s house behind it. Huge waves smashed against the rocks, and the sky roiled with dark-blue and black clouds. A jagged fork of lightning tore through the clouds to strike the glowing capsule of light at the top of the lighthouse.

  As I looked at the painting, I began to feel a little sick, as if I was out in those tossing waves, rolling up and down in the swell. I put both hands on the edge of the book to steady myself and looked up. The library was quiet: business as usual. Mrs. Silver, an old lady who lived down the street from us, was nodding over a book at the far end of the table. She looked half asleep. The park outside the windows was green, and a couple of mothers stood chatting on the path, their babies snoozing in their strollers. Everything was normal and peaceful.

  I looked back at the painting and the world tilted.

  I felt like I was falling and my stomach heaved and I could hear a roaring of wind and a crash of thunder, and then I pitched forward, smashing my knees on a rock. A cold splash of water struck my back and I scrambled up the rocks, the waves nipping at my heels, rain pouring out of the sky, thunder and lightning crashing all around me. Above me the lighthouse light blinked steadily on and off.

  Suddenly light and sound exploded together: a jagged spear of lightning hit the lighthouse, accompanied by a loud smack of thunder. Then, just as quickly, light and sound were sucked into darkness. The air crackled with electricity and I heard screaming in the wind. The light in the tower flashed on for a few seconds, illuminating the wet rocks and the dark, tumbling clouds, and then it blinked out. A few seconds later it burst into light again, then out, again and again. Like a slow heartbeat, sure and steady in the midst of all the chaos.

  CLAIRE

  THE DAY AFTER I had the dream that Annie came back, I walked home from school thinking about her, wondering if it really was her ghost or just a dream. Dark clouds were massing all along the southern horizon. There was going to be a storm.

  I was going to an empty house—Mom was visiting Marjory, an artist friend of hers, an hour’s drive away in Blackberry Bight, and I’d be on my own for supper. That was fine with me. I liked having the place to myself.

  I heated up a leftover hamburger and fried some potatoes, then settled to eat at the kitchen table with my latest ghost book (The Eternal Shadow by Philomena Faraday) propped up against the fruit bowl. Ever since Mary and Joan tried to scare the wits out of me, I’d been obsessed by the supernatural. I read all the ghost stories I could get my hands on.

  A loud crash from upstairs roused me and I looked around, startled. It was very dark outside. The wind had picked up to an intense level of wailing and screeching. I caught my breath. The Old Hollies. Ed told me they always came just before a big storm when some disaster was about to happen. I shivered.

  Then I told myself firmly in my mother’s voice that it was only the wind and ran upstairs to my room, where the crash had been. A gust of wind had knocked over the floor lamp beside my chair and broken it, and the curtains were streaming into the room, whipped by the furious wind. I slammed the window shut just as the rain came down, torrents of it, as if someone h
ad dumped a giant bucket over the house.

  I went room to room, closing windows. Then I returned to the kitchen. It was darker than ever. I tried the light switch by the door, but there was no power. I found a candlestick on the dresser and fumbled in a drawer for matches. Soon a pale, flickering light filled the room. I carried the candle over to the wall and held it up so I could see the face of the clock. Six o’clock. Mom wouldn’t be home for hours.

  Just as I was turning away from the clock, the room exploded in a crash of noise and white light. The house shook under my feet and the front door slammed open in a gust of wind. I dropped the candle.

  It fell right into the open wood box where we kept splits of wood and newspaper for starting the fire. The wind from the front door swept down through the hall into the kitchen and the paper went up in flames with a swoosh.

  The fire crackled and leaped high into the air. The noise of the storm thundered into the house through the open door, and I heard voices screaming for help. I stood rooted to the spot, with the heat of the fire on my face and the Old Hollies howling all around me.

  I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night. Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

  Alice, ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

  ANNIE

  THE BLINKING LIGHT lit my way for a few seconds and then plunged the night into darkness again. I tried to keep my balance and focus on where the rocks were as the light flashed on and off. I was completely soaked and I felt something warm and wet running down my shins: blood from where I’d bashed my knees. But I managed to scramble up the rocks on all fours and soon I came to a steep path. I half-ran, half-crawled up the slope and finally came out beside the lighthouse, gasping for breath.