NEWPORT WAKES ME with shafts of mellow sunlight that stream through the window and settle against my cheek. I lie perfectly still beneath the cocoon of soft woolen blankets, tucked tight around me so that I can barely move my toes. Keeping my eyes closed, I enjoy the warmth and the light. The smooth scents of pipe tobacco and fresh coffee drift beneath the door, mingling with the briny tang of the ocean that sticks to the walls. Louis Armstrong plays on the radio downstairs, the lively jazz a pleasant change to Mother’s warbling operatic arias. Outside, I hear people chatting. It makes me smile to hear the American accents I’ve only ever heard in the movies.
“America.”
I whisper the word to myself, enjoying the shape of it on my lips. Although I wish I’d come here in different circumstances, there’s something exhilarating about waking up on a different continent, far away from my mother’s sniping comments and obvious disappointment in everything I do. I can’t explain it, but I sense that coming here was about more than it being a convenient place to hide away. It was important. Necessary. Perhaps inevitable.
I prop myself up against the pillow, push back the blankets and stare at my stomach, unable to connect the biological fact that I am pregnant with the emotional void I feel when I allow myself to think about it. In darker moments I wish the little creature could somehow understand the difficulty it is causing and slip quietly away while I’m asleep. It has happened to plenty of women, so why not me? Mrs. O’Driscoll had said I would start to feel it move soon. “It’s like a distant flutter. Hardly perceptible at first, but you’ll know it when you feel it.” The thought repulses and terrifies me. I pull the bedcovers back up and push the thought from my mind.
Downstairs, Harriet hums along to the radio while the kettle sings on the stove. I hear the clatter of crockery and cutlery, heavy footsteps pressing against the boards on the stairs, then a terse knock before Harriet enters, pushing the door open with her behind.
“You awake?”
“I am now.” I pull myself up fully, my head muzzy with lack of sleep and the all-too-familiar dizziness that accompanies my mornings now.
“Fixed you some breakfast, as the Yanks say.” Harriet holds out a cluttered breakfast tray. “Coffee. Tea. Toast with butter, jam, and marmalade. Grits. Eggs—soft boiled, and hard. Wasn’t sure what you’d prefer.” She says all this with the emotion of an iron girder. No “Good morning. How did you sleep?” No reassuring smile as she plonks the tray onto the blankets, sending tea sloshing out of the spout. “You can eat it in bed, or I can leave it downstairs if you prefer to be more civilized.”
“Bed will be grand. Thank you.” Without her headscarf, I can properly see Harriet’s face. It is sun-kissed and etched with fine lines. She has strong cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. Not a complete ogre after all. “And thank you for the blankets.”
She passes my gratitude off with a shrug, deep brown eyes studying me. “Eat it all. You need your strength.” There’s something of a well-meaning scolding carried in her voice, reminiscent of my granny. “I’ll fetch you some clean clothes since yours haven’t arrived. Think I’ve some’ll fit you. Sure, they’ll have to do, either way.”
I dread to think what Harriet’s idea of clean clothes consists of but I don’t suppose I have much choice given the circumstances.
She closes the bedroom door with a clatter, thudding off along the landing until another door opens, closes, and all is silent.
My eyes settle on the unruly hotchpotch breakfast: generous slices of sourdough with crusts left on, black coffee in a chipped mug, a pot of strong amber tea. No elegance. No finesse. My mother would scoff and cast one of her most disparaging looks over it. This is food to devour, not to pick at like a nervous sparrow. Suddenly ravenous, I start on the toast, letting crumbs fall onto the bedcovers, not caring for table manners, or any sort of manners.
Harriet returns with a bundle of clothes, tossing them onto the foot of the bed. “You look like you’re about the same size.” There’s a moment, a beat, when something shifts in the atmosphere of the room, incomplete thoughts and unspoken words swimming around us. “Not as fancy as your own outfits, no doubt,” she adds, “but better than nothing.”
“I’m sure they’ll be grand. Thank you.”
“You can fix them up if they’re not. Presume you know how to use a needle and thread?”
“Of course,” I lie.
“I’ll make an appointment for you to see the doctor later. I’ve already told him about you. Explained that your husband passed away recently and without close family in Ireland you’ve come here to have the child.” A cover story. I wonder if that was Harriet’s idea, or my mother’s. “Right so. I’ll leave you to eat and get dressed.”
She is about to leave the room when I have an overwhelming urge for her to stay. “I’m sorry,” I blurt out, as much to stall her as to genuinely apologize.
She pauses in the doorway, a frown on her face. “Sorry? What for?”
“For causing all this trouble and landing on your doorstep and being rude to you yesterday. I was tired after the journey. I really am grateful that you agreed to let me stay here, even if I don’t seem like I am.”
Harriet hesitates in the doorway, as if she wants to say something, but changes her mind “Well, aren’t you here now, trouble and all, so we might as well get used to it. Now, eat your breakfast.”
She closes the door behind her.
After eating I dress quickly, ignoring the smell of mothballs and stale tobacco as I pull on a blue day dress that fits almost perfectly. I smooth my hair and pinch my cheeks to bring a bit of color to them. The cameo locket glimmers at the hollow of my throat as the sunlight reflects off the mirror. I touch my fingers to it and spin it around, watching the patterns of light that dance across the floorboards before undoing the fastening at the back and taking it off. I open the clasp and study the perfect little portraits inside: George Emmerson’s noble brow and kind eyes; the demure face of the mysterious lighthouse girl. In my made-up stories they always had a happy ever after, but that innocent little girl grew up to know that real life rarely ends that way.
Fastening the locket back around my neck, I make my way downstairs.
“The dress fits perfectly,” I announce, giving a little twirl before perching on the edge of a faded flocked armchair and pushing back the lace curtains at the windows.
Harriet glances up from her newspaper and studies me a moment. “I’m glad it fits,” she says, returning to her reading. I notice her gaze straying back to me several times.
The newspaper carries a headline about rising tensions in Czechoslovakia and the threat of invasion by the Germans. It reminds me of Mrs. O’Driscoll fretting about the political crisis in Europe and the possibility of another world war. Dear Mrs. O’Driscoll. I wonder if she thinks about me at all, and whether she kept the piece of paper with my address.
“Do you think there’ll really be another war?” I ask, admiring the clapboard houses across the street.
“If Hitler has anything to say about it, yes. Awful fecker of a man.”
“Europe’s such a long way from America though. I think I’d feel safe here if war did break out.”
Harriet scoffs at this. “You’ve no right to feel safe anywhere if there is a war. They said the last one would be over by Christmas, and look what happened.”
A gentle breeze shakes blossom from a tree in the garden next door. The trembling leaves remind me of my father’s shaking hands. His experience of war still carried in his nerves.
Eager to change the subject, I stand up and ask what we’ll do today. “It looks lovely out.”
Harriet laughs. “We won’t be doing anything today. You’ll rest, I presume. I have to go out.”
The discussions about me coming here had all hinged around getting away from Ireland as quickly as possible, and what would happen when the baby came. Nobody had thought about what I would do while I was waiting; how I might fill the weeks and months ahead. Now that I’m here, it seems ridiculous not to have thought about it. What will I do?
“I can’t rest for the whole five months, Harriet. I’ll go mad.” I fold my arms defiantly. “I might go for a walk then. See the mansions.”
“Pfft. Seen one mansion, seen them all.” Harriet puts the newspaper down and walks into the kitchen through a door to the right. “I have to go to the lighthouse. I suppose you could come with me.”
My ears prick up like a dog eager to be walked, but I hide my enthusiasm. I don’t especially want to spend time with Harriet, but I don’t particularly want to go sightseeing on my own either. “Suppose I could,” I reply, picking at a loose thread on one of the buttons on the dress.
Harriet peers around the door. “You’re not to be asking endless questions though, or getting under my feet.”
“You’ll hardly know I’m there. I promise.”
And so it is agreed. I will go with Harriet to the lighthouse and pretend I’m not there, and she’ll tolerate this new relative she has temporarily adopted because, whether she’ll admit it or not, I know she feels at least some responsibility for me. If she didn’t, why tuck blankets carefully around me last night and place my book on the nightstand? Why whisper into the gray morning light that she was glad I’d come? Maybe my being here is as convenient for a lonely spinster as it is for an unmarried pregnant girl. Maybe Harriet Flaherty and I are not so different after all.
While I wait for Harriet to get ready to leave, I pick up Instructions to Light Keepers and turn to my marked page. Lights must be exhibited punctually at sunset and kept lighted at full intensity until sunrise . . . When there is no assistant, the keeper must visit the light at least twice during the night between 8pm and sunrise; and on stormy nights the light must be constantly looked after. I read the letter from Grace to Sarah again, wondering who these two women really were. Like a curious child opening doors to rooms they are forbidden to enter, I tug on the distant threads that connect me to them, determined to unravel the tangled knots of the past so that I can find the place where their story ends, and mine begins.