There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us. My mother’s name was Nora Ivie, and mine was Adeline. I had been named after a soap she’d once seen in a fancy shop, Adeline Lilac Soap, made in Paris. My mother said naming me so had been a mistake because now I thought I was better than she. She said it like a curse. Actually, she was correct, but there was a reason for this. She had ruined my father’s life, and mine, and she didn’t seem to notice. She was the sort of person who saw only herself and her shadow, and the rest of us disappeared in the bright sunlight.
In the year when I turned twelve, our lives suddenly changed. My father became ill and was unable to work. He was kindhearted and trusting, two qualities I did not inherit. He was patient as well, another trait I could not claim for myself. He’d been to sea when he was young and had collected shells from the shores of India and Africa. When he fell ill, he began to create a sailor’s valentine for my mother, setting shells into the shapes of hearts and flowers. During the time of his illness, my mother went out every night and left us alone. When my father sent me to search for her, I would always discover her in the tavern down the street with other men. She acted as though I were a stranger when I appeared. “Did you want something?” she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.
“I need help getting home,” I’d announce, as if I were a poor orphan, not a difficult part for me to play. I did this for my father’s sake, because he didn’t deserve a wife like my mother. But I also did so because I knew she would be furious when she had to leave the tavern. She’d seem hard-hearted to her boyfriends if she shooed me away, and I suppose she wanted them to think she was something more than she was, so she went with me. Once home, she’d stop me before we went in the door.
“Don’t you tell your father a thing,” she’d warn me. “It would kill him. You’d do better if you kept your mouth shut.”
I was alone with my father when it happened, a quiet death, with no complaints. He told me I was the light of his life and that I must look after my mother when he was gone. Afterward, I sat beside him and wept. I knew that anything that might be good in my life had left along with his spirit. He’d been to places where the beaches were made of black sand with shells as large as a man’s hand or as tiny as a flea, and I hoped he had one of those beaches in mind in his last moments on earth. He’d quit the sea when he met my mother and became a cobbler to ensure he would always be close to home. It was likely the tanning chemicals had made him ill. He’d told me that my mother was so beautiful when he met her, he’d made her a pair of red shoes. Only a true beauty could get away with wearing such shoes, he said. Perhaps he was a fool, because even after all she’d done, he was most likely still in love with her on the day he died. He never did finish his valentine made of seashells.
When I went to the constable’s office to tell them my father had passed, they sent a sheriff to escort me back to our rooms. There was my mother, finally come home, playing the part of a grieving widow. She might have been an actress. She would have been good at that. The sheriff asked if she could support herself and me, and she had no answer. She had always turned to men for such things. Her boyfriends gave her trinkets and money, and she thought she was a queen because of that. But not one of them seemed to want to take her on now that she was available. What good was a widow with a child to them? After all, they had wives of their own.
My mother was sent to the local church and given a list of jobs where a woman such as herself was needed. That was how she came to be the housekeeper at the lighthouse. She was convinced a lighthouse would be exciting, better than the scullery or tavern jobs she could get in Boston. Naturally, she didn’t ask my opinion, and if she had, I wouldn’t have answered. She had told me often enough to keep my mouth shut, and now I did exactly that. I abolished all language on the day of my father’s funeral. I did it to honor my father and outrage my mother, who slapped me when I refused to answer her. Let her, I thought. She still couldn’t make me cry.
“You’ll regret this, Miss Adeline,” she said, mocking me.
Well, maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t, but after a day and a night of self-imposed silence, I didn’t know if I could speak even if I tried.
My mother’s job took us to an island in Essex County, forty miles north of Boston, at the tip of Cape Ann. Thacher Island was made up of fifty acres of rocks, a place consumed by woe from the start. In 1635, Anthony Thacher and his beloved wife were the only ones to survive a shipwreck when a storm came up and sank the Watch and Wait as it traveled from Ipswich to Marblehead. The tragedy claimed twenty-one souls, including their own four children, along with seven of their nieces and nephews. What can you expect to build on such sorrow? Only more sorrow to come.
By the time we arrived, in 1908, there weren’t many who would bind their lives to such a remote and desolate place. The winters were brutal, with sheets of ice falling down from the sky, a pelting so sharp and brittle it could draw blood if a person was hit directly. Snowdrifts could be eight feet high, a luminous mixture of water from both the sea and the sky, so salty and heavy it was nearly impossible to shovel the paths. Ice had to be chipped off the windows of the lighthouse so that the lanterns could be seen out at sea, a job that would freeze a man’s hands in under twenty minutes. There were storms in the summer as well, astounding electrical storms that illuminated the sky with crackling blue light and caused trees to burn up when they were struck.
Two lighthouses had been built here, each with exactly 156 steps, and three lighthouse keepers were employed; a senior fellow named Jonas Ford and two others, along with their families, were the only inhabitants. No one came to meet us when we arrived from Boston on the train, so we walked three miles to the harbor in a downpour. Rain was spitting from the sky as we made our way to Loblolly Cove. I was soaking wet, and water sloshed inside my shoes. With every step I took, I hated my mother more.
“I didn’t know if I could speak even if I tried.”
A skiff had been sent to the mainland to transport us, but the man at the wheel seemed in a bad humor, likely due to having to come out in the dreadful weather on behalf of two strangers, although he glanced at my mother once or twice. I was worried when I saw how his gaze lingered. My mother had worn her finest clothes, even though we had to walk through the rain, and she acted as if she weren’t the least bit wet. I had long dark hair and was tall for my age. People didn’t think I was twelve because of the look in my eyes. I looked wild, the kind of girl who would jump out a window or leap from the skiff that was bringing us to an island of rocks. I thought about doing so, but I held myself back. The water was so cold, even in the summertime, it would probably freeze a person’s blood before they drowned. That was no way to die, for it would surely be painful to become a block of ice under your very own skin.
The fellow who brought us to the island came with his son. Father and son had the same name: Rowan. The elder Rowan Ballard was a man in his forties. He was strong and agile, and when he smiled at my mother his gloomy face changed and even I could see how handsome he was. He was the third lighthouse keeper; there were two men above him, he explained. That was why he wore the number 3 on the lapel of his uniform.