There is a corral separating us from the protesters but I can hear them so clearly, can make out their individual faces, each one watching us in disgust, bearing the same disbelief I’ve struggled with. A man near the end of the group wears a striped beanie and brandishes a sign that reads Justice for fish, death to fishermen. It sends a chill through me, and that’s when our eyes meet, just for a moment, and it’s as though this man can see straight inside me and has judged me monstrous.
“Come on,” Basil says, pulling me by the elbow. “Don’t give them the satisfaction.”
We walk until the street is clear and then we wait for an ambulance to transport Samuel to the hospital.
“You okay?” Léa asks me softly, the two of us standing a little apart from the others.
I cast her a sideways glance. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Just seem jumpy.”
She has begun to watch me, this French mechanic. I feel her dark eyes on me often, and sometimes when I catch her gaze she turns quickly away. I have not been sure until this moment if what lives in her interest is concern for my sanity, or something more intimate, more painful.
Ennis travels in the ambulance with Samuel while the rest of us divide into cabs. I spend the drive staring through the window at the winding city, brightly colored houses built into craggy hills. Everything is still blanketed in heavy fog, giving the day a sense of unreality.
We find Ennis sprawled tiredly in the waiting room and sink into chairs around him. “He’s being looked at. I’ve called Gammy, she’s on her way.”
Forty minutes pass before Samuel’s wife, Gammy, arrives. She strides through the doors in thick leather boots, riding leggings, and a shaggy woolen sweater to cover her robust form. Her hair is as red as Samuel’s, plastered with sweat to her forehead and flushed cheeks. Blue eyes dart worriedly as she takes Ennis in a bear hug and thumps him on the back. “Where is he?”
Ennis shows her the way and then we are quiet once more, waiting. I am not good at waiting.
“How long have they been married?” I ask Dae.
“’Bout thirty years. Think they’re up to about a dozen kids now.”
“No way.”
“Yeah. Samuel’s got a lotta love to go round. Just ask him.”
“I have and he’s told me the same thing multiple times already.”
We while the day away, keeping ourselves occupied with a pack of cards Dae thought to bring. Léa and I go on a food run and return with egg rolls and coffees. Gammy finally reappears midafternoon, looking wan.
“They’re keeping the idiot overnight. He’s on some hefty antibiotics for the infection, and they want to monitor his heart. Think there might be a problem with it.”
“From the defibrillator?” I ask.
Gammy’s eyes find me and soften. “No, darl. The heart condition was from before he got injured. You saved his life.” Gammy glances at Ennis. “Goddamn cable that hit him probably saved him as well. Otherwise we wouldn’t have known about the bad ticker until it was too late. Never thought I’d thank you for anything, Ennis Malone.”
I expect it to be a joke but no one smiles. Ennis inclines his head a little in acknowledgment. Gammy watches him for a good long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she spreads her hands. “Right. Let’s get off, then. I’ve got ravenous beasts at home who need feeding and I’m sure you lot could do with a proper wash and feed.”
I wind up in Gammy’s car with Ennis and Léa, while the others all head off to find a rental car. Gammy and Samuel’s place is out of town somewhere.
“I hope this’ll be enough for you now, Ennis Malone,” Gammy says. Maybe she’s one of those people who find authority in using full names. Her accent is the same as Samuel’s, the distinct “Newfie” mix of Irish and Canadian. “Although losing your men to the waves has never stopped you before,” she adds coldly. “Anyone’d think you’d started tossing them overboard yourself.”
This is an immensely cruel thing to say, and I wonder at the poor people she’s talking about; I wonder at Ennis’s involvement in their deaths and his regret. It shouldn’t surprise me. He sent Anik into a storm, didn’t he? Wasn’t it his determination to catch fish that nearly got Samuel killed? And the rest of us, besides?
I find myself coming to an uneasy understanding of the captain’s will. Twice before I’ve recognized something similar—in myself and then in my husband—and I know it to be destructive. How far will Ennis go to get what he wants, this mythical Golden Catch? What will he sacrifice?
“He’s home now, Gam,” Ennis says quietly from the back seat. I steal a look at him in the side mirror. His head rests on the window and he watches the ocean to our left. The burden of his desire weighs heavily upon him.
“Too late, Ennis Malone. Too fucking late. And if you’ve brought any trouble with you I’ll be giving you a hiding.”
“We’ll stay in town if it makes you more comfortable.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It wasn’t Skipper’s fault,” Léa speaks up, obstinate. “We all know the risks. It’s a fool who steps onto a vessel and assumes he’ll leave it breathing. You know it, Samuel knows it.”
Gammy looks in her mirror at the much younger woman. “And do you think it’s fair, to use people’s devotion against them? To pull at their hearts until they do as you say, and take bullets for you as well?”
Nobody speaks.
Gammy looks at me and I brace myself for her next blow. “Who’s this one, then? How’d he rope you into his mess, darl?”
“I roped myself in.”
“Good luck to you, then. Lord knows you’ll need it. Now if you keep an eye on the hills ahead, you’ll see our place coming up a little ways.”
As we round a curve in the road a lighthouse appears on the headland, rearing into the sky.
“No,” I say. “Do you really—?”
Gammy laughs at the look on my face.
The lighthouse is remote enough that it’s not automatic, but still manned, and as Gammy tells me the story of her family and how they’ve always kept it, passed from generation to generation, I feel her deep sense of home. I can feel it in the earth, too, when I get out of the car and walk upon the rocks. It’s in the sky and the roaring ocean and the keening of the wind, it’s in the way she strides over her land and into her lighthouse; she owns this place and it owns her, tangible and unarguable. What must it be like to be bound so deeply and willingly to a place?
“You right, love?” Ennis asks me, handing me my backpack from the trunk.
I nod and follow him inside. The house adjoining the lighthouse is normal, really, not a relic of the past but an ordinary house, low-ceilinged, fireplaced, messy enough that it must harbor children.
And what children they are.
For an instant I try not to stare, and then I give up and do so with delight as they emerge from their shared rooms or come in from the hills outside. There are, not a dozen, but six identical daughters, the littlest six, the oldest sixteen, each with the same unruly red hair and pale freckled skin. None of them wear shoes. They look strong, a little dirty, very free. And they gaze at me with the same expressions of interest, with intelligence and mischief. I love them even before I’ve learned their names. Maybe it’s their Irish-ness, their familiarity. Maybe it’s the fabulousness of their sameness, or the strangeness of it.