Lighthouse Bay by Kimberley Freeman Page A

Harrow is about to slip past her on his way out when she stops him.
    “Mr. Harrow, wait,” she says. She watches her hand on his forearm as though it isn’t her own. She didn’t realize she was going to speak to him, but a compulsion has seized her.
    He waits, and a small stretch of time binds them together in expectation.
    Then she says, “Meggy told me about your wife.”
    And there it was: the raw pain that she has been so longing to see on his face. Finally, she has found somebody who knows . To her horror, the corners of her mouth curl up as though to smile. She pushes them down again.
    But then the vulnerability in Mr. Harrow’s face is gone, hidden under a constructed expression of acceptance. “Yes, I did lose Mary. It was very difficult,” he says. “But life must go on.”
    “Must it?”
    Her question flummoxes him. He opens his mouth to speak, then doesn’t. Rather, he remains still with his lips slightly parted.
    “My son, Daniel, died nearly three years ago,” she says in a rush. “He was fifteen days old. Born perfectly healthy, growing well. Then one morning my eyes opened late—too late in the morning, too bright—wondering why he hadn’t woken me. He hadn’t woken me because he was dead, Mr. Harrow. Dead and cold.” Here her voice breaks and she puts her hands to her mouth to stop up the tears. “Because I was out of my mind with my grief, my husband’s family saw to it that the child was buried without me in attendance. I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye to him.”
    “Oh, my dear Mrs. Winterbourne,” he says, and gently pulls her hands away from her face and holds them in his rough fingers. “It is terrible to lose a loved one, but the sun will shine again.”
    “It cannot.” Now she doubts him. He has only lost a wife, not a child. What can he know about her pain?
    Mr. Harrow searches for words. The ship rides over a bump and swell, setting the hanging spoons clanging against each other. Finally he says, “Such sadness doesn’t just bruise, then fade away. It devastates. The only way back is to rebuild, stone by stone. And sometimes one hasn’t the energy, or the inclination, and one sits among the ruins and waits for something to change. But nothing changes unless we stand up again, and keep picking up the stones.”
    Her heart lightens and darkens over and over as he speaks: hope, despair, hope, despair, fast-moving clouds over the sun. He does understand, but he is telling her she has to try to get better. Does he not know that if she recovers from Daniel’s death, then she loses Daniel a second time? Recovering is a kind of forgetting.
    But she has longed for the comfort of words such as Mr. Harrow’s and perhaps Mr. Harrow has longed for a fellow soul toshare his sorrow too, so they stand there for a moment together, hands clasped, tears brimming. And that’s when Meggy comes in.
    “Oh,” she says, her pale eyes taking in their stance, their clasped hands, their searching eyes. At first Isabella does not understand the import: there is nothing romantic about the moment Mr. Harrow and she are sharing. But, by God, it looks like it.
    Mr. Harrow, alarmed—for Isabella suspects he is sweet on Meggy—drops her hands and takes a step back, knocking his head on a hanging copper pan.
    Isabella says, “Meggy, wait.” But Meggy has already turned and hurried off.
    Mr. Harrow rubs his head. “I should go,” he says.
    Isabella nods, and is left alone in the galley a few moments later, wondering when she will harvest the inevitable consequences.
    D inner is cooking in the galley, and the smell of stewing meat is trapped in the saloon where Isabella sits alone, working on her embroidery ring. She has made many mistakes this evening, and has spent so much time unpicking misplaced stitches that she may as well not have started work at all. Meggy is nowhere in sight. Isabella begins to hope, faintly, that Meggy has decided to keep to herself about the scene with Mr.