Gull Island: A Novel
By Anna Porter
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About this ebook
When her estranged father goes missing, Jude is persuaded by her mother to find his will. She travels to the family cottage on remote Gull Island, glad to be away from the city and to have the chance to sort through old memories, but is unsettled by what she finds there.
While contending with the neglected cottage and encroaching wild animals, Jude looks not only for her father’s will, but also for photographs of herself as a baby, desperate for proof that she was loved as a child. However, loneliness and terrifying dreams soon wear on her, bringing back frightening memories. Thoughts of her distant mother and intimidating father, her jealous sister, and her mother’s mysterious friend infest Jude’s increasingly clouded mind.
Then a fierce storm sweeps away her boat and severs her from the outside world. Forced to reckon with long-buried truths and filled with the terrible sense that the cottage may be haunted by more than the past, Jude begins to fear for her sanity—and her life.
Anna Porter
Anna Porter is the award-winning author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, most recently Deceptions and In Other Words: How I Fell in Love with Canada One Book at a Time. She has written five mystery novels, including The Appraisal, which was shortlisted for the Staunch Book Prize, and Mortal Sins. Kasztner’s Train won the 2007 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and Ghosts of Europe won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. She cofounded Key Porter Books, an influential publishing house she ran for more than twenty years. In addition, she writes book reviews, opinion pieces, and stuff. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has received the Order of Ontario. Visit her at AnnaPorter.ca or connect with her on Twitter @AnnaPorter_Anna.
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Gull Island - Anna Porter
1
I HAD DRIVEN UP FAST. When I set out from the city, it was still dark. There were not many cars on the highway. Dawn breaking as I turned off the 400. No one had removed the dead animals from the side road to Honey Harbour yet. There was a young raccoon, bloody teeth bared, its chest squashed, arms pawing the air, and a large snapper, its house smashed, its guts strewn across the road. Too much night traffic. But not even one car now.
It was quiet at the marina. I couldn’t see the Limestone, though that was usually the boat they took out of winter storage first. The Hunt, a much smaller boat, had been left for me at the main loading dock. There was no one else at the docks, at the pump, or on the veranda of Jim’s cottage. Perhaps the guys who ran the place for him had been told to take the rest of the week off. They were usually cheerful and friendly, offering to haul the bags to the boat, making rude comments about my city garb, offering to come and keep me company in the evening while I waited for the rest of our family to arrive. I was not used to silence at the marina.
When I headed out, it seemed to me that the Hunt was the only boat on the lake. Perhaps April was too early for other people to be this far north. There was a chill in the air. The ice had barely gone out, and the birds that wintered in the South had not yet arrived. When my hand touched the water as I tied the boat up to our dock, it felt painfully cold.
The cottage, too, was strangely quiet. In the old days it had always been noisy. Kids running and shouting, Gina doing her ridiculous exercises on the dock, country music or opera wailing away inside, the men chopping wood or repairing the roof, or moving rocks to make an easier path into the water. Sammy had been quite useful, then, and James, to my surprise, had fitted in with the rest of the family. Years ago, there used to be a lot of bellowing and even some laughter. My mother would try to relax, read, or give strident orders to complete some task we had been putting off. The last time I was here, though, there had already been too much silence. Since I hadn’t come to the cottage often then, when I did, I was aware of the overall gloom, the sadness that had settled on the place. Mother spent most of the time in her room, gazing at the birdfeeders, her book lying unread on the bed. She left all the cooking to Gina and me. I knew I couldn’t face the ghosts of summers past.
I carried my bags up to the deck—I had brought up only two bottles of wine, because I hadn’t expected to stay long—and placed them carefully at the glass doors while I hunted for the key.
It wasn’t under the small rock where we usually hid it after we locked up at the end of the season. Hardly surprising, given the winter snowdrifts, the strong winds that had blown down some of our roof tiles and broken branches off our one remaining ash tree. While I scrabbled around among the musty, dead leaves, I thought I heard something scuttling toward the cabins. Maybe a squirrel or a chipmunk, but I saw nothing when I stood up. Still no key. I searched under the steps, no key, and nothing on the big nail where Gina preferred to hang it.
We had fought about that.
We did not have the warmest relationship, my sister and I, but we rarely engaged in open combat. It was more of a standoff. We knew each other too well for prolonged battles, but toward the end of that gloomy summer two years ago, we had allowed ourselves to express the anger we both felt—at least, I know I felt—but had kept under control. I found it oddly liberating. We argued about a whole lot of subjects we had avoided before. Mother’s choice of a condo and how long she would be able to stay there, Scoop’s ashes, Father’s mansion, Gladys, Eva, and why she kept showing up (Gina was sure that she still hankered after our father, and I was equally sure that she was secretly gay and in love with our mother). Gina suggested once that Eva had something on our parents, a secret they didn’t want her to reveal. (I thought that was ridiculous; if she had some sort of hold over them, she would cash it in, not take it in time spent at the cottage.) We argued even about little things like cleaning the place and who left dishes out the last time. Everything except William. I stayed quiet when she talked about him.
The fight over the placement of the cottage key was one of our nastiest, and it ended by not ending. It started with each of us explaining our different positions—me saying the key had to be in a place where no one could easily find it, Gina saying that everyone put keys under rocks and that our mother preferred the nail option. I viewed bringing our mother into the discussion an unfair thrust and parried with a variety of instances of my sister’s ignoring our mother’s wishes. From there, the fight escalated.
Given that we had grown up together, we both had a veritable smorgasbord of each other’s failings to choose from when we decided to be nasty. These days, our fights veered off into mutual accusations of indifference to Mother’s needs, then on to the familiar grounds of sibling rivalry over holiday plans (whose plans had most inconvenienced the others) and selfish or inconsiderate choices of long ago. I brought up her failing to show up at our mother’s bedside when she had been ill a few years ago. Unusual for Mother, she had asked for some help with her shopping. But, as was usual with our mother, the shopping wasn’t what she had meant. For reasons that hadn’t yet been obvious, she had become afraid of being alone at night.
She had been proud of her independence. She not only didn’t ask for help, but she also rejected all offers of assistance—and that attitude was still there that winter, three years ago. She insisted on doing her own Christmas shopping with only Nellie’s help and ignored our, I thought unanimous, decision to reduce the volume of gifts and the attendant headaches. We would each buy a present for just one person, drawing a name out of a hat. She wanted to buy gifts for everybody.
Gina said that it was a ruse. One of our mother’s completely unnecessary ways to show affection and demand, by implication, the same in return. I thought it was her basic insecurity, her feeling that unless she continued to earn respect and admiration, she would cease to matter. As she once described it to me, if you are no longer who you have persuaded yourself you are, then you are no one, a nonperson. That remark had been in response to my suggestion, long before her diagnosis, that she needed a break from her endless schedules, that she could allow herself time to relax.
Back then, she had been a respected academic, a sought-after public speaker. A couple of years later, she was still able to deliver her Current Affairs Lecture at Trinity College, yet she persisted in repeatedly proving her own relevance. She worried that she had been supplanted by other, more effective, or worse, younger speakers.
Perhaps it was her form of blackmailing everyone into appreciating what she did. An extreme case of impostor syndrome. Or a reasonable dread that her failing memory was no longer a secret.
Naturally, no one would ask Mother whether Gina’s contention about her preference for key placement had been correct. Gina had mentioned several times during that winter her amazement that I had managed to be invited to give readings throughout the month and that all my readings were far from home, so Gina must have had her way with the key, the reason I couldn’t find it.
After about twenty minutes rootling around under nearby rocks and feeling along the edges and undersides of all the steps and everywhere a key could have fallen from a nail, I stomped upstairs and tried the glass door. It was unlocked. Strange, I thought. We always lock up when we leave. But as I slid the door open, I had the weird sensation that I had already done this, that the damp leaves on the mat had been left there by my own boots.
The living room looked as if we had just left for a quick trip up the lake. There wasn’t that familiar musty smell we used to comment on when we opened the cottage. Seat cushions pressed down where we had sat, chairs facing one another, the Scrabble board still on the coffee table, a couple of cups nearby, the unfinished puzzle on its table, Mel’s baseball glove and ball near the couch, fishing rods with their dangling lines in a bucket, ready to deploy. There was still ash in the fireplace and logs in the iron log-box. Perhaps the photographs were a bit more faded, but they were still standing up in their plastic frames. But I was sure at least one photo was missing. At first I couldn’t tell which one, because there was such a plethora of family pictures, so many from the time Gina and I were gawky children, and so many more of her children as they went from babies to almost teens. Well, that’s not exactly right. There were a lot of photographs of Gina’s daughter, Mel, but only a couple of photos that included William seeming almost relaxed. He had been carefully posed, I am sure. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been looking up. He usually stared fixedly to the right.
My mother had put the pictures out herself and added to them as the years went by. She used to fuss about their placement, making sure no one was in the back row more often than anyone else. I used to count the number of pictures of me and compare them to the ones of Gina. I always came up short.
The missing picture had left a thin line in the accumulated dust, suggesting that it had been there as recently as last summer. There was now a small gap in the area where Gina and I were teens and our mother was young and still pretty. She had remained attractive, in a small, fragile way, well into her sixties. The lines in her face were so muted that, ignoring the obvious fact that I was much bigger-boned than Mother and Gina, people would say the three of us must be sisters. Lines had started to appear on my face, I think, already in my very early thirties—a series of thin, knife-edge lines on my forehead and a couple of softer downward ones from the corners of my mouth. It’s because you frown too much,
Mother had said when she noticed me looking at my face in her round magnifying mirror. You could try being less worried about things.
When I didn’t reply, she said, Or you could try standing on your head for a half hour every day. Let the blood circulate to your face.
She told me she had found standing on her head restful.
I turned on the electricity and went to check the toilets. I had watched the men starting and closing down the water often enough, it should, I thought, be easy to restart the system.
It wasn’t.
I turned the taps full on, nothing happened.
Oh yes, of course, the pump.
I hated going into the basement. Despite the tiny gaps that remained between the concrete slabs of its outside wall, it was murky and stank of decay and, I thought, peanut butter. Early in the season, Father used to drown mice in a bucket he kept there with peanut butter smeared around the rim. They would fall into the water after they scaled the outside of the bucket. They’re really stupid,
he told Gina and me as we watched the desperate creatures trying to get out. You could see their little claw marks on the inside of the bucket after Father threw their tiny bodies into the woods behind the house. Lots of animals like a good meal of mice,
he told us. They’ll be gone by tomorrow.
And they were. I know; I looked.
I tried to ignore that memory and instead remember how to turn on whatever it was that our father and, later, Sammy used to turn on when we first came up.
The outdoor furniture and summer things occupied the space at the front of the basement. The water tank was way in back where there was impenetrable blackness.
There was no point in turning the water on in the cottage if there was no water coming into the tank.
I thought it was getting darker.
I went upstairs to look for a flashlight. Amazing how warm it was inside the cottage. The afternoon sun had been bright and the wide windows captured the heat just as they held in the cool air in July.
I should start a fire in case the evening was cold. April was a deceptive month here. Some days it would be warm enough to walk around in shorts, then it would snow and we were back into winter. There was a pile of wood by the fireplace, a bundle of kindling and old newspapers.
The flashlight didn’t work. Whoever had used it last—and I put my money on Gina—hadn’t taken out the batteries when she left, but why would she remember to do that when she hadn’t even thought of locking the doors or putting away the Scrabble or puffing up the cushions on the sofas? I tried and failed to feel sympathy for her.
Best to leave the water till morning.
I put my groceries into the fridge and closed its door. It had begun to hum contentedly.
I made the bed in my room. The sheets felt frigid as I spread them out and patted them down on the mattress. We always left the sheets and duvets in big plastic bins for the winter. They had a damp, musty odor, with a hint of rosemary. We used dried rosemary instead of mothballs. I plumped up the pillows in their too cool covers. Would I have to get a sleeping bag? I couldn’t remember where we had stashed the sleeping bags. I hadn’t used one since that disastrous camping trip some years ago.
James and I on the French River. What could I have been thinking? It rained the first day and drizzled the rest of the week. I was not an experienced paddler, and James was impatient with my lily-dipping.
I hated sleeping in the cramped, damp tent reeking of fetid socks, and James had forgotten to pack the padded ground-sheet. He had also left the whiskey behind. I had shivered all night in my dank sleeping bag, while James snored happily in his. Luckily, I had brought along a bottle of Chablis, imagining it would be good for celebrating our first night in a tent. As it was, I drank it all on our second night while James slept. About halfway through the bottle I had proposed a toast to James’s solid back.
2
THE SKY HAD TURNED SMOKY drab. The trees, even the birches, their long, thin, skeletal branches backlit by the setting sun, were black now, as if they had been sketched in charcoal. There were a few rows of green buds, but the leaves hadn’t appeared yet. Only the lone willow that Mother had planted twenty years ago near the lake showed long light-green shoots. There were minuscule buds on the oak and, of course, the red pine seemed to be thriving in the cold early spring air. The peaked roof of Father’s cabin caught the last of the bleak light; the building itself was blacker than the trees.
It was very still.
I hadn’t known that I had been waiting for the prevailing west wind to rustle the dead leaves until I went out on the deck with my glass of lukewarm white wine and noticed myself watching for the ripple of waves or the sound of the boat rubbing against the dock. There had been only the scrunch of acorns under my feet. Nothing else.
The lake was beautiful in its mirrored stillness. In past years I would look at scenes and linger over objects, pondering the right angle, or the right light, approaching closer, backing up, holding my hands up to form a frame around an image. I used to carry a sketch pad for the occasions when I couldn’t resist the desire to make something appear on paper. Had I left one here last time? Or my paints? I hadn’t seen them at the apartment, but I hadn’t really looked for them either. I hadn’t wanted to paint.
Mother said I had shown some talent when I was younger, that had I stayed with it, I might have become a passably good artist. Eva, she had said, could have taught me so much, had I been willing to listen. A small gallery in the city had even sold a few of my smaller paintings, and I remembered a suggestion from the owner—was his name Yves?—that he have a modest exhibition of my work. I would have to help with the promotion, of course, and make sure all my friends and acquaintances came.
Mother said my friends would buy some of the paintings because, hey, what are friends for if they’re not willing to shell out a bit of money for a painting? They didn’t have to hang them to prove their fondness for me, all they had to do was buy them. For a while I had made lists of people to invite. It didn’t last. I didn’t have enough friends to make the effort worthwhile. Sure, I knew quite a few people, but the only real friend I’d ever had was Annabel, and she had decamped to Paris.
Mother had been even less encouraging about my writing than she had been about my attempt to be an artist. You’re not going to make a living at it, that’s for sure,
she had said. You have to be famous to make money writing, and you’re not famous.
Too dark to look for my paints now. Leave it till the morning. I would still be alone then; the one thing I hated about painting was that anyone could watch you.
I went inside again and lit the scrunched-up newspapers in the fireplace. The matches, I thought, were sure to be damp, yet one of them caught after only a few tries. The kindling was slow to get going and I had used up most of the paper by the time the maple log caught. My father had been an advocate of burning maple—it lasted longer, the logs were tidier. James had favored birch; it was easier to get going. The man lacks patience,
Father said, returning to one of his old jokes. He must be a lousy lover.
He wasn’t, but I had no desire to discuss sex with my father.
When I opened the packages of food I had stashed in the fridge, I couldn’t find anything I wanted. The closely packed lettuce and sliced chicken breasts reminded me of the times Gina did the shopping and filled the kitchen with her health foods, big cabbages and cauliflower, broccoli, legumes (I hated the way she pronounced legumes—the u elongated, the g swallowed), brown rice, flatbread, vegenaise. Never a single thing I was interested in eating. Naturally, when it was my turn to shop, I indulged my inner carnivore with spicy salamis, Italian prosciutto, pork sausages, rib eye steaks, and, when it was my turn to cook, I took delight in watching Gina’s discomfort. She would thank me for the effort, then prepare something for herself from her own food supply. Chickpeas and beans that smelled and looked like mush heaped onto her plate. Except when it came to dessert. She liked my desserts a lot more than the fascinating things she made with honey and imitation chocolate. Her children always preferred my cooking to hers, but they rarely got a choice. Mel used to watch me preparing my beef Madras recipe and told me she needed to learn so she could prepare her own meals when I wasn’t around.
I took my glass of wine to bed and huddled into the cold sheets. Curled up with my knees against my chest, the pillow scrunched under my head, I could see the sliver of moon and the motionless trees. My father had replaced most of the windows of the original prefab design with wide sliding doors. When he was younger, he had loved the early mornings while everyone else was still asleep and he could open the door and slip out, unnoticed, for his dawn swim in the lake. By the time the rest of us woke up, he would be sitting on the deck, reading his papers and sipping his coffee. The only signs of his swim were the wet footprints that crossed the kitchen floor and the sound of the grinding beans for the percolator. Preground coffee, he had told us, lost its flavor.
There used to be a photo of him sitting on the porch in one of those old, paint-peeling red Muskoka chairs, his feet up on the wooden railing, coffee mug in hand, squinting into the morning sun. I realized that was one of the photos my mother had taken from the collection in the living room. I couldn’t remember when it had disappeared from her carefully curated family shots.
I wondered where that picture was now.
I hadn’t been aware of it earlier but I did, now, surprisingly, miss him. Not so much his actual being, but the assumption that he would be here in the morning, sitting on the deck, drinking coffee, the momentary peacefulness of it, before the day unfolded. Nostalgia for something that never existed in real time, only in the way I had chosen to see the world when I was about five or six, when I still believed in innocence.
3
UNTIL NOW, ALONE ON GULL Island, I thought I hadn’t believed in ghosts. I didn’t hold an aggressive or fanatical position; after all, I had played once with Gina’s Ouija board, and she had almost convinced me that the island had a ghost.
The board, Gina’s birthday gift from our mother, was black with two rows of silver letters—all capitals—in a slight curve across the middle, a large YES and large NO above on either side of what looked like a moth or a june bug with spread wings. There was a stylized sun-face on the left and a moon-face on the right. A separate silk pouch contained what