Chapter 3
By the time Clelia got home, it was late. She anchored the boat and dragged herself up the veranda steps. She was tired from walking for miles and her feet hurt, but that was nothing compared to the sting between her legs. Worse yet were the guilt and fear that wouldn’t let her go.
She took a moment to school her features before going inside. Erwan sat by the kitchen table smoking his pipe. This made her stop in her tracks. The last time he smoked in the house was when Tella, her grandmother, had passed away.
“Erwan?” she said in an unsteady voice.
Tripod looked up from his cushion by the stove and wagged his tail. From far away, Snow howled. In a distant corner of her mind, she registered how strange it was that Snow wasn’t by the door to greet her.
“We need to talk,” Erwan said, not meeting her eyes.
She rounded the table. “What’s going on?”
“What happened to you?” he asked when his gaze fell on her scraped knees.
“I tripped over a rock.” She waved the incident away, burying it deep down to mull over later. “Erwan, what’s the matter?”
“Do you remember the story I told you about your mother?”
Frowning, she sat down in the chair opposite him. “Yes.”
There was only one story he told about her mother, and that was how a Japanese fishing boat had docked in the harbor thirty-seven years ago and left a little girl behind, the girl Erwan and Tella had adopted and called Katik, her mother.
He looked at his hands. “I didn’t tell you everything.”
A part of her had always known there was more to the story, yet she didn’t want to hear what was coming.
“When the Japanese trawler docked in the Gulf, your mother must’ve been about six years old. There was no way of telling, since she didn’t speak. Obviously, she didn’t understand our language, but she didn’t say a word in any language.”
She sat quietly, afraid to make a sound.
“They found her alone on a yacht in the middle of the ocean and had to assume her parents, and whoever else she’d been with, had drowned in some accident. There were signs of a fire on board, and it was a wonder that she was still alive. There was no clue as to her identity, no papers, no evidence of another soul on that vessel. What happened was a mystery they never solved. They took her aboard and sailed with her as far as Brittany.”
When he didn’t continue for a while, Clelia said, “You saw her at the harbor and brought her home. You and Tella adopted her because you couldn’t have children.”
Erwan glanced at her. “It didn’t exactly happen like that.”
Her chest tightened. “How did it happen?”
He cleared his throat. “The men wanted to get rid of your mother because she’d brought a curse onto the ship.”
“What curse?” she asked through dry lips.
“They said that since they’d rescued her, they didn’t catch a single fish. Overnight, their nets ran dry.”
“They wanted to leave her behind for that?”
“An empty net is a very powerful omen to a fisherman.”
It couldn’t have been only that. “There was something else, wasn’t there?”
He lifted his pipe and took a puff. After blowing out the smoke, he said, “They suddenly had a lot of inexplicable fires onboard.”
She gaped at him. “What?”
“Of course, the mayor at the time didn’t want to hear anything about a child being left behind with no passport and identity. Folks didn’t like the fishermen’s tales, but by sunrise the boat was gone, and the girl was found on the jetty in the harbor, alone. I took pity on her and brought her home where Tella fretted over the scrawny scrap of a person. She bathed her, fed her, and bundled her into bed.
“I immediately realized my mistake. By bringing the child here, I’d given Tella a taste of what she wanted most but didn’t have, and I knew it would be impossible for Tella to let the child go.”
He took a deep breath. “While the town council was trying to sort out the legal and administrative red tape of her fate, someone had to take care of her. Tella did it gladly, seeing that the other women were too superstitious and the only other appropriate candidate would’ve been the priest, but he was almost seventy years old and living alone, barely able to take care of himself.
“At first we thought she was deaf or mute because she didn’t react to anything we said. Tella was a clever woman though.” He smiled. “She persevered by talking to your mother and reading books to her in French and Breton. It took nine months, but one day Katik just opened her mouth and spoke a whole phrase in perfect French. For nearly a year, she’d only listened and observed, and when she finally spoke to us in our language, she didn’t even have an accent.
“By then, she’d gotten used to us and us to her, and God knows how, but we managed to get the legal paperwork done to adopt her. Tella’s family pulled some strings. Your grandmother’s father was, at the time, still very influential in government. Wasn’t easy, but we got it done. Tella was beside herself with joy, calling your mother a gift from God.” He kept quiet for a while.
“You say that as if it weren’t the case.”
“Things happened when Katik was around.”
“Such as?” Clelia asked when he fell silent again.
“Accidents. Bad harvests. Dry fishing seasons. Dead animals. Stillbirths with the sheep and cows.”
Clelia blinked. “Surely you weren’t superstitious enough to blame these things on a little girl?”
“We didn’t. Not at first.”
“What do you mean not at first?”
“There was something else.”
“Erwan, what was it?”
“There were fires.”
It felt like a punch in the stomach. “The stories the fishermen told were true? She could spontaneously start fires?”
Even as she said it and saw the pieces coming together, she
