It was a late season Nor'easter.

The wind screeched round the squat frame house, and the clapboards moaned periodically as if in reply. Every now and then the light tower that thrust upward sixty-four feet into the storm-rent sky seemed to sway just a bit. But it had been there for decades and had not yet been felled by any weather. May Plum sat in a pool of lamplight, darning a sock. Her mother, across the kitchen in her rocker, had put a compress over her eyes.

"You know, if my eyes hadn't got so poor I'd be helping you with them socks. I got to go to that new doctor that's come to the village as soon as this weather breaks."

"It ain't going to break for the next few days,Zeeb," Gar called from his chair. "This wind done set in. It's blowin' like . . ."  May kept her eyes on the sock.  She could feel her mother tense without looking at her. She knew what was coming, but her father caught himself just in time and swerved mid sentence to avoid cursing. "Blowin' like stink," he concluded. May knew what would happen next. She knew them, this room, this island all too well. Nothing ever really changed. She could predict every sigh and groan of her mother, every word her father might or might not speak, depending on how much he had drunk. She heard his sleeve brush the table and she knew that it would be followed by the splash of whiskey being poured into the mug.

Nothing ever changed, not even the seasons. It might be late for nor'easters but in truth, May realized, there was just one season in the lighthouse --- winter. It was always dark yet always too hot inside because of her mother's insistence on keeping the fire in the cast-iron cook-and-heat stove going. Spring might come, and while others flung open their windows and hung out their linens to catch the fresh breezes for a good airing out, Zeeba did not, for she was deeply suspicious of drafts. She regarded these diabolical streams of air as a kind of roaming executioner that could strike anytime. She was always on the alert for an insinuating breeze that in her mind was as pestilent as a rat-borne plague, as infectious as a flea-ridden rabid dog.

Come summer, if the wind was in the right direction, May could catch the joyous shrieks and whoops of children swimming off the town wharf.  But she was forbidden from entering the water. When she went to town with her father on a hot day it was almost painful for her to watch the swimmers. Their hair plastered to their heads made them seem sleek as seals and more beautiful than they actually were. It was mostly boys who swam, not girls. Perhaps the wet clothing revealed too much of what was beneath the light cottons and muslins that clung to the girls' bodies. May's own figure had begun to change in the last year. She was particularly conscious of Zeeba's furtive glances and odd comments referring to her robust health while staring at her waist or the bodice of her dress, which might be a bit tight. But still, it was all she could do not to jump in when she heard those children squealing with delight as they ran off the wharf into the water.

And when they reemerged she gaped at them in wonder, for their skin glistened with saltwater. She craved the feeling of those rivulets of seawater that coursed down their arms. She saw the sparkling little liquid spheres caught in their eyelashes and wondered what it felt like to look through a scrim of water drops. Like glistening travelers from far away, the children climbed from the harbor onto the wharf, carrying their souvenirs from another world. The streamlets of water that traced patterns on their shoulders, the twinkling drops in their eyelashes, the rime of salt that formed on their skin as the children baked themselves dry in the sun --- these were their keepsakes, their mementos, their artifacts from that lovely and mysterious underwater world.

But could May join them? Never. Swimming was the one subject on which her father and mother agreed.

Zeeba objected because "normal" girls didn't swim. But a few did. May had seen them jumping off the dock in their petticoats. There was no use arguing with her parents, however.

Her father seemed genuinely fearful of her swimming. "Your mother's right, de-ah. Swimming never brought anybody any good. Bad for your lungs. My uncle, he went overboard. Was only in the water for a minute, no more, and was never the same again." Gar would not permit her to even wade on the beach of the calm inlet on the back side of Egg Rock Island where the sea furrowed in.

May stole a glance up from her mending and regarded her parents. They both sat in thick shadows. Until they could get to the mainland for oil, the Plums could only use one lamp in the kitchen. It was against the regulations of the lighthouse service board to use its high-quality kerosene for domestic purposes. They were running low on ordinary lamp oil, and since May was doing the darning she got the light. But she did have schoolbooks she wanted to read. Those had to be read in daylight only. "Can't waste light on books!" That was Zeeba's constant refrain. The only book that light was wasted on was the Bible. That was the single exception.

School had been May's only escape from the lighthouse and the unceasing narrative of Zeeba's illnesses. But before the storm set in her mother had had a bad spell with her stomach and insisted that May stay home from school in Bar Harbor, on the big island of Mount Desert, for most of the past month. Then just when her mother was feeling better the storm hit so it was impossible for her father to take her in the skiff, even though it was a short sail. She would be behind in everything! And whenever she did open her books, Zeeba seemed to resent it. It wasn't simply what she said that suggested her irritation with "book learning," as Zeeba called it, but her dark glances, the little snorts that issued forth every time May sat down to read or try to do arithmetic problems in the math book. She had a peculiar way of staring at her, staring at May so hard it felt as if Zeeba's eyes were drilling through her. And they did. They wrecked her concentration. She couldn't believe how many mistakes she had made in a simple set of fractions. It was useless to be in the same room with her mother when she was trying to do homework.

But May couldn't wait to get back to school even if she was behind in every subject. If only Zeeba wouldn't get sick again! She glanced at her mother and then at the lamp. Meanwhile, the storm continued to rage outside, sealing them off more completely than ever from the big island of Mount Desert. The mail boat had not come out for days now. Too rough. Not that May ever received a letter. Still, it was nice to go down to the pier when Captain Weed delivered her parents' mail.

The stifling predictability of her life in this house, on this drear and forlorn rockbound tiny island in a boiling sea, was almost too much. Why had it begun to grate on her so intensely these last few months?

She had lived with it all her life, but right now she felt as if she could not stand another minute.

Excerpted from DAUGHTERS OF THE SEA: MAY © Copyright 2011 by Kathryn Lasky. Reprinted with permission by Scholastic Press

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