The Lightkeepers (14 page)

L
ATER THAT DAY
, Oliver appeared in the living room. Lucy set his aquarium on the coffee table, right by my usual reading spot. I reacted to this change with a combination of revulsion and fascination. I was drawn to the octopus as though he were a car accident or a dead bird on the sidewalk: gross, scary, and spellbinding.

Since that day, my interest has overcome my fear. My initial distaste remains unabated—I would not, for example, ever touch the octopus or pick him up—but I often watch him at play. Oliver is always on the move. His goal is to escape or die trying. Before my eyes, he has explored every inch of his tank, coiling his tentacles upward to palpate the screen that fences him in from above. He has eyed me accusingly through the glass. I am intrigued by his skin.
He can mimic the mottled brown of the pebbles at the bottom of the tank. When he is angry—and he is often angry—he turns a deep crimson. He is able to change more than his color, too. He can roughen his mantle until it looks like coral. He can make his flesh glisten like silk.

It has taken me a while to understand his shape. The eyes poke up on stalks, each pupil a black, horizontal bar. But the bulbous sac beneath these organs is not, as I originally suspected, his nose. It is, in fact, his body, a squishy balloon that comprises his lungs and stomach. The mouth is hidden at the center of a pinwheel of tentacles. There is a beak in there somewhere. There is venom in that beak. I have done a little reading on the subject, finding an old, battered copy of a Jacques Cousteau manifesto on one of the shelves. Leafing through the pages, I have learned that octopuses are clever. They are more intelligent than dogs. They possess extraordinary powers of disguise. A dead octopus, if moved from a dark surface to a lighter one, will gradually pale, attempting to camouflage itself from beyond the grave.

Watching Oliver, I have learned still more. Lucy has put a rock in his tank, a rudimentary shelter, and Oliver will dig beneath it, scooping armfuls of pebbles to one side. Then he will pour his body into the hole he has made. Gradually he will alter his color and texture, becoming invisible by degrees. When Lucy taps three times on the lid, however—a signal to indicate mealtime—he will balloon upward, a rabbit conjured out of a hat.

I think he has a sense of humor. For a while, Lucy kept a lamp trained on him during the day, an extra measure of heat. But one
afternoon, Oliver grew tired of the constant glare. I was on the couch at the time, watching him over the top of my book. Oliver sucked in a mouthful of water. He spouted it upward in a stream, right through the mesh lid. There was a burst of smoke, an acrid smell, and the lamp shorted out.

W
E HELD THE
Secret Santa a few days before Christmas. As it turned out, not everyone would be present for the holiday itself. Mick, Lucy, and Forest were all planning to return to their homes for a much-needed vacation.

In the morning, we gathered in the living room. I had pulled Lucy’s name out of the hat, which was awkward for me. I considered insisting that I be allowed to pick again, or maybe cornering Mick and begging him to trade. In the end, however, I decided to make a few small presents for Oliver. I saved and squirreled away anything I could picture the octopus playing with in the quiet space of his tank. Now, with everyone watching, Lucy opened my explanatory note, then unwrapped a chain of paperclips, a tiny glass jar, and a ruby-red marble. She lifted each object into the air and examined it. She got to her feet and gave me a one-armed hug, her body as stiff as a board. I honestly couldn’t tell whether she was pleased.

The rest of the gifts were similarly makeshift. A shell pendant on a length of twine. A sand dollar. One of Forest’s shark sketches, stuck into a picture frame that had been salvaged from the mantel-piece. Galen offered up a seal stone—a dark, smooth orb, as heavy as a meteorite. (He has a collection of them in a bucket in his room,
amassed over years on the islands.) Mick was the worst. He gave Charlene a can of tuna. There was a great deal of laughter. At lunch that day, Galen wore his new necklace with pride. Charlene insisted upon eating her tuna as a side dish. The conversation was light. Mick, Lucy, and Forest would be leaving as soon as Captain Joe arrived, and they chatted eagerly about what they were looking forward to. For the first time, they were people with somewhere else to go.

20

A
ND NOW THERE
are three. Charlene, Galen, and I are rattling around Southeast Farallon alone. The temperature has dropped and the wind has picked up—an awful combination. I have found myself envying the elephant seals. They frolic in the icy ocean, bundled up beneath layers of blubber.

Galen appears to be equally immune. He often goes for long walks. I will see him through the window, a dandelion of a man, lean and rangy, topped by a plume of silver. He will wander across Marine Terrace and stroll toward Mussel Flat. Eventually he will disappear on the slopes of Lighthouse Hill. I get the feeling that he is looking for something out there. What, I can’t imagine.

Even among the other biologists here, Galen is unique. He has been on the archipelago for a decade. No one else has ever come close to staying so long. Most people average a couple years at most. What’s more, Galen has never once, in all that time, returned to the mainland—not for a day, not for an hour. This is unusual in the extreme. The others voyage home at regular intervals for the sake of their own sanity. But Galen’s sticking power is legendary. I have heard all about it. Forest, Mick, and Lucy have spun yarns about him, like campfire stories.

Galen does not travel to his hometown for the holidays. He does not take weekends in San Francisco. He has even refused to return to the continent for medical care. Periodically, of course, he has suffered sprains, colds, even pneumonia. Mick took Galen’s temperature once, then begged him to call a helicopter and head straight to the hospital. But Galen demurred. Instead, in a creaking voice interspersed with coughing, he described his symptoms over the radiophone. Captain Joe was dispatched with medicine on board the ferry. (This was a few years ago; Mick told us all about it long after the fact.) Once, Galen broke his wrist while at work on the
Janus
. He marched away to the cabin, set the bone himself. An hour later, wearing a homemade cast, he headed back to work. Once, while in the kitchen preparing dinner, he got word on the radiophone that his brother had passed away. (This was Forest’s story; he had been with Galen at the time, way back when, and he shared it with the rest of us recently, in a whisper.) The funeral took place somewhere on the mainland. But Galen did not attend. Instead, on the morning his brother was put in the ground, he spent the hours in the lighthouse alone, walking back and forth and staring to the east, as though with a little effort he could see all the way to the cemetery.

Yet Galen’s motivation has always been a mystery. He has appointed himself Lord High Protector of the Farallon Islands, and in keeping with such a weighty title, he has cut himself off entirely from the rest of the world. None of the others have taken their isolation to this extent. They still keep in touch with their families. They head home for big events. They take the time to return to normal life, however briefly.

Even I am not so far gone. I send the occasional postcard to my father. I write letters to you.

O
VER THE LAST
few days, Charlene and I have bonded. Entombed in a wasteland of rain and mist. Miles from the nearest Christmas tree. We have taken to huddling together on the couch, tucked beneath the blankets we have scavenged from the beds of the biologists now on the mainland. We will play double solitaire or flip through one of Lucy’s bird books, our heads close, trying in vain to glean the differences between the fourteen identical varieties of sparrow listed there. Recently, in a fit of energy, we even got out all the jigsaw puzzles hidden in the back closet. We took over the table, though it soon became clear that each puzzle was missing a significant number of pieces. Undaunted, Charlene and I worked on, overlapping the disparate images in a patchwork quilt—a dolphin’s tail next to a leafy stretch of forest next to a fragment of one of Van Gogh’s masterpieces. When Galen returned hours later, his nose and ears charred red from the chill, we presented him with a frenetic, disconcerting collage: an image put together by a madman.

Throughout the week, Charlene has been sad. I have heard a lot about her family. At Christmas, they chop down a tree together. There is popcorn to be strung, and eggnog to be spiked, and carols to be sung to the neighbors. Though Charlene and her siblings are all in their twenties now, they are still expected to leave out milk and cookies for Santa, which their father will sample during the night, leaving a few crumbs on the plate. Like me, Charlene is too
broke to go home this year. As an intern, she can’t even send presents to her family, let alone manage a plane ticket. In my case, the income I have scrounged together has absolutely no wiggle room for luxuries. Room and board are covered, but vacations are outside my scope.

I don’t mind. The islands are where I want to be.

A few days ago, on an icy morning, Charlene and I decided to clean the cabin. Galen had disappeared right after dawn, throwing on a hat and fishing his binoculars out of the bureau. Charlene swept, and I mopped. She dusted, and I wiped down the windows. All the time, however, she was acting peculiar. As we beat the dust out of the rugs, as we scrubbed the kitchen sink, she kept turning to me, pausing, then moving away again. Clearly there was something on her mind.

The fourth time she did this, we were itemizing the contents of the bathroom cabinet. The trouble with having so many roommates is that nothing ever gets thrown away. Everyone assumes that a razor or bar of soap belongs to someone else. Over the seasons, the cabinet has become a museum of relics: moldy cotton swabs, fossilized tubes of toothpaste, empty boxes of dental floss. I tossed an entire collection of plastic combs into the trash. Charlene glanced at me and started to speak. Then she shook her head, frowning.

“Let’s take a break,” I said.

We headed down the stairs—which were gleaming, by the way—and sat on the couch, piling quilts over ourselves. Through the window, the sea had been churned into a mess of whitecaps, as frothy as whipped cream. Oliver’s aquarium appeared to be empty,
but I knew better. He was biding his time, pretending to be pebbles and glass. The radiator clanked in the corner, trying in vain to cope with the breeze. Charlene’s brow was furrowed.

“Get it off your chest,” I said. “Whatever it is. You’ll feel better.”

“It’s nothing. It’s probably nothing.”

I waited. She glanced around, then leaned in. This amused me. It would be hard to find two people who were less likely to be overheard than we were.

“I know something,” she said softly.

“Oh?”

“It’s a little weird.” She paused, biting her lip. “It’s about Andrew.”

His name caught me off guard. A ripple of nausea passed through me. Blinking rapidly, I fixed my gaze on the window I had just washed. The glass glowed with a pale, crystalline light.

“The night he died,” Charlene said, “I heard something.”

I sucked in a breath, my eyes lifted. In the corner of the windowpane, I noticed a spider web I had unaccountably missed.

“My room is next to the front door,” Charlene said. “I hear all kinds of things. If anybody goes anywhere, I know about it. When I first got here—God!—I didn’t sleep at all. Lucy would be vacuuming until ten, and Galen would be at the table, writing in that little green notebook of his and clearing his throat constantly. When I finally dropped off, Forest would wake me at four in the morning. You know how loud he can be.” She sighed. “Four in the morning. Running down the stairs. Yelling at the top of his lungs. Slamming every door in the house.”

Still, I said nothing. The spider web swayed in a draft. The radiator clanked one last time, then fizzled to a halt, and the room was silent.

Undeterred, Charlene went on. “I can sleep through most things now, unless it’s unusual. If it’s a noise I’m expecting, like Lucy singing in her sleep or somebody looking for a book in the living room, I don’t wake up. I’m used to that stuff. But that night—the night Andrew—”

She broke off. In spite of myself, I met her gaze. Her face was suffused with color now, her cheeks burning. I swallowed hard.

“Tell me,” I said. “What did you hear?”

“I heard someone leaving,” she said. “Around eleven. I thought it was Mick and Forest. They do that sometimes. Go out together, I mean.”

Her gaze slipped to the side.

“Anyway,” she went on hurriedly, “I fell asleep after that. It gets a little confused . . . There was something. A small noise, very soft. I might have imagined it. Or maybe it was an animal. I fell asleep again.”

That was me, I thought. Me leaving the cabin. I was the small noise. Charlene was fiddling absently with a lock of rust-colored hair. Her voice was low and musical, almost chanting.

“Then I heard Andrew,” she said. “I heard him go outside. I remember lying in bed, listening. Somebody was on the porch. I heard footsteps. It took me a while to be certain. He coughed. I knew Andrew’s cough. And then—” Charlene paused, eyes closed. “And then I heard voices.”

“Voices?”

“That’s right. Andrew was talking to someone.”

The full weight of what she was saying seemed to crash over me in a wave. No one should have been outside with Andrew. He had been alone on the grounds. He had lost his footing alone. He had died alone.

“I’m sure of it,” she said. “I know what I heard. Two voices.”

“But who was the other person?”

Charlene let out a long, slow breath. “I don’t know. I just know it wasn’t Andrew. He was out there with somebody else.”

21

Y
OU ALWAYS LOVED
fairy tales. On quiet evenings, on lazy Saturday mornings, I was accustomed to curling up at your side with
Hansel and Gretel
or
The Little Mermaid
. You did not incline, however, toward the more modern interpretations with their happy endings, everything comforting and sanitary. You were not interested in a version of
Little Red Riding Hood
in which no one got eaten, or a variant of
Cinderella
in which the wicked stepmother and her daughters repented and were forgiven.

Instead I heard about Ariel, the mermaid who was given the gift of life on land, the ability to breathe air, and two human legs—for a terrible price. Everywhere she went, for the rest of time, she felt as though she were stepping on shards of broken glass. In your favorite take on
The Pied Piper
, the flute player did not lead the children away from their homes, only to return them again to their jubilant parents. Instead, he guided them all into the river to drown. In your version of
Cinderella
, the wicked stepmother was never offered forgiveness. She came to Cinderella’s wedding feast, where a pair of iron shoes was clapped onto her feet, red-hot from sitting in the fire. In those shoes, she was forced to dance until she dropped down dead.

These days, I wonder whether you may have been onto something. Modern fairy tales have been altered, over the years, to
paint a picture of a safe and ordered world. There is magic in these stories, to be sure—witches, ogres, and giants. And yet, even the supernatural takes its place in the greater scheme of things, the moral arrangement of life. Virtue is rewarded, malice punished. Good people prosper; bad people do not. In the newest version of
Sleeping Beauty
, the benevolent fairies are recompensed for their integrity, living a charmed existence. The more enigmatic witch of
The Snow Queen
, on the other hand, suffers to a certain extent, yet survives. And the most evil creatures of all, like the hag in
Hansel and Gretel
—monsters who lie and cheat and have a penchant for cannibalism—are slain without mercy. In modern fairy tales, karma is a bitch.

But you had no time for such whitewashed fables. You preferred stories that were chaotic and enigmatic. The world of your fairy tales—though magical—showed the world as it actually is. Secrets flourish undiscovered. Loved ones die. Danger is not always perceptible. Evil goes unpunished. There is no order; there is no safety. I believe this is what you were trying to tell me.

I
HAVEN
’
T THOUGHT
much about my conversation with Charlene. I have not wanted to consider it. And yet, against my will, it has never been far from my mind. It is like a bright light in the corner of the room—too bright to look at directly. Though I have been keeping my gaze averted, I am still aware of that uncomfortable glow.

I know what she was suggesting. I have even dreamed about it. Andrew on the rocks, facing the sea. His skin agleam. His breath
steaming the air. A dark figure behind him, rising up. Stone in hand. I have heard the grunt of pain. I have seen the splash of blood. I have watched Andrew’s body tumble down.

What I have decided, finally, is that Charlene was wrong. Charlene was mistaken. The cabin is old. Sounds carry unaccountably between the rooms through the pipes and heating grates; I have noticed it before. Once, as I was sitting at the table, I realized that I could hear Lucy gargling in the bathroom upstairs as clear as a bell, while in the kitchen the bang of pots and pans seemed muffled. On the night in question, something similar could have happened. Charlene might have heard Andrew on the porch, along with Mick and Forest murmuring in their bedroom. She might have conflated two different events: footsteps
outside
the house, voices
inside
the house.

Or perhaps it was the ghost. I have dreamed about this too. Andrew slinking along the shoreline in the moonlight. A shimmer in the air beside him. A woman’s figure. Her body solidifying out of the mist and rain—out of nothing. I have seen the haze of her nightgown. I have seen the swing of one pale arm.

M
ICK CAME BACK
today, along with Lucy and Forest. This caught me off guard. It is hard to keep track of time on the islands. Calendars, clocks—these things seem so arbitrary. An artificial construct. There is a timelessness about this place. The seasons are measured not by a variation in the weather but by a variation in the animals. Winter is when the whales and seals breed. Summer is
Bird Season. Autumn belongs to the sharks. Night does not follow day, not really—that would imply that one occurs before the other. Instead, day and night are a great wave, beginning at the base, the bright dawn, and sweeping up through the long golden afternoon to crest in the evening and crash down again into darkness, where the cycle begins anew. Time on the islands has become, for me, self-contained and unchanging.

And so, this morning I missed any number of clues that something was going on. To begin with, I slept through the early call on the radiophone. (Before Andrew, I had always awoken with the birds. Now, though, After Andrew, I was as fatigued and somnolent as a teenager.) During breakfast, I didn’t happen to glance out the window and see the ferry approaching the islands. I didn’t observe Galen slipping out to meet the boat when it dropped anchor. I didn’t even hear the voices carrying on the wind from East Landing, where Lucy, Forest, and Mick had been deposited by the Billy Pugh, breathing in the salt air with smiles on their faces. During all this time, I was lying on the couch, leafing through a book on pinnipeds. When I heard a clatter, I shot a look at Oliver the octopus, who was floating in his tank, his skin a delicate mauve.

There was a crash, and the front door flew open.

“Woo-hoo!” Mick shouted. “Home at last. Thank the lord!”

I had forgotten how very big he was. In two strides, he had crossed the room. I found myself being swung in a circle like a rag doll. The walls pivoted around me. When he set me down, I stumbled and almost fell. Mick laughed and planted a kiss on the top of my head.

“I missed my little mouse girl,” he said. His gaze wandered down my frame, drinking me in. As he stared at my torso, I saw his brow furrow quizzically for a moment. Then, however, Charlene came hurrying out of the kitchen in an apron, her arms sudsy and glistening from washing dishes.

“Hey, you!” she cried. “I thought to myself, either there’s a herd of elephants in the cabin, or Mick is back.”

T
HAT EVENING
, L
UCY
took Oliver out of his tank. She played with him, transferring him from hand to hand, wetting the floor. She seemed to be lost in pure delight, as if she had missed him terribly during her time away. She, Forest, and Mick were all in this state—so happy to be back on the islands they were almost weightless. The mainland had been a fine respite, but they had all talked about the shell shock of returning, however briefly, to civilized life. Forest had been on the islands for five years, Mick almost as long. Lucy, a little younger, had come here straight out of college, a year or so ago, dragging Andrew in her wake. Since their arrival, all of them had voyaged home to the mainland now and again. Each time was the same. They would be baffled by the sheer quantity of land, our blue planet replaced by a carpet of grass and concrete. They would be unsettled by commonplace things. Fire hydrants. Central heating. A car horn. The gleam of jewelry. The sugary odor of a bakery on the breeze. The squeal of a bicycle braking. They would find themselves out of step, out of place: waking too early, eating at the wrong time of day, overloaded by the simple fact of a telephone
ringing. They would return to the islands like elephant seals reentering the ocean. Back in their natural habitat. Back where they belonged.

I was sitting on the couch, the others distributed around the living room, all of us watching Lucy as she lifted the octopus high. She rolled him down one arm, giggling at his confusion. Oliver flashed through a rainbow of colors. His suckers wriggled and groped, trying to find purchase on her sleeve.

I turned to Mick, who was seated at my side.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought you weren’t supposed to interfere with the animals here. Not ever. Isn’t that the biologist’s credo?”

I meant this to be an aside, a private exchange. But the room was quiet, and everyone turned to look at me. Lucy flushed.

“I study
birds
,” she snapped. “Does Oliver look like a bird to you?”

“No,” I said.

“He’s a pet,” she said. “Pets are different.”

She glared at me a moment longer, then stomped over to the aquarium and plunged the octopus into the water with a vicious movement. He sank, ballooning outward, changing shape. His tentacles glittered with bubbles.