The Lightkeepers (8 page)

11

Y
OU AND
I binge-watched crime shows one winter. I had just turned thirteen. D.C. was an unpleasant place that year, a wasteland of icy pavement and billowing wind. Rain fell by the bucketload. Snow carpeted the parked cars. You and I sheltered on the couch, bowl of popcorn at the ready, watching episodes about cops and crime scene investigators. We would argue about whether the D.A. was on the take, which suspect had committed the violent act, whether the unwholesome brother-in-law might be hiding something. Usually these shows dealt with murder, but sometimes they would shift over to rape.

The attack itself was never handled with sensitivity. You would cover my eyes during the worst of it, but I was still able to get the gist. There was always too much exposed flesh, the camera lingering on a T-shirt being ripped off, lacy lingerie tossed to the floor. You used to comment that it was unsettling and exploitative. Invariably, when the assault was over, the victim would dash into the shower. Even as a child, I found this irritating. Everybody knew about DNA. Everybody knew to go to the hospital, where the nurses would get out the rape kit and find all the evidence written on the body. But no—that would have been too simple. If the victim
had behaved logically, the show would have been over in ten minutes. Instead, she would crouch, shivering, in the shower, scrubbing beneath her fingernails where her attacker’s skin cells had collected when she scratched him. She would shove the sheets into the washing machine. She would burn the clothes she had been wearing. In the end, it would be up to the police, our heroes, to verify her story by interviewing witnesses and double-checking alibis.

That was how things struck me back then. But now I know better.

My first clear memory after the act is of sitting in the tub, clutching a sea sponge in both hands. A cold sprinkle pattered my shoulders. There was only one bathroom in the cabin, and the shower had plainly been tacked on as an afterthought, held to the wall by a suction cup. That night, there was no hot water. We had used it up doing dishes earlier. The frigid stream was peppered with flakes of rust. My teeth were chattering. My fingers were so numb that it was hard to manage the sponge. If someone had asked me what I was doing, I am not sure what I would have answered. Some powerful internal instinct had taken over, and all I could do was obey. Cleanliness. Safety. A rite of purification. A little more soap.

When I climbed out, my lips were ghost-blue in the mirror. It looked as though I had aged a hundred years. I stumbled to the toilet and threw up. I voided dinner, then lunch, then breakfast. I sank to the floor and vomited until the sides of my stomach banged together. It felt good to flush that mess away, watching it swirl down the drain.

I
BARELY REMEMBER
the days that followed. By morning, I had come down with a roaring fever. I can tell you this much: I was out of my mind.

The Farallon Islands were not designed for illness. Cuts and bruises, yes. Colds, no. There was no medicine in the cabinets. Our stock of aspirin had expired. I was too sick to go foraging anyway. I lay beneath the covers, limp and bewildered. The light through the blinds was a knife in the temple. The others had no sympathy at all. Galen and Forest refused to get anywhere near me. Even Charlene only poked her head in to flash a cheery grin, maintaining a safe distance.

It was Mick who kept me going. Without him, I probably would have died of malnutrition, dehydration, and loneliness. But he was tireless in his compassion. He came rushing to my aid, toting crackers and soup. He laid his calloused hand on my forehead and assured me that I would be better in no time.

For three days, I did not leave my room. Part of this was the illness—I was almost too weak to stand—but the greater part was Andrew. He had not varied his routine one bit. He was everywhere. He was always in the cabin. I heard him typing. I heard him in his bedroom right below me, humming as he flipped through a book. I heard him in the kitchen laughing with the others. If anything, his spirits seemed lightened.

I cannot explain what it was like to be so close to him. I might as well have been a rabbit trapped in a burrow. All the runs leading straight into the fox’s mouth. The fear was overwhelming. Even Mick noticed something amiss. A window would bang shut in another room, and I would jump out of my skin. The only solution
I could come up with was to hide. For those three days, I did not shower. I did not even visit the bathroom. Instead, I made use of the old, dusty bottles and jars that had been scattered around my bedroom for decades. I would fill a glass container with amber liquid, which Mick, believe it or not, obligingly disposed of.

Looking back, I must conclude that Mick was raised by women, rather than men. A pack of three sisters, perhaps. A single mother, maybe. Somebody had taught him the kind of benevolent unselfishness that most women are schooled, in childhood, to offer unquestioningly—and few men ever attain. Throughout my illness, Mick was unflinchingly heroic. He sat on the end of the bed and watched me, making sure I ate my soup. He told me silly jokes to keep my spirits up.

On the third day, my fever spiked. Mick stayed close, bathing my brow with a cool washcloth and wrestling the covers back onto the bed whenever I threw them off. After a while I grew delirious. I shuddered and wept. I told him that I was scared. I said it over and over:
I’m scared, I’m scared
. It seemed vital that he understand this simple fact, yet I could not be sure I was making myself clear. Mick hurried out to soak the washcloth in cool water again. He stroked my hair. He told me that anyone who tried to hurt me would have to go through him first.

“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Don’t worry, Mel. I’ll handle it.”

O
N THE THIRD
night, I ran away. Mick had left me alone, tucking me in and heading off to do a bit of note-taking in the daily log. I
lay beneath the quilt, staring out the window in a daze. Throughout my illness, I had continually lost time. It reminded me of the aftermath of your funeral—days torn from the calendar. I would blink and find that an hour had gone by. I would inhale and exhale, and in that instant, the sky would darken. Now I watched the clouds billowing across the horizon, moving with the speed of stop-motion video. The wind brushed the glass.

And then I heard it. A moan. A squeal of bedsprings. A gusty sigh. Andrew and Lucy were having sex downstairs.

I limped down the hall to the bathroom. I leaned over the toilet, attempting to throw up again, but nothing happened. I shuffled back to my room. I was weak enough that even this little jaunt exhausted me. Still, without pause, I bundled myself up under half a dozen sweaters. I hummed under my breath to block out any ambient sounds that might drift up through the floorboards. Gripping the banister, I descended the stairs. I left the cabin through the front door.

Even at the time, I was aware that this was a terrible idea. We all had been warned so many times. It was easy to get turned around at night on Southeast Farallon. The cabin and the coast guard house were not useful landmarks—dark shapes against a dark sky. The swiveling beam of the lighthouse was inconstant, disorienting. The roar of the sea came undistinguished from every point of the compass. There was no paved path. Many of the biologists had been injured, dislocating a knee or fracturing a wrist. I myself had been gutted by a sharp stone, and that was in broad daylight. I still bore the scar. Once, an intern had become so befuddled that he had spent an entire night hunched beside a boulder, unable to locate the
cabin again, unwilling to imperil himself further by abandoning the meager shelter he had found. He had nearly succumbed to hypothermia before Galen discovered him the next morning.

And, of course, there were people who had disappeared. In the old days, when the eggers and pirates had overrun the islands, one or two men had vanished every season. They would go for a walk and were never seen again.

After a few minutes, I started shivering. There was a mist in the air, collecting against my skin like gauze. The moon was bright that night, bathing the flat surfaces in a blue glow. I thought I saw a figure ahead of me. It seemed to be moving toward the coast guard house. I squinted, my heart beginning to pound. But the shape melted away. There was no one else on the grounds. The fog often played tricks like this on the mind, tangling the moonlight in bright pockets, coating the air in planes of iridescent sheen.

During my time on the islands, I had, for the most part, ignored the coast guard house, as everyone did. Though it stood only a hundred feet from the cabin, a duplicate of our own home, we all left it alone, treating it like an optical illusion—a mirage in the desert, to be seen but not touched. Mick had told me that it wasn’t safe to try the porch steps of this ancient structure, let alone go inside. The floorboards would be rotten after so many years. Even the animals gave the place a wide berth. During the summer months, the gulls nested all over the islands, pitching camp on any free inch of grass. But they did not attempt to penetrate the coast guard house. Only the bats were bold enough to claim those empty rooms and eerie silences for their own.

Now I pushed the door open with a groan of hinges. The floor was spongy beneath my feet. My arrival disturbed the bats, who launched themselves into flight, filling the air with their frenetic wingbeats. The rooms were clean of furniture. A crumpled piece of fabric lay on the floor. It looked a bit like one of Forest’s ratty undershirts. The air had a stale quality, like the interior of a cave. I shut the door behind me. At once, I felt better. There is something fundamental in the desire to have a door to close, sealing out the rest of the world.

The exertion of my brief walk had left me dizzy. I was seeing spots. I sat down cross-legged. A bat flitted past my cheek. There were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. I could not quite see them—gray on black—but I could feel their bustle and flutter. They whirled like an indoor tornado. A swollen moon dangled above the horizon. The beam of the lighthouse swept across the sea. I listened to the pounding of the waves. I smelled mildew and rot. Nature was reclaiming the coast guard house. Mice and insects were in the process of destroying it.

There was a sound. I could not identify it—somewhere between a violin and a siren. It reverberated around the room, then dissipated. It reminded me of something, but I did not have time to consider the matter. The energy of the bats was increasing. They were moving fast, rocketing past my body, clipping me with their wings, brushing my cheek. They touched me over and over.

The bats began to rise. It happened all at once, as though they had received a command. I could see them spiraling upward in a column of smoky gray. Their wings shook the air. Everything
seemed to be vibrating. My mouth was open. My palms burned. I watched the flock pour out through a broken window. Their numbers were enough to blacken the stars. They erased the moon.

Then I heard the sound again. A call. A keening.

It was the whales. This time I recognized their music. The breeze came through the window, battering my hair out of my face. The bats swirled inside the gust. I could not get my bearings. I could not catch my breath. The harmony grew louder and louder until it thundered in my ears. The coast guard house seemed to be moving around me, or else I was moving inside it. For a moment I thought I was underwater. I screamed. My voice was lost in the song. I could feel the waves crashing over me—or the wind—or the bats. I thought the whales were there too. Something was surging in the darkness, sending out pulses of noise and motion. Massive bodies rolling in the tide. Their flippers disarranging the swell of the surf, knocking me off balance. Their tails scooping holes in the material of the world. They were coming for me. Their music made my body tremble, struck like a tuning fork. The sound was mournful and otherworldly, almost human, like a cry of pleasure or pain.

I must have dozed off. Maybe I fainted. When I came to, the coast guard house was empty and dark. In the stillness, I was alone.

12

I
MIGHT EVENTUALLY HAVE
made a more concerted break for freedom. I might have pushed the rowboat out on my own and headed for the mainland. (The
Janus
would have been smarter, but I could never have started that motor without aid.) I might have told someone what had happened. I might have told Mick, however daunting it would be, stepping into the bright glare of a spotlight, all my wounds exposed. I might have smashed Andrew’s head in with a rock. I might have leapt from my bedroom window, like a dewy chick tumbling from the cliff’s edge, not yet able to fly.

But on the morning of the fourth day, everything changed.

The sun was high when I awoke. Dimly, I was aware of some kind of disturbance. For a moment I thought I was still in the coast guard house—but no, during the night I had made it back somehow. My fever was undiminished. Sweating beneath the blankets, I slid in and out of a hot, honey-colored dream. A persistent banging roused me. Someone was hammering on my bedroom door.

“Get up!” Mick shouted. “Galen wants all hands on deck.”

“I’m too sick,” I called back.

The door flew open, and Mick strode into the room. He looked even larger than usual today, his girth increased by a heavy vest.

“Get up,” he said. “We need you.”

He gazed down at me for a moment. Then he yanked the covers away. I shrieked as he hefted me out of bed. Boots were shoved over my pajamas. He tugged a sweater onto my torso. Before I could gather my wits, he had frog-marched me out of the room and down the stairs. My heart was thumping so wildly that I thought I might pass out. A shape flicked by—I almost screamed—but it was only Charlene, wrapping a scarf around her neck as she raced out the front door. Her expression was grave.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Something at Sea Pigeon Gulch,” Mick said. “I don’t know what. I just heard Galen yelling. Something bad.”

Out on the slope, I felt like an overstimulated newborn, startled by the most ordinary things. The sun was too big and bright. The wind was a bucket of ice water, upended over my head. Mick kept his arm looped through mine, preventing me from bolting. In the distance, I saw the coast guard house bobbing along as I stumbled forward. Maybe I could head back there now, shut the door behind me, and never come out again.

A group was gathered at the water’s edge. Sea Pigeon Gulch was a tiny inlet, a crevice with high, granite walls. The sun never shone into that cold gorge. My heart was now pounding hard enough that it interfered with my vision. At the crescendo of each beat, the world danced a little.

Mick picked up the pace, frowning. Forest turned and grimaced at us. He lifted a hand. It was a strange, indeterminate gesture, as though he were waving us away and summoning us onward simultaneously.

“I’m not sure you should—” he called, then paused. “It might be better for you to . . . Or else maybe . . .”

I was surprised; I had never seen him at a loss for words before. After a moment, he turned helplessly to Galen.

“Let them come,” Galen said.

Mick broke into a run. He let go of my hand. In his wake, I lost my balance and stumbled. Lucy was on her knees, rocking back and forth. As I watched, she gave a high-pitched, inhuman sound, an ambulance’s wail. Charlene crouched beside her, but Lucy batted away her embrace. Charlene, too, was wiping away tears.

“Oh, no,” Mick said, gazing into the gorge. “Oh, man.”

I moved forward slowly. It was an odd sensation. I did not seem to be walking, but rather drifting on a current, carried inexorably toward the shore. Galen stepped aside to let me pass. The stone opened outward in a jagged vee. Inside, the sea was dark and frothy, sucking at the walls.

There was someone in the water. Facedown. The waves jiggled him from side to side, his arms and fingers bobbing on the wash. I stared for a while, making sure. I knew that rangy frame all too well, the marble skin, the broad shoulders. He had been in the water long enough that he did not look completely human anymore. He might have been a clever simulacrum—a blow-up doll or a crash-test dummy. His blond hair was disfigured by dirt and blood. For once, he was not wearing his red stocking cap. Squinting closer, I saw a nasty wound on the back of his skull. His pants were torn. His ankle looked swollen. Andrew wore only one shoe.