by Amanda Dykes
Over the months, layers had peeled away from the boy, revealing emerging gifts. Leadership—the way he organized the motley crew of them. He’d plant his hands at his sides, narrow his eyes in the way that told the rest of them sparks were going off like fireworks in his head, then being lassoed into order and sense. He’d set out a plan for the day in his quiet and humble way—not demanding power or stepping on what Bob already had in place, but instead coming in and completing it. Learning fast from Bob how to try the stones, lay them out on the ground like puzzle pieces with their handpicked mates, ready to be set in their homes when the time came.
It never ceased to amaze Bob how a rock from one corner of the world, broken and cleaved by time or trauma, held just the right angles, curves, ridges to fit side by side with a stone from the opposite side of the world. William marveled at this, too, and made Bob’s science of it into an art form. Checking colors, patterns, light-catching properties for the strongest, most breathtaking effect possible. Watching him was like witnessing a rebirth. His fervor was contagious.
He’d taken to spending nights in the boathouse. There was an old potbelly stove there that had warmed the place when it was Roy’s workshop, so while the winter air crept in to frost the beams each night, William slept on a cot by the stove, content to be where his dad had spent his own time creating, measuring, planning. The light would stay on out there till all hours, just as it had with Roy, and the far wall became a working schematic board of sketches and outlines, pinned to the old wood. And more than that, a tribute to the lives. He’d begun to organize and catalogue the letters, photographs, and stories that had accompanied the rocks. Bob had looked in a few times but couldn’t follow the intricacies of William’s sorting. He’s a genius at work, bringing order to chaos. Eva keeps him in steaming hot chocolate, made with milk from the neighbor’s cow and her secret ingredient, freshly grated nutmeg.
Six days before Christmas, the three of them are walking along the harbor in town, bundles in hand and Eva’s cheeks aglow, eyes framed in laugh lines. She is more beautiful every day, increasing years only adding to her grace and spark. Broader of shoulder than when he’d first come, William takes his lanky form off to the post office and deposits a red envelope into the slot on the door.
Eva elbows him when he returns. “For Anneliese?” His quick grin answers. Letters fly between the two every week, and Bob had stumbled on calendar markings, tallying days until the coming July, when the girl would return to the Gables. If William has anything to do with it, she’ll return and never leave. There’ll be a ring in the offing, Bob wagers.
Back home, supplies stored up in the cupboards and tree hauled into the sitting room, they spend an evening draping its boughs in strings of cranberry. Frost-sweetened and harvested last month from the bogs a few towns over, only the smallest of the ruby-red fruits have been spared the kitchen to adorn the tree.
Like most of Ansel, they still hold to the old tradition of candles on the tree, lit only for a few carols, a person on standby with a pitcher of water. No one had ever had fire to answer to as a result, but they all took care. There was no end to what fire could do in these parts, as they knew so well from 1947. “The Year Maine Burned,” they all called it, and it sent shivers down spines.
All is calm this night—supper, singing with Eva’s stumbling piano playing, and bellies full of Mom’s hazelnut pie, a recipe Eva had resurrected with much more grace than her attempts at the piano. William stokes embers in the hearth to that perfect warmth where the coals sing like chimes.
“Stay,” Eva says, as William jackets himself to head into the night. It’s snowing, and potbelly stove or not, it’ll be cold in the boathouse. “That bedroom’s just going to waste up there.”
William could never say no to Eva. The bond they’ve formed since his arrival had done things to Bob’s soul. A son he’d never been able to give her. An unexpected mother after losing one so dear.
“I’ll be back,” he says, doffing his cap like an old gentleman. He’d scrounged up Bob’s old newsie cap and had taken to wearing it on shore, when he didn’t need so heavy a covering. “I’ll just go out for a few hours.”
“You’re as stubborn as your uncle,” she says, with a wink. The way she says it sings highest praise, and the way she slips into Bob’s arms after William has left, pulling him into a dance just like that night on the Charles River in Boston, has Bob’s chest full to bursting at the very thought of this woman—in all the wide world—choosing him.
They know “a few hours,” in William’s universe, might mean well into the wee hours, and so with the peace of a full home brimming with unseen blessings, they retire.
Something wakes Bob. At first all is quiet, but something underlying the dark unsettles him, launches him from his bed. William.
He’s not in his bed. Nor downstairs. Out in the night the air is tinged with smoke from the harbor homes’ fires. He looks toward the dock, where the Savvy Mae bobs in a quickening wind as if frantic herself. He turns, everything seeming to slow. Behind the house, an orange glow fills the dark. Sparks shoot in bursts.
That single thought pounds in his chest again—William.
He flies, blind to time, space. All he knows is he’s in the boathouse now, coughing in a black soup of darkness and angry light. Half the building is afire. Someone’s been fighting it—walls are charred, some aglow, some groaning beneath a quaking beam above them.
“William!”
No answer.
Where is he? A prayer pounding with his very pulse. His eyes dart. He’s vaguely aware of sweat trickling, eyes burning, lungs wheezing. The structure is alive, walls compressing, expanding, fighting for breath just like him. Where. Is. He?
There is movement. From the harbor-side of the boathouse, the end William had set up his world in. A shadow emerges from gray smoke, doubled over and jolting in a fit of coughs.
“William!”
The young man’s face jerks up, soot-covered. Devastated. Lugging two buckets, he runs past Bob and straight out to the creek out back, the same one he’d confronted Bob near, upstream at the church.
Bob grabs the bucket Roy always had upside down for a stool and follows. Their legs run in tandem, then in utter chaos. To the fire and back, Bob can’t count how many times. It might have been hopeless, the two of them against a ravenous fire in an old place like that but for the snow that night and the week before, and William’s dousing everything so quickly.
Somewhere in the haze, Eva joins them. Time warps into a nothingness that feels like an eternity. Until finally they collapse, the three of them watching the place smoke. Flames gone—and part of the boathouse, too. Not all, but a chunk from the harbor end, and they’ll keep watch the night to make sure it goes no farther.
Wrapped in a blanket from William’s cot, Eva drifts off, head against Bob’s shoulder. The hem of her white nightgown is singed, uneven where the fire bit into it. Bob fingers it, throat throbbing as he thinks what could have happened, how close it got to her. This woman who should be clad in silk and diamonds, wearing cotton and ashes as her crowning glory.
He looks up, sensing William’s gaze. And what he sees written there closes his throat even more.
“William.” He rasps the name out, willing it to chase off the despair on the boy’s face.
The boy looks from Eva’s hem to the ground between them. He sniffs, swallows hard. It’s cold, white moonlight that lights him now, not the eerie red of the fire. It traces his features, highlighting two things: Torment. Guilt.
Lower this time, he repeats the name. “William?”
“I should never have had a lantern in there,” he mutters as if in a dream. A nightmare. He shakes his head, eyes growing wild as they shift side to side.
Bob waits.
“I just thought . . . five more minutes. Five more minutes would get the job done. I was working on the pile from the prisoners of war.” Face pinched, he winces. “One thousand two hundred and”—he swallows again,
throat surely raw—“seventeen. That’s how many you have from prisoners of war.”
He’s talking about rocks now. Almost in a trance. The kid needs sleep. It won’t look so bad in the morning. The three of them are alive. The boathouse still stands—most of it.
“They should be in order. What they went through . . . the least they deserve.” He pulls dry blades of wild grass from the ground around them, snapping them off. He looks at Bob directly now. “So someone can find them, if they want. What if . . . what if someone comes looking someday? What if someone wants to know?”
He looks fevered. He needs to get inside. But this mad rambling, it wants out.
“What if . . . what if a daughter wants to know? Or a son? They should be able to come here.” He climbs to his feet, more old man than young in his stiff movements. Has he been burned? “They should be able to find out about what happened, and how it matters, and how it’s going to save more lives, and . . . and that it wasn’t for nothing, and—”
He wobbles. Grips a nearby tree trunk, leans his forehead on it. His own story pulsing in his ramblings.
Bob is beside him, guiding him inside. He’ll return for Eva and keep watch himself for the rest of the night. But for now, what this boy needs is rest. To close his eyes to the horror he was nearly consumed by. Is being consumed by.
“Shh,” Bob says. “They will. We’ll see to it. You did a good work in there, William.” And he had. Even in the dark, Bob could see the boy had guarded those papers with his life. Whisked some of them out of the way, doused the ones he couldn’t. Water would dry. Flames would never relinquish. “You did good.”
Bob guides him toward the house, but William halts. “Fathoms . . . will burn,” he mutters and turns back toward the boathouse in a daze.
Bob’s hands are on the boy’s shoulders, turning him back toward the house. His chest aches at the delusional mutterings.
“I’ve got you, son.”
Words the boy longed to hear for so long. William’s breathing becomes thicker, and he locks Bob’s eyes with his own in a silent thank you, and a silent plea.
A quick glance back shows Eva’s eyelids fluttering sleepily open. He holds up a finger to indicate he’ll be back in a minute for her—but she’s looking at the boathouse, stricken.
Bob reaches the front door at the same time as Leonard Fink from down the road, who says he smelled the smoke. One look at the black-streaked face of a nearly unconscious William, and he’s off down the road to fetch the doctor.
William’s almost asleep by the time Bob gets him to the sofa in the sitting room, helps him lay his head down, pulls the deep red afghan up around him. He looks so young. Innocent. Beneath all that black soot, he sees a glimmer of the babe he held so long ago.
And just as he reaches the door to head out in the snow once more, he hears a barely audible murmur. “Fathoms . . . fire . . .”
With a wordless prayer Bob leaves him. But when he gets to where he’d left his bride cocooned against a tree in her nightgown and a blanket, she’s gone.
Delicate footprints in the shallow snow and dirt lead into the boathouse. Instantly, his stomach is heavy, hot tar. In a blur of motion he’s inside the boathouse, in the smoldering mouth of a dragon who has consumed too much already.
And he sees it in a split-second, happening before he can stop it and yet with the stillness of time slowed. Eva, stooping in her white nightgown, golden hair about her shoulders as she reaches for a scrap of paper on the ground.
The beam above her, shifting at a sickening angle. Unloosed by carbon and soot, its strength burned right out of its sinews.
It falls, and all goes mute as he launches himself toward her.
But by the time he’s there, this girl—the one with the crowbar beneath a Boston moon who righted his world in that scarlet dress—is fallen. Pinned, unconscious. Dressed in a growing pool of scarlet. Some madness overtakes him from a place unseen, and he lifts that impossible beam from atop his beloved.
thirty-three
Teetering, skittering right along with his pulse, Bob watches the doctor examine Eva on the sofa William has cleared for her.
There are the surface injuries—the gash along her jawline. The broken fingers where her hand had locked tight around what she’d gone in after.
And then there is the doctor’s look, the stroking of his moustache, down and down, with a troubled sigh. This comes when he examines her legs. They do not respond. They may not respond, not ever. He kindly says there are cases where movement is regained after a blow to the spinal cord, but there is gravity in his gaze, too, that says he believes otherwise for Eva Bliss.
But, oh, she breathes. Thank you, God. Every muscle in him wants to gather her right up, the way she’d done with the pieces of his soul, mortaring them together as they worked side by side to stack rocks.
The way they might never work side by side again.
No matter. They did not need to work side by side for him to never leave her side. This will be his life now. Caring for her. Whatever it takes.
A breeze from the front door as the doctor departs rocks a crumpled paper on the floor beside Eva. In all the urgency, it had slipped from her hand when the doctor examined her and bound her shattered fingers.
He smooths it . . . and falls numb as he reads Roy’s writing. Two words destined to keep coming back and back to him. Bent, it seems, on crushing him. 77 Fathoms.
This, his brother’s proclamation of ever-growing love—is this what it’s bound for? Destruction? Hanging his head, he tightly crumples the paper in his hand.
Eva stirs, and there’s a gentle touch upon his knee. She’s been in and out of sleep since they’d moved her in, and he doesn’t know how much she’s heard.
Her sleepy eyes flutter open, pale lips spreading into a thin smile. “Unnecessary contrivances,” she says.
Her words snatch him back to the night they met. For her sake, he summons a wan smile, remembering their old joke. “Names?”
“No,” she says, closing her eyes and rolling her head back on the pillow. “Legs.”
So says the woman who scales an island mountain path every day with him. Who counted her war coveralls and the work she did while wearing them as her greatest honor. Who could live ten lives and still never run out of footsteps to take her the places her heart afire dreamed of.
Her courage smites him.
“You know what is necessary?” Her eyes remain closed as she speaks.
A moment passes, and he wonders if she’s gone back to sleep. But she reaches out, covering his hand in hers and sliding her soot-streaked fingers down until she opens his hand and touches the paper. “This.”
The fathoms. She’s not just talking about letters on paper. Eva knows what they mean. To Roy, to Jenny . . . to William, whom she loves unending fathoms of her own—enough to give everything to put this paper back in his hands. She’d known what William’s fevered ramblings had meant after the fire—Bob had not. A mistake he would live to regret every moment. If he had gone in for the paper instead of Eva . . .
Soon her breathing steadies into a deep rest, and he lays her bandaged hand over her heart. Gripping the paper, he heads to the boathouse, bracing himself to face that place.
Wild desperation claws at him, trying to get past the numb wall drawing up around him. Inside, he takes in the north end of the boathouse, with its charred walls and roofless corners. Everything here tells the story of a man—William—who had to make an impossible choice.
Papers preserved.
A pile of rocks, where William is sitting with a soiled rag, scrubbing at the rocks to scour away blackened ash with his own fingers.
His frenetic motion stills, hunched shoulders falling more as he senses Bob’s presence.
“You should be sleeping,” Bob says. His voice comes out flat, and it sounds faraway.
William turns slowly. “Can’t.” He stands. “I . . . heard the doctor talking.”
Bob’s jaw sets. He can’t re
turn to those words. “Time will tell,” he says. He feels something pulling him up out of these shadows, to be the light-giver William needs right now. But the dull shock weighs him down until his eyes swim.
Time will tell what? Whether his love would walk again? Nothing would stop her from living a full life, he knew. But there had been other things the doctor mentioned. Possible complications of such an injury, to do with her heart. The sort that could end her. He winces, as if that can hold back the encroaching darkness.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” William’s look is so fragile, so full of fledgling hope.
Bob will not lie. But how can he tell him the truth? That his fear for Eva is so dark he can hardly swallow around it? He exhales slowly, willing stiff legs to carry him to the potbelly stove. He picks up the metal coffeepot Eva keeps there, swirls it around as if to mix the hot chocolate that’s so painfully absent inside. Sets it down and walks mechanically on. His boot crunches over something unnatural on what should be a hard-packed dirt floor. He freezes.
The ground shimmers in a way that is almost beautiful, but it sinks a fist into his gut. A quick scan shows wooden boxes splintered, gruesome in their sharp angles, cradling more shards within. His fingers buzz with numbness coming alive.
This is—was—the Fresnel lens. His life’s savings, the fruit of his family land. The last hope of the lighthouse . . . shattered to pieces.
This should not wreck him. It’s just wretched glass. Eva is alive. William is alive. And yet this last blow somehow piles all the others together and buckles his knees, fells him to the earth like a dead old tree.
Palms breaking his fall, smarting with pain from the glass dust, he looks around and sees only shattered lives. Forget the lens. Forget the land. Forget it all! But every shard is a reminder that all he’s done is bring grief and hurt upon everyone he loves. All for a stupid tower.
Far off he hears William’s voice calling to him. A hand touching his shoulder tentatively. A wavering voice uttering two words—I’m sorry—over, and over, and over again.