The Lightkeepers

by Abby Geni

  Once I had attained the lighthouse, I paused to catch my breath. The view was as impressive as ever. The sea had a cloudy aspect, like split pea soup. Islets stuck out of the murky depths like oyster crackers. There were sea lions swimming to the north, churning the waves into froth. I sat down at the little desk. Someone had left a pair of binoculars there, cheap and plastic, the sort given to children on camping trips. I adjusted the dial and peered through the lens, staring to the east, looking for San Francisco. I could not see land, not exactly. There was a long, hazy stain. In that moment, it was hard to remember what the biologists—and the lightkeepers—had fought so hard to preserve in this awful, perilous place.

  I thought about just letting myself go, sobbing until I had no more tears left. I could not remember the last time I had cried that hard. Childhood, maybe. Tears for you. This seemed to be the right moment for it. I thought, too, about throwing myself right down Lighthouse Hill. Eight months pregnant or not, the world was a terrible place. Alternatively, I could stay up here forever. I could eschew food, drink, and sleep. Eventually the islands would claim me. If I lingered in the lighthouse long enough, I might become a statue, a part of the mountain stone.

  A moment later, there was a scuffle. I turned and saw a lean figure, a cap of curls. Forest was mounting the slope. He stepped into the lighthouse. He showed no surprise when he saw me. He was beyond being surprised. His grief and shock were too big for that. All the smaller emotions had been crushed beneath the weight of his loss.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He was rubbing his fingers across his chest. With a jolt, I recognized that gesture. It was Mick’s. Forest was doing it without realizing it, the same turn of the wrist, the same accompanying sigh. There was a silence as we gazed together at the view. It was early afternoon, and the light was bold and garish, the shadows harsh. The islands never looked their best at this time of day. I preferred the morning and the evening, when the air was as sweet and golden as peach-skin.

  Forest cleared his throat.

  “Mick and I were together,” he said. “As you know.”

  I had not been expecting this. After a beat, I did my best to feign amazement, my hands flying upward, mouth opening.

  “I think it’s best if we don’t lie to each other,” he said.

  I gazed at him in consternation.

  “I found your camera, Melissa,” he said.

  My face flushed. I could feel it happen, like water coming to a boil on the stove. I knew what he was referring to. I had kept that camera hidden beneath my bed, safe, I thought, from prying eyes.

  “How—how did you—”

  Forest shrugged. “I went through your stuff. I was hunting for a sweater of mine. I should apologize, I guess. I’m sorry.”

  He did not sound sorry. His voice was absolutely flat.

  “When?” I asked. “When did this happen?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Oh,” I said faintly.

  “They’re nice pictures,” he said.

  I sat up a little straighter at the desk, trying to gather my wits.

  “You have to understand,” I began. “When I took them, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong. I just woke up and looked outside. It was an accident, kind of. I know it must seem like I was spying. But I would never have shown them to—It really wasn’t a betrayal of—”

  Forest shook his head. “I don’t care why you took them.”

  Most of my blood seemed to be trapped in my head. I was sure that my face was glowing like sunrise.

  “Mick wasn’t the father,” Forest said, gesturing toward my stomach. “He said he would lie for you, and I went along with it. So we’re on the same page now,” he ended, his voice getting thick. “You know, and I know.”

  These words seemed to cost him everything he had. His head sank, his arms falling to his sides. It was strange seeing him like this. He looked and moved exactly like the Forest I remembered, but everything about his manner was different. His posture. His level of focus. The emotion radiating from him. I felt as though I were meeting him for the first time, on this sunny, breathy afternoon, after living under his roof for a year.

  He passed a hand across his brow, like a man waking from a dream.

  “I should go,” he said. “I can’t talk to you. I can’t talk right now.”

  I nodded. Gripping the corner of the desk, I hauled myself to my feet. But Forest was already out the door. I watched him leave, silhouetted against the sea.

  THAT NIGHT I got down on my knees and looked under my bed for the first time in ages. There were my watertight tubs of photographic equipment. There were my work boots. There were dust bunnies, and sweaters, and a hat, and a rock, and a few sad, bent coat hangers. At last I found the camera. I sat up again, the baby kicking irritably at my groin. I worked the button with my thumb, flicking the pictures along. The moon. The coast guard house. A gleam against a black window. A shimmer of bodies in motion. Two torsos touching and parting like dancers in a pas de deux. Faces turned toward each other, a line of darkness between them. Inches away.

  Resolutely I got to my feet. I knew that Forest was in the kitchen. I could hear him talking to Galen, their voices rising up the staircase along with the smell of cinnamon tea. Moving quietly, I hurried down the hall. I eased into Forest’s room without turning on the light. I set the camera in his desk drawer. Before I slipped back out of the room, I took one last look at the image that was still visible on the screen. Two faces, iridescent profiles, poised on the verge of a kiss.

  39

  I SPENT MY LAST day on the islands indoors. It began raining at dawn, a gentle misting, the sort of drizzle that seemed likely to blow over. An hour later, however, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The rain picked up, a steady, roiling gush. The landscape was blurred by curtains of silver. I could barely pick out the gray expanse of the ocean through that downpour.

  Still, Galen was in an exhilarated mood. He had taken the boat out early, at sunrise, before the storm had settled in. He described the morning, which had still been fine then. The sea had been flat, opaque. He had been fired with a distinct impression of sharks nearby. He had felt them coming. It was getting to be their time, the warm weather drawing them back from their winter vacation homes. Any day now, the first kill might be glimpsed from the lighthouse.

  After breakfast, the biologists elected to walk to the murre blind. The men bundled themselves up beneath ponchos and sweaters. Lucy had a swollen wrist; she had fallen on the rocks and caught herself at a bad angle. (I had helped her to bandage the joint. Lucy and I will never be friends—I will be glad to see the back of her when I leave the islands for good—but we get by. While I wrapped the gauze, she had gently guided my movements.) The three of them barged onto the porch. Through the window, I watched as the downpour swallowed them up.

  Once they were gone, I decided to sneak into their rooms. To intrude on these private spaces, I knew, was a flagrant breach of confidence. Full-grown adults did not normally live in this kind of collegiate community, without privacy. As a rule, we did the best we could to maintain what boundaries we had.

  But I was in a mood. I entered Galen’s sanctum first. I wanted to see his famous—infamous—collection before I departed. As I had suspected, his room was as tidy as his mind: immaculately organized, a place for everything and everything in its place. His museum of relics and specimens was all that I’d hoped for. A length of twine hung above his window, and rows of gleaming feathers were pinned there like beads on a chain. Shells of various sizes glimmered on the nightstand. There was a glass jar filled with what at first seemed to be buttons, but on closer inspection turned out to be dead beetles. The desk had been taken over by the half-assembled skeleton of a bird, an array of slim white bones. I knew there was more hidden in boxes and drawers, but I did not dare to pry too much. Galen might glean I had been there.

  Still, I was curious. I poked through the wastebasket and got on tiptoe to examine the bureau top. Galen
had told me that he had a broken teacup somewhere. It had been flung at the wall many years ago by a visiting researcher during a heated debate. Galen had swept up and saved the pieces as a souvenir. He had told me that he had a scrap of elephant seal skin. It had been torn off one male by another’s teeth during a battle over territory. Galen had peeled it from the rocks and carried it home, pinning it to his bulletin board. He had told me that he had a human rib bone—a relic, he believed, from the battling eggers, some poor man’s corpse. He had told me that he had the skull of a seal pup, a human tooth, and the talon of a falcon.

  Galen had told me that he gathered and kept anything that spoke to the nature of life on the islands. He did not discriminate between the mundane and the vital, the human and the animal, the tragic and the wonderful. He had told me that the greatest illusion of the human experience was the idea that we were outside of nature—that we were not a part of the food chain—that we were not animals ourselves.

  Soon I headed downstairs. The rain lashed the walls and splattered the windows. The air was heavy with the smell of wet birds. I stepped into the living room and paused. I had not been inside Lucy’s room—Andrew’s room, as I still thought of it—since my first days in the cabin. For a while I stood in the doorway, edgy and tense. The space looked different than I remembered. Lucy had reorganized it months before, switching the positions of the bed and dresser, hanging curtains, and removing the rug. It was a homey little area, shabby but warm. She had a lot of knickknacks scattered around—a ceramic paperweight, a snow globe, a tiny, bronze statue of a cat. I glanced through the papers on the desk: a bill, a half-completed letter. I tugged open the drawer of Lucy’s night table. There was something in there, swathed in cloth.

  It was a picture of Andrew. I had unwrapped it and was holding it in my hands before I registered this fact. I stared down, mesmerized. I had forgotten what Andrew looked like. My memories of him were all tactile in nature: heavy calves, moist skin, breath. It was strange to see another human being looking back at me. A weak chin. A mischievous smile. He had not, after all, been a monster. That was the way he usually cropped up in my dreams: a ghoul with glaring red eyes, exhaling sulfur and steam. Instead, he had been a man. No more, no less.

  I wrapped the picture in the cloth again and tucked it back where I had found it. My fingers were unsteady, but otherwise I was calm. I hurried into the hall. I sat down on the stairs. The rain was falling in torrents, splashing against the roof and hammering the porch. I could not see outside; the windows were as blind as stained glass, patterned with a mosaic of water. I don’t know how long I sat there. The downpour was unabated. It was amazing to me that there was this much rain in the world. Surely the sky would empty itself out eventually. A telltale drip was coming from somewhere in the house. The roof, or the walls, or the windows had been penetrated. After I was gone, the others would have to spend a few hours with the caulking gun and spackle, trying, yet again, to do the impossible—to contain the wildness here, to pretend they had control over nature, to mitigate what it might do to them.

  At last I hefted myself upright. Gritting my teeth, I climbed the stairs once more. The rain was louder here, booming on the roof. In the distance, thunder growled. I could not hear the gulls or the murres, any of the usual suspects. The storm had wiped out all traces of animal life, for the moment, anyway.

  It took all the courage I had to enter the bedroom that Forest and Mick had shared. Inside, I stood frozen, stunned at my own daring. I breathed in the combined musk of two athletic, unshowered bodies—Mick’s smell had not yet evaporated. I glanced around at the ceiling fan and the frayed, threadbare rug. Forest’s dresser was tidy. He evidently preferred not to use a pillow; his bed looked odd, empty at the top, like something that might have belonged to the Headless Horseman. His clothes were hung crisply in the closet. There was an echo of Galen’s neatness in the way the papers on the desk were all lined up at right angles, the thumbtacks and pencils stowed in specific little jars. I peeked into the trunk at the foot of the bed—more papers, a few years’ worth of documentation about sharks. There were sketches, photographs, and meticulous notes. Somehow, Forest had managed to take the greatest and most ferocious predator on earth and render it boring. I would not have been able to sit there and read through those files, not for love or money.

  After some searching, I found my own camera, with the images of Mick and Forest’s rendezvous stowed on the memory card. It was hidden at the bottom of the closet now. I turned it over in my fingers. The pictures were not mine anymore—if they had ever been. I tucked the camera away again, out of sight.

  Then I gazed across the room at Mick’s things. The bed was exactly as he had left it the morning he had died: a heap of pillows, the blanket trailing onto the floor. I was sure that if I opened his dresser, I would see shirts and socks crammed in there willy-nilly. His books had been shoved roughly onto the shelves—backward, upside down. Muddy boots under the bed. A closet with sweaters piled on the floor, hangers unused. Mick’s energy was captured there, the impression of a body in motion, a large, generous personality, too full of enthusiasm to bother with petty matters like tidying up. I got to my feet and headed across the neutral zone. I knew I did not have long. The others would be back soon, wet, weary, and hungry for lunch. There was something I wanted to do before they returned.

  In Mick’s nightstand, I found a leather bracelet. He had owned a few, with varying degrees of masculinity (some braided, some chunky, some ringed with metal studs). He had alternated them according to his mood. This one was stiff with sweat, the mahogany hue weathered to a pale brown. I pocketed it. I was hunting for small items that Forest would not miss. I found a T-shirt in Mick’s drawer: my favorite, a bright orange thing that was emblematic of his luminescent temperament. I stole a postcard he had begun to write to someone but had never finished—a chatty note about the whales, ending in midsentence. The important thing was that it was in his own handwriting. I was moving fast now, a dervish, disarranging the books and upsetting the papers on the desk. I took Mick’s baseball cap. I found a tiny rubber chicken in the corner of a dresser drawer, a miniature bit of hilarity, and I swiped that too. I grabbed a book about sea lions, highlighted and marked with Mick’s script.

  Right then, there was a sound from downstairs. A door slammed. Voices rang up the steps. I jumped in alarm, like the thief I was. I hurried down the hall to my bedroom with my stolen goods clutched under my arm.

  I WILL TELL people that Mick was the father of my baby. When my twin aunts ask—when my own father asks—when my son himself is old enough to ask—I will lie. Mick gave me this gift, and I will grab it with both hands.

  I will spin a beautiful story. I will begin, always, with the eggers and the lightkeepers. I will not, perhaps, relate this tale as well as Galen (and his book) did, but I will do well enough. I will describe the way lightkeepers inhabited the islands. They left the sharks, the whales, the seals, and the birds alone. They sought peace, an income, and a home. They built a strange little community on a godforsaken rock, where they protected one another, raised their children, and thrived.

  Then there were the eggers, who came to the islands with a different agenda. They decimated the murre population with abandon. (Even now, the birds have not fully recovered.) Not content with causing an environmental catastrophe, the eggers brought weapons to the archipelago. They died in battles with other eggers. They died in caves, poisoned by the fumes rising from the guano. They died by tumbling into the sea, overburdened by the weight of too many eggs.

  When I tell people about the father of my baby, I will say this: There are two kinds of people in the word. There are eggers and lightkeepers. The former are driven by acquisition and avarice. The latter are driven by curiosity and caution. Eggers take what they can, consequences be damned. Lightkeepers take what they need, nothing more. Eggers want to have. Lightkeepers want to be.

  I will tell people that my son’s father was a lightkeeper. I will share my memori
es. I have so many memories. The walks Mick and I took. The hours we spent together—him reading, me dozing with my feet in his lap. His terrifying attempts at cooking. His sweeping gestures, those massive arms zooming perilously through the air. I will describe Mick’s head-thrown-back guffaw. I will imitate the athletic bounce of his stride. I will tell stories of his hilarious clumsiness, machinery coming apart in his hands, tools crumbling into pieces. I will describe, too, his limitless capacity for kindness. In this way, I will be able to keep him with me. The ordinary ebb and flow of life on the islands, so unremarked and unremarkable, will crystallize, through telling and retelling, into stories—and will pass, over the years, into legend.

  My photographs will stand as illustrations. Mick on board the Janus. Mick in the kitchen, frowning at a box of macaroni and cheese. Mick making a silly face to get me to laugh. It is a bit unsettling to think that these snapshots will enhance and inform my deception. I have always thought of photography as truth-gathering. I have imagined my pictures to be immutable and honest, as sure as the ground beneath my feet. But now I see that truth and photography are fundamentally at odds. A snapshot is a two-dimensional representation, like a painting or a sketch, carefully prepared, framed, and cropped. It is the world represented by the mind of an artist, rather than the world as it actually is. The photographer can cherry-pick what will be included in a collection of images; they can be selected or omitted with purpose, then assembled and arranged so that, as a whole, they might suggest any story at all.

  My beloved work will strengthen the lie I must tell. I can include a snapshot of Mick blowing me an ironic kiss. I can exclude the picture of him doing the same to Lucy so she would not feel left out. I will keep the images of him writing in the daily log, standing in the lighthouse, operating the crane to pull up the Billy Pugh, cooking dinner, pointing ecstatically at an elephant seal, snoring on the couch, and roaring with laughter. I will throw away the snapshot of him waltzing around the living room with Charlene, singing at the top of his lungs. I will include my favorite picture of Mick—eyes aglow, smiling lovingly at the camera. I will exclude the following shot, which shows that Forest was there too, standing behind me all along.