That’s when Russell heard it, the faintest sound at his feet.
He looked down.
Perry had left a cardboard box.
Russell shivered as the chill air wrapped around his body.
The box moved. There was something inside.
And then the box mewed.
Alki Lighthouse
Alki Point, West Seattle
First lit: 1868
Automated: 1970
47.5762 -122.4206
Alki, the Washington State motto, means “by-and-by” in Chinook, a local Native American language. In 1851 the first white settlers in the area landed at the present day location of the lighthouse. They named the settlement New York-Alki.
A few years later a young entrepreneur named Doc Maynard was made unwelcome there and moved on to found another settlement a few miles from the inhospitable point. It is one of the ironies of his life that in his last years, a near destitute Maynard lived very close to the lighthouse where New York-Alki had long since succumbed to Doc’s city, which he’d named Seattle.
FEBRUARY 1
Cassidy parked the car and pounded a fist against the steering wheel. The horn blared and she’d have jumped out of the seat if it hadn’t been for the seat belt.
Once again she glanced at the GPS. The “current position” and “destination” coordinates were superimposed. The coordinates matched the numbers on the envelope sitting beside the stick shift. She looked out her windshield. No question, that was it. The Alki Point lighthouse stood barely a dozen yards off the main beach road. She’d even found a parking spot right in front of the gate. Over two thousand dollars of hiking clothes and hour upon hour learning how to use the GPS in case she ever got lost again.
And there was the stupid lighthouse in plain view down a little garden path.
She tossed her stupid alien-manufactured rain pants over the stupid GPS and climbed out of the car. Maybe if she left it unlocked, someone would steal all of the crap and she could pretend this was just a bad dream. Deep breath, Cass. Take a deep breath. She pressed the button and the car sealed everything safely inside with a smug chirp.
She pushed on the gate and the lock rattled, but it didn’t open. A bronze plaque was bolted onto the fence.
“Winter hours: Sat-Sun 12-3. Mon-Fri closed.”
Today was Saturday, the first of February. Nine in the morning. Three hours to wait.
She kicked the gate.
Hard.
Well, that was one advantage to her new light-hiking, all-weather, waterproof boots by Vasque, which sounded like a plaque rinse more than a boot. They gave her the ability to kick a solid iron gate and not break her foot.
She couldn’t even get a decent snapshot from the road, too many trees had grown up in the gardens. The expensive houses were packed side-by-side all along the beachfront. No passage through.
She returned to the driver’s seat and glared out at the neighborhood. Pounding her feet on the floormat made her feel a little better. She started the car and popped the clutch badly enough to stall the engine.
“Okay, Cassidy, you can do this. You know how to drive a goddamn car.” She hadn’t needed one in New York, so it had been something of an adventure to buy one when she returned to Seattle. She’d learned on a stick, but after a decade in the city, it hadn’t come back as quickly as she’d expected. She didn’t ride bicycles either.
She was glad she hadn’t invited Jack James along, she was no mood for a date. At least not if you wanted it to go well. And Jack’s everlasting calm would just irritate her more. He never engaged his emotions in anything. Not in anything at all now that she thought about it.
Once again. Start the engine, in gear, ease out the clutch. She rolled out of the parking spot and down the street looking for a place to turn around. Fifty feet farther on, a little sign was posted on a rusted fence.
Two words.
“Beach Access.”
“Yes!” Lighthouses were on beaches.
She checked the rearview mirror. Someone was pulling into her spot.
“That was mine, mister.”
The next one she could find was halfway around the bay over a quarter-mile away according to her stupid GPS. She considered taking it with her to throw in the ocean but resisted the urge.
The wind was at her back as she walked back to the little flight of gritty concrete steps down to the sand and rock beach. No park ranger to refuse her a parking pass, she’d have an easy walk along the water’s edge on a bright blue day.
At the bottom of the steps she turned right along the sandy verge and was confronted by a much bigger sign.
“Residents only beyond this point.”
Well, her car was parked in the neighborhood, sort of, so she was resident here at the moment. Besides, she formed the argument in her head, the sign was faded and was badly broken in one corner. “Broken sign, rule no longer valid.”
Finally she rationalized that no one would be out on a day like this to give a damn anyway. It was blowing stiffly, though not like last month and the air was definitely cold enough to snow. Thankfully the sky was sparkling blue, not a white, puffy cloud in sight. No danger of a soaking rain today.
She strode past the sign warm in her red watchcap, her knee-length Michael Kors parka, and her Vasque hiking boots that could definitely climb this beach, which was much less steep than any of those seven peaks.
The view was once again spectacular. The bay curved away to the left, the tall hills of West Seattle towered behind dotted with beautiful houses and towering trees. In front of her, almost too vivid to be real, floated Vashon and Maury Island. Beyond them, soaring up into the sky were the Olympics; the Three Bothers mountains posturing, each striving to raise his rugged, white-capped shoulders higher than the other two peaks.
The sand disappeared and she was forced to clamber over huge rocks that had been piled up in front of the houses as a breakwater. In addition to the breakwater each house had a massive seawall of concrete. She could see over the top of one to the array of kayaks and children’s toys in the narrow back yard. The next house had a crane with a dock actually dangling from the end of it. It must be able to swing out and drop into the water on calmer, warmer days.
The third house had a tall tree that blocked her view of the house and looked as if it blocked the owner’s view of the Sound. Well, that certainly made no sense. This view was so valuable the land was probably sold by the square foot.
Then there was the lighthouse. The same angle as it appeared on the calendar. Maybe the photographer had come on a day when the front entrance was closed as well. A small yard of perfect grass surrounded the old keeper’s house, set back among the gardens.
The lighthouse itself was perched on the edge of the massive boulders, just feet above the sea. All around its base were small white stones, as if the building were afloat in its own little white sea of foam. The Alki light lacked the rigid stoutness of the West Point lighthouse. Rather than squat and powerful, its red-capped light soared three stories into the blue sky. The white paint shone so brilliant in the sunlight that it was painful to look at. Maybe she should have bought one of those polarized, glacier-expedition, sun goggles.
She tugged out her camera and snapped a couple of photos. Only after the last shot did she notice that a sailboat had sailed right into the picture on the far side of the lighthouse. Cobalt blue hull, red sails. If there hadn’t been a photo of the first lighthouse with that same boat framed on her condo wall, she’d think she was losing her mind.
She took another picture just so that she could prove later that it was real. Maybe this was a trademark in Seattle and every sailboat looked like that. Though she couldn’t imagine why. It was as if the last month hadn’t really happened. Or was happening again.
Sitting down on a moderately flat rock, she watched the waves for a while, without the slashing spray this time. She tugged the Michael Kors jacket over her knees and almost down to her ankles. The watch cap pulled down ove
r her ears kept her head reasonably warm.
“Becoming quite the adventuress, aren’t we, Cass?” She felt strangely light, as if the breeze that was making her nose and cheeks sting with the cold could lift her up and she’d just fly away. Unfettered. Bound to no one.
Except a couple kajillion readers. That slammed her back to earth and she could feel the cold rock against her butt despite the jacket, her leggings, and the woolen underwear that she just might start wearing year round it was so warm.
She pulled off her heavy gloves and dug out her father’s letter. Nothing new on the outside of the envelope. Just a destination point for this month’s crazy journey.
Dearest Ice Sweet,
His voice sounded in her head. He wrote the same way he spoke. Warm, friendly, his letters were always an intimate conversation.
We made it to the second lighthouse. Alki, by-and-by. That’s what it means. Maybe you remember that from school, it is the state motto after all. I always sat on the south side of the ferry just to watch for this lighthouse.
“I remember, Daddy.” He must have pointed it out to her a thousand times, on every single trip to Seattle, both directions. He’d said it so many times that it had lost all meaning, just words that were a part of the day like, “Good morning.” or “How was school?” Ignored, forgotten.
Suddenly she was in the big ferry boat once again, hundreds of people milling about, trying to find a way to be comfortable on the hard plastic seats for the half-hour crossing. Children racing up and down the aisles waving their Gameboys or Walkmans. Tourists snapping photos through the salt-stained glass that would never come out the way they pictured them; the journey a blur of half-forgotten images of a place they’d never been and could barely remember.
Things really do happen by-and-by, especially the good things. We were working the vineyard. A couple of the guys had drifted off, and one had slashed his leg so badly with a roto-tiller that he’d gone into the VA hospital after coming out of the war unharmed. Strange, I can’t remember his name. Don’t even know what happened to him.
We made some of the worst wine you can imagine those first years. But we got better, figured it out the hard way. It was still a brutal amount of work, but it was drinkable by the time your mother first came by.
She was a tourist, vacationing in California after getting out of school. Came to the coast to check out Berkeley for graduate work. She and a carload of girlfriends were doing the vineyard circuit. I opened a bottle of our Merlot for them to taste. Our very best. Hadn’t meant to do that, but your mother always had the ability to turn me into a bumbling fool, right from the first time I saw her. She came back the next weekend with one friend, the week after alone. Soon she was helping in the fields. The rest, as they say, is history.
“Pretty slick, Daddy. Hitting on a college girl on vacation.” She remembered the story. Daddy always told it exactly the same way, as if the tracks of it had been burned forever upon his heart. Unchanging, unchangeable over the years.
This lighthouse always made me think about the strange course my life has taken. The wanderings that took me to a place I’d never been or imagined going. That gave me a family, a wife and daughter, and a place to be in the world. Looking back, everything happened as if there were some great master plan. From the past looking forward, it was the most haphazard series of choices and chance.
Remember, Cass, pursue your dreams, but don’t expect them to follow that straight and narrow path that you see so clearly in your head.
Life happens in its own fashion. At its own pace. I learned not to second-guess it. All that is good in my life came to me “by-and-by.”
Vic
“Ha!” There was another memory she’d lost track of. That’s what he’d said every single time he saw the lighthouse. “It’ll come to me by-and-by.” She glanced back over her shoulder.
The lighthouse stood there looking down at her.
“By-and-by, huh?”
It didn’t answer.
“Good thing I didn’t wait for by-and-by, Daddy. I’d never have gotten here.”
Or would she? Mama went to Vassar in economics. Cassidy attended her mother’s alma mater and got her degree in marketing, most of it done as an independent study.
While other students were partying, she was taking courses at the CIA. The Culinary Institute of America was less than a dozen miles up the road after all and it was too good a chance to pass up. No big surprise, being her father’s daughter, that she had an exceptionally well-trained palate. By the time she’d graduated from high school at sixteen, she’d read a hundred books about wine. She’d graduated from both Vassar and the CIA at twenty. Columbia School of Journalism had been by chance as much as conscious choice. The class assignment to write a review of the Punk and Wine Bistro had led to her first sale and she’d never looked back.
Daddy was wrong, it certainly hadn’t been by chance. She’d planned and she’d worked so hard and given up so much. She was out here alone wasn’t she.
“Given up a hell of a lot, Daddy.” She brushed at a tear raised by the cold wind.
Her fingers were frozen, even colder than her cheeks. Blowing into her curled hands warmed them little. She pulled the gloves back on, forming fists with her hands, leaving the chilly fingers of the gloves empty.
The lighthouse stood high above. The sailboat was disappearing southward, continuing its own chilly journey.
She’d planned… to get as far away from Seattle and Bainbridge Island as far she could. Marketing had started out as a degree in business. A thousand times she’d pictured herself smashing through the glass ceiling at some huge corporation. Of being like Carly Fiorina, then a top AT&T exec. She’d gone on to be president of Hewlett-Packard. Cassidy had written her a piece of teen fan mail, the only she’d ever written, but no answer came. One thing Cassidy knew, though, a woman could do anything.
“If Carly can do it, so can I.”
“Absolutely!” Her father would agree. “Anything but food or wine. The reviewers are such an old boys’ club.” His voice was a whisper in her memory, as warm as the wind was cold. As deep as the waves thudding down on the beach gravel. He’d warned her of that so many times she’d taken on the challenge.
“But I found a way through. You know, Daddy, I did an end run on them.”
“Right,” she waved her arms about to make her point and then waved them some more to get a decent blood flow. “I ignored that old boy’s club completely and forged my own path to the tables.” She’d cut quite a swath. Stepped on a number of toes, but success forgave many sins.
“I knew what I was doing.” Even as she said it, the words went sour. Her path, that had been so clear, was only so in retrospect. Maybe that part of Daddy’s letter was true.
“But I’m in control now. The rest of your letter is just plain silly. I know where I’m going.” And she did. A year maybe two more on the west coast, a couple in Europe, and she’d swing back into New York at the very top. Let the New York Times beg her to come aboard. The only major metro newspaper that didn’t syndicate her column. Well, other than the Washington Post, but that was such an inside-the-Beltway paper that it didn’t bother her nearly as much.
“I know what I’m doing. My path is clear, Daddy.”
The roar of the wind and the crash of the waves against the beach were her only answers.
“Crystal clear.” Again the sour taste. Her path wasn’t that clear. What was clear was that she was losing her mind.
She was sitting on the windiest point of Seattle in a below-freezing day on the first of February. Sitting here with icicles where most people had fingers, holding a conversation with her dead father about career choices he’d be the first to argue were hers to make.
That was a laugh. Actually, it was. It bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her. It started small and it built and built until it burst forth and she could barely catch her breath.
“Totally and completely nutso!” she shouted at the wind and
her words drifted away, wrapping around the lighthouse on their way landward.
“It will all make sense by-and-by, my ice sweet girl.”
She spun around, but there was no one near. No one but memory to whisper to her with her father’s voice.
# # #
Angelo lay back on one of the cockpit benches, his back against the cabin wall. His hood raised against the wind. A silver travel mug clutched in his gloved hands.
Russell imagined that someday he’d be able to feel his cheeks again, but not anytime soon, damn but it was cold.
“Hey Angelo.” His friend had been quiet for the whole trip.
“What?” A one-word answer. His friend was Italian and never gave one-word answers.
“It’s Saturday. How can you afford to be out here with me? Thought you did a Saturday lunch. Not that I don’t appreciate it and all.” He pointed the boat up a few points tighter to the wind. Even with the reef in the main and the small jib up forward, she still skidded over the wave tops at better than seven knots.
“We do a lunch.” Angelo’s voice was so quiet Russell could barely make out his answer over the wind.
“Well?”
“Well, what?” It wasn’t like him to be obtuse.
“Well?”
Angelo took a long pull of his coffee, so long he seemed to be avoiding the answer.
“No traffic, my man. Saturday lunch is so slow, the sous chef can handle it, with one arm behind his back.” More coffee. “And his head in a sack.”
“But you’re the best cook there is, Angelo.”
“Don’t let my mother hear you say that.”
Still had his sense of humor, that at least was a good sign. Russell kept them headed down the Sound, maybe they’d circle Vashon Island.
“What about your wonderful wine reviewer? Didn’t she make it all better?”
Angelo shook his head. “A nice article about the tasting, business picked up a little, but people don’t come to restaurants to drink hundred-dollar bottles of wine. They come for food. I still haven’t really paid off the tasting and that was three weeks ago.”
Where Dreams Are Born (Angelo's Hearth) Page 5