by Неизвестный
Which suits him fine. He is not in the business of making noise, but of making light. In water and at sea, life revolves around his light. And each evening before starting his watch, Erlen recites the Light Keeper’s Prayer. A longish prayer—Erlen does not have it up by heart. Which is why the prayer is typed, framed, hanging at the landing at the base of the light tower. Erlen does not bother with the beginning, but the end holds salt: . . . grant, oh Thou Blessed Savior, that Thou would join us as we cross the last bar and struggle for the farther shore, the lee shore of the land where the sun never goes down, and where there is no darkness for He who is the light of the world will be the light thereof.
No one would accuse Erlen of being overly religious, but he isn’t the type to stand in the way of it either. A prayer can’t hurt here on the rock, he thinks when he climbs the steep sixty-foot spiral staircase to the service room, where the light is kept. The light, a first-order Fresnel, stands nearly twelve feet tall and six feet wide. The lenses are composed of glass segments arranged in rings and stacked in concentric circles.
When his father kept the light it used to take the young boy—and then later the young man—Erlen all of a day to clean the nearly one thousand pieces of glass. This left only a little free time to comb the rocks for pieces of the sea: sand-smoothed pebbles, razor clam shells, the spiraled dog whelks that house miniature tornadoes inside their fragile casings. The shells held to his ear, the young man Erlen marveled that out of such dryness could issue the musical sound of water. And that the high tide could carry such items of fragility and strength (once—whole green and blue glass floats all the way from Japan) seemed a mystery intended for him to solve. Imagine his surprise when he found one day not a shell, but a woman, nude and shivering, washed up on the breakers. What could he do but take her and that bedraggled fur coat tucked under her arm into the lighthouse? What could he do but fall in love with and marry her? What could he do but get her with children—twins no less? And what could he do, being book-bound and a little forgetful, but lose her?
“I’m not surprised,” Inspector Wilson said when Erlen had delivered the news: Mrs. Erlen Steves, wearing nothing but that tattered fur coat minus the collar and a portion of the left sleeve, had jumped from the rocks. “This lighthouse has a history of driving its keepers mad.” Inspector Wilson circled a finger around his ear, and then tugged on the jacket of his Coast Guard uniform.
Erlen searched his memory of all the logbooks he’d read. “I didn’t know that.”
“Well, you know it now,” Inspector Wilson said, casting a long look at the girls, already toddlers, tethered to a laundry line—in accordance with the light keeper’s safety manual.
“A selkie loves water,” Astrid says.
“—A selkie loves land,” says her sister, Clarinda.
“—A selkie walks on two feet . . . ”
“—whenever she can.”
Jump-rope geniuses, Astrid and Clarinda sing out tandem rope rhymes and never miss a beat. At the Mt. Angel boarding school they are unusual girls—always have been, Mother Iviron thinks—and not just because they are twins. Skin pale, jaws strong, mouths flat, the girls have eyes a color of blue so reluctant they border on gray. The only way Reverend Mother Iviron can tell them apart is the way Astrid pushes out her lower jaw in the presence of uninvited pity, while Clarinda tears up and turns red.
They are united utterly, so that what one girl starts the other girl finishes: rhymes, riddles, math problems. A phrase in the mouth of one twin finds its completion in the mouth of the other. If Astrid feels the bite of a nail, Clarinda cries out as it punctures the sole of her shoe. When Astrid slaps the girl who calls her “creepy times two,” it is Clarinda who makes penance with a spate of Hail Marys, repetition being the heaven of duplicate things.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women, and the fruit of thy tomb, Jesus.
Fruit of the tomb? Mother Iviron, beyond girlhood puns, doesn’t think twice when she makes the girls wear the hair shirts. Old-fashioned, oh yes. But to tell the truth, they don’t seem to mind it too much.
Equally suspicious to Mother Iviron is the way the girls prepare for bed. They slide their cots together and before climbing in, they line up their shoes, turning the points toward each other as if the shoes might continue an ongoing conversation.
“When a selkie drags you under . . . ”
“—she’ll split your skin asunder.”
When she hears this kind of talk, Mother Iviron stretches a hurting smile across her face. Far be it from her to stifle the imagination. And certainly tragic stories of the sea bear instructional value. But when the girls turn eleven and substitute sea chanteys for prayers, Mother Iviron sends them home to their father with her regrets.
The lighthouse stands sixty feet high, tall as a castle. The painted rings of black and white turn the light tower into layered cake, spun sugar. The staircase curves in a tight spiral, the corkscrewed architecture of a lightning whelk. In the lantern room, the girls crack open a window and take turns playing Rapunzel. All the lighthouse needs now is a resident witch.
The girls shout into the wind: Come find us! In the meantime they keep busy. The work: polishing brass and cleaning glass, doing all to bend and multiply light in its refractions and reflections. Special care must be given to the first-order Fresnel and its catadioptric lens assembly. The bull’s-eye lens rotates and magnifies the light as it swings. From a distance of twenty-six miles away the light appears as a flash over the water. At least, this is what their father’s manual of operation says. But to the girls wearing their green safety goggles, the lenses look like a gigantic, transparent beehive. The rotating bulb behind the bull’s-eye is the queen bee. Astrid and Clarinda, the custodians of the glass, are the confused, dim-witted drones.
For the longest time they thought the light was meant to lure the ships nearer—yes, right up to the rocks. Never did they imagine the light was meant to turn away every vessel except the mail boat or Inspector Wilson’s tender, which can arrive in evenings without any warning and set their father scrambling. Astrid and Clarinda aren’t quite sure what to make of Mr. Wilson, the Coast Guard’s Aid to Navigation Inspector. When he comes with his high-powered nose lowered, Mr. Wilson always examines the kitchen first, tallying its contents and cleanliness down to every drawer and cupboard, each piece of cutlery. Astrid thinks he looks like a bloodhound on the scent of something turned sour. Clarinda thinks he looks like God wearing a dark uniform and white gloves. Only God would smile more often, Clarinda decides as she pockets two knives, a fork, and a spoon—just to throw the count off.
Bewildered. Erlen Steves is bewildered. Nobody told him how to raise girls. His many books about sea creatures, legend, and lore have been no help at all. And nothing in the engineering texts or the lighthouse operation manuals explains how to ease the loss of a wife and a mother.
All of which is to say, Erlen hasn’t fully recovered. He knows this. Lulled by the changing moods of the water, its murmur and roar, it’s hard not to think water, think salt, think tears. He knows it’s unseemly to grieve for so long, but his sorrow is amplified, doubled, on account of the girls. He is not sad for himself: he lost a wife he suspects he was never meant to have. But for the girls to lose their mother while still so young—it splits his heart in half every time he looks at them.
He tries to be strong. He kisses them each on the forehead. Astrid’s skin is always a little cool to the touch, Clarinda’s always a little warm, feverish even, and then he climbs the sixty feet to sit with the light. The night watch he spends alone in the service room, cleaning the glass, polishing the bull’s-eye lamp, which turns and turns as regularly and steadily as the beating of a heart. That anything so large or so small as a bulb could whirl with such constancy brings a comfort to him here in the lighthouse, where he knows nothing, not even water, should be taken for granted—neither the things the water carries away nor what the water might b
ring.
By day Sister Rosetta teaches the K–6 boarders at the Mt. Angel Parochial School. By night she writes a religious mystery novel and edits the Convent Cloister Herald, circulation thirty-eight. Thirty-seven after Sister Margaretta, God bless her, died peacefully in her sleep.
She’s got a talent, that one, the other sisters say. A real way with the words, the way they never lockstep fail on her. And the way she can phrase a question: “Does Jesus still bear the wounds in his side and hands and feet now that he is ascended to the right hand of the Father?” A question so direct it unsettles the older sisters, Mother Iviron in particular, whose eyebrows stitch together at the scent of such mysteries. Such unanswerable questions ring with the hollow interior of the rhetorical. They make Mother Iviron’s joints ache and her teeth throb. Sister Rosetta, blissfully unaware of what her words do to Mother Iviron, pokes around for the soft entrails, for the heart of faith, keeps poking with these questions in her nighttime dreaming.
Her dreams! Sister Rosetta’s dreams could fill an ocean. Will she ever stop? “Honestly,” Mother Iviron says. The way Sister Rosetta’s frolicking queries keep the first-year postulants up at night, roiling the calm, rarified air within the stone walls of the convent—it’s enough to drive them to distraction. Why did Jesus heal some and not others? Sister Rosetta asks in a dream, and the postulants and novitiates rise and bob in the gathering waters of Sister Rosetta’s viscous questions.
It wouldn’t be so bad, except Sister Rosetta is always the first to stir, waking with a shout and leaving the rest awash in her unnavigable dreams. Some of the postulants have signed up for swimming lessons. Others wear life jackets under their seersucker bedclothes and clamp plugs over their noses.
After too many nights left stranded in Sister Rosetta’s dreams, Mother Iviron makes phone calls, drafts letters. In record speed, Sister Rosetta’s résumé makes the rounds.
A man fell in love with a woman.
But the woman was in love with the sea.
Their father’s voice winds down the staircase from the service room, that furnace of green and light and heat grown thick with their father’s singing. He is shaping his grief, casting sorrow line by line, limb by limb, into the figure of a woman they cannot remember. In the place of her body, Astrid and Clarinda have these weepy words they know they were never meant to hear, but have long ago committed to memory. The same words that pushed Sister Iviron’s determined smile askew, words that make the girls thirsty to know things. So many questions Astrid and Clarinda would love to ask their mother. So much about sky, skin, water, they would like to know. But their mother swam out to sea one day and forgot to return. “It was very strange—she being a champion swimmer,” their father sometimes says.
When they cannot bear to hear their father sing, they climb the steps, put on the safety goggles, and tug on his sleeves. They pull him down to the kitchen for dinner, for midnight snacks, for a breakfast which is always the same fare: Spam on crackers or macaroni with canned tomato sauce.
“Tell us a story.”
“A sad, strange story.”
“A strange, scary story.”
Erlen tries. He collects and collates the strangest stories he can find. To date he has amassed two notebooks full of sea lore and legendry. As they eat their macaroni and Spam, he tells of lighthouse ghosts and large boats split to splinters on rocks like these, and small, mischievous sea creatures. He tells them about a mermaid who almost married a prince. But the prince married another and the mermaid came to him one night as he lay sleeping and killed him with a poisoned kiss upon the lips.
“That’s not so sad,” Astrid says.
“And it’s not so strange,” Clarinda adds. She holds a row of macaroni noodles between her teeth and makes strange music through her homemade harmonica.
“Then maybe you’ve heard about the selkies, who look astonishingly like seals. In their whiskers they carry magic. If they fall in love with a human—and they do this more often than you might think—then they will unzip their fur, tuck it into a bundle, and hide it somewhere safe. Later, when they are tired of their human body, tired of human love, they simply pull their fur back on and swim out to sea.”
The girls shudder. The pupils of their eyes dilate, then shrink to pinpoints, as if their eyes themselves are breathing. Erlen likes to tell this story because it’s the only story the girls sit still for. But certain parts of the story he doesn’t tell. A wayward selkie who has children with a human must come back for the children when they become women—otherwise those children will remain trapped forever in their human bodies. But this involves the changing of bodies and desires, and this isn’t something Erlen likes to think about. He doesn’t like change. To Erlen’s reckoning, his girls will always be girls just as the lighthouse will always be their stronghold, their safety.
But one night he finds the girls in the lantern room, their long hair braided into knots and flung out the window as a ladder, their bodies leaning dangerously over the sill, and he realizes in a blink how thoroughly he doesn’t understand them—how foolish he’s been to hand them so many fictions to inhabit. He hauls them back in, too hard. His fingers leave a mark on Astrid’s arm. But it’s Clarinda who gasps and narrows her eyes. And he knows everything he will do to make it up from this point forward will be exactly the wrong thing.
In the waking world water is danger, water will drown them. The girls do not know how to swim. Though long since off their lighthouse leads, they still cling to each other behind the rail, afraid of the seventh wave, the sneaker that might pull them over and out. At night they push their beds together. Two commas, if they lie on their beds, touch toes to toes, head to head, their bodies form a circuitous loop. Choosing one heart to live in, one body of dreaming to inhabit, they drift in no time into each other’s dreams. Barefoot they clamber over shore rock and into the shallows where the limpets and starfish move so slowly it’s as if in dreams; time sheds its hold over things born in water. Deeper they wade until they feel underfoot the velvet and buzz of the corals.
Farther out, the rock and sand shelf plunge and the water swallows them. It burns a little to take it in through the nose. But they’ve been practicing every night in their dreams and breathing under water comes more easily than it used to. Overhead the sun blooms purple, blooms blue, a kelp bulb floating across their untroubled liquid ceiling. When they wake to a waterless sun, the light carries edges and angles, slicing their room. Gone are the dreams, the very memory of the fact that they had indeed been dreaming. The only clues: salt rimming their eyelids and crusted under their fingernails, their nightgowns wet and wadded into a pile at the foot of their beds.
The girls are good readers, having scoured the lighthouse logs for any mention of their mother. And they’ve even memorized the Light Keeper’s Prayer in its entirety—no easy feat. But theirs is a lopsided education, and when the girls ask how to divide twins by twos—a problem of fractions if ever he’s heard one—Erlen writes to Mr. Wilson, requesting a visiting schoolteacher and nanny.
In no time he receives a typed letter on heavy linen paper. It is from Mt. Angel Convent. A suitable candidate will be sent over immediately. Erlen scratches his head, sniffs the lily-white stationery in sheer amazement. He cannot recall actually mailing his request. The notion that God and Mr. Wilson might work in tandem, and quicker than the Tuesday mail boat, only adds to his bafflement. For there is Mr. Wilson’s tender, nosing alongside the landing. All this on a Monday!
With a bellow from the foghorn, the boat heaves to, and down Erlen goes, clink, clink, clink, his boots over the steps. The girls, eyes gray as stone, stand on the landing and clutch the rail. But it’s the new teacher Erlen’s worried about, bobbing and pitching in Inspector Wilson’s tender. Erlen ties off the boat and studies her. He can see she’s a stranger to water: her face is as pale as her starched collar and veil, and she’s got a fine sheen of sweat above her upper lip. It’s the look of an inlander just about to feed the crabs. Go ahead, he�
��d like to tell her, retching is the best way to beat the nausea. Instead he says nothing. When he grabs for her hands, soft and pudgy like a child’s, they melt to fit his. Erlen lifts her from the boat and his breath stutter-steps. He realizes he has forgotten what a woman’s hands feel like.
Sister Rosetta, a little queasy in Mr. Wilson’s tender, takes his advice, pushes her glasses a little higher up on her nose, and locks her gaze on the unmoving lighthouse. She spots the two girls standing at the railing. Hard telling where one girl begins and the other ends and Sister Rosetta understands why she’s been sent: to care for them in the singular, to care for them in the plural. For it’s clear in a glance that this land does not love these girls—stick-thin, chalkyfaced, their long brown hair whipped to tails. Sister Rosetta sees a picture of twinned longing so raw and pure she has to look away.
Mr. Steves, the girls’ father, reaches out and pulls her from the boat. His hand is rough against her skin and though his grip is completely appropriate, she feels flustered, can’t help thinking that this is perhaps the first and last time she will be touched by a man, any man.
The boat leaves with another blast. Mr. Steves strides ahead to the lighthouse with her suitcases. Sister Rosetta angles her head and studies the girls, whose fingers have turned white under the pressure of their grip.