Lighthouse on the Lake

by Elizabeth Bromke

  By the time he finished, they’d pulled off the road and driven a mile toward the shore, parking finally just outside of the lighthouse. “Did I bore you?” he asked, glancing over at her assuredly.

  “Quite the opposite,” she answered. “You enchanted me.” They sat in silence, staring at the narrow tower that descended high above the water like it was reaching for Heaven. But when she looked over at him, he grinned back at her.

  “No one has ever called me enchanting before,” he remarked, chuckling.

  She laughed, too. “No one has ever enchanted me before.”

  Michael licked his lips, his smile falling from his mouth as he leaned over towards her. Amelia swallowed and leaned into him, pressing her hand down onto her handbag, accidentally knocking it to the floor of the truck.

  The moment caught in the air, and she stared at the bag. Unreasonably bothered. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, bending to collect it.

  He reached for her hand and pulled her back up to him, wrapping his other hand around the back of her head and gently, slowly pulling her in for a chaste, tender kiss.

  It was the most passionate moment of Amelia’s life.

  Just a moment later, when he took her hand in his and remained sitting, staring across to the house and lake beyond, she let out a long sigh. “I’ll miss this place.”

  “You can come here anytime, though. Right?” He looked at her and squeezed her hand.

  “I sort of... I sort of thought I’d get it, you know? That it could be my little project.”

  “Maybe it still can. Maybe Liesel will sell it to you.”

  Amelia did not want to talk about Liesel. She’d spent the past fourteen days obsessing over why she hadn’t gotten a call or a text. There must have been a mistake. That’s what she finally settled on. Maybe Gene was even wrong. Or maybe the so-called baby had passed away in some tragic accident. Amelia couldn’t cling to the past any more than she could plan for the future. It was just her cross to bear. To roll with the punches.

  “I haven’t even heard from her, though,” she answered, rolling her shoulders back and down. But the idea reminded her. “Wait a second,” she said, releasing Michael’s hand and reaching for the contents that spilled out of her bag.

  His eyes lit up in the orange light of evening. “Is that what I—”

  She tucked her hair behind her ears and pulled the white envelope onto her lap. “It couldn’t be,” she reasoned. “There’s no way.”

  But she pinched the corner and tore it off, then pushed the side of her finger along the short end, at last pulling out a two-page handwritten letter.

  Amelia’s eyes flashed over the words, reality coalescing around her. “Oh my goodness,” she whispered. “We were right.” Her voice rose. “It’s her!”

  Michael leaned over and read at her side.

  Amelia stuck her hand into her handbag and called Kate, adding in Clara and Megan to the line in one big group phone call. Once her sisters were all listening in, Amelia began. “You’re not going to believe this.”

  ***

  After she finished relaying the new information, she looked over at Michael, who’d picked up the envelope she let drop to the console. It was an oversized white mailer, its paper thick and lined like specialty stationary.

  “Look,” he said, opening his hand. In it, lay a small, silver key.

  “Cancel dinner,” Amelia answered, plucking it from his palm. “Our plans have changed.”

  Chapter 40—Amelia

  “Wait a minute,” Amelia whispered as they neared the little home that stretched into the lighthouse building.

  Michael stopped. They stood on the sand, her left hand in his right, the sun dipping lower and lower. Time felt irrelevant and relevant all at once. She could camp there that night. She could slip inside to the home of her grandparents and fall asleep to the rhythm of the lake. She could take a midnight stroll up into the tower and look out across the water and down the shore toward the Village and Heirloom Island. And she could do it all with a handsome, smart, able-bodied lawyer right there by her side.

  But of course, they were losing light.

  “Should we start here or there?” she waved a hand from the house to the tower.

  Michael looked down at her, his eyes shimmering against the setting sun, his skin warm in the red glow. “It’s your choice. I’m just here for you.”

  She smiled and nodded, then led him to the house where she slid the key into the lock. It fit and a gentle turn offered smooth egress. No need to break in. The house, according to Liesel, was hers to explore. And her sisters, but on the phone, they gave Amelia full permission to look around without them. After all, it would seem that they wouldn’t need permission, soon enough. Soon enough, all the Hannigans could converge on the property, adding it to their growing list of projects.

  The space was nearly barren. A potbellied stove squatted in the easement between a front room, perhaps a sitting room, and the kitchen where there sat an antique refrigerator and a block of wood atop iron bars—an island. It looked much different than Amelia recalled from her childhood. Smaller, sure, but also older. More bizarre. It reminded her of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth home, which she’d visited in Philadelphia some years earlier, during a brief stint with the City Theatre as a spotlight tech. She realized now just how much Grandma Acton had done with the place.

  There were just two bedrooms, which sat on either side of the small bathroom where Amelia once took a bubble bath. The same clawfoot tub from her youth still sat there. However, it had seen better days. Orange rust stains coagulated in the drain and around the hardware. A crack rang along the far lip. The pedestal sink was in similar condition. An oval mirror—no medicine cabinet—hung above, revealing a fresh-faced, awestruck woman. Amelia, of course. The mirror was cloudy with grime and age, but she liked the way she looked in it. She saw herself differently there. Happy, perhaps. Interested. Entirely consumed by where life had taken her.

  “It looks like they had it cleared out,” Michael commented, poking his head into a narrow linen closet. The white interior paint cracked where the hinges creaked.

  Though there wasn’t much to see, they spent a while examining everything from the worn shag carpet in the bedrooms to the jammed casement windows.

  “It’s probably just paint,” Michael offered, studying the edges. “I don’t see any locks.”

  Amelia nodded then strode back toward the front door. “Come on,” she urged. “I want to go up before the sun sets.”

  They had time. Lord knows they had time. Summer in the northern states saw long days. Its sun sank slowly, taunting children long after their bedtime. And Amelia wanted every minute with that lazy sun. She wanted to see what was in there. She wanted all of it. The sun through the lighthouse windows on her skin. A chance to see Michael in that light, way high above the reflections of the lake.

  He followed her from the house down the winding path of crumbling steppingstones. Though the Actons had died only relatively recently, it was now clear to Amelia that neither they nor Liesel had ever completed any renovation projects. But Amelia liked that. She wasn’t too interested in turning the place into something flashy. Preservation felt more appropriate there. Some special touches, perhaps. New paint. Scrubbed porcelain. What would bring that property back to life had nothing to do with shabby chic window treatments or stainless-steel appliances. People. People would bring it back to life.

  Amelia opened her hand to Michael, who dug the key from his pocket and passed it to her in one fluid motion. Again, she slid it into the brass lock and turned it until a satisfying click drowned out the sound of blood rushing to her head. The moment belonged to Amelia. As much as the house on the harbor belonged to Kate. As much as the cottage belonged to Clara.

  She turned and glanced up at Michael, who nodded her in. The space was sparser than the house, with aged wood boards nailed in dizzying rows around the circular walls inside the ground floor. Metal ladders zigzagged up and up, narrowi
ng away from Amelia and Michael’s place on the cobblestone floor.

  Amelia frowned. “I’m not sure what I was expecting.” She stepped up to the windowless wall, pressing a hand to the boards as if to take the pulse of her grandfather’s place. It occurred to her that she and her sisters had little stake in the property. They hardly knew their grandparents, and their father—though he did work in the lighthouse as a young man—had left it behind once he met Nora.

  That didn’t mean Amelia and her sisters couldn’t reconnect in some way. Now more than ever she felt in her heart that there was something there, on that abandoned property. A life force of some kind.

  “Take your time,” Michael cautioned as Amelia mounted the first ladder.

  She paused, realizing she wore a dress. “Maybe you should go first?”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s safer if I’m beneath you. So that I can catch you if you fall.”

  Amelia’s cheeks glowed. Michael was a true gentleman. She could trust him. With her decency, for one, and her life, for another. She smiled down at him and began her climb. Moving like a cat from the first ladder to the second without a hitch. Michael stayed half a ladder’s length below.

  When she reached the top, through a hole that opened onto a sturdy platform, her breath caught in her throat.

  Standing there, by the defunct red light, a view to the world awaited them. Michael’s head appeared in the opening, and she reached down, taking his hand once he was in a position to push up.

  “Wow.” He patted his hands off on his pants and studied the light. “I’ve never been in a lighthouse.”

  “I was here a couple of times,” Amelia replied. “As a girl.” But it was different. “I was always distracted, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know. If we were here, we were playing around and getting into trouble. Grandpa Acton never let us come up here. I’d snuck up here.” She smiled behind a faint blush.

  Michael smiled at her. “You’re rebellious?”

  “Used to be. Megan and I were both the black sheep of the family. Until Kate surprised everyone.”

  “How can there be three black sheep in one family?”

  Amelia frowned and strode past each window, her hand pressing along the cloudy glass as though she was testing it out for fortitude. “Good question. I guess none of us were truly rebels or black sheep or whatever. But when we came back here and Dad was gone... things changed. Our mother changed. Her temper was short. We were always grounded. Clara was her priority, which I understand now, but if Dad—”

  She broke off and tears welled along her lower lash lines.

  Michael walked to her, gently slipping her hand into his. He didn’t finish her sentence for her. He didn’t shush her or tell her not to cry. He just waited. He gave her time. He let her be.

  Finally, she emerged from the darkness of her grief. “If our dad were around, maybe everything would have been normal again.”

  “I’m sure he wanted to be,” Michael offered, his voice low.

  Amelia blinked and looked up at him. “If I knew that, I think I’d be able to get over it.”

  “You can know that,” Michael answered.

  She frowned at him, confused.

  He explained. “I’m not a father, but I’m a man. And I have a family. And what family man doesn’t want to be with his family?”

  She shrugged and stared out the window across the water. The image of her father’s wristwatch flashed in her mind, and her gaze danced down below, to the dock where they’d found it. In a way, she believed Michael. “We will never have the answer, I guess,” she murmured, her eyes fixed on the narrow wooden platform where her dad used to tie off.

  “Amelia,” Michael said, turning to face her. He let go of her hand and gripped her shoulders softly but with a purpose. He had her full attention. “You will have the answer one day. We’ll find out exactly what happened to your dad. But even when we do, it won’t change what you know in your heart.”

  The point radiated through her body, from her fingertips into her heart like a shock wave. Michael was right. No matter what became of Wendell Acton—if he got scared off by Kate’s pregnancy (which she knew wasn’t true), if he and their mother had a blowout fight, or if he learned about Gene—it would never strip her of the memories she did have.

  The ballet classes he’d driven Amelia to when no one else in the family took her seriously about honing her dance technique. The Tragedy and Comedy faces he found at the swap meet and brought home for her. Then, of course, the week they drove to Detroit together. A father-daughter duo on the run from nothing and everything.

  Just months before Kate’s news, Amelia had begged their mother to take her to an oddball city tour her middle school drama teacher had raved about. The drive was long, and the whole thing sounded weird to Nora. But Wendell had interrupted their conversation about it. Amelia could just picture him, strolling into the kitchen, jangling the change in his pocket before pulling a gallon of milk from the fridge and taking an inconspicuous sip.

  “You want to see a show in Detroit?” He hadn’t heard her question, but his guess warmed her heart.

  Nora had been working on bills, her glance toward him was both hopeful and skeptical. Amelia’s gaze flew to her father, and she nodded urgently. “But it’s not really a show, it’s a walking tour of downtown Detroit. But Mr. Adamski said that if you grow up in Michigan, it’s just one of those things you have to do.”

  “It sounds dangerous,” Nora had inserted, finally pausing and giving the request its due attention. “Downtown Detroit? And, come on. That would be true of, oh, I don’t know. Frankenmuth, that adorable little German town. Or Mackinac Island. Or the Tulip festival, for Heaven’s sake. But a walking tour of downtown? This isn’t New York.” She laughed and returned to her noisy adding machine, the white paper curling down the side of the table.

  Amelia remembered feeling a deep disappointment. As a child, before that summer trip to the wild west, Amelia’s idea of her future felt fuzzy but optimistic. She could be anything. She always thought that. She could be a veterinarian or a teacher or a doctor, if she wanted.

  “I can handle a little danger,” Wendell answered, winking at Amelia. Her love for her father had swelled like a balloon. “And anyway,” he’d added, “I love local history.”

  Now Michael’s words swirled in her head like a tornado. He was right. It didn’t matter where he went. Amelia knew that Wendell Acton was a good dad. A great one. He loved her sisters and her mother. And he loved Amelia. More than any man ever would, probably.

  She glanced up to Michael, swallowing past the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she whispered and pushed up on the balls of her feet, closing her eyes and trusting that he felt the same.

  Michael kissed her softly, with patience. He kissed her slowly, so that she could shake her worries about the past and fears about the future. He transported her into a fairytale but kept her grounded there, on the observation deck, surrounded by the slow sunset and glistening water. Surrounded, too, by the promise of a fresh start.

  In the lighthouse on the lake, Amelia was everything she ever wanted to be. She was her father’s daughter. She was a princess in a tower with her unwitting knight in shining armor. She wasn’t in the spotlight, of course. Instead, she was the spotlight.

  But, mostly, Amelia was home.

  Epilogue

  Megan Stevenson clicked off the call and turned to Brian. They were eating dinner together, as had become a new, odd tradition, especially with Sarah spending her summer in Birch Harbor with Clara. It was late June, and though the divorce paperwork still existed, it was firmly on hold.

  They were trying to make things work. In the weeks since their initial reunion, as Kate’s first official guests at the Heirloom Inn, Hannigan history had finally settled into place.

  The letter from Liesel confirmed Amelia’s suspicions to the T. In the summer of 1992—the summer they’d spent in Arizona—Liese
l had turned twenty-seven. She was on the brink of a personal crisis, coming to terms with learning that she was adopted through her loudmouth younger brother. In an effort to know everything she could, she tracked down contact information for her birth mother. The only trouble was that a firm no-contact order still stood in place, despite Liesel’s age. Her mother, a woman named Nora Hannigan, had signed paperwork preventing Liesel from ever reaching out. Still determined, Liesel went against her nature and the order and called Nora’s home phone number. It had gone to voicemail. Afraid to leave a message regarding such a big thing, Liesel instead wrote down the name from the machine’s greeting. Hi! You’ve reached Nora and Wendell. We’re out right now. Leave a message, and we’ll call you back!

  Wendell Hannigan. On a whim, Liesel had called for information about a Wendell Hannigan who lived in the area code of the phone number. Luck struck, and she spoke with someone, a local fisherman who knew a Wendell, but his name was Wendell Acton. This, somehow, made even more sense to Liesel. Surely if she was given up by these people, they might have a rocky history. Or perhaps she wasn’t even his child, but he could at least point her to Nora.

  By the time she had tracked down Wendell Acton’s parents—who could have been her grandparents, he was gone. Off the map.

  But by then, Liesel learned that Wendell Acton’s parents worked the lighthouse north of Birch Harbor, Michigan. All it took was a phone call, one rainy Saturday. They answered and when Liesel so much as suggested that she may have been Wendell Acton’s long-lost daughter, they believed her without question. It confirmed for Liesel all she had hoped for. However, the Actons warned Liesel away from Nora, claiming she had moved on and wasn’t worth the emotional energy.

  Still, Liesel and her paternal grandparents stayed in close touch. And when they passed, they requested the deed to the lighthouse be transferred to one Liesel Hart of Hickory Grove, Indiana.

  She had no idea that she had younger sisters. She had no idea that Nora’s heart was shattered at losing her.