The Language of Sand (8 page)

“Except you don’t have any tea. You may not have a teapot either.”

A search of the cabinets yielded a scuffed kettle bearing a dented belly.

“One out of two.”

Abigail wandered into the living room and checked her watch. It was a little before six a.m. She hadn’t been awake this early in ages, not since Justin was an infant. She would stir at the sound of his soft, insistent crying and pad into his room, the carpet muffling her footsteps, then scoop Justin into her arms, and his crying would cease. It was gratifying that her touch could quiet him, that it had so much power. She smiled, then trembled from the cold, shaking off the memory. Abigail rubbed her arms, wondering what to do.

“The lighthouse.”

Why Lottie kept the door locked was a mystery as well as a redundancy, given that the front door was as secure as a vault and
practically impossible to open even with the appropriate key. Abigail didn’t get it, which was for the best. Grasping Lottie’s logic would have meant she’d relinquished her own.

A few steps up the spiral staircase, the iron risers began to growl ominously. Abigail froze, afraid the stairs might not hold. To assess their strength, she shook the railing and jumped on the lower landings. The wrought iron held fast, so she cautiously began to climb. Halfway to the top, Abigail made the mistake of glancing over the handrail. The staircase snaked around the walls vertiginously, bottoming onto a concrete slab.

“Note to self: Don’t look down.”

The tower acted as a giant megaphone, amplifying her words into an echo that swirled through the lighthouse like a coin in a drain. Abigail couldn’t resist trying it again.

“Oh, say, can you see,” she sang.

The bar of the song ricocheted off the walls, vibrating impressively.

“Watch out, Celine Dion.”

For as much as Abigail had been talking to herself, this was the first time her voice wasn’t being filtered through her own ears. The echo didn’t match what she was accustomed to hearing. There was a gap between how she thought she sounded and how she
really
sounded. That was why Abigail always made Paul leave the message on their voice mail.

His voice wasn’t especially deep or distinctive, yet there was a dignified quality to his speech. Each word was enunciated to perfection, which was what Abigail first noticed about him when they’d met in graduate school. They were in the library and she’d taken a seat at the same study table. When the girls at the next table began to talk too loudly, Paul noticed it was bothering Abigail.

“Could you lower your voices, please?” he asked.

His intonation said volumes. The girls promptly stopped, then Paul flashed Abigail a glance. She smiled to thank him and he smiled back. Though that wasn’t what hooked her. It was his voice as well as those six short words he’d spoken.

Abigail returned to the library every day for a week to see if he’d be there. He was, sitting at the same table, in the same spot. Neither had enough nerve to approach the other, until one rainy evening when Abigail bumped into him in the vestibule of the library and he struck up a conversation. She was so enthralled by the purposeful manner with which he talked that she couldn’t absorb a sentence he was saying. Meaning peeled apart from the nouns and verbs, stripping them to a chain of syllables, a pure resonance. Paul’s voice was like a snake charmer’s pipe, enchanting beyond reason. Abigail could have fallen for him with her eyes closed.

They began seeing each other, then continued to date as Abigail completed her linguistics thesis and Paul finished his doctorate in applied mathematics. Initially, the subject seemed dry and impenetrable to her. To hear Paul discuss it, she would have sworn he was describing a piece of art. His passion for numbers was rivaled by Abigail’s passion for words, his exuberance infectious. He would transform as he sketched a theorem for her, growing more animated with each sign he scribbled onto napkins or place mats or newspapers, whatever was handy. Abigail had been captivated by his descriptions of math and by his unparalleled respect for it. If he could love numbers with such ardor, she couldn’t imagine how it would be to have him love her.

After they’d earned their respective degrees, they moved into a three-room apartment together. They were both low on the totem poles at their new jobs, scrimping on food and essentials to get by. Abigail had been employed by an online research company. Paul worked at a think tank. Since their positions’ potential outweighed the starting pay, they were willing to make do. Plus, Abigail’s father slipped her cash when she would let him. He was so proud that she’d chosen to pursue a career in lexicography, he would tell people it was the equivalent of having the eldest son in a Catholic family enter the seminary. Flattered, Abigail made it clear to her father that she wanted to make it on her own. He acquiesced by sending smaller checks less frequently. She didn’t mind going without as long as she had Paul.

One night, as they walked to their favorite Chinese take-out restaurant to order the cheapest entres on the menu, Paul pulled Abigail aside.

“I’ve got an idea. I think we should rob the place, take the money, then run off to Las Vegas and get married.”

Abigail knew he was kidding, but he wouldn’t drop it. Paul dragged her into the tiny shop and dug a pointed hand into his pocket, pretending to conceal a weapon. “Follow my lead.”

“Paul,” Abigail protested.

When she wrestled his hand from his coat pocket, he produced a velvet ring box. Paul got on one knee and opened the box, revealing a delicate engagement ring.

“I could never love anyone more than I love you, Abigail. Never. Will you marry me?”

The cooks and clerks looked on expectantly. Abigail was speechless. She wiped her eyes and managed to get out a single word:
yes.

Paul was everything she wasn’t—spirited, fearless, unflappable. He was capable of the unexpected, and being with him made her feel as if, maybe, someday she might do something unexpected herself.

Abigail would never hear her husband’s voice again, a fact that echoed in her heart as she clung to the iron handrail and allowed her gaze to fall into the well of the lighthouse, disregarding her earlier warning. The stairs wound downward, uncoiling away from her like her memory.

She climbed the remaining steps to the top of the lighthouse, which was crowned by the lamp room, a circular turret walled with windows that created an enormous lantern. Access to the lamp room was gained through a trapdoor-style hatch. The massive lamp squatted in the middle of the room, encased in thick plates of glass, each covered in raised concentric grooves, similar to those of a record. While running her hand along the glass and circling the lamp’s pedestal, Abigail tripped over a tin pail she hadn’t noticed, sending it clattering around the room cacophonously.

“If I wasn’t awake before, I am now,” she said, righting the pail and setting it aside.

The view from the lamp room was breathtaking. The ocean stretched infinitely to the east while the silhouette of the island’s trees and marshes sprawled to the west. As the sun bulged over the horizon, it radiated golden light into the clouds, tinting the undersides pink. This was the quintessence of a sunrise.

Abigail stepped onto the parapet, mindful not to let the door to the lamp room close, in case it locked. She couldn’t afford to get trapped out here. She was a newcomer on Chapel Isle, and hardly anyone was aware she’d taken up residence at the lighthouse. Who would think to look for her? Who would miss her?

The sentiment of
missing
was constant for Abigail. She missed her husband. She missed her son. She missed the life she was going to have with them. She was already beginning to miss the person she’d left behind on the mainland, the woman she had been before she went from Abigail to Abby.

A low railing encircled the lighthouse’s parapet, too low to hold. She skimmed it with her fingertips, grappling with the impulse to categorize the sunrise, to apply adjectives to it, sculpting it into a class and rank. She wished she had a camera.

“A picture
is
worth a thousand words.”

Abigail detested that cliché, the implication being that language was insufficient, imperfect. For her, it was the ultimate insult. However, during the fire, she had seen that the adage could hold true. It wounded her to admit there were instances when words were heartrendingly inadequate.

Descending the spiral staircase, she realized it was far scarier going down than coming up. Some of the steps whimpered under her weight, others yowled, iron gritting against iron. Abigail counted the noisy stairs to maintain her composure. By the bottom, the total numbered more than one hundred. Woozy, she flopped onto the couch in the living room, which expelled a puff of dust.

“Charming,” she said as she choked.

The house was in dire need of a thorough cleaning. But Abigail
firmly believed Lottie ought to have taken care of that. It was still too early to go into town and haggle with her for another discount on the rent or to request a complimentary maid service. Even if Lottie agreed to compensate her somehow, who knew when she would get around to it? Abigail couldn’t handle another night’s sleep on towels and decided to tackle the laundry before she unpacked. Lottie had mentioned a washer and dryer. There was only one place they could be.

The basement door was under the staircase. Lottie hadn’t unlocked it as she had the one to the lighthouse, so Abigail spent ten minutes sorting through the panoply of keys on the key ring. It struck her that an inordinate amount of her time was being consumed by locked doors.

“This is turning into a full-time job.”

Once she got the basement door open, she was walloped by an unsavory smell—a potpourri of must, mold, and another scent she couldn’t quite discern. She flipped the light switch.

“At least this works.”

If there was a short somewhere in the house, the bulbs might illuminate or snuff out at will. Getting caught in an unfamiliar basement in the dark was not an ideal way to start the morning.

“Please stay on,” Abigail implored, taking a tentative step. “Please stay on.”

The stairs creaked beneath her in turn.

“Does everything in this house squeak?”

The next riser screeched in reply.

“It was a rhetorical question.”

Two light fixtures bracketed each end of the basement, and there was a small window, but years of grime acted as a shade. The first light was by the stairs. The second was at the far side of the house, under the kitchen, creating a forest of murky shadows in between. A pale square form was glowing dimly from the opposite corner of the basement. Abigail thought it must be the washer. While navigating through the darkness, she hit something, knocking
her shin hard. She had to squint to see that she’d walked into a stack of dust-coated crates.

“More dust. How lucky can a girl get?”

Feeling her way along the wall, Abigail inched forward. The stone was cool and gritty to the touch. The unusual smell was growing stronger. She couldn’t place it. Soon she came upon the water cistern Lottie had spoken of. A vast cavern built into the earth, it was large enough to house a compact car. This was the source of the foul odor.

While stepping away from the cistern to catch her breath, Abigail backed into something cold and solid—a deep porcelain sink. That was what had been glowing. Next to it stood an old-timey washtub with a hand crank to wring out clothes.

“I should have known. This must be what Lottie meant by a washer and dryer.”

The bulb overhead flickered.

“And that’s enough of the basement for today.”

In a dash for the stairs, Abigail collided with another mound of crates, slamming her other shin, then ran upstairs into the living room, which was mercifully bright and free of obstacles for her to sideswipe.

“What a bonus. Matching bruises,” she griped, massaging her lower legs.

Her discarded apple was lying on the floor, reminding Abigail that she needed a cup of coffee, some food, and, most important, she had to pay Lottie a visit. Maybe the café she’d spotted in town would be open for breakfast and someone there could tell her where to find a laundromat.

The dusty linens she’d shucked off the bed the previous night were draped on the rocker in the master bedroom. Abigail gathered them and the towels into a ball. Given the amount of clothing she had to wear in addition to her pajamas to stay warm, laundry threatened to become a real issue.

“So help me, there had better be a laundromat on this island. That ancient washer in the basement isn’t going to cut it.”

Abigail got dressed in reverse, removing the clothes she’d slept in before she put on a pair of khakis and a knit top from her duffel. Even though she wasn’t overly concerned with her appearance, she did notice that the house didn’t have a full-length mirror. The puny one in the bathroom was the only mirror in the entire place. Abigail had to wonder if, after a while, she would forget how she looked from the neck down.

 
e
lide
(i lid´),
v.t.
,
e
lid
ed, e
lid
ing. 1.
to omit (a vowel, consonant, or syllable) in pronunciation.
2.
to suppress; omit; ignore; pass over.
3.
Law.
to annul or quash. [1585–95; < L
ēlīdere
to strike out, equiv. to
ē
–
E
–+ –
lidere
, comb. form of
laedere
to wound]