The Lightkeepers (2 page)

SHARK SEASON

1

I
WILL NEVER FORGET
the first moments of my arrival. The Farallon Islands were not what I had been expecting. They were both smaller and stranger than I had pictured. A tiny, aquatic mountain range. It looked as though a single, powerful wave could wash the whole thing away. I stood on board the deck of the ferry. Waves smacked the hull while Captain Joe dropped anchor. The dizzy horizon danced as the boat swayed. I shaded my eyes with a hand, staring up at my new home.

Long ago, this place had been called the Islands of the Dead. Now I could see why. Southeast Farallon was less than one square mile across. The other islets were bare, bald, and broken. There were no sandy beaches. The shores were streaked with seaweed, the peaks fragmented and craggy. The islands were arranged by height, like wedding guests in a snapshot. There was a crudeness about their contours. God might have made the world, but he seemed to have deputized his underage stepson to fashion the Farallon Islands out of some lesser brand of clay.

At my side, Captain Joe was shouting into a walkie-talkie. A crackling voice responded. I had spent the past five hours on board the ferry. I was disoriented, in desperate need of a shower. The boat slid up one side of a wave and down the other. I squinted against
the sunlight. We were moored alongside a sharp cliff. Rock against clouds. Something was descending over the edge.

It looked like a deflated birdcage. There was a heavy iron disc at the bottom. Ropes and netting swung against the sky. This, I knew, was the Billy Pugh. (The origin of the name is unknown. I asked and got no answer.) Captain Joe was giving instructions. Someone on the other end of the walkie-talkie replied, the voice garbled by static. The ocean was inky, capped with slimy bubbles.

I would be transported to shore by crane. There was no dock on the Farallon Islands. No marina. No semblance of normalcy. The ferry was twenty feet from the cliffs and could come no closer without being broken open on the reefs below the surface. The Billy Pugh landed on deck with a clatter. Without ceremony, Captain Joe guided me inside the network of ropes. He arranged my feet on the base: a metal circle, scratched and scarred. Above my head, the mesh was gathered and synched around a hook. Above that, a steel cable snaked upward. Somewhere at the top of the mechanism was a crane. A shadow against the clouds.

I turned to Captain Joe.

“This is safe, isn’t it?”

“I’ll send your luggage up after,” he said.

The ground lurched under me. I gasped, knotting my hands into the ropes. The Billy Pugh did not look secure enough to hold me. I was moving fast, rocketing upward. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. I could hear the whine of the steel cable. The disc shifted beneath my feet. I tried to keep my balance as the Billy Pugh swung like a pendulum. The ocean fell away, the ferry distorted, Captain Joe reduced to a
foreshortened cartoon. I thought I saw a dorsal fin in the distance. I thought I saw three of them, moving in unison. I thought I would throw up.

There was a bang. The Billy Pugh had landed. I pushed my way through the gap in the ropes and collapsed onto the Farallon Islands.

What followed was a blur. I lay on my back. Proud that I’d passed my first test. Waiting for the nausea to subside. The granite was cold on my skin, uneven beneath my spine. I could see the crane better now—a rusted spar that lunged over the water. The Billy Pugh was descending again. Someone close by must be operating the thing. I did not know who had transported me to the islands, who was on the other end of Captain Joe’s walkie-talkie. There were six permanent residents here. Six biologists lived in isolation and wildness on the Islands of the Dead.

The crane’s mechanism was perched on top of a nearby hill. Someone was inside, but from this distance I could not make out any distinguishing features. All I could see was a human silhouette. The winch rotated, the cable unspooling. The Billy Pugh dropped out of sight. I watched a seabird pass. I inhaled the odor of mildew and guano. The islands were pungent enough to singe my lungs.

My luggage followed me on the same perilous trip. By the time I got to my feet, the Billy Pugh was sitting beside me again, stacked with my suitcases. The ferry was already leaving. The prow was pointed to California, the wake a churn of gray sludge. I could not see Captain Joe. He had descended into the deckhouse without so much as a goodbye tip of the hat. It did not do to linger in these waters.

I looked around for my unknown assistant. But the silhouette in the crane’s window was gone too. Whoever had been there, operating the machine, had not seen fit to introduce himself, to help me with my bags, to welcome me to the islands. There was a lump in my throat. For now, I was on my own.

It took me a while to make my way to the cabin. Dragging my suitcases. Panting and sweating. It was early afternoon, cold and clear. A seabird winged by in the distance, braying its harsh cry. The ocean boomed. White spray rose above the cliffs. The lighthouse stood sentinel against a hazy sky.

On the porch, I felt like the victim of a shipwreck. The cabin appeared abandoned. There were cracks in the windowpanes. The boards sagged beneath my weight. There was no doorbell. I was still winded from the labor of my walk. My luggage was strewn around my feet. I remember steeling myself to knock. I remember arranging my face into a pleasant, oh-how-nice-to-meet-you expression.

But before I could move—before I could blink—the door was yanked open from within. I stepped back, startled. Two men lunged into the doorway.

One was old, the other young. Perhaps it was the influence of my sea-addled gut, but they both struck me, in that moment, as otherworldly. The elderly one could have been cast in a movie as Poseidon—a thatch of silver hair, a weather-beaten face, an air of gravitas. The younger man was as slim as a sapling. He had calloused, muscular hands. A minor deity, perhaps. A sprite with limited but surprising powers.

Now, of course, I know their names: Galen (old) and Forest (young). At the time, however, I had no idea. I took a deep breath and grinned.

“Hello,” I said.

“Get your tail in gear, or we’re going to miss the whole show,” Forest said. It took me a moment to realize that, although he was facing in my direction, he was addressing the man behind him. I just happened to be in between his interested gaze and the sea.

“Fine, fine,” Galen grumbled, cramming a hat over his white bangs.

“Hi,” I said, louder. “I got off the ferry a few minutes ago. I’m—”

Forest pivoted, smiting himself on the brow. “I forgot the damn camera. Can you believe it? I
forgot
the damn—”

“Too late,” Galen said. “We’ll have to make do without it.”

They barged onto the porch, and if I had not moved aside, Forest would have collided with me. He was zipping up his coat. Galen scanned the shoreline with a pair of binoculars. I opened my mouth and closed it again. My nerve failed me. I could not attempt to announce my presence to them a third time. I watched mutely as they stepped over my suitcases and darted down the stairs.

For a moment, I actually wondered if I might be dreaming. It did seem a bit like an anxiety nightmare: the dreadful boat ride, the massive waves, a horrible mesh cage, a soupy ocean, distant dorsal fins, mysterious figures on the landscape, no greeting, no assistance with my suitcases, no surety, no safety.

Both men trotted off down the path. I watched their figures receding. They had almost reached the crest of the hill when Forest finally turned.

“Oh, of course. You must be Melissa,” he yelled. “Welcome! We’d stay and chat, but—”

Galen took over the sentence, finishing the other man’s thought.

“—there’s a feeding frenzy in the West End Cove,” he shouted. “Get into the house. Don’t go outside. This place is tricky.”

I could not bring myself to bellow back that they had my name wrong. They were already out of sight, dashing away like kids after the ice cream truck.

2

T
HIS LETTER, LIKE
all the others, will never be mailed. In the past, I have found all kinds of creative solutions for the letters I write to you. I’ve burned them. I have buried them in the ground. I have shredded them into confetti. While hiking in the mountains, I have folded my messages into origami flowers, hanging them in the trees. When I took a rafting trip down the Mississippi during a long summer, I would fashion the pages into boats, which I set on the current, watching them drift like water lilies, darkening slowly, sinking when my back was turned.

I have been writing to you for almost twenty years. But none of these missives have ever reached you. None of them have ever been read. After all, I wrote my first letter to you the week you died.

T
HIS IS WHAT
I remember:

Your exit from the world was sudden. You kissed Dad on the cheek, went to work, never came home. I was at school when the accident happened. I heard the sirens. An ambulance went haring past the windows of my eighth-grade history class, drowning out a lecture on trade routes in Europe. A little while later, the intercom buzzed into life, a crackling hiss that filled every classroom in
the building with the aural equivalent of sand. There were a few thumps as the principal grappled with the microphone. I remember the look of annoyance on my teacher’s face. Then my name was spoken. My name was spoken again. I got to my feet, feeling all eyes on me, and began shoving books into my bag. I was not apprehensive. At the time, I did not connect those two things—the ambulance and my name.

It turned out that your car had stalled. The morning was cold, as only D.C. winters can be cold, the air so damp and heavy that it lay over the world like cheesecloth. You had no knowledge of mechanics—that was my father’s job—but you went through the motions anyway: cursing, opening the hood, staring in bafflement at the labyrinth of cogs. Finally you abandoned the vehicle where it was, at the corner of 13th and G, and strode up the hill toward the nearest garage. The sidewalks were wet and slick. Handfuls of blue salt, strewn over the pavement by landlords and store owners, coped imperfectly with the pockets of ice. I imagine you, a slim figure in brown, your face muffled up to the eyes by one of your own hand-knitted scarves. You paused at a crosswalk. You waited for the green. In the middle of the street, you observed too late that a dump truck had begun to skid on a patch of black ice.

The police would later refer to this as a No Fault Accident. You were correct to be in the crosswalk just then. The driver had seen the light changing and attempted to stop, but the slippery pavement, combined with the inertia of his cargo—thirteen tons of gravel—had prevented him. Everybody had followed the law. Somehow this bothered me. I would have preferred an accident in
which somebody was at fault. It was difficult to grasp that there was no one to blame for the loss of my mother—not even you yourself.

What I recall most clearly about that day is sitting outside the principal’s office kicking my feet on the carpet and wondering whether I’d brushed my teeth earlier. The only reason I could come up with for having been dragged out of class was that you, in your well-intentioned but over-scheduled way, had once again forgotten to pick me up for a dentist appointment. You were notorious among the staff at Dr. Greenberg’s. I imagined that someone had called with a friendly reminder, and you had gone flying out of work, coffee on your sleeve, your purse dispensing bits of Kleenex down the road from an unzipped pocket. That was the drill. Any minute now, I was sure that you would appear in the hallway, breathless and bewildered.

When the door opened, however, it was not you at all. Aunt Kim stood there, her face ghastly. Her demeanor was enough to bring me to my feet. Aunt Kim was usually as imperturbable as a slab of granite. Even now, she was not exactly in tears. She was just pale, and her coat was buttoned wrong. At the sight of me, she flinched. Then she approached the receptionist. The two of them held a whispered conversation, glancing my way. I was alarmed to see the receptionist’s expression change, her habitual bored glaze giving way to a sympathetic grimace.

There were three sisters in your family. You were the oldest and best. Kim and Janine, the twins, were as identical as peas. They enhanced this quality by dressing in gray, keeping their hair short, favoring wispy scarves, and sporting brown lipstick. Each twin,
on her own, was conservative and unremarkable. But whenever I saw them together, they were downright eerie, like walking mirror images, like an optical illusion. Same gestures, same sidelong glance, same vocal tone. When the three of you were in company, this impression grew stronger. You shared their build: slim, small, and birdlike. You were a little taller, a little bolder. Your laugh rang out a little louder. But there was so much you three shared—that swing of the hips, that tilt of the head, that rough, throaty murmur. Echoes and parallels and mystery.

When it came to temperament, however, you were unique. You lived on your nerves, exhaling emotion like breath. A beautiful sunset could stop you in your tracks. A friendly debate at a dinner party could whip you into a table-pounding frenzy. Kim and Janine lacked your sparkle. They were stoic and calm—women who viewed any display of emotion as a sign of weakness.

Now Aunt Kim took my arm and led me outside. Her mouth was a thin line.

In the car, Aunt Janine was waiting. At the sight of her, the alarm bells in my mind began to jangle. The twins were serious about their respective jobs. They never took sick days. Their holidays were always constrained. The sight of them in the mid-afternoon, away from their desks, still dressed in their work clothes, their mouths tight, their hands trembling—I did not understand it. I did not like it one bit. Aunt Janine offered no explanations. She motioned me into the back seat.

Aunt Kim drove. Her hands were so tight on the wheel that her knuckles blanched. I was still hoping that all this had something to
do with my teeth. The windshield was decorated with coils of frost. Through the glass, I saw the sleepy gleam of the Potomac River between the buildings. Aunt Kim’s cell phone rang. She did not answer it while driving; she was not that sort. She pulled to the side of the road first. I recognized my uncle’s voice on the line, though his words were indistinguishable.

“Oh yes,” Aunt Kim said brightly. “Right here. Mm-hm.”

I rolled my eyes. Clearly I was being discussed.

“Which?” she asked. “The one in Bethesda? Oh, I see.”

I kept my gaze on the river.

“Be right there,” Aunt Kim said, still in the same brittle, cheery tone.

Without a word to me, she turned the car around. She and Aunt Janine exchanged a glance, communicating through twin telepathy. One narrowed her eyes, the other nodded, and they both looked away. We passed my school again. In the intervening minutes, that stone building had been diminished somehow. Through the window the place appeared curiously distant, as though viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. The traffic was bad that morning. D.C. traffic is always bad. We drove in a silence that seemed intensified by the chilly air. Several times, I saw Aunt Kim reach automatically for the radio. It was the rule of law in her car that NPR must always be blaring. Each time, however, her fingers drew back as though burned.

Her cell phone rang again. Once more, she pulled to the curb, earning herself a barrage of honking from the cab behind us. My uncle’s voice sounded down the line, though I still couldn’t catch any words.

“Nearly there,” Aunt Kim said.

But then her face went blank. All the expression was erased, like a wet cloth on a chalkboard. There were just two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, slightly open. In that moment, she looked so much like you.

My uncle was speaking, a muffled stream.

“I understand,” she said.

Once more, she turned the car around. I saw my school approaching in the distance. Apparently we were going to spend all day passing back and forth in front of it. I cleared my throat, but Aunt Kim did not look at me. Beside her, Aunt Janine folded up one hand and pressed it unsteadily to her mouth. They still had not exchanged a word. They did not need to.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

It was Aunt Janine who answered.

“We’re taking you home,” she said.

F
OR A FEW
days afterward, my memory is empty. Somebody else dressed in black and attended the funeral. Somebody else handled the cloying embraces. All I have are brief, watery flashes. The icy air of winter pervading the house. My father’s red, swollen eyes. The wake was a blur of soft carpeting and muted lights. Every adult in the known universe seemed compelled to approach me and say something about God working in mysterious ways. “I’m sorry for your loss,” each of them said, as though they had all received the same script. A single moment does stand out plainly for me: one
of my little cousins tugging at Aunt Kim’s sleeve. I was standing nearby, awkward in my somber dress. In her bell-clear voice, my cousin asked about you. She wanted to know whether you would be there soon, whether you would sit by her.

I was fourteen years old. At the front of the room, there was a gleaming mound, half-obscured by flowers—your coffin. I knew what was in that coffin. I knew the answer to my little cousin’s question. But I still found myself pausing, heart in my throat, waiting for Aunt Kim’s reply.

“Don’t be silly,” she snapped. “Get yourself a cookie and be quiet.”

I blinked. Time passed. I was standing outside, on the pavement, in the clean wind. This kind of thing happened often, for a while. Blink, and an hour would elapse. Blink again, and a whole afternoon might go by. It was as though someone were slicing at my internal calendar with a pair of scissors, removing time.

A few nights later, I came to myself again. I was sitting in my bedroom. My father was downstairs; he too had gone into a kind of walking coma, subsisting on televised football and cups of black coffee. He would have been glad of my company, no doubt, but I was avoiding him. I was avoiding everyone. Aunt Kim had urged me to call her anytime. Aunt Janine had independently said the exact same thing in the exact same tone. One of my classmates had dropped off that week’s homework, which was piled on my desk, awaiting my attention. There were a thousand things I could have been doing. But the world had turned upside down, and no one else seemed to have noticed. It was astonishing that my school
continued to function, that I would be back there on Monday. It was incredible that cars still rolled down the street outside. Curled on my mattress, I practiced saying the word
dead
. Dead to rights. Dead sure. Drop-dead gorgeous. Now that I thought about it, the word was everywhere. It cropped up in everyday conversations, in moments where it had no right to be, like a warning note, something I had been foolish enough not to pay attention to before.

Then I remembered the Dead Letter Office. A few weeks ago—or a decade, it seemed—my class had gone on a field trip to the local post office. It had been dull, in the particular way that forced visits to government institutions are always dull. Rooms filled with filing cabinets. A sweaty tour guide in a blue uniform, armed with cue cards and a litany of groan-worthy puns. Long hallways. No break for snacks. The Dead Letter Office was where the mail ended up if it could not be delivered. Our tour guide had shown us around proudly. The place was special, he said. The large, grand Dead Letter Office in New York City had even been featured in a Christmas movie once, since all the wish lists that were addressed to
Santa, North Pole
amassed there during the holidays, heaped like an indoor snowdrift.

Alone in my bedroom, I hurried to my desk. I grabbed up a pen—with a spray of feathers in place of an eraser, as I recall—and a sheaf of paper. Then I wrote for ten pages, front and back, without stopping.
Aunt Kim’s necklace at the funeral would have made you laugh
—
she has no taste
—
Aunt Janine wore flats because of her bunions—it was so strange to see them there without you—two instead of three—everyone was chatting and having coffee, the
whole family wandering all over and giving each other hugs—but the twins kept stopping and looking around—like they were waiting for you—
I was barely conscious. My hand moved across the page, and words followed.
They made you wear an awful dress at the funeral
—
I thought you should have your jeans on, but Aunt Kim said No Way
—
I put a package of gum in the coffin
—
I don’t believe in heaven, but you sure do
—
maybe the gum will help your ears pop on the way up
—

Finally it was over. The letter was done, folded into an envelope. I crept downstairs. Moving quietly so as not to rouse my father, I collected a stamp. On the envelope, I wrote just one word:
mom
. Then I threw on a coat and hurried down the street to the mailbox.

T
HERE ARE ENVELOPES
for you in every state I have ever visited. For nearly two decades, I have written to you. Perhaps it is strange that I still have so much to say. I often find myself turning to you, reflexively, a question on my lips; I still engage in imaginary quarrels with you. I store up the memories I have left—the ones that have not fallen by the wayside—and run them through my hands, examining them. The raucous cackle of your laugh. The honey-and-lavender odor of your hair. Your habit of humming on long car trips. Your penchant for linen skirts. I still experience that surge of bottomless sorrow. Even now, this can only be alleviated by a few minutes spent at my desk, scribbling away, head bent over the page.

The whole matter has been complicated, of course, by my continuous traveling. For my work, I have circumnavigated the globe.
As a rule, a nature photographer never stays anywhere too long. Straight out of college, I took a job capturing images of desert animals, rambling across the horn of Africa over a period of weeks. In my father’s words, I “caught the travel bug.” Since then, I have hiked up mountainsides and gone spelunking through caves. I have broiled red in tropical climates and slept in makeshift igloos. I have set foot on every continent. I have swum in nearly every ocean.