The Lightkeepers (22 page)

35

I
HAVE NOT FELT
the desire to write to you as often lately. I have not been aware of your absence in the same way I used to be.

After your death, the lack of you was all-consuming. I thought about it constantly. It was as though I’d lost something basic, like my sense of smell or my ability to laugh—the sort of thing I could live without but might not want to. I felt like a tuning fork that when struck rang out loneliness instead of music. I felt as though I’d been halved. These are the things I wrote in my letters to you—and mailed, every few days, to the Dead Letter Office.

Now, however, all that has changed. I am no longer halved. In my pregnancy, I am doubled. That is what occupies my mind nowadays. I can’t marinate in my loss anymore. I can’t dwell endlessly on your absence. Not when I am overwhelmed by the presence of the baby.

I think about it all the time. I think about
him
all the time, since I have become convinced that the fetus is a boy. There is a maleness about him, all elbows and knees. Sometimes, when I lay my hands on my belly, I will experience a kind of mental shock—the emotional equivalent of static electricity. A baby. A boy. The two words might well be synonyms, interchangeable. That is how sure I am.

At night, I often dream about him. There he is in a diaper and hat. There he is in my father’s lap—my father altered by his sudden elevation to grandfather, smiling in a peaceful way that I have not seen since you were here. I imagine my aunts, your twin sisters—I imagine them leaning over a basinet, faces soft. I see my son in the bath. Seated in a red wagon. On the playground. There he is, learning to go down the slide by himself, his mouth a startled O. I imagine the weight of him on my thighs, his head against my breastbone, warm and sleepy, as we turn the pages of a book together. I hear him cry, a piercing siren. I enjoy these dreams. They have given me the chance to get to know the baby before I meet him. He is here with me now. He is filling the absence you created twenty years and a thousand letters ago.

I
T IS
J
UNE
. Recently we had a rain-washed morning, full of thunder. The gulls were affected by the weather. For the first time since Bird Season began, their cries were hushed. The islands were eerily still. Through the window, I saw feathery shapes hunkering down, shivering, heads beneath their wings.

Galen and I lingered indoors. Together he and I lounged around all morning. Rain hammered on the roof. He read a book about blue whales, and I roamed the kitchen, hoping against hope that there might be a magical cache of delicious food hidden somewhere. Galen hummed a nautical ditty, and I ate stale saltines. Galen flipped through the daily log, and I napped on the couch.

The daily log is an interesting study in personalities. Forest’s notes, for example, are all business, a list of the sharks he has seen. He does not bother with complete sentences, telegraphing his information:
Goof Nose in Mirounga Bay, 6 a.m.
That kind of thing. Mick, on the other hand, tends to ramble on enthusiastically about seal behavior:
Two new mothers this week. Babies nursing like crazy. Already gained a few pounds. Cutest damn things! Wish I could adopt one.
Then there is Lucy, whose entries are surprisingly flowery. In her curlicued cursive, she lavishes praise on the gorgeous sunsets, the wild surf, and the aerial ballets of the double-crested cormorants. Though I enjoy reading the daily log, I usually skip Lucy’s entries. In life, she is a solid, matter-of-fact person. On the page, however, she can become pretentious, as though striving to appear deep and emotional.
I would give anything to feel the power and glory of flying free against a purple and gold sky
, she once wrote, apparently without irony.

As the morning wore on, the storm worsened. Rain plummeted in buckets. The air in the cabin was as hazy as evening. Finally Galen summoned me to the table. His smile was warm as he patted the chair beside him.

“How’s the book?” he said. “You’ve been reading it, I hope?”

“Yes,” I said. “The eggers.”

“And the lightkeepers,” he said. “That’s the important part.”

He narrowed his eyes at me appraisingly. Then he sat back. The rain picked up, a torrent gushing through the gutters like an airborne river. The thunder grumbled. Galen’s gaze was lifted to the
ceiling. He began to speak. He told me the story of the lightkeepers in measured tones, apparently from memory.

They had flourished here, for a while. Once the eggers were gone, the men had brought their wives to the islands. They had brought their children. They had built our cabin, as well as the coast guard house—twin structures standing sentinel in a lonely wilderness. As Galen spoke, his hands flitted through the air. For a time, the lightkeepers and their families had thrived. It had been a lovely, peculiar life. Children playing at the foot of Lighthouse Hill. Climbing the two small trees. Skipping stones on the ocean. Making pets of the seal pups. I found it comforting to know that I was not the first pregnant woman to have lived on the islands.

The rain showed no signs of abating, as though a tap had been turned on in the sky. Galen’s expression darkened. Eventually, he said, the lighthouse had been modernized, remade with an automated mechanism. There was no longer a need for a permanent host of lightkeepers. The crew, along with their wives and children, packed up their belongings and headed back to civilization.

“Modernization is an unstoppable tide,” Galen said.

Times had changed and kept on changing. During World War I, the military had shown a brief interest in the islands. Later still, the place had been considered as a possible locale for a new prison or a refueling station for oil tankers.

I let my attention wander. I knew how the story ended. A nature preserve. A wilderness refuge. A home for biologists. Secure, pristine, and untouchable.

Galen tapped my arm. His expression was stern.

“They were our predecessors,” he said. “They were like us. Do you understand?”

“Noninterference,” I said sleepily. “Nonintervention.”

“Yes,” he said. “The lightkeepers took only what they needed. They studied and documented and made no changes. They protected this place.”

He prodded my arm again, driving the point home.

“That’s what we must do, always,” he said.

Y
ESTERDAY
I
GAVE
in and visited the murre blind. This was a result of the combined efforts of Mick and Galen, who had badgered me for a week straight, insisting that I had to see the murres fledging their chicks. Though it is June, we don’t have warm days here. Instead, we have afternoons of bright sun and sharp wind, the temperature changing by the moment. The climb made me nervous. Galen managed it on two legs, but I found myself on my hands and knees, crawling like a dog and scrabbling for purchase. My belly hung beneath me, a pendent mass. My heart was pounding as I reached the blind. Mick was right behind me—he had been back there the whole time, ready to catch me if I fell.

“I’m not going back down that slope,” I hissed in his ear. “I’ll just stay up here forever.”

“Good idea,” he said.

The murre blind was a simple tin shack. Seabirds, as a rule, have good color vision, but they are not adept at recognizing shapes. A group of people standing on a nearby crest would have alarmed
them. But a slate-colored hill, topped by a square, incongruous, slate-colored object, did not concern them at all. Mick helped me settle onto a folding chair. The blind smelled funny. Fish and seawater. I leaned forward, compressing my belly, and peered through the window.

The coast ended in an abrupt and dramatic cliff. The murres were packed along that edge, crushed together. There seemed to be no space between their bodies, no glimpse of rocky ground. They moved constantly. The mosaic of black and white feathers shifted like static on a screen. It was hard to pick out individual shapes. The occasional flash of lipstick red indicated an open beak. The noise was deafening. The square frame of the window made me feel as though I were looking through a viewfinder. The verge of the precipice was ruffled with feathers and beaks. Beyond that, the sea stood solid and imposing, a flat slab of gray.

After a while, I began to notice the chicks. Most of them were still at an intermediate stage, midsized, with a mangy appearance, their baby fluff not quite gone, their adult feathers not quite grown in. We had come to the blind to watch these chicks learning to fly. I had observed the process with the gulls already. I had seen that the necessary muscles were in place, and there was clearly an instinctive understanding of what to do, yet a stumble or two was inevitable on the way—a confused farce of trial and error. I had watched young gulls turning sideways in midair, landing on their heads, or simply flapping their wings while running across the rocks, their little faces illuminated with elation, quite sure that they were airborne.

With the murres, however, the matter turned out to be very different.

“There,” Mick said, pointing. “Right there.”

A pair of birds had taken their chick to the edge of the cliff. Before my eyes, a conversation took place, the parents instructing and the baby responding. (I could not, of course, hear their voices over the clamor; I just watched their beaks opening and closing like a silent film.) And then the chick was plummeting toward the sea. I cried out as the tiny body whizzed downward. Had the parents shoved it? Had the wind caught it at the wrong moment? Had the chick jumped of its own accord? I could not be certain. For a moment, things looked bleak. The chick was accelerating. Moving at that speed, it would not survive a collision with the water.

Then I saw a flutter. A wiggle. The chick flung out its wings. Mick whooped. Galen tugged a small green notebook from his pocket and scribbled something down. The chick flapped once, twice, and began to rise.

T
HAT EVENING
, I made my announcement. I waited until dinner was over. We had just received a delivery from the mainland, and we spent the meal luxuriating in a wealth of salad and fresh fruit. Lucy made chicken with a rich pesto sauce. Dinner was punctuated by groans and the scraping of forks. When we had all eaten our fill—when everyone was leaning back in their chairs, eyeing the dirty dishes balefully—I got to my feet. I lifted my water glass and clinked it feebly with my knife.

“I have something to tell you,” I said.

Lucy was watching me steadily. I found it impossible to meet her gaze. Mick intervened. With incredible swiftness, he unzipped my sweatshirt. He yanked the fabric aside with the showmanship of a magician opening a curtain onstage. I was wearing only a thin T-shirt underneath. My belly was undeniable.

“We’re pregnant!” Mick crowed, laying a hand on that swollen globe.

In that instant, I saw that nobody was the least bit surprised. I was in my third trimester now. Everything about me was different—bulbous breasts, puffy rear end, indistinct jawline. Still, they all went through the motions. Galen congratulated me in a deep, booming voice. He got to his feet and laid his hands on my shoulders in a kind of solemn benediction. Forest kept a placid smile on his face. Lucy flashed me a bright, true grin. She gave me the first real hug I’d ever received from her.

“He’s going to be a great dad,” she whispered in my ear.

The evening that followed was strange. They were biologists, and I had become an interesting specimen. Forest occasionally shot me a look I could not interpret; it might have been amusement or discomfort. Lucy insisted on feeling the baby, laying icy hands on my stomach. She stood there for a long time, beaming, waiting until the fetus responded with a kick. Behind her eyes, there was a suggestion of something more than happiness. Relief, maybe.

The clock ticked in the corner. Someone had broken out a case of wine. I sipped grape juice with a sour aftertaste—a few weeks past its sell-by date, I guessed. As the hours passed, I remained
quiet. I did not have to lie. I did not have to say anything at all. Mick sat beside me, shielding me, deflecting every question, filling the space with his big, benevolent presence.

At one point he reached over and took my hand. Not since your death had I felt so safe, so protected, so loved.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, I was woken by a strange sound. At first I thought it was my seal pup—my lost-and-found pup—calling for me again. Crying for its mother one last time. It took me a while to come fully into consciousness. The keening went on, punctuated by heavy, sodden breathing. Gradually I realized that it was human. A wracked, heartbroken, anguished noise. Someone was sobbing.

I sat up in bed, palming the hair out of my face. For the life of me, I could not figure out where the sound was coming from. It could have been Lucy downstairs, weeping into her pillow. But it also could have been coming from the hall outside my door—from Galen’s room, maybe. The wind whirling around the cabin played tricks on my ears. The voice itself was not recognizable. Pain had distorted it, washing out the usual characteristics: age, gender, vocal quality. There was something universal, I realized, in the noise of a person crying. I did not dare get out of bed and try to locate the sufferer. What I was hearing was too intimate for that. I tilted my head to the right and left, trying to pinpoint the source. But I could not solve the riddle. The sound was coming from everywhere at once, as though the house itself were in tears.

36

T
HERE IS NO
way forward except through words. Since you died, I have dealt with every tragedy and loss the same way—by writing. So I will write to you now. Even though my letters have begun to feel hollow, even though the act brings me less and less solace, I will write to you. There is no remedy for what happened today. But I will put the words on paper anyway, hoping against hope for comfort.

The first few hours of the morning were lovely. I woke late, wrapped in what felt like a quilt of sunlight. Captain Joe had recently made an appearance, which meant the fridge was stocked. I ate a bowl of cereal with strawberries and fresh, creamy milk. I found a gossip magazine crammed at the back of the bookshelf, where it had been hiding, undiscovered, for my entire tenure on the islands. I flipped through it with glee. The house was quiet. Only Galen was home. He and I maintained a companionable silence, moving around each other with the mute ease of goldfish in a bowl.

Around ten o’clock Lucy appeared at the front door, hard hat in place. In her poncho, she rustled across the room to where I lay on the couch.

“Get up,” she said, standing over me.

“Why?”

“I need help. Mick dropped a piece of equipment in the water. One of my best nets. It’s caught on a reef. We need all hands on deck.”

Galen was already on his feet. It took me a while to extricate myself from the couch cushions. It took me even longer to get my flea collars around my ankles. I have reached the stage of my pregnancy in which bending over is complicated.

On the porch, the first thing I encountered was Kamikaze Pete. Weeks of unceasing battle had diminished his physical person, but not his spirit. He was thin and bedraggled. He had not taken the time to care for his plumage, feathers jutting out any old way. One eye was permanently squinted shut. Still, he launched himself as vindictively as ever at my skull. I ducked low and made a break for it, skidding down the steps. Kamikaze Pete did not chase me. He stayed on his own turf, shrieking threats at my retreating form. Galen followed me down the stairs.

Lucy was already halfway across Marine Terrace, leading the way. I saw Mick at the water’s edge. He was shadowed against the brilliant shards of light strewn across the surface of the sea. Threading through the birds was not easy; I had to be cautious. Chicks of various sizes bobbed everywhere, tumbling onto the path and squawking up at me. Their parents were not as welcoming. They whacked my shoulders with their wings and emptied their bowels onto my poncho. Their cries rose around me like fog, thickening the air, making it hard to keep my bearings.

I glanced up. I saw Lucy in motion. I saw Mick swinging a rope in both hands. I glanced down, checking my progress. Then I looked toward Mick again.

A group of gulls had come out of nowhere. Even at a distance, I heard the screech of their voices, nails on a chalkboard. Wheeling in formation, they plunged out of the sky. Mick lifted his arms, batting the birds away. But there were too many of them. He was encircled by a tornado of feathers.

What happened next is etched on my brain like ink on photo paper. I remember every instant of it, every action, every breath. I will remember it forever.

There was a sharp crack. Mick lurched to the side. One of the gulls had made contact with his hard hat. Another swooped in, slamming against the plastic dome. Before my eyes, the thing broke apart. It seemed almost geographical: an earthquake splintering the hard hat into shards. The pieces exploded outward. Bright plastic, white birds. Mick was without armor. He was defenseless.

The gulls did not hesitate.
Pecked in head
—their favorite kind of violence. They beat at Mick’s face, disorienting him. A large female took aim. Her beak glinted. I saw a splash of blood. She had sliced off a wedge of Mick’s ear.

He screamed. There was no time for me to take it in. There was no time left. Beaks swiveled around him like knives. Slashing at his forehead. Tearing his throat. Pulling swatches from his poncho. Ripping his fingers to the bone. The birds were decorated in blood now, marked and smeared with war paint.

In what seemed to be slow motion, Mick twisted in midair. He was scored all over by wounds. The gulls had tattooed his wrists and hands with abrasions. One ear was gone. A crimson hole. His Adam’s apple poured a waterfall down his neck, streaking his
poncho. The birds swooped around him, unrelenting. His hand rose in a helpless gesture. A trail of red mist followed the movement, drifting behind his arm like an afterimage. He was standing too close to the water.

A slip. A stumble. That is all it takes to claim a person’s life. Mick fell inside a cloud of wings. He disappeared behind the rocks. A splash rose against the shore, glinting in the light. The birds rose too, triumphant.

Something touched my arm. It was Galen, gripping my elbow to steer me forward. We stumbled frantically through the rookery. We reached the shoreline together. His grip was causing me pain. It was hard, at first, to make sense of the mix of glare and darkness. Dazzling coins were spangled across the water. My eyes adjusted slowly. There was a long shadow inside the wet glow.

Now, in retrospect, I am aware that I did not want to understand what I was looking at. I took it in without registering its meaning. Denial is a powerful thing: it can alter what we see, help us forget the moments of transgression and pain in our lives, keep us unaware of violence. Mick’s body bobbed limply on the ocean. Facedown. I held my ground, waiting for the scene to resolve into something else. Any second now, he was going kick his legs. He was going to surface, gasping for breath. He was going to start to swim. I was calm and curious, nothing more.

A moment later, a gull landed on Mick’s back. Its beak flashed, and a spatter of crimson coated its feathers. It took flight with something in its mouth—a hunk of quivering pink. A second bird followed suit. It perched quizzically on Mick’s arm, its weight dipping
the limb beneath the surface of the water. It peeled a strip of skin from the back of his hand. Then another bird landed. And another.

At my side, Lucy was sobbing. She waved her arms in vain, trying to scare the gulls away. Galen had his fingers buried in his hair. His mouth was contorted. The birds were growing bolder, circling in a pack. They yanked tufts of Mick’s hair out. They stabbed at his poncho, penetrating the fabric, wrenching mouthfuls of wet flesh from his torso. They smacked one another with their wings, battling over who would alight on the body next. They shrieked in what seemed to be elation. Mick was a sodden mass, oozing coils of blood over the surface of the sea.

I don’t know how long I would have stood there, unwilling to believe what I was seeing. Forever, maybe.

It seemed as though the noise of the birds was growing louder. The roar became unendurable, thundering in my ears. I had an impression of motion and wind, of something rising around me, as though all the gulls on Southeast Farallon had taken flight at once.

Galen grabbed me as I fell. The last thing I remember is the expression on his face—eyes haunted, mouth open—and the vise of his wiry arms.

I
WOKE IN
my bedroom. I kept my eyes closed for a bit, inhaling the familiar odors of dust and mildew, feeling the light from the window on my cheek. Somebody else was there. My heart leapt. I wanted it to be Mick; I was sure that it would be Mick. He had always been the one to care for me when I was ill.

“How are you feeling?” Lucy said.

I opened my eyes. She was leaning over me. Her hair swung in its usual braid.

“I’ll get you some water,” she said, turning toward the door.

I flung out a hand to stop her.

“What happened?” I said.

She sank onto the bed, frowning. I was struck anew by the hale solidity of Lucy. Her whole body spoke of matronly good health. But her face had a dewy aspect now. Her eyes were swollen.

“You know what happened,” she said.

I was still hoping she might come up with an alternate solution. Maybe Mick had been rescued just in time. Maybe the kiss of life had saved him. Maybe he was downstairs now, shrugging off the last vestiges of hypothermia. Maybe he was fine. That was what I wanted to hear: Mick was absolutely fine. It was the What If Game all over again.

Lucy brushed a lock of hair wearily from her face.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

At once, I pushed myself upright. With a frantic gesture, I reached for her, pulling her into a bear hug. I saw the shock in her face. My belly knocked the wind out of her. She patted my back, and I gripped her rib cage with all my strength. This was not a benevolent instinct. I wanted to force what she was about to say back into her throat, through her lungs, down through the soles of her feet. I wanted to prevent her from saying Mick’s name aloud, from saying
drowned
or
gone
or, God forbid,
accident
. I did not want her to say a word.