The Lightkeepers (5 page)

7

Y
ESTERDAY
C
APTAIN
J
OE
made his first appearance since my arrival. Normally he comes twice a month, but he has been hindered by engine repairs. It has been almost seven weeks now. I was in my room when the boat appeared on the horizon. It might have been dropped there by magic. My heart turned over. I have come to understand why people in olden days imagined that the world ended at the horizon line. It is sometimes hard to believe that anything can exist beyond that cold edge.

Through the window, I saw that Galen and Forest were on alert. Dressed in their typical, ludicrous gear—waterproof pants, bright orange jackets, hats with earflaps—they were heading toward East Landing. I knew the drill. Captain Joe would approach as close as he dared. One wrong turn, and the ferry would find itself torn apart on the jagged cliffs. Galen and Forest would lower the Billy Pugh. Captain Joe would load it up with our groceries, toilet paper, and toothpaste. Galen and Forest would respond by sending back our outgoing mail. In truth, the whole thing reminded me a bit of space travel. Captain Joe would blast off from his native soil, his cargo hold stocked with supplies for the crew at the space station. The journey from California could take as long as six hours each way. Galen and Forest would meet him at the
boundary line, where the crane would bridge the empty air. At any moment, something could go wrong. Someone could be injured, or worse.

Captain Joe is not the first ferryman to service the islands. I have recently discovered that there were others before him—many others. Most of them quit the moment they found easier work. A few fled after being hurt on the job; broken bones and concussions were common. One drowned. Five years back.

Our oceanic view is the most dangerous stretch of water on the Pacific coast. In places, the sea is only fifty feet deep. The tides sweep in and out at a quick, breathless eight knots. Powerful currents wind through the ocean with their own internal logic, like rivers carving banks into water, rather than earth. There are monstrous waves. Boats slosh and tumble like marshmallows in cocoa stirred by a spoon.

Soon Captain Joe was on his way home. Galen and Forest headed back toward the cabin, loaded down with boxes of groceries, tampons, batteries, and all the mail that had been piling up for us in the post office in San Francisco. The ferry motored smoothly away from the shore. I watched it go with a sense of desolation. The emotion passed quickly, but for a moment I felt like an abandoned child. Watching a parent retreat into the distance. Alone in a hostile and unfamiliar place.

On board that ferry was a postcard for my father. I had been on the islands for nearly two months, and during that time, I had prepared only one piece of mail to send to the mainland. On it I had written,
Proof of life.

This has become a running joke between Dad and me—the cryptic postcard. (He doesn’t know about the letters I save for you, of course.) My postcards to my father tend to be as brief as telegrams. I will amuse myself by communicating my meaning in as few words as possible.
110° in the shade
, I wrote during my month-long stint in the Sahara. From Paris, where I was sent to photograph the piles of skulls in the catacombs beneath the city, I wrote,
Beaucoup de dead people
. And when I was living in the arctic circle, throughout the eerie summer months, when the sun neither set nor rose—when it skimmed the horizon in bewildering revolutions, drifting higher and lower like a balloon caught in the breeze—I wrote simply,
Bright.

Dad has gotten into the spirit himself, omitting unnecessary verbs and articles. It is a game we play, trying to top each other.
Office a madhouse
, he will write.
Overworked. Printer ink dangerously low.

I am aware that my relationship with my father is unusual. Home has been a constant point on the compass since my childhood. For my work, I have bounced around the globe, rootless and unmoored. A month in Costa Rica. Three weeks in Taiwan. Half a year in Australia. Sleeping on couches and bare floors. Letting my stomach tie itself in knots over the local cuisine. Photographing birds and geckos, shacks and trees, people and gravestones. Photographing everything.

And then, like a swallow to Capistrano, I have returned to my father’s sprawling two-story house. He has never had the chance to transform my old bedroom into a study or a storage area. I have
continued to use it, sleeping on that narrow mattress beneath the mobile of the solar system I built back in middle school. I have kept my own books on the shelves, my own clothes in the drawers. My father and I have transitioned into companionable roommates.

The whole thing is both logical and odd. Most of my old friends from school have mortgages of their own by now, not to mention husbands and kids. But I have never lived anywhere long enough to justify paying rent, let alone buying furniture. Besides, I like my father’s house. I help him with the garden. I do most of the cooking. I know the surrounding neighborhood like the back of my hand. Dad and I have our own rhythms and routines, built over years, honed and perfected. His book club. My soap opera addiction. His morning run. My evening walk. His workbench in the basement, strewn with sawdust and tools. My darkroom in the attic, foul-smelling and secret, baths of chemicals shimmering in the gloom. The photos of us on the wall.

That house is where I remember you best. I remember your thin shape curled on the couch, book in hand. I remember your voice raised in song, echoing down the hall from the shower. Each room is a treasure trove of unexpected recollections. Any little thing—an object, an odor, a sound—might trigger a memory, jolting me into the past. A laundry basket might remind me of your hands, working deftly to fold the clothes. The squeal of a cabinet opening might bring back a chance conversation you and I once had while sitting in the kitchen. The sky on a stormy afternoon, clouds mounting outside, might call up an image of you dashing around the house, closing all the windows in anticipation of a hard rain.

There was a postcard for me on board the ferry, by the way.
Miss you
, my father had written. Two words only.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I found myself on the roof. There was a good reason for this: a leak had appeared in the cabin. At noon, a storm struck without warning. It rained wildly, desperately, as though the sky had something to prove. The gutters overflowed. The air was filled with so much moisture that when the wind blew, it rippled like the sea. Lunch was spoiled by a miniature waterfall. Though Charlene and I knew nothing about carpentry, we were the two who could be spared to tackle the problem. Lucy had disappeared on Bird Watch as soon as the storm blew over. Mick wanted to check on an injured sea lion and document its progress—to record whether it would survive or perish. Forest had finally solved a glitch in the video camera and was hoping to catch a few sharks on film. Andrew was probably asleep. Galen handed me the necessary items: tar paper, tiles, a hammer, and a sad collection of bent, mismatched nails. He explained where to find the ladder. As an afterthought, he reminded me not to fall.

To be honest, I didn’t mind being up there. In fact, I wished I could have brought one of my cameras. Any new perspective on an established landscape can shake loose inspiration. The sea, the seals, the coast guard house—they all looked diminished now, unreal. The pictures would have been striking. But I could not risk dropping my camera from such a height. It would never survive the fall, and I did not think I would be able to tolerate the death of another of my precious instruments.

Charlene and I crawled around, crablike, hammering down anything that seemed loose. She had brought a caulking gun, which she squirted at the slightest provocation. The shingles were rough to the touch. We found a few chinks that required maintenance. We got into a confused debate about which rooms were beneath us at any given time. We discovered a chimney. Then we relaxed for a while, gazing across the sea.

As always, I was slightly baffled by the fact that I could not see California. I could see nothing beyond the ocean’s edge. There is nowhere more alone than the Farallon Islands. The rest of the world might disappear—the human race wiped out by a pandemic, a meteor strike, a zombie uprising—and we would be the last to know anything about it. We would be the only ones spared. The day was fine, despite a cold, breathy breeze. October had crept in without my notice. The grass was yellowing at the corners like mildew on cloth. The mice were spending more time underground now, their scuffle and scamper less constant. The two trees near us were wilting, no longer embracing. Maroon leaves tumbled across the stones.

For the first time, Charlene opened up to me. In the manner of the very young, she chattered on about herself, never realizing that she hadn’t asked me any questions. This was not exactly narcissism. She was at the age in which her own personality fascinated her so much that it eclipsed everything else. Her own capacity for creativity. Her own brand of intelligence. She did not seem to heed the unspoken rule that talk of the past was verboten here. I heard about her family’s farm in Minnesota. Without guile, she
mentioned something about an aunt who had disappeared for a time and returned with a new name, claiming to have suffered amnesia. Before I could process the oddness of this—particularly when described in Charlene’s upbeat cadence, as though it were not odd at all—she had already moved on. She was free-associating, leaping from idea to idea. She told me about her college roommate at Berkeley. She told me about the sweet-tempered boyfriend she had left behind, perhaps permanently, perhaps not.

This seemed like a good opportunity. When she paused for breath, I broke in. With every semblance of nonchalance, I asked if she had any idea whether Mick might be single.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Really?”

“Really.” Charlene shot me a worried look. “In fact, I’m sure he isn’t.”

“Ah.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh,” I said. “No reason. Still learning about everyone.”

There was a pause. Charlene was playing with her bangs. Her hair was the sort of fiery red that always made me do a double take. Day by day, I felt the need to check the pallor of her skin, the profusion of her freckles, trying to verify whether such a shade could possibly be real. I did that a lot here generally. The islands were a place that seemed to exist in fantasy, ever-changing and harsh.

Suddenly Charlene stiffened. A look of horror crossed her face. Gazing past my shoulder, she murmured, “Oh no.”

“What?”

She pointed behind me. I pivoted with some care, trying not to dislodge any shingles. My feet scrabbled for purchase on the slanted roof.

In the distance, I glimpsed a boat on the water. The
Lunchbox
was bobbing in the calm surf near Mirounga Bay. There was only one passenger. To my surprise, I saw that it was Lucy. Evidently she had rowed out alone.

“I hate it when she does this,” Charlene said. “I just hate it.”

I peered at the rowboat’s faraway contours. Lucy’s work—observing, tagging, and cataloging the birds—did not necessitate travel on the water. Galen and Forest, the shark boys, could often be found on the briny blue, but in Lucy’s case, a pair of binoculars would suffice. Still, her inquisitiveness might have gotten the better of her. Maybe she had decided to row to the Drunk Uncle’s Islets. Maybe she wanted to visit Arch Rock, which was shaped like a gigantic lock with an old-fashioned keyhole. From there, she would be able to see the burrowing owls and cormorants right under her nose.

And yet, as I looked closer, I saw that Lucy was wearing a neoprene wetsuit. Her body seemed different, wrapped in rubber. Usually she obscured her curves beneath layers of clothing, but now I could see the fleshy arc of her hips, the full measure of her generous bosom. She held a snorkeling mask up to her eyes, adjusting the strap. Beside her on the deck was a bulky breathing apparatus, a snaky hose coiling among the benches. Lucy lifted the end of this tube and stuck it between her teeth. Then she sat down and tugged on a pair of bright blue flippers.

“Is she doing what I think she’s doing?” I asked.

Charlene sighed. “It’s her hobby, believe it or not. She’s a diver. She goes down there and looks for anemones. She collects sea urchins and shells. She likes to see them up close.”

With a splash, Lucy plunged into the water. For a moment she was visible in the surf, pushing her mask into a better position. A swell washed over her, and she disappeared.

“But the sharks,” I said.

The rowboat, abandoned, slid back and forth on the waves. I could hear the smack of the surf on the hull. Lucy’s breathing hose was unrolling slowly, spooling over the side.

“We’ve all tried to talk her out of it,” Charlene said. “Especially Galen. He put his foot down. Big arguments in the kitchen. Lucy was polite, but she wouldn’t budge. She asked us to show her in writing where it said she wasn’t allowed to do it. And we couldn’t. There aren’t any rules for this. Nobody thought to make a rule about recreational diving.”

“It’s crazy,” I said.

Charlene bit her lip. “She doesn’t do it that much. Only a few times since I came. I did ask her about it once. She said it was something she had to do.”

The sea was opaque. Slippery waves. Drifting shadows. A clamor of sunlight glinting off the surface. The water did not allow me to pick out a human shape.

T
HAT EVENING, THERE
was tension in the air. Lucy had not returned. I found it difficult to settle to anything. A cat on a hot tin
roof. I was amazed that Galen and Forest could sit with their heads together, poring over a tidal chart. I was amazed that Charlene could focus on her book, pencil at the ready, occasionally underscoring an important word with two precise lines.

In my travels, I have learned that biologists are a strange breed. A certain kind of individual is drawn to this work. I have grown accustomed to the type. In Texas, I met a herpetologist who caught wild rattlesnakes with his bare hands for fun. In northern California, there was a botanist who enjoyed free-climbing the giant redwoods, scaling those massive trunks with no ropes or harnesses. In Greenland, I encountered an ichthyologist who imitated Jesus, walking on water. Born and bred in that climate, he was able to determine the density of the ice by sight. I often watched him, heart in my throat, as he strode over the surface of the ocean, sending out ripples in the layer of standing water above the deeper core of dark, porous frost.