“It’s longer this time,” she said, clearly not happy about it. “Mom wants me up there for a couple of months at least. Because she’s lost her second job and needs to look for another one. But that’s only eight weeks. Or maybe sixty days.”
He looked over at her, saw the serious expression on her face. Two months. That was an impossibly long time.
“You’ll have fun. When you get back, you’ll appreciate this place even more.”
“I appreciate it now. And it won’t be fun. Dad’s girlfriend is a bitch.”
“Don’t use that word.”
“Sorry. But she is.”
“Did your mom say that?”
“No. I made it up myself. It wasn’t hard.”
“Well, try to get along,” Saul said, having reached the end of any advice a lighthouse could convey. “It’s just for a little while.”
“Sure. And then I’ll be back. Help me up, I think my mom’s here.” He couldn’t hear a car, but that didn’t mean anything.
He took her hand, braced himself so she could lean on him and get to her feet. She stood there, balanced against him, hand on his shoulder, and said, “Goodbye, Saul. Save this tidal pool for me.”
“I’ll put up a sign.” He tried to smile.
She nodded, and then she was gone, scampering across the rocks like some kind of deranged daredevil—showing off.
On impulse he turned and shouted “Hey, Gloria!” at her before she was out of earshot.
She turned, balanced with both arms outstretched, waiting.
“Don’t forget about me! Take care of yourself!” He tried to make it sound without weight, sentences that could float away into the air. Nothing that mattered.
She nodded and waved, and said something he couldn’t hear, and then she was running up the lighthouse lawn and around the curve of the lighthouse wall, out of sight.
Below, the fish had its mouth around the small red crab, which was struggling in a slow, meditative way, almost like it didn’t want to get free.
0016: GHOST BIRD
The lighthouse rose from fog and reflections like a mirror of itself, the beach gray and cold, the sand rasping against the hull of the boat as they abandoned it in the shallows. The waves came in small and half curling like the froth of malformed questions. The lighthouse did not resemble Ghost Bird’s memory of it, for its sides had been scoured by fire. Discoloration extended all the way to the top, where the lens, the light within, lay extinguished. The fire had erupted from the landing windows as well, and in combination with the bits of broken glass, and all of the other talismans human beings had rendered up to it over the years, gave the lighthouse the appearance of something shamanistic. Reduced now to a daymark for their boat, the simplest of its functions, the one task that, unperformed, made a lighthouse no longer of use to anyone. Made it into a narrow, haunted redoubt.
“Burned by the border commander,” Grace had told them. “Burned because they didn’t understand it—and the journals with it.”
But Ghost Bird caught the hesitation in Grace’s voice, how she still would not tell them exactly what had happened within the lighthouse, what slaughter and deception consisted of, any detailed accounting of what had come at them from the seaward side.
All Grace could offer in its place was a localized pathology—the origin of the orange flags. The doing of the border commander, a cataloging of all that was unknowable to her. Perhaps the commander had been trying to keep separate the real from the imagined. If so, she had failed. Even common thistles had been so marked. Given more time, the commander might have marked the entire world.
Ghost Bird had a vision of the journals impervious, still up there, reconstituted, were they now to enter, walk up into the lantern room, undo the trapdoor, stare down as had the biologist, as had she, so many years ago. Would the reflected light from those frozen accounts irradiate their thoughts, contaminate their dreams, forever trap them? Or was there just a mountain of ashes in there now? Ghost Bird did not want to find out.
It was late afternoon already. They had left the island in the early morning, in a bigger boat Grace had hidden out of sight of the pier. The biologist had not reappeared, although Control had searched those waters with a kind of nervous anxiety. Ghost Bird would have sensed her presence long before there was any danger. She could not tell him, for his own sake, that the oceans through which the biologist now traveled were wider and deeper than the one that led them to the lighthouse.
* * *
They trudged up the beach toward the lighthouse, taking a path that minimized the possibility of sniper fire from above. Grace believed everyone was dead, or long since had moved on, but there was always the chance. Nothing arose from the seaward side, ghostlike or otherwise. Things came out of the sea, things like the biologist, but less kind.