If you read last month’s story, “A Different Light,” you’ll recognize the characters in today’s story, which takes place nine years earlier. And if you haven’t read “A Different Light,” no worries. This story stands on its own. Enjoy!
Outside the window thick gray clouds and sheeting rain darkened the day. Aunt Lu’s grandfather clock said it was 8:35, but it looked to Amelia like twilight rather than morning. She could scarcely make out the willows in the lawn. Mostly she saw their branches, tossing in the wind like shadow horses rearing their heads; they even sounded almost like horses neighing in fear, the way the wind moaned and keened as it lashed them.
A gust of wind drove rain against the big picture window and set the flame of the candle on the sill bobbing and flickering. Amelia sat in the window seat, hugged her knees to her chest, and watched till the flame righted itself and began to blaze straight up, its reflection mirrored perfectly in the glass of the window. Beside her, Jamie stood, scowling, his arms across his chest. He was 15, six years her senior, and had always seemed almost a father, as much protector as playmate, but now as she looked at him, he did not look at her or smile reassuringly. He only stood stiffly staring out the window, his face hard.
The power in the Inn had flickered out around midnight, after they’d all fallen asleep. There were no guests, so Aunt Lu hadn’t bothered to power up the generator. Instead, she’d brought Jamie and Amelia down to her sitting room to sleep by the fire. Jamie hadn’t slept much, Amelia knew, for every time she woke in the night, he was lying on his side on the sofa, staring into the fire. “Is she home yet?” Amelia had asked each time.
“No,” Jamie said. “Go back to sleep.” And she had. But he hadn’t, she was sure.
This morning, Aunt Lu had gathered candles and three old hurricane lamps with glass chimneys, and she and Amelia had lit them and set them around the sitting room. Their flames danced cheerfully, and the fire in the hearth crackled merrily, a stark contrast to the lowering darkness outside and the aching fear around Amelia’s heart.
Mom had not come home in the night. That wasn’t wholly unusual, but it never got easier to wake and realize she was not there and had left no message on Aunt Lu’s answering machine.
“We couldn’t listen to it even if there was one,” Jamie had growled when Amelia asked about messages.
“The machine doesn’t work when the power’s out,” Aunt Lu said gently.
“Does the phone work?” Amelia asked, her eyes wide with worry.
“Yes.”
“So she can call us?”
“Yes.”
“She won’t,” Jamie said. “She’s probably too groggy to remember the phone number—”
“Jamie,” Aunt Lu said in a warning tone.
“—and too hungover to think to look up the Inn in the phone book—”
“Jamie!” Aunt Lu said again.
Jamie turned away from her, stalked to the window, and muttered, “Assuming she could even find a phone book wherever she is.”
Aunt Lu didn’t hear him, but Amelia did, and though she knew as well as Jamie that what he’d said was true, she wished he had not said it out loud.
Aunt Lu phoned the three of Mom’s friends whose numbers she had in her address book. None of them had seen Mom or knew where she was.
“You should call the bars,” Amelia said.
Aunt Lu gave her a pained look, mixed with pity.
“Bars aren’t open in the morning,” Jamie said.
Those were the last words he’d spoken. Amelia watched the rain sheet down and listened to the wind as it howled around the Inn, and to the ticking of the clock. That had been half an hour ago. Half an hour that felt to Amelia like a day, for Jamie had said nothing since, just stood there staring out the window and scowling.
Another gust of wind rattled the window. Amelia startled, and Jamie tensed, clenching his jaw even tighter. The look on his face scared her as much as Mom’s absence. Always Jamie believed that Mom would come home, and always Mom did. But if Jamie stopped believing—
Wind shivered the window again and struck it with a blast of rain so loud Amelia jumped. In the year she’d lived at the Inn, she had never seen rain like this. Usually the rain was soft and gentle, barely a drizzle dripping from a misty sky. Occasionally it was a steady drumming, almost comforting as it pattered against the roof and windows. But this rain was angry. It blew this way and that like a flock of starlings and screeched like fighting gulls. Amelia unfolded her legs and stood with her back to the window, the wind, and the rain, and faced Jamie. She wished he would look at her, or that his face would soften, or that he would wrap her in a hug. But he continued to stare out the window, his jaw clenched and his arms crossed firmly, almost fiercely, over his chest.
“Come.” Aunt Lu sat on the small sofa beside the fire and beckoned. Amelia sat beside her, and Aunt Lu placed an arm around her shoulders. For several minutes the only sound was the quiet ticking of the clock and the soft crackling of the fire. “You know, that candle in the window reminds me of a story about my great-grandmother Lucy—”
“Lucy!” Amelia’s face lit with a smile. “That’s your name!”
“Yes, I was named for her. Did your mom ever tell you about her?”
Amelia shook her head. She looked over at Jamie. He hadn’t moved, still stood with his back to the room, his whole body tense and set.
“Jamie,” Aunt Lu said, “take a candle and go get the flashlight, will you? It’s in the front desk. Second drawer on the left.”
“Why do we need a flashlight?” Amelia asked. “I thought you were going to tell us a story about our—” She paused and thought for a moment. “Would she be our great-great-great grandmother?”
“That’s right,” Aunt Lu said.
“So why do we need a flashlight?” Amelia persisted.
“You’ll see.”
Jamie returned with the flashlight. Aunt Lu turned it on and shone the beam of light onto the bookshelves that lined one wall of the sitting room from floor to twelve-foot ceiling. The Inn had been a women’s college a hundred years ago, and this room had been the library. Amelia watched the beam of light move across the top shelf.
“There,” Aunt Lu said, stilling the beam on a row of thick brown books about halfway from the window to the opposite wall. “It should be on that shelf. Grab the ladder, Jamie.”
Jamie rolled the ladder along its rail and clambered up to the shelf where Aunt Lu’s light pointed.
“Is there one that says ‘Lucy Grant Devries’ on the spine?” Aunt Lu moved the light slowly along the row until Jamie found the book she wanted.
But it wasn’t a book. It was a box shaped like a book. At the back was a brass clasp that held the hinged lid in place, so the box could stand on its end. Aunt Lu unfastened the clasp and opened the lid. Inside lay a sheaf of papers, yellow with age and tied with string.
“These were all written by my great-grandmother,” Aunt Lu said. “Most of them are to her brother John and his wife, Mary.” She untied the string and looked at several of the papers, touching them carefully, almost reverently, before she said, “Aha, here’s a good place to start.”
Amelia settled herself beside Aunt Lu on the little sofa. Jamie sat in a chair opposite them. Aunt Lu began to read.
August 12, 18—
Dear Mary and John,
We arrived at the new station last Thursday. They call it an island, but really it is a great rock heaved up out of the sea, like the back tooth of a dragon. Father says it is over 100 feet from the top of the island to the water—though of course that changes depending on the tide—and in most places the sides are sheer, vertical rock faces. The island has no harbor, only three little landing places, big enough for a Makah canoe (I am determined to learn to paddle one!) but not for any larger craft, and certainly not for a lighthouse tender. Our supplies were placed in boxes, and a large derrick lifted them from the tender to the top of the island.
After all our supplies were taken off the tender, I rode to the top of the island in a basket attached to a winch! It was the most exhilarating experience of my life—the basket swayed on its cables and the water foamed beneath me and the wind whipped my hair out of its braid into my face, and I felt alive and in love with the world. You’d have loved it, John! And Mary, you would have shrieked with glee as I did. I was terribly disappointed that the ride was such a short one. I’d have done it a dozen more times if they’d have let me, but of course the tender must move on to supply other lighthouses, so I had to be content.
But at least I was the first to scramble into the basket (after Father, of course), so I was able to watch Hannah and Ellen from the top of the island as they rose from the tender in the basket. I wish I could have taken their rides for them; neither of them enjoyed it at all. Hannah was calm, as she ever is, but also pale and stood stiff as a board as she clutched the cables, so I knew that she was afraid. I think no one else could tell, though. But everyone could see that Ellen was frightened. I thought she might cry; she certainly looked ready to, but she looked at Father, and he smiled at her, and she bit her lip and didn’t cry after all. I think it is a very good thing she married him, for both of them, though I do miss Mamma terribly.
Our quarters are small—just a kitchen, parlor, and dining room on the main level and four sleeping rooms in a little half-story above. The lighthouse rises from the center of the dwelling, so Father does not have to go outside to light the lamp. But Mr. Cohen does. He is Father’s assistant, and a very...colorful...person he is, too. Father says he ran away from home and went to sea when he was only 15. (My age! Though it would be fun to climb the rigging and sit in the crow’s nest, I’m not inclined to become a sailor any time soon.) But Mr. Cohen did, and he spent his next 15 years plying the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific. After that, he was a gold rusher, a lumberjack, and a railroad man; Father says he helped build the Transcontinental. He is gruff and grizzled and talks like a dog, in sharp barking phrases. He lives in a little two-room shack. I’m sorry to call it such, but it’s the only appropriate word. It does not deserve to be called a dwelling, but somehow he manages to dwell there. Perhaps that is why he is so tetchy. His shack is aways from our dwelling, and when it is his turn to keep the light, he must cross a wide swath of open field to get to the door that will take him up to the light. He says that once, the wind was so strong it blew him across the field!
“Three hundred yards, if it was an inch,” he told me. “I rolled like a tumbleweed and thought I’d be swept right off the cliff, when—wham!—I blew smack up against the keeper’s house. Cracked my ribs and busted my knee and couldn’t hardly walk for a week, but I was alive, so I wasn’t going to complain.” I doubt it is possible that he did not complain, whatever he may say; he is singularly irascible when he is in pain. His thumb was pinched in the door yesterday, and the words that spewed from his mouth! Ellen was horrified. I thought it rather funny.
Mr. Cohen tells us that when he first came, the rain used to seep in under the roof shingles in the keeper’s dwelling and moss grew on the walls—on the inside, Mary! And the wind drove the chimney smoke back into the dwelling—he says on a windy night you couldn’t hardly light a fire or you’d asphyxiate. But a couple years ago, that was all tended to, so it’s a snug little place now, for which I am grateful, particularly since Mr. Cohen says the winds reach 85 knots sometimes! No wonder he was blown clear across the field. And the sea in winter—he says that during a storm the waves crash halfway up the island and send salt spray so high it coats the lighthouse windows. I expect that will be my job—clearing the windows of salt after a storm. I don’t mind too much. It’s exhilarating to stand at the top of this lighthouse. There is a narrow walkway with a metal rail all around the outside of the light room. Father says the light is 65 feet above the base, and I have counted the stairs, though I have yet to get the same number twice, but even so, there are close to 300 of them; also, two ladders, a vertical one that you must use both hands and feet to climb and a shorter one that is a little more like stairs. All told, when I stand at the top of the light, I am 165 feet above the water! On a clear day I can see across the strait to Canada. Vancouver Island is twenty miles away, Father says, and our light can be seen from the island.
I have more to write, of course, but Ellen is calling for me, so I must sign off.
Your affectionate sister,
Lucy
“She lived in a lighthouse?” Amelia said. “That’s so cool!” She looked at Jamie, hoping he would smile, or at least look at her.
He did neither, just continued to stare into the fire. “I thought this had something to do with candles,” he said. Amelia did not like the way he said it, like he was bored or angry. She pressed up against Aunt Lu.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Evensong Stories to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.