Book Preview: The Light She Tended

She never got used to him leaving, and he did it every night. How pleasant life could be in the hours preceding his predictable departures. The little bedroom of the keeper’s quarters was dark as coal, save for the blade of light slicing through the window every ten seconds. It was peaceful there and then, in the interstices between days. They could submit themselves to rest and listen to the bleating fog signal and the curling waves. They could feel the warmth of the other glowing through the sheets. All the while, time burned through the wick of the night until a new morning leaned against the dark. 

At five o’clock on February twelfth, 1880, Lucy felt the stiffening of her husband as he snapped from sleep to wakefulness. She knew that his eyes were peeled open, trained on the cedar planks holding the roof up. She had learned to remain bone-still as he flexed his fingers and shook off the paralysis of sleep. What would be the effect of turning on the sheets and wrapping her hands around his shoulder; pressing her lips to his stubble? It would not change the fact that a storm was creeping in from the heart of the sea, or that the kerosene was running low. The light needed tending to, and he was the man to do it.

He lay in the room for a fraction of a minute, blinking, preparing himself to face the dark. Then he made a small triangle of the sheets. A flush of cool air rushed into the bed as if from the waft of a broad-winged bird, and his body slipped out. He fit his feet into the boots planted at the edge of the rug and reached for the coat hanging from the dresser. With her eyelids clamped tight, his breath and the knocking of soles against floorboards were the only pieces of him that she could detect. 

He paused, shortly, before breaking the plane of the bedroom. She felt his eyes on her body in the bed. She pasted an image of his face on the black cork of her mind.

Then the room was empty, save for herself. It stayed the same and was entirely different altogether. She opened her eyes in the dark and the moonlight came in like shrapnel. She could squint out the edges of the things that filled their bedroom without seeing their centers. Outside, the surf raged on insipidly, as if it had something to say but could find no ears to understand its message. Whitecaps formed on the ocean like small bleeding cuts, and the spray pelting the windows could have been skyborn or seaborn.

‘He’s gone,’ she knew but didn’t say.

It was another hour until she rose to feed the chickens and the horse. The morning was like a nerve exposed. Sparse light filtered through the wash of the sky, ragged and worn out as soon as it reached the Earth. Down the slope, the surf wrecked itself against the rocks. 

The coop was as quiet as a convent when she arrived. Lucy lifted the hook from the eye bolt and swung the rotting door. Twelve pairs of yellow eyes burned back at her, dulled by the warmth of straw and feather. She scattered a handful of feed in the pen and the chickens lifted their prehistoric feet, descending the roost in a jumble. Freed from the shackle of the dark, they went mad in the early light. The thoroughbred was waiting for her at the seam between clearing and forest. His coat was the color of lamplit copper; his eyes glowed calmly. He blew into her palm before ripping off a mouthful of hay, staring at her as he chewed.

She started a small heatless fire as soon as she returned to the house. It licked the air shyly and retreated into itself, growing redder by the moment. Lucy poured a cistern of well water into a pot and placed it over the flames. From the cupboard, she fetched a round mug and dropped a teabag in for Everett. He could walk through the door at any moment, briny and coated with salt. 

Lucy did not look out at the Lighthouse until half of the water had boiled off the pot. The lens was still turning, to her surprise, though the beams were nearly lost to daylight. It appeared fragile without blackness surrounding it. The house remained silent, save for the dying simmer of the water and the slow ticking of the wall clock. The time was nearly seven. 

She told herself to remain calm as she hurried down the slope. Worry could do nothing but stifle the senses, and she had no basis for believing that something had happened. It was normal, on Sugarloaf Scarp, for the unexpected to occur. But the whiplash of panic struck her when she reached the door to the tower. Locked, still, though the lens was still turning. He only sprung the padlock once each day, when he reached the light before dawn. She pieced the puzzle in her mind and shuddered at what it meant. He had not made it down to the Light.

Her mind blurred, becoming a hostile place for thoughts, and she began to run. Down to the edge of the scarp, to the edge of the Earth, where she could look down on the jagged line between sea and rocks. She scanned for any sign of him — his coat, his cry — but found nothing but the primordial  coastline. Chiseled, relentless.

“Everett!” she called. 

The ocean swallowed her voice, and she realized that she was terrified. He was missing, and she was alone.