“Can we trust him?”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly—I don’t actually know anything about him.
“Well,” she says, turning around to face me and sliding her hands down into the pockets of her thick black robe, “he’s just waking up. Take him some breakfast. I don’t want a stranger inside the house.” This is one of her gifts: She knows when people are near, when they’re coming to the island—she senses their arrival like a nagging in the pit of her stomach. And this explains why she decided to cook breakfast—what drove her from bed just after the sun rose, compelled her into the kitchen to turn on the stove and pull out her good skillet. She might not want a stranger in the house, she might not trust him, but she won’t allow him to starve. It’s just her nature. Even her grief can’t keep her from kindness.
She pours maple syrup over the stack of warm pancakes then hands me the plate. “And take him some blankets,” she adds. “Or he’ll freeze out there.” She doesn’t ask why he’s here, why I brought him to the island—for what purpose. Maybe she just doesn’t care.
I tug on the green rubber boots beside the front door and a black raincoat, then grab a set of sheets and a thick wool blanket from the hall closet. Holding a palm over the plate of pancakes to keep the rain from turning them into a soggy heap of sugar and flour, I step outside.
Pools of water collect in divots and holes beside the walkway, and sometimes the rain seems to rise up from the ground instead of from overhead—a snow globe effect, but with water. A swift wind crashes against my face as I make my way down to the cottage.
The sturdy wood door rattles when I knock, and Bo opens it almost instantly, as if he had been just about to step outside.
“Morning,” I say. He’s standing in jeans and a charcoal-gray raincoat. A fire crackles in the fireplace behind him. And he looks rested, showered, and new. Nothing like how I feel. “How’d you sleep?”
“Fine.” Yet his voice is weathered and deep, betraying perhaps a lack of sleep after all. His eyes stare unblinking, soaking me in, and my skin prickles with the intensity of it. He is not someone who looks through you, past you, like you’re not even there. His gaze is sharp, incisive, and an itch settles behind my eyes, making me want to look away.
He shuts the door behind me, and I set the plate of pancakes on the small square wood table in the kitchen then brush my palm down my jeans even though there is nothing to wipe off. The cottage feels different with him inside it, and the glow from the fireplace smooths over all the hard, rough edges so that everything feels muted and soft.
I place the sheets and wool blanket on the musty gray couch facing the fireplace, and he sits at the table. “Can you show me the lighthouse today?” he asks, taking a bite of the pancakes. In this light, in the scarlet hue of the fire, he reminds me of the boys who come into town aboard fishing boats, green and wild looking, like they’ve been cast off by the winds, set adrift.
He reminds me of someone who has left his past behind.
“Sure.” I bite the inside of my bottom lip. My eyes scan the cottage. The tall wood bookshelves beside the fireplace are crowded with books and old almanacs and tide-chart periodicals, all covered in a decade of dust. Lumps of aqua-blue sea glass, collected over the years from the island’s rocky shores, are piled into a small porcelain dish. On the top shelf sits a large wood clock that probably once lived on the deck of a ship. This cottage has served as the living quarters for a variety of staff and hired laborers, men who stayed a week and others years, but almost all left something behind. Trinkets and mementos, hints about their lives, but never the full story.
When Bo finishes breakfast—so quickly that I know he must have been starving—we leave the warmth of the cottage and are submerged by the drizzling rain. The ash-gray sky presses down against us—a weight that is tangible. Water trickles through my hair.
We pass the small greenhouse where herbs and tomato plants and leafy greens were once tended and grown, the glass walls now tarnished and smudged so that you can no longer see inside. The island has taken back most of the structures, decaying walls and rot seeping up from below. Moss covers every surface: a weed that feeds off the constant moisture and cannot be contained. Rust and mildew. Slop and mud. Death has found its way into everything.
“The singing hasn’t stopped,” Bo says when we’re halfway to the lighthouse, our feet making hollow clomping sounds that echo against the wood walkway. But in the wind, the voices are still there, sliding lazily in with the sea air. It’s so familiar that I hardly discern it from the other sounds of the island.
“Not yet,” I agree. I don’t glance back at him. I don’t let his eyes find mine again.
We reach the lighthouse, and I pull open the metal door, corroded at the hinges. Once inside the entryway, it takes a moment for our eyes to adjust to the dim. The air is stark and smells of moisture-soaked wood and stone. A rounded staircase serpents its way up the interior of the lighthouse, and I point out to Bo where not to step as we ascend—many steps have rotted away or broken—and at times I pause to catch my breath.
“Have you ever been taken?” Bo asks when we’re almost to the top of the stairway.
“I wouldn’t know if I had,” I say between gasps for breath.
“Do you really believe that? If your body was inhabited by something else, you don’t think you’d know?”
I stop on a solid step and look back at him. “I think it’s easier for the mind to forget. To sink into the background.” He doesn’t seem satisfied, his jaw shifting to the left. “If it makes you feel better,” I say with a partial grin, “if a Swan sister is ever inside me, I’ll let you know if I can tell.”
He raises an eyebrow and his eyes smile back at me. I turn and continue up the stairway.
The wind rattles the walls the higher we climb, and when we finally reach the upper lantern room, a howling gust screams through cracks in the exterior.
“The first lighthouse keeper was a Frenchman,” I explain. “He named the island Lumiere. It was a lot more work to keep the lighthouse running back then—maintaining the lanterns and the prisms. Now it’s mostly automated.”
“How did you learn all this?”
“My dad,” I answer automatically. “He studied lighthouses after my parents bought the island.” I swallow hard then continue. “We need to check the glass and the bulb each day. And everything needs to be cleaned a couple times a week to keep the salty air from building up. It’s not hard. But during a storm or a thick fog, this lighthouse can save the lives of fishermen out at sea. So we have to keep it running.”
He nods, walking to the windows to look out over the island.
I eye him, tracing the outline of his shoulders, the curve of his assured stance. Arms at his sides.Who is he? What brought him here?Fog has rolled in over the island, creating a sheer veil of gray so that we can’t make out any features of the terrain below. After a few minutes of staring through the glass, he follows me back through the doorway and down the winding staircase.
Otis is sitting on the wood walkway outside, waiting with eyes blinking against the rain, and I pull the lighthouse door closed. Olga is several yards up the path, licking her orange-striped tail. They’re both used to the relentless downpour, their cat instincts to escape wet weather have gone dormant.
