Trigger warning: contains themes of grief, and subjects of drowning and a slight suggestion of suicide.
The morning tide was as dark and still as the night I saw him.
I had closed my eyes, to breathe in the ocean laced air. When I opened my eyes, I just happened to look down at the shore. There he was.
Growing up on The Rock, we're all told the same story about how we’re born. Which is that we were washed onto the shore. With the low tide, covered in sea foam, little barnacles over our belly buttons, and seaweed around our legs.
I didn’t think it was a baby, but all the same something in the way it was laying there. Nothing, and then just there. A body.
Fetching the wheelbarrow and a blanket from the house, I hurried down.
A man, naked as the day he was born, laying on his back. I got him to cough up the water in his lungs. His eyes opened just enough for me to get him up and to stumble into the wheelbarrow.
As I helped him over, and watched him fall into it, I couldn’t help being reminded of my children. How when they were little they would fall into my lap, walking backwards and then dropping.
It wasn’t until we were in front of the fire at the cottage, and I was wrapping him in covers, putting his hands and feet between my armpits; that I realized he couldn’t be much older than Dylan would have been.
Maybe a bit younger.
My son had been one of the first of the drownings. He had gone fishing with my brother, and the ocean kept them. Then came the others.
Young people who had always swam like fishes, suddenly going out into the waves and not coming back. Or people just being gone, leaving wet patches where they had once been.
It’s what happened to Keria and the Jenning boy. Both in broad daylight.
Keria’s class had taken their lunch on the beach, and was usual for the school here. She had been on a blanket with three of her friends.
Her teacher had gone to relieve himself and when he came back the girls were gone. All four of them. Their blanket was soaked to the sand, their lunches soggy on top of it. The only thing washing ashore was a pink bow that had been Kiera’s. None of the other children claimed to have seen it.
If the Jenning boy, David, hadn’t gone in the same way a month before, I might have dove into the water looking for her myself. But he had. Before the Jennings left for the mainland, they stuck a sign in the front yard.
“Seventeen year old David Jenning was playing catch with his little sister. Katherine had gone to pick up their baseball, and when she returned her brother had disappeared. Where he stood was wet grass instead. Carried away somewhere unseen.”
But it wasn’t just the drownings. Since I had been a girl, slowly, the Rock had started to lose its people. But held on to me.
His name is Eddie.
I find him a set of Earl’s old clothes to wear in the morning. They make him look younger, scrawniner, and he eats like a dog that’s been starved for weeks. I make sure he’s drinking water between mouthfuls, but other than that we sit in silence.
When he stops, a dazed look about him as I clear the plates, he says he didn’t know anyone still lived here. I tell him I hear that a lot.
He uses Earl’s old kit to shave, and cut his long hair. His face now open and clear, I figure that he must be older than he looks. There’s that maturity and hardness in his face you can’t pick out but it’s at odds with the rest of him.
The rest of the day he follows and helps me tend to the chickens and the garden. I send a message to the mainland of a young man washing to my shore but there’s no reply. I set him up in one of the old bedrooms, he helps me cook dinner, he insists on it in a way I’m not used to.
“Does this work?” He means the TV.
I say not in a long time.
He sees the VCR and asks if I have any movies, and I tell him I have many. When the video rental store closed for good, there was a free-for-all and I went home with boxes of them.
I ask what his favorite is. Eddie says they didn’t watch movies at the school.
He pauses, and sees that I don’t react. I might be an old crone on the rock, but I still get the news out here. Radio and the stacks of newspapers brought in with the store boat. Earl used to think the radio was enough, it told us the major news of the world. And what good was a newspaper six months old? But I liked the routine of it.
So I knew what school he meant. I had also seen the tattoo on his belly, but I didn't tell him that. I don’t want him to feel like he was left too vulnerable.
Eddie went on to say that the only time he saw a movie was on the weekend when they were free to go into town. Cadets got free admittance for one movie a month at the local theater. The rest of the time he saved most of his money his family sent him to pay for a ticket.
At the mention of family I asked him if he wanted me to send a message to the mainland using his family name? They might respond then, knowing a cadet was here. Or whatever ranking he had now.
I concluded he was probably an instructor at the school now. Or maybe he had been stationed at one of the watchtowers by the beach and that had something to do with how he ended up here.
When he didn’t respond, I looked up from the fire, and saw two tears roll down his face, before he pretended to cough so he could wipe them away.
I asked if he wanted to see about getting that TV and VCR running again.
He fixes the chicken coop. He stops the dripping in the kitchen faucet. He finds the extra shingles in the lighthouse and works on the hole in the roof that I had been putting off for ages.
He finds Dylan’s old bike, and goes off into the town to ride.
I find myself walking there for the first time in years. I catch glimpses of him gliding like a ghost between the abandoned buildings. The distant echo of the wheels that I’m surprised hadn’t rusted stiff by now, floating in the air, letting me know when he’s close.
And I’m glad for him. The sight of that tattoo tells me he probably hadn’t gotten to ride a bike in the sunshine when he was a little boy. Or an older boy.
He hadn’t gotten to feel the wind in his hair, or the contentment of routine, like coming back to a home with dinner cooking after a day of adventure and exploration. He hadn’t had anyone call to him and wave as he rode by.
Sometimes I find him walking through the broken down store fronts. Sometimes he brings things he found back. Once there was a set of old earrings still in the box on the kitchen table waiting for me.
One day I found myself in front of the old Jenning place. The yard is so overgrown I can just barely spot the sign. I considered going in to look at it, but I didn't. I just look over the boarded up door, the blown in windows where Cecilla would lean out on a pillow to watch everyone go by, or the brick work that used to be a vibrant red.
I walk by the old diner. The whole front entrance had been blown away years ago, or caved in, or something. I see Eddie sitting inside at a booth.
He had cleared off the seats and table. He waves to me, and it's a few seconds before I go to sit across from him.
“Have you heard from the mainland?” He asks.
“Yes, this morning.”
“Are they looking for me?”
“They thought you deserted, but were glad to hear that wasn’t the case.” I said, “They said you can come back on the store boat that’s scheduled to come at the end of the month. Another two weeks, and then you’ll be back in civilization.”
He nodded. Gray eyes looking off into nothing. I ask if he’s gonna be in any sort of trouble, I don’t quite know how those things work. He shrugged, and said he didn’t think so, because he hadn’t deserted his post.
That was the most he ever said. Nothing about how he ended up in the water, what happened to his uniform, how he had survived all the way to the Rock. Only that he hadn’t deserted his post. But he never said his absence was an accident either.
Eddie looks over at the faded painting on the wall. A cartoon burger and shake with large eyes, so faded down by being exposed to the elements that the pair is now reduced to faint outlines with a few spots of color.
I want to tell him what it used to be like here. I try to bring back the noise and bustle of the place. I close my eyes, and when I open them Eddie is staring at me.
We’re walking along the shore, and he asks if I ever thought about going to the mainland.
“I think it’s passed me by. Last time I went it was too much.”
I had gone to the mainland with the store boat, to discuss my staying there on the island after Earl had died.
The Deputy Director had considered updating the lighthouse for some time. It was one of the few posts that hadn’t been updated with remote monitoring on this side of the country, and it would be more cost effective than paying someone like me to live there.
Earl had passed six months before, and despite my father being the previous keeper, and all his fathers before him, I hadn’t ever officially registered as his replacement. Earl had, it was how we met.
I supposed a part of me had always figured I’d be tied to the thing.
I never could call the lighthouse “her” but it felt like a family member. A limb. When classmates talked of their parents considering going to the mainland a few times out of the year for extra work, my brother and I shrugged.
We had the lighthouse, we never had to fear about our father being out of work.
But then the idea of living on the mainland held a new offering of life. I considered it for a moment.
But it had been longer since I stepped foot on the mainland than I thought.
They had renamed the streets and there were so many more of them. I got lost trying to find the bank, and it had been ages since I took physical money out. I felt like I was being stared at, and measured, and found lacking by how low I was to find the bank number and pin in my notebook. I wasn’t sure how much to take out, and when I said $100, I thought I saw the bank teller huff.
I felt like I was in the way at the Deputy Director’s house for the two days I would be there. I was so nervous like a child to even go down and eat with his family, then ashamed when they brought my food up.
I went to a store to get some simple allergy medicine, and I could feel the frustration of people behind me, and the cashier, because I had brought a large bill the cashier had to fetch change to break.
I was used to the dockers of the store boat making soft conversation with me. Open faces I could read. A slower manner.
I almost cried that day. At my age. And I could hear Earl trying to reassure me I just wasn’t used to being around so much happening. I would have to keep coming, and coming back to get used to it.
And a voice in my head replied that I couldn’t.
I didn’t tell Eddie this, but maybe he could read my thoughts because he said I wasn't that old.
“My Grandma is a good twenty years older than you, Mara.” He said, “You could live with her, she lives in town.”
I asked what he thought I could do for work. Because I had only ever done one thing.
“You wouldn’t have to.” He said, “I could give you what you need.”
I laughed, an allowance, I said.
“Not an allowance.” He said, “Just money. That’s all.”
We stop, and he lays out the blanket for us to sit. I take the glass bottles of lemonade out first, and push them into the sand just a few feet away where the water sits.
I ask him if he’s close to his grandmother. He says no, but she’s the only family he has.
We eat our cheese and pickle sandwiches in silence. The raisin and cinnamon cookies are still warm, having been packed as soon as they came from the oven. As I retrieved the lemonade, Eddie brought up his grandmother again.
“She tried to petition. When I was twelve.” He takes a bite of cookie, “Her and a bunch of her friends. They tried to get it all done away with. They said the regular draft was enough already. It didn’t work but the war ended a few years later anyways.”
I remembered that. I remember thinking that I was glad my own boy hadn’t been around for them to take him from me. I could believe in the ocean’s care of him more than a military school by far.
“Why didn't you leave the school then?”
“I had only ever done one thing.” He said pointedly.
I gave his head a light pat, “You couldn’t live with your Grandma?”
“We’re not close.” He said.
“And yet you think she’d open her doors to a complete stranger?”
“You did.”
“That’s different.” I said, “You’re good company, and your grandma sounds more hard-hearted than me.”
But that wasn’t hard. Even as a small girl I was labeled the soft one. As I got older it was obvious the weathered old biddies of the Rock didn’t know how a salty, sturdy, calloused bloodline of my father had managed to produce something like me.
Maybe that was why I had never registered to be a keeper until Earl was gone.
Some people are just too soft for life. Too soft to be a soldier, too soft to be a real lighthouse keeper. Or a person. I had assumed that was why the Deputy Director, the whole Home Office had agreed to keep things as they were.
Just keep me here until I die. I never caused any trouble, my needs were simple, the most electricity I mustered up had been to watch movies with Eddie since he came.
“The way Grandma’s logic works I think she’d welcome you.” Eddie was saying. “I think she’d like you.”
I shake my head.
One evening we fell asleep on the couch. I wake up to Eddie speaking softly. I don’t move. I feel his hand search for me, and I open my palm out to him. Feel him squeeze tight, before falling back asleep.
The day is here now.
The store boat came early, so we woke early. We had coffee at the table, and listened to the radio in gentle silence. We ate toast, and searched for things to say.
I asked him if he wanted to take the bike with him. Or the scarf I showed him how to knit, or any of the artifacts he found in town. And each time I think I was talking to try and delay time moving.
We stand at the dock, the sun just a crack of light on the horizon. The boat can be seen well enough.
“I’ll come visit.” Eddie says. “I’ll come see you.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“You don’t want me to?”
I do. But I don’t think he should. I imagine he’ll get on that boat, and he’ll live whatever life is meant to be laid out for him. He’ll go on to marry, possibly move far away from the place that gave him that tattoo on his baby skin.
He’ll forget there is anyone on this rock.
That inner boy, the one that breathed to life on these shores and in my home, in my care, is looking at me now. Large gray eyes, a hand warm and too soft to hold a gun. A voice too gentle to give a command. But doesn’t know how to do anything else.
He’s asking me something. I walk with him to the store boat, and my feet don’t stop.
I close my eyes, smelling in the ocean air. I don’t open them again, until I’m looking out to see the Rock.
The view of the ocean from this vantage point is one I’ve never seen before. The waves, the smallness of the island, thinking of its ghosts left alone finally.
I walk around to the other side of the deck. And see the sun coming up on the endless horizon.
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Very nice :)
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