How to Knit a Heart Back Home

by Rachael Herron

  “And then?” Owen’s eyes burned into hers.

  “I went to the bathroom down the hall—I didn’t want to use hers. It seemed to upset her when I opened that door. So I just went down there for a minute, but when I was gone, the power went out, and Janie called out for me to come get a flashlight, and when I got back to her room with the light, she was gone.”

  “In the rain.”

  “Miss Verna said they put an alarm on the side door since the last time she got away, but with the power being out, it didn’t sound. And the backup battery failed.”

  Owen dropped his head back, staring at the ceiling. “She got out.”

  Pressing her lips together, Lucy nodded.

  Miss Verna came around the lobby counter and stood in front of Owen. “Mr. Bancroft,” she started.

  “Don’t call me that,” he said.

  Lucy started. Was he going to scream? Yell? How bad was this going to be? She bit back tears for the hundredth time since this all started.

  “But . . . I’m so . . .” Miss Verna held out her hand and Owen caught it in both of his.

  “I’m just Owen, you know that. I’ve never been Mr. Bancroft to you. My mother is sick. Very sick.” Owen’s voice was professional, firm and direct, and Lucy got the feeling that this must have been how he’d sounded when he’d been on the job. “You can only do the best you can. You can’t control when the power goes out, and you can’t be everywhere at once. She doesn’t wear a tracking device. We’ll go out and find her, don’t you worry. Just stay by the phone for when we call you, and take care of Janie and the other residents, can you do that for me?”

  Tears were streaming down Miss Verna’s face by the time he finished speaking. She nodded, and then she pulled him into her arms, pressing her cheek against his. “Go find her. I love her, and I’m sorry.”

  Lucy bit the inside of her lip and took a deep breath. Then she said, “I’m coming with you.”

  Owen looked at her, and she couldn’t read what was in his turbulent sea-dark eyes. He didn’t say anything, just nodded.

  The inside of his car smelled of wet leather—the windows steamed almost instantly. Owen cranked the defrost without saying a word.

  Was he too furious to talk? Could she blame him?

  “Do you have any idea where to go first?” she asked.

  “Not a clue,” he said. He rolled his window down and shined his flashlight with its surprisingly strong beam into the bushes they passed. “Just driving.”

  He still didn’t sound angry, though. Lucy didn’t get it. She didn’t get him.

  “Owen, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” It was all her fault. Miss Verna hadn’t been actively watching Irene because she’d known Irene had been with Lucy. Safe with Lucy.

  Owen shrugged. “Shit happens.”

  “You can’t just say that. It’s not that easy.”

  “You know what?” He looked at her for a moment, and Lucy’s breathing quickened in the darkness of the car. “Sometime it is. Sometimes life just goes wrong, and there isn’t anything anyone can do. You had to go to the bathroom. Not a crime. The power went out because of the storm, no one’s fault. Mom got out. Now we find her.”

  How could he be so calm about this? Lucy wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. And she wanted, more than anything, for him to pull over, turn off the car, and take her in his arms and kiss her senseless, but she knew that was the most stupid thing she could want—there was no time for that, and worse, she knew the divide between them was too broad. He’d made that perfectly clear at the bookstore.

  She sat straighter and held tightly to the seat belt, looking out her own window into the rain.

  “Why were you there, and not at the brigade orientation? I saw that captain, and he didn’t know where you were.”

  Lucy turned in surprise. “You went there? I’m always at those meetings. I’m good at those, good at motivating recruits. But I figured it was my turn to take a break. I left Jake a message at his office, and I guess he didn’t get it. But doing something like teaching knitting, doing something in combination with Whitney, working on my business at the same time . . .” She fiddled with the fraying edge of the seat. “I suck at that. And I’m working on things I suck at.”

  “You could get hurt.”

  Her head swiveled so fast her neck hurt. “Teaching knitting?”

  “Trying to save lives. In this podunk town where the closest trauma center is a thirty-minute helo flight away.”

  “So you’re telling me I can’t?” Words were coming to her now. She had to get them right. And no one, not even Owen, would tell her she couldn’t do something.

  Not even if it meant losing him.

  “Shouldn’t, I said.” Owen’s voice was still calm. Strangely so. As if he knew something that she didn’t. “I don’t want you to do something that I can’t. Especially if I can’t follow you. I never said that you couldn’t. Of course you can. I know you’re great at it.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a natural. I saw you with my mother that night in her house. You have the touch. You’re brave, and strong, and you’re wonderful. I’m just jealous. And stupid.”

  Lucy heard his words, but they didn’t make sense to her brain. It almost sounded like he believed in her again.

  Still.

  Hope rose, that tiny beating of butterfly wings in her chest, and she pushed it down. They just had to focus on one thing at a time, and right now, it was fixing what she’d screwed up. Before it was too tragically late.

  “We have to find her, Owen. Before we talk about anything else, we have to find your mother.”

  Owen nodded and turned the wheel so they were driving down Main Street alongside the shore, shops to their left, dunes to their right. “Did she say anything, anything at all tonight? Any place name? Any word she said tonight would be freshest in her mind, might act like a homing device.”

  Lucy thought over every word they’d spoken since she’d arrived at Willow Rock, but it was hard to remember—so much of Irene’s speech had seemed disjointed, fractured. Single words, hung on threads of sound that didn’t seem to be sentences as much as random thoughts, like floats of yarn, carried behind colorwork.

  “It was difficult. . . . She didn’t make sense.”

  “I know. Take your time.”

  She thought harder. “But I did talk to her about Eliza. She perked up when I did, got brighter. I told her about finding the box with Silk Road and the papers. Talked about the ‘Cypress Hollow Lighthouse’ pattern. I asked if she’d ever made it, since it was such a popular pattern when the book came out. She did repeat the word lighthouse a few times.”

  Shivers of horror rippled up and down Lucy’s spine as Owen hit the accelerator, speeding past the pier, headed for the curve of the cove where the lighthouse stood, still invisible to them.

  “It’s too far,” she gasped. “She couldn’t make it on foot, could she?”

  “My mother?” Owen said. “She could make it in forty-five minutes, even with the rain. It’s less than a mile and a half from Willow Rock. She’s there, I’d bet everything I have on it. She hated that my father chased me up there—she ranted about getting it pulled down when they put in the auto-strobe. I’ve never known her to actually go there, but I can’t imagine that’s stopping her now. Goddammit.”

  They were almost at the parking area. The dirt lot under the looming building was empty as Owen fishtailed the Mustang into it with a spray of mud.

  “Wait,” he said, as Lucy reached for her door handle.

  “What?”

  “You’re taking your bag?”

  She nodded. “I can sling it over my back like a backpack. It has Band-Aids in it. . . .” The words sounded idiotic to her ears. Band-Aids? The cowboy Band-Aids that she’d put on Owen the first time he’d been in the parsonage? What good would they do in a medical emergency?

  But Owen groped in the back of the car, bringing out a small first-aid kit. “Good. Put this in your
bag, too. It has iodine and gauze and a couple of bandages. Not much, but it’s something.” Then he changed the subject abruptly, and his words were rushed, pushed together. “Lucy, I can’t make it up those stairs, not up more than one flight. If she’s not at the bottom, if she’s gone up, you’re going to have to bring her down.”

  “But—” Her head swam. In her whole life, she’d never been higher than the second story of her house. She was unable to even go onto her roof. “I don’t think I—”

  His right hand, warm, perfect in the way it fit hers, grasped her left. “I believe in you, heart.” He lifted it to his mouth and kissed the back of her knuckles, grazing them with his mouth. The butterflies in her chest turned into fluttering sparrows. “I always have.”

  Irene was nowhere to be found on the bottom floor inside the lighthouse. By the look of the inside, the graffiti and the broken beer bottles, many had forced their way in over the years. Owen’s flashlight, which had seemed so strong earlier, seemed dull now, lighting only small swathes of rubble in front of them. The interior smelled harshly of seaweed and oil and decay.

  Lucy clutched the back of Owen’s leather jacket and hoped he wouldn’t notice.

  They entered a small kitchen, which led into a machine room that opened onto the bottom of the staircase. It spiraled overhead to the left and made Lucy dizzy as Owen swung the flashlight up the broken steps. Pieces of the staircase were missing altogether. Irene could never have made it up those steps. From here, she and Owen could only see the very bottom portion, and they were in such bad repair that she wouldn’t trust them to hold a person who weighed more than a child.

  And then the flashlight’s beam hit something on the bottom step.

  One pink slipper, covered in fresh mud.

  Owen groaned. “Fuck.”

  “Oh, God. I can’t.”

  Owen put his hands on Lucy’s shoulders and moved her toward the bottom of the stairs. “I’m calling 911. You have your phone? As soon as I’m done calling them, I’m calling you. Open the phone, lock it, and put it back in your pocket. It’ll be an open line, and I’ll be able to hear you.”

  Lucy wanted to say, I’m so scared, I’m too scared, I can’t, but she folded her lips and looked at him instead. She wouldn’t say the words.

  “Goddammit, I wish I could go instead,” he said as he handed her the flashlight. “But I’d make it one flight and they’d have to send the paramedics for me, too. I just can’t . . . There’s nothing more in the world I want to do. There’s nothing I used to be better at. And I know—” His voice broke, and then he started speaking again. “I know you probably don’t think much of a man who can’t do the job he’s meant to do. But I can’t do it. I need you to, Lucy.”

  Lucy felt fizzy, feeling the blood drain from her head, her face, and dug her fingers into his jacket. What the hell had she been thinking? This was worse than the night of the car fire. So much worse.

  But so much more depended on this. Owen needed her now. No one else could help him.

  Owen looked at her. In the darkness, she could barely see him, and behind her something rustled, something that didn’t bear thinking about. But suddenly, Lucy thought she knew what might be in his eyes.

  “Lucy . . .”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful.” And with those two words, Owen kissed her. It felt as if she’d been waiting for this kiss her whole life. His mouth was heavy on hers, and she kissed him back, greedy for the days, for the years, they’d missed. She pressed against him and felt him, how they fit each other, perfectly. And as suddenly as the kiss had started, it ended.

  His fingertips swept her jawline, and he whispered the same words, “Be careful,” but it sounded like he was saying something else.

  Lucy nodded and turned, adjusting her bag behind her so that her hands were free.

  She took the first few steps carefully. They creaked, swaying under her weight. Good God, they should have torn this place down years ago. Why hadn’t they? People kept talking about turning the lighthouse into a hostel or a resort, a moneymaker for the town, but this was ridiculous. She could hear nothing but the blood pounding in her ears, a constant, throbbing roar.

  One flight up, just out of sight of Owen, her foot plunged through a rotted board, but most of her weight was still on her back leg, and she caught herself on the railing. The rail itself swayed treacherously, and as it curved ahead of her, she could see it was broken into splinters.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she gasped.

  In her pocket, her cell phone rang, making her jump. She answered.

  Owen said, “You’re doing great.”

  “You can’t even see me.”

  “I can hear you haven’t crashed to the bottom floor yet.”

  “Thanks for that vote of confidence.” But the sound of his low laugh in her ear made her go limp with relief, and Lucy remembered to breathe again. “I’m locking the phone open now.”

  “Good.”

  She put it back in her pocket, knowing that whatever she said, he’d hear. And if she told him something . . . something terrible, he’d be able to disconnect and call 911 back with an update.

  But she prayed to God that wouldn’t happen.

  Another flight. She wouldn’t think how high she was. The steps were worse here—two were gone entirely, just missing. A hole gaped down into blackness, and even when she swept the flashlight’s beam into it, she couldn’t tell its depth.

  What if Irene had . . . ?

  No. She hadn’t. That was all that mattered. She was either up above, or she wasn’t, and there was only one way to find out.

  Lucy leaped from the whole step she stood on to the next partial one. The staircase sighed and seemed to sway, but it held. Lucy exhaled with relief and kept moving up.

  Too scared to rely on the rickety railing at all, Lucy pressed the palm of her left hand against the clammy wall, cupping the peeling paint as if it would give her purchase. She leaned forward and swept the beam of the flashlight forward a few steps with her right hand, and then used the same hand to feel the next step, to test its weight first before putting her foot on it.

  About two thirds of the way up was a small landing with a window with no glass left in it. Rain lashed through the opening, and from here, Lucy could see the lights on Main Street. They were so far down. And she was so far up. No, no, no, she should never have looked. . . .

  But knowing Owen could hear her on the open line, she said, “I’m still going. I haven’t found her.” Her voice was breathy, so she cleared it. “It’s pretty high, but I’m good.”

  It was a damn lie. How kids came up here for fun was beyond her. This wasn’t fun, this was pure, sheer hell. Scary, and so flipping high up . . . Lucy’s palms sweated and she felt a dizzy sickness at the base of her skull. She wished she could hear Owen’s voice in her ear, telling her she was going to make it, but stopping now to talk would be ridiculous.

  She could do it. She would do it.

  Just a few more steps. The wood here was a little better up on this last stretch, as if the higher the stairs went, the less they’d been used over the years. Lucy understood. God knew on a normal day she’d never have made it this far.

  Finally, at the top, Lucy ducked her head to pass into the lantern room.

  The old shattered light stood in the middle of the circular space, but the glass walls themselves stood mostly intact. Lucy tried to peer out, to see if Irene was outside on the deck, but since the beam never had to shine inland, the room had been supported by a wall on the inland side, making it impossible to see all the way around. If Irene had made it up here, and if she was on the other side of that wall, Lucy would have no way of knowing it. Except by going out there.

  A door to her left hung open on one remaining hinge. Outside, a metal railing fenced in the iron deck that creaked in the wind. Lucy could almost see it sway, just as she swore she could feel the building itself mov
e in the storm under her feet. She would not think about earthquakes, not right now.

  Lucy inched her way to the door, and then sat down, feeling like a child too scared to go down stairs standing up. She swung her feet out into the rain, feeling the biting drops soak through her jeans, and she prayed like she’d never prayed before that Irene wasn’t up here, that she was hidden someplace safe. Locked in the bathroom at Tillie’s, maybe. Or in the back storage shed at the public library, sleeping. Anywhere but up here, alone, in this storm.

  Her feet hit the iron deck with a clang. “Owen, I’m on the outside now, at the top.” She did well, she thought, at keeping the panic out of her voice.

  Then she made the mistake of looking down.

  She could see through the iron slats. Of course. All the way to the rocks, so far below. When Lucy raised her eyes, all she could see were the clouds huddling over the breaking waves, the enormous surge of the tide below. And she was so small, up here, so high, alone . . .

  She backed up, pressing herself against the wall of the lighthouse as flat as she could, as if that would save her from falling.

  And a knitting needle in her bag poked her sharply in the back.

  Eliza Carpenter.

  Lucy shook her head, sharply. Eliza wouldn’t have been scared up here. Eliza would have thought it was an adventure, one she would have told Joshua about later, and jotted down in her notes. Eliza would have thought it was exciting. Maybe she’d been up here, in this very place, in a storm before. Maybe that was the inspiration for the cabled sweater.

  She’d be Eliza, then.

  Pushing away from the wall, but not trusting the railing, Lucy walked carefully to the right, using the flashlight to make sure she stepped only where the decking looked strong. Up here, too, there were holes in the iron, where the deck had rusted and actually fallen away, spots that took Lucy’s breath away with abject terror.