The Last to See Me

by M Dressler

  I felt the tray lower in my hands. No. I didn’t believe it. It couldn’t be right, what this man was saying.

  Mrs. Folde leapt in. “Oh yes! I feel that so much, too! That we shouldn’t keep our dear ones from their proper spheres! Though of course I do hate it when my little ones leave my side—they’re perfect little angels, you know, and you would have loved to meet them—but I can’t help but feel it’s good for them to get away from all this primitiveness sometimes and see more of the civilized parts of our state. Left to their own devices out here, young people are apt to lose some sense of propriety.” She glanced primly at me. “Despite the best supervision, I promise you.”

  Mr. Folde said quietly, “Sarah.”

  I couldn’t move. I waited. I was a tree listening for the coming jack.

  “So what you’re saying, then, Mrs. Folde,” the head raised his eyebrows, “is that you’re not really fond of the isolation at this station? Or of the lightkeeper’s … uncivilized life, as you say?”

  “Oh! No! Of course not! I didn’t mean—Of course I would never say—”

  “Perhaps you mean you’re not likely to commit to its duties for very long? Or fulfill them with alacrity and gratitude?”

  “No, I—”

  “I do take your meaning I believe, madam. Thank you very much for your frankness. I’d say we’re done here.”

  Mr. Folde’s face, I thought, was a mirror of mine. Stunned. Understanding. Seeing how, in one moment, everything was ruined. I told him with my eyes, as plain as day, I’m not weak, and neither are you. But something just broke here, and you know it, and I know it, and there’s no going back, not for either one of us. It’s all done, just like that.

  I stepped back and, with one jerking move, smashed the tea set to the floor under us. For both of us. I saw the hot water splash the shins of the head and I heard the cups roll and shatter against the feet of the dining chairs, and I saw Mrs. Folde’s guests all lift their fine shoes up, forgetting everything but their own leathers, their own skins.

  And then I took another step and clutched my sweaty cap and decided, dishonestly, willfully, to pretend to faint. So that I couldn’t be blamed for the accident. I took one look at Mr. Folde. As I sank, his arms flailed toward me, though it was Quint’s arms I imagined I saw, waving to me, from the speeding bow of a ship.

  Mr. Folde was quickly on the floor beside me, his one hand scraping the broken pieces of china from my apron while making his apologies to the commission, his other so tight on my arm it hurt.

  I heard him say to Mrs. Folde, “Dear wife, would you please take our guests into the front parlor, so Emma Rose can catch her breath and see to repairing this unfortunate incident?”

  Mrs. Folde, shrunken, humiliated, led the men out of the room. I pulled my arm free from Mr. Folde’s as soon as they were gone and stood and walked like a frozen thing to the kitchen and pulled the broom and the dust pan from the closet and came back. The room was empty and I stooped and began mopping up the pieces of the Folde heirloom. Feeling nothing. Not even sorry.

  So. Quint was going to the east, then. Far away. Because I’d shamed him by being a servant. Because I hadn’t let him come to my room when he asked. So that was why he hadn’t come back to me. To a university he’d go, instead. He liked books. Greek and Latin. He’d read me some poems. Maybe he’d even cared for such things more than he ever let on to me. And now he’d get to study all the latest ideas, too. So that was all it took, then? To replace love? Steamships and trains. Was that how easily love was swept aside? Afternoons curled on each others’ necks on the sand. No, if I let myself take all this in right now, I thought, keeping my head down, I’ll never stop smashing things. I’ll smash the lamps and their chimneys, too, and I might even burn the house down, to cover up this burning inside me.

  Mr. Folde came back and stood over the ruin. “That was a mistake, Emma.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll need to talk about this later.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have to go and join the others. Can you finish this?”

  “I’ll see to it all.”

  “Well then.” He stared at me like a Fresnel that couldn’t, didn’t want to turn. But he went.

  After the men had gone outside, Mrs. Folde staggered up to her room and shut her door, without a word to me. I hung my apron and cap in the kitchen and went to my cottage and lay down on the bed and cried for a good ten minutes. And then I didn’t cry anymore. There was no point. Weeping—it’s for people who can pump their longing out through their eyes and be done with it. I can’t and couldn’t. I still wanted. I wanted so much. I felt no end to it, how the wanting kept growing, like my own hair. But I stayed where I was. And let the afternoon go by, hot, the sun dragging its claws over the window. At sunset I stood up and saw not the usual fireworks of golden and orange and blood-red streaks in the sky but clouds going purple, dark, like a bruise. Warm warns before storm. Mrs. Folde’s words. I had been waiting for her to come from the house and fire me. Or Mr. Folde. But they didn’t.

  When it was pitch black and I could no longer see my hand fumbling and lighting the lamp, I changed out of my tea-stained skirt into a fresh one and combed my hair and cracked the cottage door. I saw one light burning high in the Folde house, up in Mrs. Folde’s bedroom. All the other rooms were black-eyed. I thought about how eager I’d been to leave my dirty, dreary work at the Point. But now that Quint wasn’t ever going to come back again I wanted, suddenly, to stay on. With the children. And get to know them better. Those little boys and girls who stared at me, awed, as if I held the key to mysteries. The twins, Roger and Timmy, with their identical shovel-noses. Theresa and Christina, locking hands when the grass was wet. Little Alva, rolling on her chubby, piped legs. Mrs. Folde, who leaned on me and needed me, as troubled as she was. I didn’t want to leave her. And poor, exhausted Mr. Folde, who’d knelt down to me on the floor when the other men had curled their spines like sea urchins poked in the center. I had to give him that.

  I stepped out into a wet, spreading mist. Over at the McHenrys’ house, between the lace curtains, the lights burned brightly. The first assistant and his wife would be having dinner with the commission now, and Mr. Folde would be alone at the lighthouse seeing to the compressors and to the bottomless winding.

  Seven dollars a week. I had to keep my wages and keep my nest-egg growing, so I could do something on my own, one day, maybe, with a little luck. Hold fast, Emma Rose Finnis. You can’t let yourself be beaten, not by men in golden straw hats, not by the Lambrys, not by hook or crook. I hurried across the shadowy turf as fast as I could toward the signal house. I was going to tell Mr. Folde how sorry I was for losing my temper and ask him not to let me go, not just yet.

  I opened the low, black door. He was leaning over one of the barrel-shaped engines that stored the air that fed the sirens. His lightkeeper’s jacket was off and thrown to one side, over a stool; his shirt sleeves were rolled up, showing his long arms. His back was bent and rounded over the compressor. He held a claw-shaped tool, fixing something that seemed hard to reach. He must have heard my step because he gave up wrestling and dropped the wrench with a heavy clanging sound, and straightened.

  “Oh,” he said vaguely, as if he hadn’t really seen me at first.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Folde. To disturb you.”

  “It’s nothing. I’m making no progress. Are you better?”

  “I’m better.”

  “You’ve been crying.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “No. I guess it doesn’t. It’s all decided, by now.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the McHenrys’ house.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Folde.”

  “Yes. I am, too.”

  “I don’t know what to—I—I think I let the Irish in me have its way.”

  “Is that your excuse?”

  “It’s my excuse. But I’m still sorry.”

  “Things could have gone better for the both of
us today, couldn’t they?”

  “Mr. Folde. About the tea set—I can pay—I’ve been saving up money. It’ll take me some time to pay it all back, but—”

  “It belonged to my mother’s family. It was with us for many years. The only fine thing my mother ever owned. I owned.” He looked at me.

  “I’ll find a way to get it all replaced. I will.”

  “Some things don’t get—replaced—as you say. It doesn’t matter. Life goes on making its decisions, great and small, without us.” His whiskers were damp, and the back of his hands were greased. He rubbed one against the other. With frustration, I thought. I knew.

  He came away from the compressor, looking sad and tired. He seemed, just then, like a horse on an endless carousel, a man for whom the pulling never ended. His face made me forget my own pulling for a moment.

  “Well. I have to go up to the light, now,” he said.

  He came toward me and his foot grazed my skirt. He reached for his jacket as if to put it on but then changed his mind and threw it aside again.

  He said, “Oh Emma, it wasn’t a good day!”

  “No, sir.”

  “Not for those of us who hoped to climb higher than where we started.”

  “I came to ask if I can still—”

  “We understand each other, Emma, don’t we? We can console each other. We should. We birds of a feather. We two … gulled gulls.” His voice sounded empty and hoarse.

  I moved to one side but didn’t have much room with the compressors all around us. I turned around, and he was standing between me and the heavy, closed door.

  “Mr. Folde, I have to go back to the house and see if Mrs. Folde needs anything. She didn’t look so well when she went upstairs.”

  “Not yet, Emma. Please. Please. Not yet.”

  He took another step toward me. I understood. I dodged between two engines.

  “Careful,” he whispered. “You’ll slip on the oil.”

  I hadn’t. Not so far.

  “We could make each other feel clean again, Emma. Find a new path. Even if we go nowhere.” His eyes lit with the spark of a sailor seeking a harbor. “When one way is blocked, shouldn’t we try to find another way?”

  He tried to put his arms around me. I ducked, with nowhere to turn, in between the two machines.

  I warned him: “I’ll holler. They’ll hear me.”

  Up over me, I saw one of his arms rise to the wall behind my shoulder, to the shadow of something there. I heard him push the handle. The engines began to hum.

  “The sirens,” he said despairingly. “Always needing to be charged. In a minute no one will be able to hear anything. Not even you or me. We’ll be nothing.”

  He looked dazed. For a minute I thought he would let me go.

  “We have to keep to our places in the dark, Emma. We two. We have to keep to our stations and not rise. Don’t you see we’re cursed? Can’t you feel the weight bearing down on you, always, always—my weight—like this—”

  He was pushing me to the mucky floor.

  I’d worked in a boardinghouse. I’d been muscled since I was fifteen. I wasn’t going to go without a fight. I reached into a pool of oil and flung it in his eyes.

  Pratt gets out of the car with his flashlight.

  The Point, the place where I fought, is nothing now. A ruin of bricks and chimneys.

  “Keep close,” Pratt says, beckoning to Ellen.

  A hundred years ago, I struggled under Folde. A heavy, jagged-toothed thing, time is. Like a full-grown man on your chest, the shrieking of engines in your ears. I reached behind me and felt the tool he’d dropped and lifted it and brought it down hard. Something soft gave—his skull—with a muffled crack.

  And then I got free and was racing, racing through the night. The light from the lighthouse spun, raking the mist over my head. The fog sucked like cold gas into my lungs, even as they pumped, pumped the air out, and the noises of the night animals blurred and the moon hung colorless as butcher’s paper.

  The Point is nothing but shadows and empty shells now, stones hidden in grass, white walls thrown down, paths filled in, branches touching the ground, roots in barren post-holes. The signal house still stands but is boarded and locked, and the light tower rises up with a head, but no eye.

  Pratt and Ellen shine their little beams over the sagging shutters and the fallen roof of the Folde house. And they still think to find me here, as hard as I ran, as hard as I ran away that night.

  Pratt climbs onto what’s left of the porch. He shines his beam through the hole that was the front door.

  “Philip,” Ellen says over his shoulder. “Don’t you leave me out here alone.”

  “I won’t.” He holds out his hand to her. “Watch your step.”

  Inside, the Folde staircase has given up all its steps and the spindles have fallen away. They lie in dusty, scattered bones on the floor. Pratt swings his light toward the rotten dining parlor dressed in a thousand cobwebs and onto what was the coal grate, the brick base littered with the tiny skeletons of mice, paws closed in tight fists.

  Across the floor, where I pretended to faint after smashing the Foldes’ china, Pratt shines his light across a garden of broken green bottles and then lifts it to the chunks of falling plaster on the walls. He moves it to the foulness written in between the curtainless windows, and holds it there.

  “What is it?” Ellen comes closer.

  “Graffiti.” Pratt stares up at it. “Carved into the walls.”

  “Delinquents. I told you.”

  He steps on the broken glass, crushing it under his heels. Coming closer, he reads, “‘We all fall. We all die.’”

  “Nice.” Ellen shivers.

  He traces his light higher, until it shines through the splintered holes in the ceiling. “Can’t go up there. We’d fall right through.”

  Ellen shines her light nervously around the room before following Pratt’s footsteps into the hall and back outside. I’ve woven myself into a spider’s nest hanging on the porch. So little do the living understand: when you brush past a web it may seem fragile, but it’s a powerful lacework; a thing made of pure will.

  “Over there are the foundations of the other buildings,” Ellen says, leading the way in the thick night. “They were moved, years ago. They were all assessed as more valuable properties.”

  “This was quite the station, once.” Pratt scans the ruins.

  “But sad, now.”

  They pick their way over the turf and stones.

  “Outbuilding. Over there.” Pratt points. “Listen. Do you hear something?”

  Crying—ah, but there’s often crying here, now. I try to hush and soothe it. There, there. You should go now, I whisper to the local girl and boy drugged and confused in the coal house. Before they get to you. Hurry along, as I did. Hurry, hurry, while there’s still time.

  “Hear it?”

  Ellen nods, following now behind his raised wrist.

  Pratt pushes open the softened, coal-dusted door. Squinting through the circle of his light, he sees the poor, opium-smoking creature I was trying to comfort, coiled and whimpering against a wall cut with more carved writing. Her hair is streaked black and pink, her bare shoulder covered in inked tattoos, the same as the sailors used to fancy, but angrier and with more color.

  Pratt kneels down at her side. The sleeping boy, his hair also streaked, rests his head in her dirty lap and doesn’t move at all.

  Pratt pats the girl’s wan cheeks. Then the boy’s. “Wake up. Come on. Both of you.”

  “Don’t!”

  She flies at him, hurling her arms at his face.

  “Stop it!” Pratt wrestles her till she’s quiet. Then: “How long have you been here? Tell me your names.”

  “Don’t let her touch me or talk to me!”

  “Who?”

  Ellen shines her light down, sees the pieces of burned tinfoil.

  “The woman with no face!” the girl shrieks. “She came and she took him away this time!
” She slumps toward the boy in her lap. “Took his breath away. Made him see.”

  “Ellen? Are you hearing this?”

  “I’m right here.”

  “You better keep everything inside you!” the tattooed girl howls. “So she can’t get to it!”

  “Change of plans,” Pratt says over his shoulder to Ellen. “We need to get these two up and walking. Let’s go!” He looks down at the girl. “Up!”

  They manage, with Pratt taking her limp shoulders and Ellen her bony knees, to carry the poor thing outside the door.

  “We need to get them to the hospital,” Ellen says lowering her. “If I can bring the car down here?”

  “Right. Take the keys. Come as close as you can.”

  In the rising moon, running with her light below the cypress trees, Ellen looks like a faint, ghostly thing, skimming low and fast.

  Alone, grunting, Pratt carries the limp boy out, too.

  The girl lies moaning on the ground. “I want her to fucking die.”

  “Who is it you want to die?” Pratt says.

  “The woman with no face. Sucks the life out of you. From the mist!” She points toward the lighthouse. “It comes from there,” she shouts. “From there!”

  “From the lighthouse. Yes. All right. Hold on. We’ll get you help.”

  “Can’t. Know why? The world’s a fucked-up place.”

  Ellen, behind the wheel, pulls onto the faint stamp of earth where my cottage used to be. She opens the car’s doors. Together they lift the dead weight of the girl, stuffing her clumsily inside, and then the boy.

  “You’ll take them to Fort Kane,” Pratt says.

  “You’re staying here?”

  “Come back as soon as you can. You have your phone?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Go.”

  The half-moon rises higher, brightening everything. Its edge is a filling sail. Hurry. Hurry.

  23

  I ran along the road, the Point growing smaller behind me. My only thought, once I’d left Folde in his own blood in the signal house and flown away to my cottage and grabbed the valise and put everything I had in it, my clothes and my mother’s hairbrush and my savings, the only thing I could think of was that I had to get to the village and find Quint while there was still time. He needed to know I was leaving, too, and on my own. That I wanted to be a part of the world as much as he did, a world full of electricity and telephones and that wasn’t all kitchens and coal and ash bins, but beyond these things, somewhere …