Thirty minutes later, the new mirror installed, Rayna paid with cash. She touched the knitted metal still lying on the counter. ‘This is pretty. What is it?’
Fiona pulled the mess toward her. ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’
‘An earring? Oh, is it a snowflake?’
‘You can see that?’
‘Of course. It’s so pretty. What pattern is it?’
Fiona blushed. It felt good to be praised. ‘My own, actually. I’m just playing around.’
‘Well, keep it up. It’s gorgeous.’ Rayna ran the tip of her finger over the auto part jewelry hanging inside its case on the counter. ‘You’re so talented. I envy you.’
‘What?’ It was so ridiculous Fiona almost laughed. ‘You envy me?’
Rayna smiled at her like they were real friends. ‘You’re single. So pretty. You have your own business, and while I’d never give up even a second with my kids, sometimes I envy what time you must have. For everything. For making this gorgeous stuff – I mean, look at this necklace!’ She paused, and her voice was sadder when she resumed. ‘You’re your own person.’
‘Sometimes I don’t like that person very much, though,’ Fiona admitted, surprising herself. ‘Aren’t you your own person?’
Rayna raised a shoulder and dropped it prettily. ‘I have no fucking idea who I am.’
It was funny, hearing the swear word drop from her lips. Fiona found herself liking Rayna suddenly. Trusting her. ‘You’re Rayna Viera. Your kids are as gorgeous as you are. Your husband is tall and handsome and owns the hardware store, providing employment to himself and others. I’ve heard you make the best lasagna in town. Your hair is perfect, your nails are perfect, even your shoes are perfect. Look at them! Not even scuffed.’ She pointed down at Rayna’s patent black pumps. ‘Everyone wants to be you.’
‘Well, everyone isn’t that smart, then. I’m a mother to two kids. I’m a wife to Tommy. I’m a soccer mom, for Christ’s sake. I get a new Lexus every year. But my husband is having an affair, both my kids have ADHD, and I hit that mailbox on purpose.’
Fiona laughed out loud. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘But your life is perfect.’
‘Nope.’ Rayna smiled.
‘Man, I like you more now.’
Rayna’s smile faded. ‘I get it.’
Crap. ‘That came out wrong. Like everything else lately. I’m sorry.’
Rayna said, ‘I kind of thought you had the perfect life. And last night, I figured out I was wrong.’
‘Oh, yeah. You were so wrong.’ She pulled out two paper cups. ‘Coffee?’
Rayna nodded. ‘Absolutely.’
Fiona poured and watched as Rayna added way too much sugar. ‘That’s not good for you, you know. If you cut back slowly, you won’t notice that it’s not as sweet. You’ll feel better in the long run.’
Rayna said, ‘You really do try to fix everything, don’t you?’
Fiona said simply, ‘It’s what I do.’
‘Honesty?’ Rayna made a between-us motion with her hand.
‘Yes.’ She didn’t know why she was agreeing. She didn’t know this woman, not really, and certainly hadn’t ever considered her a friend. But today was different. Fiona was different.
‘Can you fix me?’ Rayna’s eyes were filled with simple longing. ‘I want my husband to love me again. For me, not for who he thinks I am. I would also like to stab the bitch he’s screwing, but I’m worried I’ll go to jail.’
‘There is that to worry about.’ Did Fiona’s own eyes look as sad when she thought about Abe? Probably. ‘I think I’m not as good at fixing things as I thought I was.’
‘That whole letting-the-past-go thing?’
Fiona sipped her coffee. Hers could actually do with a little sugar. Maybe. ‘No, I’m good at that.’
‘Are you?’
Of course she was. ‘Yes.’
Rayna narrowed her eyes at her. ‘Real honesty, right?’
Such honesty. It felt good. ‘Yes.’
‘When I left Abe at the altar? It was the worst time in my life. I was in love with Tommy, one hundred and twenty percent. I knew it was the right thing to do, letting Abe go, although I did it the wrong way, obviously. But I let that go. He has, too. Everyone moves into the future –’
‘I know all this.’
Rayna held up a hand. ‘Hear me out. Just for a second. You had a bad time in the lighthouse. Don’t you think it’s time to let that go? We all have messed-up backstories. Even the people who look like they don’t.’
‘I have so let that all go.’ Fiona added a packet of sugar and stirred briefly before sipping. Holy crap, coffee was better this way.
‘Have you?’
‘Why do you think I want the lighthouse to come down?’
‘If you’d moved past it, honey, you wouldn’t care.’
‘What?’ Fiona heard the words. She just didn’t understand them.
Rayna leaned forward, cupping her coffee with both hands. ‘If you had let your mom go, really let her go, you wouldn’t give two figs about what happens to the lighthouse.’
Damn.
‘Why did you have to say that?’ Fiona smiled, but knew it was wavery, at best. ‘Crap.’
Rayna touched her wrist, lightly. ‘Seems like moving forward, really moving forward might be good for you right now.’
‘Hey,’ she said, and then lost her bravery.
‘What?’ asked Rayna.
‘How do you –’ No, she couldn’t say it.
‘Get over Abe Atwell?’
Fiona pointed a you-got-it finger at Rayna.
Rayna shrugged. ‘Find another man. That’s what I did.’
‘Nah,’ said Fiona. ‘I’m not sure I’m up for that.’
‘Well, then, you’re screwed.’
Yeah. She’d figured that.
Rayna smiled at her then, and Fiona realized she had a new friend. It was stupid, she could have had Rayna as a friend years ago, she was sure of it. But she’d been so busy being mad at her, angry that she’d hurt Abe way back when. Jealous that Rayna’d had the ability to do so. She’d held on to the past.
She, who was so good at moving forward.
Maybe that was just a cover for being terrible at it.
Daisy chose that minute to roll in the front door. ‘Well, fine. I see I’ve been replaced. Show up late just once …’
Rayna and Daisy both laughed.
So did Fiona.
And the sound of their laughter, combined, sounded a little like hope.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Most of the time your knitting doesn’t need to be watched. Your fingers are clever enough to move the stitches by touch, isn’t that wonderful? Every once in a while, though, you should pay close attention to what your hands are telling you. – E. C.
It wasn’t raining yet, but the cold front was pressing down, exacerbating the headache Abe’d already had when he’d left this morning. Even in two sweaters and his coat, he was still cold on deck. The haul hadn’t been worth it. Fifteen black and yellow rock cod and a kelp greenling which would make good eating later, that was it. Luckily he’d had no tourists slated to come along today. His mood wouldn’t have done well with couples from Massachusetts excited about spotting a whale. Not that he’d seen one today. Nothing was going right today.
Kind of like yesterday.
This fury – when would it go away?
Abe had seen her face – he knew she’d regretted saying it the moment it had happened. And really, was it that big a deal?
So people knew he’d abandoned his dying father.
Coldly. Callously.
Hell, yes, it was a big deal. The anger rose again and he swore as a splinter from the wheel dug into the palm of his hand. He’d sanded the shit out of this wheel – there should be no splinters, and the fact that there were made him even angrier.
Abe reached into the first aid box housed to his right and ripped the top off an aspirin bottle, swa
llowing two dry for his headache. Then he headed for the channel, the engine chugging below him.
His eyes fell on the lighthouse, small and gray against the slate sky. It was tiny from here.
Abe got out the binoculars and looked at the place. He couldn’t help it. Abe always fought with himself for doing this – he shouldn’t need to look at it every time he went past, but he did it anyway. Kind of like driving past his mom’s house whether or not he had time to stop. Just checking in.
There was a person at the foot of the lighthouse today, near the bench he’d shared with Fiona. His stupid, traitorous heart ached. Idiot heart.
He couldn’t tell who the person was, not from this distance, though he could tell the person was female. Something about the color of the coat, about the way the person was standing, made him wonder if it could be her.
Fiona.
Nah.
He shook his head and lowered the binoculars. He wouldn’t think about it. It didn’t matter who was up there. Didn’t matter a bit that the woman was wearing a dark-colored cowboy hat. Plenty of cowgirls in town.
The boat stubbornly fought the gathering swells, moving closer to land.
‘Don’t do it, you pathetic loser,’ he muttered to himself. No. He wouldn’t grab the high-powered Nikon 12x50 binoculars, the ones he watched the stars with. No way.
And then, of course, he did.
At that magnification, he could absolutely make out who it was. And it sure as hell was her.
With these binoculars, he could see the grease spot on the back of her jeans. When she turned in profile, he could see the tears on her cheeks.
She was holding a small metal box in one hand, and what looked like a lighter in the other.
The clouds were growing more ominous overhead, but Fiona was grateful the weather matched her mood. It would keep the tourists away. When she’d driven into the small parking lot, an old motorhome had been driving away. The young guy at the wheel had given her a snazzy salute, and Fiona guessed that later he’d use an app on his phone to process his lo-res ultra-grainy Instagram images of the decrepit building, posting them with words like ‘super creepy old lighthouse somewhere on the coast. Great beer twenty miles south.’ Every time she searched for the Cypress Hollow lighthouse online, images like this came up.
Even she had to admit the building was gorgeous on a dark afternoon. It rose black against the pale gray sky behind it, jutting proudly up, light glinting from the shards of glass left at the top in the lantern room. From here, she couldn’t see the rusted holes in the metal, the water and bird damage on the ledges, the broken boards and caution tape flapping at the bottom. She just saw its silhouette, still proud and fine.
Fiona walked to the bench at the edge of the cliff, the bench she’d shared with Abe. She would not think of him, though, not right now. This had been her own bench long before she’d been here on that date. She wouldn’t think of the way she’d discovered, below in the caves, how his mouth felt on hers, wouldn’t remember the way he heated her blood and made her head spin with delight at the same time.
Fiona was here to think about her mother. To let her go.
Rayna had been so right it hurt.
Contrary to what she’d always believed, Fiona had been nothing but a perfect failure in moving forward. She, who thought she had nothing holding her back from a bright future, had let the pain of her mother’s leaving hold her bound, and she hadn’t even known it. She’d tattooed her very body with the pain of that memory. She’d kept the metal box with her mother’s sketches hidden under her bed. Fiona had thought, mistakenly, that keeping the box out of sight meant that she was over her mother’s abandonment. Instead, she’d been keeping it close, keeping it safe.
All these years.
Her mother wasn’t coming home. Ever.
From her pocket, she took out a bright red lighter she’d lifted from the counter at the station. She’d throw it out after this, wouldn’t sell it on to someone else. Not after it had been used for something like this.
Taking the lid off the tin, she held up the first sketch. It was of a monkey puzzle tree – the one that used to be at the curve of the road just a couple of hundred yards away. It had blown down a few years before in a storm. The sketch was rough, the pencil lines faded now. Bunny had taken a book out from the library, Fiona remembered, and had studied how to draw the bones of the tree first, and then build around the shape. To Fiona’s untrained eye, her mother hadn’t been bad. The tree was recognizable, the horizontal jutting branches at a sharp angle to the trunk, the slight rise and curve of the road still the same as it was now.
Fiona flicked the lighter and held it under a corner of the brittle paper. It caught instantly, and zipped red and black up to her fingertips faster than she thought it would. She dropped it, and it harmlessly flared itself out at her feet on the gravel.
The ache cut less deep already.
The second one was a drawing of the very spot Fiona stood on. The lighthouse, the bench (still new then, unsplintered and smooth), the horizon far at the top edge of the paper. Two seagulls dove toward the bottom of the page.
It also burned cleanly and quickly. So did the others.
She saved two for last. Both sketches of a little girl, Fiona had never been sure if they were actually her or not. One danced near a snowman in front of a small cottage in the woods, someplace Fiona had never been. Bunny could have imagined her there, though, right? The hair was the right length, and she’d had those exact Mary Janes. But what little girl didn’t?
The second was more likely Fiona, if either of them were. The girl, closer in this sketch, leaned her head against a car that resembled the old Pinto her father had driven. Her eyes were closed, and though she smiled, it was a sad, tired-looking image, and Fiona had always hated looking at it.
Having saved it for last, she ran the lighter along the bottom of the paper and said, ‘Goodbye, Mom.’
As if the wind had heard her, a cold wind kicked up, carrying half the page, still blazing, to the foot of the lighthouse. Fiona sucked in her breath, but it was fine. Of course. A tiny ember like that couldn’t catch the old wood.
But holy hell in a handbasket, it could catch the long-dead weeds at the base of the building. One flame licked upward. Then another.
‘No. No. No.’ Fiona ran at the weeds. She tried stomping the small fire out with her boots, but every time she stepped the fire moved sideways, and the wind whipped the flame through piles of dried leaves and detritus that swirled and blazed.
The edge of the windowsill caught first – a burning, twirling ember landing on a pile of clumped bird feathers. Fiona could actually hear them crackle as they ignited. She beat at it with her jacket, but it was too fast for her, the wood too old.
The whole damn wooden lighthouse was tinder, and she’d provided the match.
The heat of the spreading flame drove her backward, and she stared up at the building. Goddamn.
What if she didn’t call 911?
The thought only rested in her mind for a second, long enough to regret having wasted any time. The pause, though, that her fingers felt as they reached for her phone … Fiona wanted it to burn.
And for that she felt nothing but true, deep grief.
The dispatcher told her they were sending the engines her way, and then asked if anyone was inside the building.
Fiona’s heart broke. ‘Not anymore.’
And then she ran for the door of the keeper’s house.
Abe didn’t understand how it caught so fast.
From midship, Abe watched the lighthouse spark and then go up like a Roman candle. One minute it was fine, and Fiona was in front of it. The next, he couldn’t see her against the glare of the blaze.
The worst of it was his helplessness. Still scudding into the channel, Abe couldn’t abandon ship – he’d made the swim to the rocky shore in high seas once, and he didn’t know if he could do it again. He called 911, but couldn’t get through, the lines probably jac
ked from everyone else calling. With his binoculars, he saw passing cars and RVs stop on the highway to watch the fire, carelessly blocking the fire engines that roared up.
He watched as the fire fighters aimed hoses on the blaze, watched as the water steamed up in white billows of evaporation against the heat. The top of the lighthouse had already caved in with a rumble he could hear even this far away.
But her.
He hadn’t seen Fiona again. She should be running around – she should be up there on the road, watching with the tourists – she should be leaning in shock against the battalion chief’s truck.
Desperately, he called 911 again.
The dispatcher’s quick words tumbled over each other. ‘911, are you reporting the fire on Highway One?’
‘I’m watching it. There’s a woman. There should be a woman,’ he gasped.
‘What?’ Radio traffic squelched in the background.
‘Tell them to check the lighthouse keeper’s house. For Fiona Lynde.’
‘Are you saying someone might be trapped?’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ he roared. If Fiona had gone in, to get something out … It didn’t matter that she’d started the fire, it just mattered that she was safe.
Through the binoculars, he watched as men who’d been putting up a ladder suddenly ran toward the keeper’s house, the side of which was already blazing.
Barely breathing, Abe slowed the boat so he wouldn’t go into the channel and lose sight of what was most important. He kept the binoculars steady, absorbing the motion of the boat with his legs.
Two firefighters carried someone out, rushing her away from the fire and over to the ambulance. They laid her on a stretcher, strapping an oxygen mask to her face.
When they took off the person’s cowboy hat, long brown hair spilled out.
Abe pushed the throttle control to full power, taking the south curve into the channel way too fast. He didn’t give a shit. There was only one place he needed to be, and it wasn’t on the damn water.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
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