by Abby Geni
But the archipelago did not make the work easy. The builders could not transport their usual tools to shore. They could barely get to shore themselves. It was not possible to bring bricks and mortar from the mainland either. Instead, the workers had to mine their materials out of the living rock. (As I read, I remembered the gashes I had often noticed in the landscape, rough-hewn scars. These quarries had, in the centuries since their creation, eroded until they did not look man-made anymore. They had the appearance of marks scored into the earth by an alien spacecraft.) The crew would chisel bricks out of the ground, then crawl up Lighthouse Hill bearing the stones on their backs, like the slaves who had once built the pyramids.
In 1855, after many failures and injuries, the lighthouse was completed. Four lightkeepers were stationed there. They did not have a cabin, like ours. Even the coast guard house had yet to be conceived of, let alone built. Instead, the lightkeepers lived in a stone shack. Food was scarce. Four men, no women. On top of everything else, the pay was wretched. And there were the eggers to contend with.
I sat up straighter, lengthening my spine. Then the baby engaged in a particular maneuver, one I had experienced just a few times before. It felt as though the fetus were skiing down the interior slopes of my body. It never failed to startle and delight me. I had described the sensation to Mick once, and he had explained that in all likelihood it was the baby turning over, doing loop-the-loops in my womb.
I flipped to the next page in the book, recalling myself to my work. There was an illustration at the top of the chapter: a man with a devious expression and a handful of orbs clutched against his chest. An egger.
At the time the lighthouse was built, no one had officially laid claim to the archipelago. Vast portions of the United States were still unowned. So the eggers had overrun the islands. The situation among these men amounted to something between a black market economy and outright piracy. The lightkeepers were caught in the crossfire. As they slept in their shack and made the trek up the hill to work the mechanism, they were aware of squabbles taking place on the other side of Southeast Farallon. Eggers versus eggers. Fistfights were common. Now and then, knives or guns would make an appearance—at which point the lightkeepers would signal the mainland for help. Soldiers would be sent to break things up.
From there, the situation continued to deteriorate. The avarice of the eggers was unending. Once, after a skirmish, an enemy faction decided to hide out in Great Murre Cave and pretend they’d fled the islands. While inside, they were showered by guano. Soon, there was so much ammonia in the air that it became toxic. Driven by greed, the men refused to leave, and so they died there, one by one.
I resettled myself, trying to accommodate the baby’s girth. The eggers had begun to remind me of the gulls I saw outside every day—motivated by voracity and anger, bent on the ruthless extermination of all others. The gulls, too, would risk their own safety, even their own lives, to attack an intruder.
The lightkeepers, on the other hand, seemed rather like the biologists. They did not intervene in the natural world. They observed and recorded without interfering. They tended the lighthouse and left the animals alone.
Eventually—inevitably—the eggers had turned their attention to the lightkeepers, too. The eggers had damaged and defaced the government’s property. They put up signs warning the lightkeepers not to set foot on their turf. They insisted that the lightkeepers pay for every murre egg they ate. Perhaps the strain of the long war had affected the eggers’ minds. At last they attempted to oust the lightkeepers entirely. There was a skirmish in which several people were injured.
The murre population was, by then, in a downward spiral. There were fewer and fewer eggs on the ground—and chickens had finally begun to appear en masse in California. There was nothing left to fight for. But the eggers fought anyway.
In 1881, the government took action. Soldiers came and removed the eggers in one clean sweep. Only the lightkeepers remained.
I WOKE TO a knock at the door. I did not realize I’d dozed off until I opened my eyes. I was still in the chair, spine molded against the wooden slats, book in hand. One finger held my place. There was a crick in my neck.
Mick appeared in the doorway, his hair sticking up. His face was burnished brown from a day in the sun.
“You’re busy,” he said.
“No. Come in.”
I laid the book aside. Mick wandered around the room for a minute, touching things in what appeared to be a random way. He seemed nervous. He spent a while examining the knob of my closet door, fiddling with a loose screw.
Finally he turned to me.
“I was thinking about our conversation,” he said.
“About the gulls?”
“No.” He pointed to my belly. “About this.”
His expression was hesitant. He sat on the edge of the bed, a safe distance away, his weight making the mattress slope.
“You haven’t told anyone else, have you?” he said.
“No. Just you.”
“Good,” he said.
He bit his lip. He seemed to be struggling with an idea—something weighty, out of character with his usual sweetness and jollity. I waited. Mick’s mind moved in slow, determined shifts, like the changing of the tides.
“Say it was me,” he said.
“What?”
“Say it was me,” he repeated. “To the others.”
Still, I did not understand. Mick clicked his tongue impatiently.
“Galen and Forest,” he said. “And especially Lucy. We’ll tell them I’m the father.”
He reached across the empty air between us and collected my hand, pressing it between his hot palms.
“I want to do this for you,” he said. “I can’t do much, but I can do this.”
“I don’t—” I began.
His grip intensified, crushing my fingers.
“Please,” he said. “I mean it. You can tell everyone it was me. Even your family. Your dad. Everyone. It’ll make your life easier, won’t it? No more questions to answer?”
I could not speak. I threw myself forward, landing against his chest. We nearly tumbled off the bed. Mick burst out laughing. His arms closed around me, holding me, steadying me.
LATER THAT NIGHT, as I drifted off to sleep, I found myself thinking about Galen’s book again. The eggers. The lighthouse. The sea. It occurred to me that the book had not used the term “lighthouse keepers.” I was glad of this. To do so would have implied that the primary task of those people had been to maintain a building, a human structure. Instead, the book had referred to them as the keepers of the light itself. There was something important in that. Something fundamental. My pillow was warm, the radiator grunting, the air thick with steam. Perhaps there were only two kinds of people in the world—the takers and the watchers—the plunderers and the protectors—the eggers and the lightkeepers. Just as I felt myself on the verge of an epiphany, the wind outside gave a deep sigh, and I slipped into sleep.
35
I HAVE NOT FELT the desire to write to you as often lately. I have not been aware of your absence in the same way I used to be.
After your death, the lack of you was all-consuming. I thought about it constantly. It was as though I’d lost something basic, like my sense of smell or my ability to laugh—the sort of thing I could live without but might not want to. I felt like a tuning fork that when struck rang out loneliness instead of music. I felt as though I’d been halved. These are the things I wrote in my letters to you—and mailed, every few days, to the Dead Letter Office.
Now, however, all that has changed. I am no longer halved. In my pregnancy, I am doubled. That is what occupies my mind nowadays. I can’t marinate in my loss anymore. I can’t dwell endlessly on your absence. Not when I am overwhelmed by the presence of the baby.
I think about it all the time. I think about him all the time, since I have become convinced that the fetus is a boy. There is a maleness about him, all elbows and knees. Sometimes, when
I lay my hands on my belly, I will experience a kind of mental shock—the emotional equivalent of static electricity. A baby. A boy. The two words might well be synonyms, interchangeable. That is how sure I am.
At night, I often dream about him. There he is in a diaper and hat. There he is in my father’s lap—my father altered by his sudden elevation to grandfather, smiling in a peaceful way that I have not seen since you were here. I imagine my aunts, your twin sisters—I imagine them leaning over a basinet, faces soft. I see my son in the bath. Seated in a red wagon. On the playground. There he is, learning to go down the slide by himself, his mouth a startled O. I imagine the weight of him on my thighs, his head against my breastbone, warm and sleepy, as we turn the pages of a book together. I hear him cry, a piercing siren. I enjoy these dreams. They have given me the chance to get to know the baby before I meet him. He is here with me now. He is filling the absence you created twenty years and a thousand letters ago.
IT IS JUNE. Recently we had a rain-washed morning, full of thunder. The gulls were affected by the weather. For the first time since Bird Season began, their cries were hushed. The islands were eerily still. Through the window, I saw feathery shapes hunkering down, shivering, heads beneath their wings.
Galen and I lingered indoors. Together he and I lounged around all morning. Rain hammered on the roof. He read a book about blue whales, and I roamed the kitchen, hoping against hope that there might be a magical cache of delicious food hidden somewhere. Galen hummed a nautical ditty, and I ate stale saltines. Galen flipped through the daily log, and I napped on the couch.
The daily log is an interesting study in personalities. Forest’s notes, for example, are all business, a list of the sharks he has seen. He does not bother with complete sentences, telegraphing his information: Goof Nose in Mirounga Bay, 6 a.m. That kind of thing. Mick, on the other hand, tends to ramble on enthusiastically about seal behavior: Two new mothers this week. Babies nursing like crazy. Already gained a few pounds. Cutest damn things! Wish I could adopt one. Then there is Lucy, whose entries are surprisingly flowery. In her curlicued cursive, she lavishes praise on the gorgeous sunsets, the wild surf, and the aerial ballets of the double-crested cormorants. Though I enjoy reading the daily log, I usually skip Lucy’s entries. In life, she is a solid, matter-of-fact person. On the page, however, she can become pretentious, as though striving to appear deep and emotional. I would give anything to feel the power and glory of flying free against a purple and gold sky, she once wrote, apparently without irony.
As the morning wore on, the storm worsened. Rain plummeted in buckets. The air in the cabin was as hazy as evening. Finally Galen summoned me to the table. His smile was warm as he patted the chair beside him.
“How’s the book?” he said. “You’ve been reading it, I hope?”
“Yes,” I said. “The eggers.”
“And the lightkeepers,” he said. “That’s the important part.”
He narrowed his eyes at me appraisingly. Then he sat back. The rain picked up, a torrent gushing through the gutters like an airborne river. The thunder grumbled. Galen’s gaze was lifted to the ceiling. He began to speak. He told me the story of the lightkeepers in measured tones, apparently from memory.
They had flourished here, for a while. Once the eggers were gone, the men had brought their wives to the islands. They had brought their children. They had built our cabin, as well as the coast guard house—twin structures standing sentinel in a lonely wilderness. As Galen spoke, his hands flitted through the air. For a time, the lightkeepers and their families had thrived. It had been a lovely, peculiar life. Children playing at the foot of Lighthouse Hill. Climbing the two small trees. Skipping stones on the ocean. Making pets of the seal pups. I found it comforting to know that I was not the first pregnant woman to have lived on the islands.
The rain showed no signs of abating, as though a tap had been turned on in the sky. Galen’s expression darkened. Eventually, he said, the lighthouse had been modernized, remade with an automated mechanism. There was no longer a need for a permanent host of lightkeepers. The crew, along with their wives and children, packed up their belongings and headed back to civilization.
“Modernization is an unstoppable tide,” Galen said.
Times had changed and kept on changing. During World War I, the military had shown a brief interest in the islands. Later still, the place had been considered as a possible locale for a new prison or a refueling station for oil tankers.
I let my attention wander. I knew how the story ended. A nature preserve. A wilderness refuge. A home for biologists. Secure, pristine, and untouchable.
Galen tapped my arm. His expression was stern.
“They were our predecessors,” he said. “They were like us. Do you understand?”
“Noninterference,” I said sleepily. “Nonintervention.”
“Yes,” he said. “The lightkeepers took only what they needed. They studied and documented and made no changes. They protected this place.”
He prodded my arm again, driving the point home.
“That’s what we must do, always,” he said.
YESTERDAY I GAVE in and visited the murre blind. This was a result of the combined efforts of Mick and Galen, who had badgered me for a week straight, insisting that I had to see the murres fledging their chicks. Though it is June, we don’t have warm days here. Instead, we have afternoons of bright sun and sharp wind, the temperature changing by the moment. The climb made me nervous. Galen managed it on two legs, but I found myself on my hands and knees, crawling like a dog and scrabbling for purchase. My belly hung beneath me, a pendent mass. My heart was pounding as I reached the blind. Mick was right behind me—he had been back there the whole time, ready to catch me if I fell.
“I’m not going back down that slope,” I hissed in his ear. “I’ll just stay up here forever.”
“Good idea,” he said.
The murre blind was a simple tin shack. Seabirds, as a rule, have good color vision, but they are not adept at recognizing shapes. A group of people standing on a nearby crest would have alarmed them. But a slate-colored hill, topped by a square, incongruous, slate-colored object, did not concern them at all. Mick helped me settle onto a folding chair. The blind smelled funny. Fish and seawater. I leaned forward, compressing my belly, and peered through the window.
The coast ended in an abrupt and dramatic cliff. The murres were packed along that edge, crushed together. There seemed to be no space between their bodies, no glimpse of rocky ground. They moved constantly. The mosaic of black and white feathers shifted like static on a screen. It was hard to pick out individual shapes. The occasional flash of lipstick red indicated an open beak. The noise was deafening. The square frame of the window made me feel as though I were looking through a viewfinder. The verge of the precipice was ruffled with feathers and beaks. Beyond that, the sea stood solid and imposing, a flat slab of gray.
After a while, I began to notice the chicks. Most of them were still at an intermediate stage, midsized, with a mangy appearance, their baby fluff not quite gone, their adult feathers not quite grown in. We had come to the blind to watch these chicks learning to fly. I had observed the process with the gulls already. I had seen that the necessary muscles were in place, and there was clearly an instinctive understanding of what to do, yet a stumble or two was inevitable on the way—a confused farce of trial and error. I had watched young gulls turning sideways in midair, landing on their heads, or simply flapping their wings while running across the rocks, their little faces illuminated with elation, quite sure that they were airborne.
With the murres, however, the matter turned out to be very different.
“There,” Mick said, pointing. “Right there.”
A pair of birds had taken their chick to the edge of the cliff. Before my eyes, a conversation took place, the parents instructing and the baby responding. (I could not, of course, hear their voices over the clamor; I just watched their beaks opening and closing like a sil
ent film.) And then the chick was plummeting toward the sea. I cried out as the tiny body whizzed downward. Had the parents shoved it? Had the wind caught it at the wrong moment? Had the chick jumped of its own accord? I could not be certain. For a moment, things looked bleak. The chick was accelerating. Moving at that speed, it would not survive a collision with the water.
Then I saw a flutter. A wiggle. The chick flung out its wings. Mick whooped. Galen tugged a small green notebook from his pocket and scribbled something down. The chick flapped once, twice, and began to rise.
THAT EVENING, I made my announcement. I waited until dinner was over. We had just received a delivery from the mainland, and we spent the meal luxuriating in a wealth of salad and fresh fruit. Lucy made chicken with a rich pesto sauce. Dinner was punctuated by groans and the scraping of forks. When we had all eaten our fill—when everyone was leaning back in their chairs, eyeing the dirty dishes balefully—I got to my feet. I lifted my water glass and clinked it feebly with my knife.
“I have something to tell you,” I said.
Lucy was watching me steadily. I found it impossible to meet her gaze. Mick intervened. With incredible swiftness, he unzipped my sweatshirt. He yanked the fabric aside with the showmanship of a magician opening a curtain onstage. I was wearing only a thin T-shirt underneath. My belly was undeniable.
“We’re pregnant!” Mick crowed, laying a hand on that swollen globe.
In that instant, I saw that nobody was the least bit surprised. I was in my third trimester now. Everything about me was different—bulbous breasts, puffy rear end, indistinct jawline. Still, they all went through the motions. Galen congratulated me in a deep, booming voice. He got to his feet and laid his hands on my shoulders in a kind of solemn benediction. Forest kept a placid smile on his face. Lucy flashed me a bright, true grin. She gave me the first real hug I’d ever received from her.
“He’s going to be a great dad,” she whispered in my ear.
