Lightkeeper's Wife

by Sarah Anne Johnson

  Hannah glanced up the darkened stairway toward her old bedroom, the last place where John had slept, the last place she wanted to go. Her father nudged her mother aside and kissed Hannah on the cheek, took her by the shoulders as if to feel her strength, and then, satisfied, stepped back and let her mother take the lead.

  Hannah stood in the hallway, not wanting to step in any direction. As she looked toward the kitchen, she saw John frying a fresh fillet of sole as he’d done the night he’d spent here. Or when she looked toward the living room, there he was with his boots kicked off by the fire, talking with her father about his catch.

  “Why don’t you relax with your father while I finish getting dinner ready?” Nora said.

  Her father led her into the parlor at the front of the house where he’d set a fire going. The room was warm, and Hannah fell into a chair and stared into the flames, suddenly tired. Her father sighed over his newspaper and she turned to him, but he did not look up. She had never considered the fact that he would age, but there he was, stooped a bit at the shoulders, a soft belly pressing out against his sweater. Still, he was a handsome man with a swath of dark hair and brown eyes, a heavy jaw that strengthened his round, poutish face.

  They sat for some time in silence. Theirs was normally a conversation of dropping a trap off the side of the boat and a wave signaling the buoy’s rise to the surface. It was watching a squall blow in from the horizon, battening down the boat, and racing for the harbor with hardly a word spoken. But this silence was something else.

  He sat with the newspaper across his lap, his spectacles balanced near the end of his nose. “When did you get those?” Hannah asked.

  He looked up, pulled from thoughts deeper than the news. “They’re just for reading.” He folded the paper and slapped it against his knee. “You must have questions, Hannah.”

  “I want to see the place tomorrow.”

  “We’ll go, then.”

  Hannah stood and gazed out the front windows, imagining herself into the distances beyond the dark. The men John had rescued walked through their lives with a scant memory of him or no thought at all. He’d ridden away from here and into his absence, which only seemed broader and deeper now.

  “Been awhile since you stood right there,” he said. He took his glasses off and dropped them onto the side table. He asked Hannah to help him get some firewood and groaned as he stood up and stretched his back. “I’m no good at getting old. No good at all.”

  He led her out the side door into the yard where moonlight lit the side of the house. Alongside the barn, the cords of wood he’d stacked rose near as tall as him. He reached behind the woodpile, wiggled his arm back there, and came up with a bottle. He drank and dabbed his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “You want some?”

  “No thanks.”

  “I hurt my back pulling traps. This relaxes the muscles or makes me too drunk to care. I don’t know which.” He drank, leaning back against the woodpile, his head tilted to look into the sky. The moon cast the woods into an otherworldly glow and they could see the yard, the broken traps and boat parts and mangled nets.

  “If there’s anything you can’t do—”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “Why hide the bottle?”

  “Your mother doesn’t want to know about it, but if I need it for the pain, she’ll ignore it. It’s just her way.” He sat on the chopping block, and with his hands on his knees, he leaned forward and spoke as if he meant to be heard.

  “I heard about that rescue of yours.”

  “You know better than to listen. People like to hear themselves talk.”

  “Sure, but I know you, so when I hear something like that and weigh it against what I know about you, there’s not a lot left to question. I’m no fool. I know what you’re capable of doing in a boat.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with what I did.”

  “You think you’re so goddamned invincible,” he said. “You always have.” He spat at the ground. “I taught you good but everyone is susceptible. I’m not saying this because I doubt you. You know I don’t, but you can’t control everything that happens out there, no matter how strong or good you are. You can’t control an ocean.”

  He sloshed the liquor around in the bottle and took another sip. “I wish you’d just think, Hannah. Stop and think. That’s what scares me. You’re so full of passion you don’t stop to consider the consequences.”

  “You believe some thirdhand story, but you’ve never once come up to Dangerfield to see what I do.”

  “I guess we’ve both been remiss.”

  They sat for a while watching the dark. From this part of the yard Hannah could see the bedroom window she’d stared out of for years as a younger girl. The bedroom where she’d spent her first night with John. The bedroom where he may have spent his last night.

  “Mother’s heard about the rescue too?” Hannah asked.

  “Not from me.” He rocked himself forward and stood from the chopping block, slid the bottle back behind the woodpile. He loaded Hannah’s arms with wood, then his own, steady as if he hadn’t taken a drink. They stacked a couple loads of maple by the fire and went outside again to brush wood shavings from their clothes.

  In the dining room, the table was set with everyday dishes, scratched and worn with years of use, while the good china remained in the cabinet on display. Hannah’s mother swept from the kitchen to the dining room and back again, placing serving dishes around the table.

  “Christ, Nora, would you come in and sit down? We’re half starved.”

  “You’ve never been starved in your life,” she said, untying her apron and hanging it on a peg behind the door.

  Her father didn’t look up from his meal. The food seized his attention, and he worked his way around the plate as if finishing was another task in life.

  Now Hannah’s grief took a turn, and she found herself chattering as if the silence would destroy them. She spoke frantically, afraid that if she stopped, the heavy oak table would crack down the middle in the face of John’s absence and her father’s drinking and the years not spent sitting together around a good meal. “I haven’t had a roast like this since the last time I sat right here. I just can’t seem to get it to cook for the right amount of time. Father, pass the salt, would you? I love how the potatoes are crunchy on the bottom. Did you roast them in the same pan with the meat?”

  “There’s plenty more,” her mother said, nudging the potatoes toward Hannah.

  “Father, what do you think? Is this the best dinner you’ve ever had?”

  He looked up from his plate as if caught in the act. “What? Yes, yes, it’s good, real good.”

  When her mother finished eating, she folded her napkin and placed it beside her plate. She leaned back and considered her husband before speaking. “Edward, those traps have been piled out back for months. I’m not saying you should move them on your own, but now that Hannah’s here—”

  “I told you I’d take care of that,” he said.

  “He won’t admit he needs help, Hannah. Maybe you can talk some sense into him. We can afford to get someone to help him out, but he won’t allow it. He’s too stubborn.” Her mother leaned forward in her chair. “It wouldn’t kill you to get a little help, Ed.”

  “I’m fine,” he said. He pushed himself up from the table.

  “Where are you going now?”

  “I’ll be outside.”

  “Getting some more wood from the pile?” Nora asked, her voice a sarcastic snap.

  The sound of the kitchen door slamming shut was answer enough.

  ***

  In the morning, when Hannah was making coffee, she watched the fog drift past the kitchen window. An off-kilter formation of geese flew over the trees, their call growing distant and marking the immensity of the world beyond their yard. She’d woken several times during the night to
check the lights, but the lighthouse beam didn’t interrupt the dark and she felt her childhood bed beneath her. There in the shadows her dresser settled into the floor, the washbasin right where it had always been, and the night table by the bed. She’d thought of lighting the candle, but the darkness softened. What a blank and sprawling enormity—nighttime without the regularity of the light flashing, the four-hour check for oil, the threat of bad weather that would call her out onto the beach.

  She drifted back to sleep and found herself alone in her dreams wandering the woods behind the barn, running along the trail toward Dennis Pond, through the thick patch of spruce that thinned to pine, an occasional birch tree and then a green field and brambles and there was the pond. Still and flat as the beginning of time. Did you take him? The place where they’d found his horse wandering was less than a mile east of where she stood. In her dream the water smelled like rain and mildew, and when she turned toward where his horse would’ve been, her feet froze and she couldn’t move. She tried to speak, to scream. Where is John? But her throat didn’t work and she had to pantomime the words, holding her hands out and stabbing the pond with her questioning glare, as if to say, Where, where, where?

  ***

  The next morning, she stared into the fog from the kitchen window and tried not to think about John, but his absence took up space and had weight. If he’d been here to spend the night with her, they would have fallen asleep wrapped around each other and would have woke to make love. He’d cover her mouth to keep her from making noise, and when they fell away from each other, they’d lie back in bed and talk about the lighthouse like it was a child they’d left behind.

  When she heard her mother’s firm foot on the back stairs, she poured a cup of coffee for her and cut thick slices of bread for toast, relieved by the simple act of placing her hand on a loaf of bread.

  “You’re up early,” Nora said. “Aren’t you tired from your trip?”

  “Habit. The lights,” Hannah said.

  Nora arranged the butter dish and the jam pot on the table and set two places. “This is strawberry, but there’s beach plum, too, if you’d rather.”

  Hannah felt her mother holding back the one thing she wanted to talk about. “Strawberry’s fine.”

  Nora carried her coffee to the small table by the window. Hannah took the toast from the stove, tossed it on a plate, and brought it to the table.

  “Did you sleep well?” Nora eyed her cautiously, stirring her coffee, the spoon against the cup an annoying tinkle in the air.

  “He didn’t want to leave that last day. He kept forgetting things and coming back to the house. I just wanted him to leave so I could get on with my day. I thought he’d be back in a couple of days. He always came right back.”

  “I know.”

  “And then there was the storm. I thought for a while he stayed in Orleans to get out of the rain, or was injured.” Hannah scraped her knife around the rim of the jam jar, over and over, and then dropped the knife.

  Nora opened the window a crack and let the cold air into the room. “You’ll have to get on with things at some point,” Nora said. “Do you think it’s practical to stay in Dangerfield? You could have a good life here, find a husband when you’re ready.”

  “I have to stay. It’s my home now, Mother.”

  ***

  That afternoon, Hannah rode alongside her father, who was in a bad humor but determined to take her to the place where John had gone missing.

  “It’s hard on your mother,” he said, rocking with the stride of his horse. He could’ve been talking about his drinking or losing John or just about anything. He spat into the bushes and scratched his whiskers. “There’s things you lose that don’t come back.”

  She felt him trying to right himself like a man holding on for his life to a capsized dinghy. Only he couldn’t get hold. His thoughts ran scattershot, careening in one direction, distracted by the sound of a dog barking—“Don’t know whose dog that is, but if it was mine, I’d whack it good and hard”—then taking off in another direction that led to a place of dumb silence. He shook his head, repentant about things that were not his fault—John gone missing, Hannah’s refusal to stay ashore, his disabled back—when so many things were his fault.

  On Summer Street, loose rocks and tree roots upended the road. They passed the old graveyard in silence and then onward through the pines. The smell of pond scum reached them first, a smell that Hannah remembered from childhood.

  “It was over near here.” Her father pointed. “The horse was just wandering, like it was waiting for him to come back.”

  Hannah stared at the ground where he pointed. Nothing but dirt and dried pine needles. If the horse had been waiting for him to come back, John must have stood right there, but the ground showed nothing. She followed a trail into the woods, casting her eyes into the bushes, looking for…what?

  When Hannah had exhausted herself searching through the woods for any sign at all of her husband, when her eyes grew tired and common sense told her to stop, she stood by her father and looked across the pond. What had she expected? This place meant nothing. It was a spot in the woods, unchanged by whatever had happened here.

  “There were marks from different hooves, marks from wagon wheels going in both directions up the road. One line of thinking says he was ransacked and carried off around the back of the pond along that skimpy bit of road. Another theory is they sunk him out in the pond, but you know how far you have to go out there to hit any deep water. We went out in rowboats with tall branches, poking them all around down there. We did that for six days. Men traveled along the main road with a sketch of John and talked to anyone who would listen. We tore this place up, Hannah. There was nothing. It’s like he was standing right there.” He tapped his foot on the ground in front of him where two stones rested side by side. This was his offering, his uncertain knowledge. “Right there,” he said, “and then he just disappeared.”

  Grief was like a wave cresting, gathering size and velocity. Hannah braced herself against it. Isn’t this what she’d wanted—to know?

  On the ride back to the house, her father didn’t know what to say or how to console her, and she couldn’t find the words to express her distress. A woman standing on her porch watched them pass. Hannah felt the woman’s eyes on her, thanking fate for sparing her own husband and sending a prayer out for Hannah, as if this act of goodwill would spare her. Hannah didn’t want her prayers. It was too late for that. The sun became a sliver on the sky, the cold a slap on her face that said, Wake up! Wake up! Don’t you see what’s going on? Your life is not here. It is gone, like your husband is gone, and you are left, Hannah, left.

  ***

  Back at the house, Hannah went to her room and lay across the bed until her tears became sobs she couldn’t control. John was torn from her, one rip at a time. She was relieved to let go, and then stricken once again by the thought of a life without him. The sound of his voice, the weight of him in the bed beside her, or waiting for him to return from the beach during a storm. For over six years, she’d feared it would be the sea that would take him, never the road. Not once had she imagined danger on the road, and for this she blamed herself. If only she’d thought to worry about the road, this never would’ve happened. If only she’d held him back from leaving with one more thing. John, you forgot your… Was it the weight of the wagon that had slowed him down enough to run into whatever had killed him? Or had he left her parents’ house too early, or too late? Why? Why? At the window she watched the road. The evil, darkening road. Never again would she trust it. She’d ride home alone in spite of it.

  Her father’s shadow by the woodpile. How much time did he spend out there? The sound of her mother downstairs, a storm of domestic activity that started in the front parlor and worked its way down the hall toward the kitchen. She saw how they rattled around in their own pain. No one was exempt.

 
Hannah wiped her face, swollen from crying. She pulled back her hair and went downstairs.

  Her mother placed an apple tart on the cooling rack by the window. “Did you get any rest?” she asked. She ran a cloth under cold water and folded it neatly, then held it out to Hannah to place over her swollen eyes.

  “Not really,” Hannah said.

  “It’s going to take time.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find him,” Hannah said.

  “I know, I mean to grieve. For all of us, but for you, dear—”

  Hannah removed the cloth from her eyes. “When did his drinking get this bad?”

  “Oh, Hannah, stop it. You need to think about what you’re going to do.”

  “I’m serious—when?”

  Her mother went to the window for the tart. “You’ve got to try this. I rolled the dough out thinner, which makes the crust a bit crispy.”

  Hannah watched her wipe down the counter and put the dishes away. She bent to pick up crumbs that had strayed from their proper place atop the pie and brushed them into the sink. Nora worked hard to keep back her waves of anger, all the things she did not want to say. The disappointments and devastations that coursed through her over the years took shape in her stooped shoulder, the rolls of fat around her waist and gathered at her ankles, the squint of her right eye that held some essential part of herself back, as if she’d given everything she had to her husband and her child and her store, and this one thing, hidden, she would keep for herself. Hannah saw it glittering beyond the dark reaches of her mother’s pupils.

  “It’s only because of his back,” she said finally, then took out the trash herself. “You’re grieving your husband, Hannah. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  ***

  That night was her last night in Barnstable, and her mother roasted a chicken. The three of them gathered around the table staring into the candles, grief palpable like ocean waves they had to walk through. Her mother carved the bird, her face bowed and in shadow. She looked beautiful right then, the strong lines of her cheekbones, her eyes focused on her work, but her mind was somewhere else as she lifted generous portions onto each plate.