The Night Mark(10)

While pretty and picturesque, Faye didn’t see anything on the south shore of the island worth photographing. No houses, no landmarks, no rock formations or wildlife. Only sand and grass and trees. Ty started the boat back up, and they made their way around a bend to the north shore of the island.

And there it was.

Faye stood up and gripped the gunwale, camera momentarily forgotten.

The lighthouse appeared like something from a dream or a painting of a dream. Solid white and shimmering wet after a recent rain, it shone like a pillar of pure moonstone. The roof of the lighthouse was black and glinting and below it the widow’s walk around the lantern room was like an iron choker. The glass panels surrounding the lantern room looked intact, and in the evening sunlight they winked and flashed, casting the illusion that the beacon inside still burned. True, the paint was peeling and the stone facade chipped and cracked, but it was magnificent, dignified and elegant, like an English stage actor who’d played Hamlet in his youth and in his later years strode the boards as Lear. Once a mad prince, now a mad king.

“You like it?” Ty asked.

“I love it,” she breathed.

“It’s not bad,” Ty said. “Only one on the East Coast with a solid white day mark.”

“Day mark?” Faye repeated.

“Lighthouses have a day mark and a night mark. The day mark is what they call the paint job,” Ty said. “Some lighthouses have wild paint jobs. I’ve seen candy stripes and diamond patterns, red stripes and black stripes.”

“And the night mark?”

“The night mark is the pattern the light flashed. Some lighthouses had a steady beam. Some lights flashed. That’s how navigators told lighthouses apart. Every part of a lighthouse had a use. You have electronics and radar and sonar and GPS on boats now. Imagine trying to get from here to Maine without any of that.”

“I couldn’t get from Columbia to Beaufort without my GPS.”

“Yeah, I’d last three days if that before I ran into a sandbar or reef. Lighthouses saved a shit ton of lives.” Ty narrowed his eyes at the lighthouse and shook his head. “Probably won’t last much longer before it falls into the ocean.”

“I’ll make it immortal,” Faye said, pulling her camera out of her bag. She lifted it to her eye and got off a few dozen shots as quickly as she could. Despite sitting on the very edge of the water, the lighthouse looked secure enough to climb if she could find a way to it. It sat on a base of rock four feet or more above the sand. Behind it she saw another line of rock.

“What’s back there?” Faye asked, pointing at the rocks.

“Probably where the keeper’s cottage stood,” Ty said, squinting at the shore. “It was a nice job if you could get it. You get a house and you go to work ten feet from your back door. The beach is your front lawn. Of course, you have to climb about a million stairs a day. And there’s nobody else for miles around if you get hurt or get sick. And when the hurricane hits, you got nowhere to go except inside the lighthouse.”

“That sounds like my dream job,” Faye said. “I’d take pictures of the beach every single day and watch it change through the seasons. And I’d have killer quads climbing those stairs three and four times a day.”

“Sounds boring as shit to me,” Ty said.

“Maybe I was a lighthouse keeper in my past life.”

“Maybe you were boring as shit in your past life.”

“Distinct possibility,” she said, getting off a couple more shots as they rounded the island’s northern shore.

“It’s a shame the lighthouse is locked away on a private island. It should be open to the public.”

“What? You want tourists climbing up and down it every day, putting their gum on the steps and tossing their Coke bottles off the top?”

“Maybe not. But I want to climb it,” Faye said. She didn’t want to climb it. She needed to climb it.

“I’m sure there’s a way. Just not from here. You can’t see it from here, but there’s one nasty sandbar under the water by the pier.”

“It’s okay. I’ll find a way out there. I’ll sweet-talk anyone I need to.”

Near the base of the lighthouse, Faye noticed the remnants of an old pier, thick, rotting wood pillars poking out of the water like a hundred tiny islands. At the last pillar where the pier had once ended, Faye saw a bird land—a white bird with a long bill and a blue-black head.

“Ty? Do you know what that is?” She pointed at the bird. Ty narrowed his eyes. She handed him the binoculars and he peered through them. He laughed.

“Somebody must be having a baby,” he said.

“What is it?”

“A stork. A wood stork.”

“Do you see wood storks around here often?” she asked.

“Never seen one out here. Not too many of them around anywhere.”

“I swear to God that very same bird or its identical twin was perched on my balcony at six o’clock this morning. Bizarre.” She didn’t tell Ty about seeing a bird just like it when she’d scattered Will’s ashes. She liked Ty and didn’t want him thinking she was imagining things like birds stalking her.

“You sure you aren’t pregnant?” Ty asked.

“If I were, I’d still be married.”