The Night Mark(64)

“Oh...” she breathed when she stuck her head inside. It was all she could say. The entire room was alive with light. The lens glowed like a giant white flower throbbing as it bloomed. And the prisms of the lens caught stray beams like butterflies in a net and released them across the glass in a flurry of a thousand wings and a thousand colors.

The sound was nothing she’d ever heard before. Faye closed her eyes and put her hands on the floor of the lantern room, feeling the sound as she heard it. Had anyone ever created a museum for lost sounds? She’d read somewhere that kids born in the year 2000 and after would never hear the sound of a telephone dial tone. It was an aural artifact. This sound should be in that museum, the whooshing hum of a living lighthouse run on gas and clockwork gears. She heard the gears turning and clicking in the box beneath her. The sound on her palms felt like a cat’s belly as it purred or Will’s chest when he snored, another artifact for the museum of lost and forgotten sounds. She was listening to the last heartbeats of a dying way of life.

“Like it?” Carrick called up. He stood at the base of the ladder, his hands on the backs of her calves to steady her.

“It’s beautiful...” She had to shout for him to hear her but by his smile she knew he’d heard.

“I know. Come out to the catwalk. It’s easier to talk out there.”

Faye came down the ladder and followed Carrick out to the catwalk. Catwalk? She liked that term so much better than widow’s walk.

“It’s so pretty in there I can’t stand it,” she said. “All those prisms. It was like standing in a kaleidoscope.”

“It’s not too bad out here, either,” he said, turning his gaze to the sea.

“No,” she said. “Not bad at all.”

They stood on the ocean-side edge of the watch room gallery. The lighthouse beacon flashed and shone over their heads, illuminating the water below them. White-maned breakers crashed on the sand and rolled back down into the water, where they gathered their strength to crash again and again. The breeze was salt scented and cool at the top of the lighthouse. It lifted her hair and tickled her legs.

“Did you always want to be a wickie?” she asked, hoping it wasn’t a question Faith had ever asked him.

He shook his head. “Never really occurred to me. Went into the navy at eighteen. After the war, I needed a job. They were looking for a navy man for the Boston Light, and I qualified. Right age, I could read and write, haul heavy cans of oil, keep good records and stay up all night when it was my shift. I took the job because I needed it, not because it meant anything to me but a roof over my head and steady pay.”

“It seems to suit you.”

“I thought it would be just another job. But then I got out to the Boston Light and met Dan Chisholm—he was principal keeper there. He shook my hand and before he let it go he said to me, ‘I know you’re a military man, but the war’s over and this is a civilian light. We keep people alive out there, and we don’t ask what flag their ship flies. Everyone deserves light, Morgan. Whatever you do, keep the light burning.’ Then he let my hand go. For an ex-navy man, that was quite something to hear, but I liked the sound of it—everyone deserves light. Lord knows in the war I got sick and tired of worrying about what flag the ships around me were flying.”

Carrick shrugged and flashed her a sheepish smile. “I guess that sounds fanciful to you.”

Faye swallowed a hard lump in her throat.

“No. It sounds...right,” she said. “It sounds like something a good man would believe.”

“Chisholm is a good man.”

“I meant you.”

He smiled again. “I try. All any man can do is try.”

“Is this what you want to do for the rest of your life? Tend a light?”

“I thought about that. Truth is, I doubt I can count on this job for the rest of my life. If I live long enough, that is. They put the sun valve in here. Next will be the engine to turn the light. Maybe in ten years, twenty, all the lights will be run on electricity. Everybody thought horses would be around forever and, lo and behold, now we have automobiles. Won’t be long before lighthouses go the way of the dodo.”

“Progress always wins in the end,” she said.

“You can’t fight time. And you shouldn’t even if you could. That is a losing battle.”

Faye was losing her battle with time. Or winning it. She couldn’t tell yet.

“Well...I have to say you might have the nicest office in the world.” She waved her arm to indicate the island, the ocean and the wide night sky above. “And no mosquitoes up here.”

“The sea breeze mostly keeps them away, and you don’t get them much this high up,” he said. “But you do have to watch out for birds. They think the light is something else and they fly toward it, and it kills them.”

“Poor birds,” she said. She knew just how they felt. She looked at Carrick, who looked so much like Will that it was impossible for her not to fly toward him, even knowing she might be flying toward a false light.

Standing at Carrick’s side, she marveled at the view and the silence between them. It was a companionable silence, not the silence of strangers but of friends or lovers who knew each other intimately enough that words weren’t necessary when the moment spoke for itself.