Here So Far Away(25)
Something in the Way
Eleven
September 1992
That Saturday, one of the volunteers from the heritage society burst into the lighthouse with four women in tow. “George, these fine ladies are writers from the city, here for some weekend culture,” she gushed. “I’ve been telling them the lighthouse has a very storied history.”
“Are any of you writing about lighthouses?” I asked.
“Who knows what the day could inspire!” the heritage lady said, herding them along.
She took them on the Tour of No Return. Every floorboard, every nail, every windowpane and latch. “Now, we’re not entirely certain, but we think this notch in the wall might have been made by the original lighthouse keeper. Oh, what triumph or sorrow did lead that man to leave his literal mark upon the structure of this magnificent monument?”
I was pretty sure the notch had come from someone—someone me-like—opening the door to the service room too hard and slamming the knob into the wall.
As I polished the glass in the lantern room, I pondered how long it would be before someone tried to hurl herself through it. At first, the women were just eyeballing one another and trying not to laugh. Until the restlessness kicked in. The helplessness. The despair. One of them was massaging her stomach like it was sore, which gave me the in. I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “Do you need to go lie down?”
She was confused for a second then beamed. “I have a pain!” she announced. “A terrible pain! I must go lie down in the car!”
“I’ll help you!” another woman said. “In case it’s something serious!” She disappeared down the steps without even looking back to see if her friend was following.
The others seemed pained too—pained that they hadn’t been quicker on the draw.
I followed the two women downstairs. “It’s either big-time gas or another gallbladder attack,” the one clasping her belly said as they power-walked toward the door.
“We can only save the others if it’s gallbladder.”
Two minutes later: a loud trumpeting from the car.
“Well, it’s not gallbladder,” I muttered to myself.
They didn’t come back in.
The sun had swung around to the west behind a veil of fog by the time the heritage lady released her remaining hostages and left me to close up the lighthouse.
I was trying not to think about how much the two escapees were like Lisa and me. I’d thought that we’d be like that forever, that we’d grow up and she’d get married and I’d travel the world and we’d end up back where we started, singing opera to Thompson’s clerks to get free samples. Only, in a better mall.
You will, I told myself. It’s just been five days. Four of them spent sitting awkwardly on opposite sides of classrooms, staggering our trips to our lockers, which were a few doors apart. It sucked, but it wasn’t step-on-a-pebble-surprise-your-foot’s-amputated suckage. Most friends fight and get over it, right? Bill once nearly knocked Sid’s head off with a golf ball after Sid said the T. rex on the miniature course was a dead ringer for Tracy. If anything, we were overdue.
Cut it out, Frances. Think about something else.
Like the pig standing behind the Town Car in the lighthouse driveway as though it were waiting to board a bus. I was no girl detective, but I supposed this was the one that Francis had been in search of.
“Git!” I said. “G’on, pig, git!”
Because it would understand me if I sounded like a cast member on Hee Haw? The pig gazed into the middle distance. I clapped my hands, whistled, took a run at it.
It shuffled around to Abe’s side. Stared at the door expectantly.
“Like I’m driving you. It’s not physically possible for you to wedge yourself in there,” I said, opening the door to check.
It did. Wedged itself in there good, settling with a smug snuffle.
The farmhouse on the ridge looked like it was floating on the mist. I had no intention of offering my services to the old farmer as my mother had suggested, had a feeling that if I was foolish enough to go within one hundred feet of Constable Francis McAdams, it would be my blood he’d be wearing next. Seventeen, he’d said, like it was a dirty word.
“Seventeen and a half,” I muttered as I gave the pig’s barrel-sized rear a shove and closed the door. Well, almost. If I were eighteen, he wouldn’t have recoiled so, as if seven months would make such a big difference.
The reflection in my rearview mirror was all pig, and Abe protested as we climbed the ridge toward the farm. He could take five hundred evenly distributed pounds of people, but this was pretty arse-heavy, even for a Town Car.
The farmhouse was in the old “Queen Anne” style, or trying to be. No turret, just double-decker bay windows topped with a domed roof, like the crown of an old birdcage. It had an enclosed porch beside the bays on the front like the one we had at home, an open veranda on the side that overlooked the fields, and a single-story extension poking out from the back. The house seemed to have been built one section at a time, grand ideas improvised along the way. But the soft yellow paint and white trim were timeworn, the roof of the weathered barn coated with rust. As I pulled into the drive, I could see the barn was built right into the slope so that you could climb up and enter the hayloft at ground level.