My mother found me living a new life on an island off the coast of Maine where a lighthouse on a rocky finger of land sheltered my solitude. A society designed to preserve the past had offered me refuge in exchange for being present, for walking on floors and opening doors, for filling musty rooms with my breath. I was the lighthouse caretaker, and I cherished the responsibility, my necessity. I scrubbed and oiled the wooden floors and the stairs that spiraled up toward the extinct light. Each day I wiped the windowpanes clean of salt air. My days were portioned by one hundred and eight squares of glass divided into twelve windows that faced the sea in three directions.
In the summer, tourists would return to the island. They would flood the lighthouse with laughter and greedy cameras, but in the winter silence met the wind and danced along the shore, kicking the waves against the rocks and flattening yellowed sea grass. On the opposite side of the island, a small village hunkered down around a marina and waited. The shopkeeper warned me that the winter winds overpowered the island’s tentative supply of electricity, so I stockpiled lamp oil and firewood and shelves of books. I was prepared to survive. I wasn’t prepared for company.
She arrived on a heavy day when snow clouds hung low and the wind blew sideways beneath them. Spits of ice stung my cheeks when I circled the lighthouse to gather wood. With my arms full, I crouched down to collect a log that had slipped from my pile, and when I straightened my legs and turned around, she stood in front of me.
“Let me help you with that.” She extended her arms.
She was old, older than she should have been, but I knew her. I knew that used-up, empty face, and looking into her thin, sagging skin and the hollows under her eyes, I wondered which emotion had devoured her youth—grief or guilt.
“Where is he?” I asked.
Shaking her head, she stepped toward me, her arms still extended. When I didn’t move, she reached out and removed two logs from the stack I carried. The wind whipped around the house and plastered her hair across her face. She pushed at it with her shoulder, and I watched her helpless gesture.
“Come inside,” I said after a moment.
The rooms were small but drafty, and the wood stove fought to create its circle of warmth. I kept a rocking chair and an end table large enough for a book and a cup of tea two feet from the stove. After placing my logs in the wood bin, I hung my coat on the hook by the door and checked the water level in the kettle on the stove, my new, normal routine. My mother continued to stand in the open doorway, the two logs heavy in her skinny arms. She wore a faded green coat that once brought out the green spark in her eyes. Hanging loosely on her, it hid the remnants of a figure she once carried proudly. I felt her measuring me, taking stock. I turned my back and stoked the fire.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“I knew you would stay by the sea.”
“I know she’s not coming back,” I said, a lie I told the doctor in the hospital over and over again until I convinced us both. My mother never came to see me, and she never spoke to my doctors, so she couldn’t understand the pattern of my thoughts. But she pretended to. She pretended to know me deeply.
“Are you?” she asked.
I turned to face her, and she stepped into the room, closing the door with her heel. Her steps echoed on the floor when she crossed to the wood bin and dropped her logs, when she hung her coat next to mine. Her gray skirt was twisted, her wrinkled blouse untucked under a thick white sweater. The sweater was new. My mother didn’t believe in casual clothes. Straightening her spine with a resolve that no longer fit her appearance, she approached me, and I recoiled. I couldn’t imagine her arms around me.
“You walked from town?” I was staring at her high-heeled boots, the mud clinging to her toes.
“The detective I hired forgot to mention there are no taxis on this island.”
“Not in the winter.”
She sat on the edge of my rocking chair and held her hands out to the warmth. Her hair, iced from the long walk, melted onto her shoulders. I turned my back again and busied myself with moving the kettle to the highest heat. I continued to grasp the pot-holder.
“He put me in a hospital,” I whispered.
“It was the only choice,” she answered.
When I turned back to her, she shook her head. Her wide-eyed face, the cheekbones and thin brows we’d inherited, moved helplessly back and forth, and she clasped her hands in her lap. Her spine collapsed again.
“Where did you go?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. Pushing the wet hair off her shoulders, she swallowed, a tight movement that looked like it might choke her.
“She was my baby.” Her voice caught, and she squeezed her eyes shut. “She was innocent.”
I wanted to tell her, to say it out loud, to make her admit it. There was no innocence. It was a lie, a veneer we agreed to maintain. But then she opened her eyes, and I couldn’t face the blame smoldering there, the accusation screaming it was my fault, that I should have protected my sister. I should have sheltered her innocence. At least I tried, I wanted to say. We thought we had found a way out, but then like everything else, it was an illusion. Emmy and I went to the edge of the ocean that day to escape, but the sea betrayed me. It stole my sister and left me alone.
“Emmy was impulsive,” I said, repeating lore instead of truth. We were too far beyond repair to seek new patterns.
My mother smiled, but the beam of it traveled inward. “Such an impulsive little imp. One time she made me a cake for breakfast. A Tuesday cake, she said, because Tuesdays deserved to be celebrated. They didn’t get to be the beginning or end of the week or even the middle, so she thought they needed some attention.” My mother laughed, a muted echo of the manic glee I remembered that Tuesday and in all the Tuesday stories to follow. I knew what would follow the dramatic pause. “But she forgot the flour!”
“The cake was hollow,” I said and watched my mother’s face tense in resentment at my flat tone, my theft of her memory. After a moment she turned her nostalgic smile inward again, and her face relaxed. I was forgotten.
Over the years, my mother tried to recapture the charm of that moment. She baked Thursday cupcakes, purposefully forgetting the flour, but Emmy had lost interest and pretended ignorance. She told our mother that Thursdays were the worst day of the week because Mrs. Peterson gave math quizzes on Thursdays, and she saw no reason to celebrate math quizzes. Then she took a bite of a cupcake and suggested Mommy take cooking lessons.
“I ate your cupcakes,” I said, and my mother pulled her gaze back to the present and squinted at me with confusion. “Your Thursday cupcakes.”
“Oh those.” She waved a hand in dismissal. “I never was much of a cook, was I?”
“I liked your cookie-cutter pancakes,” I said. She was the one who taught me to mark special occasions with shapes. The day I moved into the lighthouse, I stopped at a gift shop in the village, but they didn’t have any cookie cutters shaped like a lighthouse. Instead, I bought stars. “I tried them with eggs,” I said.
“You were always too impressionable.”
The kettle whistled, and I dropped the pot-holder She reached to pick it up, but I snatched it before she could. Reprimanded, she slid back in the rocking chair. She clicked her heels against the floor as she rocked slowly back and forth. The kettle still whistled, a shrill scrape inside my skull. I stood up, and twisting the pot-holder between my hands, I looked her in the eye.
“I survived,” I said.
She didn’t blink. The chair came to a halt, and the clicking stopped. Her face was empty, her gaze distant and unseeing. Then her chin dipped, slightly, a nod. But maybe I imagined it. Standing, she eased the pot-holder out of my hand and lifted the kettle off the stove.
“I could use a cup of tea,” she said. “You?”
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