The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

The storm had been building since noon, and by the time the light came on, the whole headland smelled of iron and salt. Nora climbed the last of the ninety-seven steps with the lamp oil balanced against her hip. Her father had counted those steps every night of his life, and she had inherited the number the way other daughters inherit silver. Elias was already in the lantern room, hunched over the clockwork with a screwdriver between his teeth. "You're late," he said, without turning around. "I'm early," said Nora. "The light isn't due for another twenty minutes, and you know it." "The light is due whenever the sea says it's due." He took the screwdriver out of his mouth and pointed it at the black window. "There's a trawler out past the Hook. She's been running without her port lamp for an hour." Nora set the oil down and went to the glass. Beyond the rain she could see it: a single smudge of yellow rising and falling, too far east, far too far east. "She'll take the reef," she said. "She'll take the reef," Elias agreed, "unless we give her something better to look at." They had done this before, the two of them, in the winter when the fog came in thick enough to chew. Nora knew the drill without being told. She pumped the oil, checked the wick, watched the mantle catch and bloom into that hard white brightness that always made her eyes water. "Turn her up," Elias said. "She's up." "Turn her up more." "Elias, if I turn her up more we'll crack the mantle and then that trawler has nothing at all." He stopped. He looked at her the way he had looked at her the first summer she came, when she was fifteen and useless and terrified of the height. Then he laughed, one short bark of a laugh, and stepped back from the clockwork. "Your father said the same thing to me. Word for word. Nineteen forty-one, and a corvette out where that trawler is now." "And was he right?" "He was right." Elias wiped his hands on his trousers. "It's a terrible thing, being right at someone." The lens began to turn. Nora felt it through the soles of her boots first, that low grinding shudder as the weights dropped and the great crystal drum came around, and then the beam swept out across the water, white and enormous, cutting the rain into slanting silver lines. They watched. The beam went out, came back, went out again. Nothing changed. The smudge of yellow kept its wrong course, east and east and east. "She isn't seeing us," Nora said. "She's seeing us. She just doesn't believe us yet." Elias reached past her and put his hand flat on the cold glass, as though he could push the light farther by leaning on it. "Give her three more turns." Nora counted them. One. Two. And on the third, the yellow smudge stopped, hung still for a long moment in the dark, and then began to swing slowly, painfully, to the north. Elias let out a breath he had clearly been holding for some time. "There," he said. "There she is." Nora did not answer. She was looking at the beam going out over the water, and thinking that her father had counted ninety-seven steps every night for thirty-one years and had never once, not in any letter, explained why. Now she thought she knew.