The Hogsback

Four-oh-six, and the coffee had gone cold for the second time.

Maren had been awake since a little after two, when the fog signal started its two-tone groan and kept at it, low note, high note, every thirty seconds, like an old dog that wanted something from the other side of a door. She'd given up on sleep at three. Now she sat at the workroom bench in the oil house in her gray fleece and a pair of her father's wool socks, with the laptop open in front of her and the radio on standby at her elbow, its little amber display reading 68 the way it had read 68 since the day she cut the lock.

Six days. On the twelfth the severance stopped, and she had a legal pad upstairs with the arithmetic on it in ink so she couldn't fudge it later.

She wasn't thinking about the legal pad.

The radar sweep went round on the laptop screen, a pale green arm that she had spent most of July teaching to talk to a MacBook through a serial adapter, a Python script and a great deal of language she would not have used in a standup meeting. The point sat at the center like a thumbprint. The Hogsback painted every sweep at 041, a hard little bruise a quarter mile out. R4 blinked where R4 always blinked. And to the southwest, filling the lower left of the screen, was a ragged band of clutter that hadn't been there at midnight. At midnight it had been forty miles off and loose, like a handful of gravel thrown on a table. Now it was twelve miles off, it had edges, and it was coming.

She checked NOAA on her phone. Small craft advisory. Squalls with gusts to 35 kt after 0500. Visibility one quarter nm or less in fog. She read it twice and set the phone face down, as though that helped.

Then she did the thing she'd been doing every foggy morning since the wharf.

Carol at the co-op kept a camera on the roof for the harbormaster, a cheap thing that refreshed every thirty seconds and mostly showed gulls. Maren had bookmarked it in June without telling anyone. At this hour the harbor was a gray soup with a sodium lamp burning a hole in it, but the lamp sat right over the inner moorings, and under it, if you knew where to look, you could see the ball for the Wren. White, with a green stripe. Abby had painted the stripe herself. Ev had told her that, unprompted, in the voice people use for the weather.

The ball was there. The boat wasn't.

Maren refreshed. Ball. Water. Nothing tied to it. She refreshed again and the gull on the piling had moved and the mooring was still empty, the pennant trailing off it in the slack tide like a dropped shoelace.

She looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. 0419.

The logbook was open beside the laptop, volume thirty-four, the crushed corner flattened under a can of WD-40. She didn't need to look at it. She'd read the page so many times that it came up behind her eyes on its own.

0505. Fog. F/V Wren out early again, hauling inside the ledge. Plotter freezing. Talked her round R4. She talks more than the radio. Toast.

He'd known her habits. Out early, before the fog burned off, so she could haul and be back on the mooring before the big boats came in and made her feel small. Ev had told Maren that too.

431. The squall line ate another mile. The fog signal groaned. Maren put her hand on the radio, not to key it, just to have it under her palm, the case warm from the standby circuit, and she thought about her father sitting on this same stool with this same warmth under his hand and a cold cup of coffee he'd write down later in one word.

At 0440 the speaker hissed, broke, and filled with a voice.

"Lightkeeper, Lightkeeper, this is Wren." High and fast and too close to the mic. "Lightkeeper, you there? My plotter just went black, the whole thing, it's just black, and I can hear surf. I can hear it breaking and I can't see anything. I don't know which side it's on. Please. Are you there?"

Maren had the mic in her hand before she'd decided anything. Her thumb found the key the way it found Ctrl-S.

"Wren, this is Gannet Head. I'm here." Her voice came out an octave too high and she dragged it down. "Pull your throttle back to idle. Don't turn. Just idle and tell me what you hear."

A gasp of open mic, engine noise, the hollow slap of water on a hull. "Okay. Okay, idle. It's on my left, I think. Or ahead. It sort of moves. Who is this? You're not him."

"No," Maren said. "Stay on this channel."

On the laptop, a dozen small echoes salted the water inside R4, any one of which might be a twenty-eight-foot boat and any one of which might be a wave. She was leaning in to sort them when the speaker opened again on a different voice, lower, wind across the mic.

"Abs. Abby, it's Dad."

Maren took her hand off the key.

"I'm on the boat. I'm standing right on it." A pause with breathing in it. "The engine's all over the floor. I got the injectors out on a rag. I can't come get you, sweetheart, I can't..."

The transmission cut there, as though he'd squeezed the handheld instead of letting go of it. Maren pictured him under that sodium lamp, a big sunburned man in a cockpit full of engine parts with his thumb crushing the button. She could see Carol's camera from where she sat. She didn't look at it.

Then, flat and fast: "Gannet Head, Pelletier. I'm coming to you. Keep her talking."

---

The fog took his headlights until they were almost at the gate. Maren had the Aldis lamp on its strap over one shoulder, the battery in a canvas bag over the other, and the laptop clamped against her ribs with the cable trailing back to the jack her father had labeled LANTERN in those blocky capitals she'd found in July and not understood until right now. She had the oil house handheld clipped to her fleece. Abby was saying something about the smell of rockweed.

Sam got out of the truck without shutting the door. He had a yellow tide booklet in his fist, the free one Coombs gave out at the register every January, and he went past her to the tower door as if she were a post.

He took the first step with his good leg. Then the bad one came up after it, slow, and he made a sound through his teeth.

Ninety-one steps. Maren had counted them on her first night and every night since, the way she counted everything. She'd never counted them behind someone. He climbed with one hand on the rail and the other bracing his right knee, good leg up, bad leg after, and every eight or nine steps he stopped with his forehead nearly on the iron and said nothing at all. Below, the beam of her headlamp jittered on the granite. Above, the LED optic turned behind its glass, and every six seconds the stairwell lit white and went dark.

"Wren, you still idling?" Maren said into the handheld.

"Yes. The surf's louder. Is that bad? That's bad."

Sam stopped. He didn't turn around. Step forty-something, by Maren's count.

"Tell her," he said. "Tell her you hear her."

"I hear you, Abby," Maren said. "We're coming up."

At the top he hauled himself through the hatch into the lantern room and stood bent over with both hands on his thighs, breathing like a man who'd been held underwater. Sweat ran down past his ear into his collar. Maren came up behind him and set the laptop on the sill. The squall line had crept another mile.

Sam straightened slowly and looked out through the glass at nothing. Gray in every direction, lit and unlit, lit and unlit. Somewhere out in it, a quarter mile or a few hundred yards, his daughter sat at idle beside the ledge that had killed his father, and there was no boat he could put under himself and no rope he could throw.

He looked down at the tide booklet in his hand like he'd forgotten bringing it. Then at the lamp on Maren's shoulder.

"All right," he said. He opened the booklet to September and smoothed it flat on the sill with a palm the size of a dinner plate. "Low was 0218. You want the height or you want me to shut up?"

"Height," Maren said.

He ran a finger down the column. "Low was point four. It's coming. Call it three feet now, a little better." He glanced at his watch, a big black Casio with a cracked face. "Three-one at quarter to. Rising about a foot every forty minutes from here, give or take."

She wrote 3.1 on the back of her hand with a Sharpie because there was nowhere else to write it.

The lantern room had not been built for two people and a laptop. The optic sat in the middle on its pedestal, a fat cylinder of LEDs that hummed and threw its white sweep out every six seconds, and the space between the optic and the glass was about the width of an airplane aisle. Maren knelt on the iron grating with the MacBook on the sill. Sam stood behind her with his bad leg locked straight and the tide booklet flat under his palm. The Aldis lamp sat at her knee, dark, like something that might bite.

The radar was worse up here. Or no worse, and she was just more frightened of it. The scavenged antenna on the oil house roof swept the bay and sent its picture up the cable her father had run, and her little Python window drew it in green: the point, solid; the long smear of the Hogsback at 041; R4 a hard dot to the southeast; and in between, a scatter of returns that came and went with every pass. Waves. Rain from the front edge of the squall. A boat.

"Which one's her," Sam said.

"I don't know yet."

"You don't know."

"Wren, Gannet Head," Maren said into the handheld. "Can you knock your engine in gear for five seconds and then back to idle? Just five seconds."

"Okay. Okay. Going."

Maren watched. Three sweeps. On the fourth, one of the small echoes northeast of R4 slid a hair to the west and held when the others didn't. It was closer to the ledge than she wanted. A lot closer. Then the next sweep came through and the dot was gone, swallowed into the edge of the Hogsback's return like a crumb pressed into bread.

"There," she said. "No. There." It came back. Faded. Came back.

Sam leaned over her shoulder and she smelled diesel and sweat and the cold off his jacket. He didn't say anything. He breathed through his nose.

"She's set toward it," Maren said. "The flood's carrying her up onto it."

"I know which way the flood goes."

She had every page of thirty-three volumes on this machine, and the one that mattered was the half-page sketch in volume 14, the clearest of the Hogsbacks he'd drawn. She'd scanned it in July because it had the best soundings. She pulled it up beside the radar window, dragged its corners, dropped the opacity to forty percent and laid it over the picture, rotating until his pencil point matched the green point. His ledge sat on the radar's ledge almost exactly. He'd drawn the Hogsback the way he always drew it, in heavy cross-hatching with the pencil pressed so hard she could see the furrows in the photo, and a row of little x's along the seaward side like stitches.

She had looked at this drawing perhaps forty times. She had always looked at the ledge.

Between the inshore end of the Hogsback and the tip of the point, where she'd assumed there was only shoal and weed, he had drawn two light parallel lines. Thin. Almost apologetic. Inside them, in his small figures, soundings: 7. 8. 8. 6. And in the margin, in capitals she had to zoom to read:

GAP. SAND. 7 FT AT LOW WATER PLUS 4. NOT BEFORE. TOWER ON STBD BOW, KEEP IT THERE.

"Sam," she said. "What's the bottom between the Hogsback and the point."

"Nothing. Rocks. Nobody goes through there."

"He did." She turned the laptop toward him. "He's got soundings. He says it's passable at low plus four feet."

Sam stared at the screen. The optic swept white across his face and left it gray again.

"We've got three-one," Maren said.

On the radar, the small dot slid a little closer to the stitches.

Sam looked at his watch. Then at the window, where the gray had gone darker on the southwest side, a bruise coming up through the fog. The first rain ticked against the glass like someone tapping to be let in.

"That front's twenty minutes out," he said. "Maybe less."

"Then she can't sit there forty."

"She can't go through on three feet either."

"She doesn't go through yet. She holds." Maren keyed the handheld. "Wren, Gannet Head. Abby, I want you to put your bow on one-eight-zero and give it just enough throttle to stand still. You're going to feel the current pushing you. Push back. That's all you have to do for a while."

"One-eight-zero. Okay. How long's a while?"

"I'll tell you."

The dot stopped creeping. It shivered on the edge of the stitches, sweep after sweep, and held. Maren let out a breath she had apparently been saving since Tuesday.

"Three-four," Sam said.

The rain thickened. On the screen the squall's leading edge came in as a ragged green wall, swallowing returns as it went, and every pass the little dot got harder to pick out of it. Maren thumbed the Aldis lamp's switch on, felt the heat bloom against her knee, and opened the shutter toward 041. Three long. One short. Alvarado's careful voice came to her, a second report would escalate, and she sent it again anyway.

"Abby. Do you see a light?"

A long hiss. "I see something. Off my right. Is that you?"

"That's me. Keep it there."

"Three-seven," Sam said. His voice had gone flat as a tabletop.

Then the surf. Maren heard it through the radio before Abby did anything, a deep hollow boom like a door slamming in a basement, and then Abby's voice came apart.

"I can hear it, it's right there, it's right there, I'm going to hit, I can't..."

Sam's hand closed on the sill hard enough to buckle the booklet.

Maren knew the phrase. She had typed it into column F of her spreadsheet nineteen times and once, in May, thought it was the most boring sentence in the English language.

"Abby. Easy now. That's the ledge talking, and it talks louder than it is. You've got water. I can see your water. Bow on one-eight-zero and breathe."

The hiss went on long enough for Maren to count to six.

"Okay," Abby said, small. "Okay. One-eight-zero."

"Four-oh," Sam said, and then, because he could not stop himself, "four-oh, go, go."

"Wren, come right to two-two-five, slow. Find my light. Put it on your right bow and keep it there. Don't chase it. Just keep it." Maren opened the shutter. Long, long, long, short. "Count with me. One, two, three..."

The dot left the stitches and slid into the space between his two faint pencil lines. The squall hit the tower. The glass went white with water and the whole lantern room shuddered, and for three sweeps she couldn't find the boat at all, and Sam said "Maren" once, just her name, and then the green wall smeared past and the dot was there, past the inshore end of the Hogsback, past the point, in the open.

"Two-two-five," Abby said. Her voice cracked in the middle. "I've got... there's nothing. There's just water. I've got water. I can see the green can. I can see the can!"

Sam sagged against the rail with his bad leg out in front of him and put the back of his wrist over his eyes, and the optic swept across him and away.

"Good job, Wren," Maren said. "Head on in. Stay on 68 till you're tied up."

She closed the shutter. Her fingers smelled of hot metal. On the laptop, under the fading rain, the pencil sketch still floated at forty percent over the bay, and in its lower corner, below the soundings, below the gap, there was a small arrow she had never noticed. It pointed off the edge of the page. Beside it, in those same blocky capitals: SEE VOL. 2. FOR M.