Chapter 12
Volume Thirty-Five
It took her eleven minutes to find the page, which was ten more than it should have, because Abby was still talking on 68 all the way up the channel and Sam kept saying "Okay, Ab, okay," into the handset as if she could hear him, and because Maren's thumb would not stay steady on the phone. She had backed up every page of thirty-three volumes, and the photos were in order, and none of that helped when the person scrolling couldn't read.
Volume two, page forty-one. She zoomed in.
2 Nov 90. 1340. LW, wind NW light, flat. Rowed the gap between Hogsback and the point with lead line. Three passes. Sand, 4 ft at MLW, nothing hard. Nobody uses it. If M ever runs this water she ought to know it's there. M's birthday.
Below the entry he had drawn the gap again, smaller, with a little rowboat in it the size of a fingernail. The rowboat had two oars. He had shaded them.
Maren set the phone face down on the console. Sam had gone quiet behind her. Through the streaming glass the squall was moving off toward Vinalhaven, and the optic went on sweeping the rain the way it had done every six seconds since 1989, for nobody, for everybody.
"She's at the float," Sam said. "She's tying up."
"Good."
He looked at the phone and then at her, and he didn't ask, and she didn't tell him.
Boatswain's Mate First Class Teresa Alvarado came back on the first Tuesday in October, at 8:15 again, and this time she did not count the stairs. She stood in the kitchen with her cover under her arm and a manila envelope in her other hand and looked at the coffee maker, which was new, and at the sink, which was old.
"Gil Haskell says the plumbing's historical," Maren said.
"Gil says that about my mother's house." Alvarado set the envelope on the table. "I'm going to tell you some things, and you're going to nod, and then I'm going to have that coffee."
Maren nodded.
"On September sixth, Sector got a weather report for this stretch of coast that mentions lightning." Alvarado said it flatly, reading off the inside of her own head. "Lightning makes flashes. People see flashes. Sector also got a phone call at 0710 that morning from a lobsterman named Samuel Pelletier, who wanted to know who he should talk to if anybody tried to write up a light at Gannet Head, because he'd like to talk to them personally."
"He called you?"
"He called the duty officer. The duty officer is twenty-four years old. He wrote down everything Mr. Pelletier said, including some words I had to look up." She slid a single stapled sheet from the envelope. "Radio watch only. Channel 16 monitored, 68 as a working channel, because that's what they use around here and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Every call goes in a log. Times, vessels, positions, what you told them. No lights. The lamp stays in that brick building unless the building is on fire."
"And if somebody's on the ledge?"
Alvarado looked at her for a while. "Then you call us first. And then you do what you do, and you write it down honestly, and I read it."
Maren signed in two places. Alvarado signed under her, in a small square hand, and then took a second thing out of the envelope: a certificate on heavy cream stock, with an anchor and an eagle and Maren's name spelled correctly, which Lumentide had managed only about half the time. VOLUNTEER RADIO WATCH, it said, and under that, in smaller type, a phrase about assistance to the maritime public that sounded like it had been written by a committee and then signed by a human being.
"It doesn't mean anything legally," Alvarado said. "My chief makes them on the color printer. People like them."
Maren pinned it to the corkboard over the sink with a red pushpin, next to the tide table from Coombs Hardware and a receipt for a sump pump she was still disputing. It hung slightly crooked. She left it that way.
"Your father ever get one of those?" Alvarado said.
"He never asked."
"No," Alvarado said. "I guess he wouldn't have." She drank half the coffee standing, said it was good, which was a lie, and went up to service the optic. Maren heard her on the stairs, and somewhere around the fortieth step, faintly, counting.
Dennis Farrow's offer had been good until the end of June, and then, by a letter on heavy letterhead in August, good until October 1, "in recognition of the unusual circumstances." The letter was in the junk drawer under the batteries. On October 1 Maren found it while looking for a nine-volt, read the date, and put it back.
On October 2 he left a voicemail. He said he hoped she was well. He said the market for coastal hospitality remained strong, and that he'd heard (he said this with a small laugh) that she'd been doing some kind of radio thing, which was charming, really, and could be part of the brand. He said his door was always open.
She listened to the whole thing on the gallery with the phone held a little away from her ear, as though it might be damp. Then she went inside and caulked the window in room four.
Gil had finished four of the six rooms, on a payment plan Ruthie had apparently negotiated with him in a single phone call that neither of them would describe. Rooms five and six had plastic over the doors and a sign in Maren's handwriting that said HISTORICAL. The first guests arrived on Friday, October 11, in a rented Tahoe from Portland, all four of them from Palo Alto, all four of them wearing the same quilted vest in different colors.
Their names were Priyanka, Theo, and a married couple called Wes and Dana who finished each other's sentences in a way Maren found exhausting by the end of the driveway. Theo had been cut from Stripe in March. Priyanka had not been cut from anything; she had simply stopped sleeping. Wes and Dana had founded something together and sold it and now didn't know what to do with their hands.
The basket was a Longaberger that Ruthie had donated with the comment that it had been her sister-in-law's and she was glad to see it leave the building. Maren held it out in the front hall.
"All of them," she said. "The watch too, Wes."
"It's a health device."
"It's a phone that's ashamed of itself."
They put them in. Priyanka put hers in last and kept two fingers on it for a second, like a person setting down a bird.
The first day was bad. Maren had expected that. She had built a whole slide in her head about it, back in April, with a curve on it labeled withdrawal. Dana asked three times what the wifi password was, as a joke, and the third time was not a joke. Theo walked to the end of the point at four in the afternoon and stood holding his empty right hand at chest height, thumb moving. Wes wanted to know whether the fog signal was going to do that all night. It was. At 11:40 Maren found Priyanka in the kitchen in a borrowed fleece, eating peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon and looking at the corkboard.
"What's that?"
"I keep a radio watch."
"For what?"
"Boats." Maren filled the kettle. "There's a ledge out there. Sometimes their electronics quit in the fog."
Priyanka looked out at the dark window, where the six-second flash went across the glass and was gone. "And you just. Sit up."
"When there's fog."
"Does anybody know?"
Maren thought about that while the kettle ticked. "A few people," she said.
By Saturday afternoon Theo had read most of a paperback mystery from the shelf in the parlor and wanted to argue about the ending. Wes and Dana had gone down to the rocks at low water and come back with a periwinkle in a coffee cup that they wanted to keep and could not be talked out of naming. Priyanka slept until ten. Nobody asked about the basket. On Sunday morning Theo asked whether he could come up to the oil house and look at the radar, and Maren let him, and he stood behind her for twenty minutes with his hands in his vest pockets, watching the green sweep go around, and didn't say anything at all, which was the nicest thing a guest had done so far.
Sam's truck came up the drive on Sunday at a little after two, with Abby in the passenger seat talking before the door was fully open.
She was smaller than Maren had pictured. That was the first thing. On the radio she had sounded tall, the way people sound tall when they talk fast and loud over an engine, and in person she came up to about Maren's collarbone, in a Maine Maritime sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up and a braid that had been done in a hurry. She stopped at the bottom of the porch steps and looked up.
"Say something," Abby said.
"Hello?"
"No, say the thing." Abby made her voice lower and flatter. "Keep it on your right bow and keep it there."
Maren felt her face go hot. "Keep it on your right bow," she said, "and keep it there."
Abby put both hands on top of her head. "Okay. Okay, that's weird. That's really weird. You're not him. I mean, obviously you're not him, Dad told me, I know you're not him, but I've had that voice in my head since I was sixteen and I always pictured a guy with, like, a beard, an old guy, a really big old guy, and the whole time it was a guy and then for one morning it was you, and I couldn't tell. On the radio. I couldn't tell the difference. Isn't that weird?"
"She talks," Sam said, coming around the hood with a paper bag. "Sorry."
"She's fine."
"I'm fine," Abby said. "I drove down from Castine at six. I have a fluid dynamics quiz Tuesday. Can I see it? The radio? Dad said there's a radar on the roof he built out of a dead boat."
"He didn't build it," Maren said. "He scavenged it. I fixed it."
"Can I see it?"
They went out to the oil house, and Abby stood in the doorway with her mouth open and then came in and touched everything: the Icom, the thermos, the green spines of the ledgers, the Aldis lamp on its shelf, which she lifted, tested the weight of, and set down very carefully, like it was somebody else's baby. Maren took volume thirty-four down and opened it to the right page and put it on the workbench, and stepped back.
Abby read standing up, the way her father had. She read the way people read their own names on a list, fast once, then slow.
"He never said," she said finally. "He'd just come on. 'Morning, Wren.' Like he'd been waiting." She ran a thumb down the margin. "I thought maybe it was somebody at the co-op. I thought it might be Carol's husband for a while."
"Carol's husband can't work a toaster," Sam said from the door.
"I didn't know that then." Abby closed the book and kept her hand flat on the cover. "I used to bring him a Whoopie pie. I'd leave it on the float at the co-op on the way out. On a piling. Like an offering, I don't know. They were always gone when I came back." She looked at her father. "Did you take them?"
Sam looked at the radar.
"Dad."
"Gulls," he said. "Probably gulls."
In the kitchen Maren made coffee in the new machine, and Sam sat at the table with his bad leg stuck out into the room where somebody would certainly trip on it, and drank half a mug, and set it down.
"That's weak," he said.
"It's the setting on the bag."
"Your father made it so you could stand a spoon in it." He picked the mug up again. "Tasted like a tire. This is fine. It's weak." He drank the rest and pushed it toward her for more, and she filled it. He looked at the certificate over the sink for a while without saying anything, and then at the window, where a lobster boat was working the string off the point, and Maren realized he was reading the buoys.
"That's Gagnon," he said. "He's too close in."
"He's fine. He's got radar."
"Radar," Sam said, as if she'd said horoscope. He turned the mug a quarter turn on the table. "I gave the notebook to my mother. She's eighty. She read it twice and put it in the Bible with my father's obituary. She said to tell you she's sorry about your seizure." He looked at the mug. "That's what she said. About your seizure."
Maren did not trust her voice, so she cut him a slice of the pie Ruthie had sent up that morning, and he ate it, and said it was dry, and ate another.
Slack water came at 4:52 that afternoon, high tide, flat as a plate. Ruthie drove up in the hardware store's van with the box on the passenger seat buckled in.
"He'd have hated that," Ruthie said, unbuckling it. "Seat belt. He'd say a box of ash doesn't need a seat belt. I'd say rules are rules, Walter."
The guests were down at the far rocks with a bag of driftwood and a debate about fire. Maren and Ruthie went the other way, out along the granite past the fog signal house to the end of the point, where the spruce gave out and there was only bare rock and the water a few feet below, so still that the Hogsback, at full tide, showed nowhere at all. Just a smooth patch. A darker green.
Ruthie had brought nothing to read and had told Maren on the phone that if Maren brought anything to read she'd be walking home. She stood with the box against her hip. She was wearing her reading glasses on top of her head and, Maren saw now, something else around her neck under the collar of her coat, a thin chain.
"I took it off the hook," Ruthie said, seeing her look. "The day after. I shouldn't have. It was in the house, it was yours."
"The leash."
"He called it that because I said he needed one." Ruthie pulled it out. It was the chain from his reading glasses, without the glasses, a cheap brass-colored thing gone dark at the links. She lifted it over her head, slowly, careful of her hair, and held it out in her fist. "He'd say it's yours. I'm only the hardware store."
Maren took it. It was warm. She put it in the pocket of her fleece and kept her hand around it there.
"You do it," Ruthie said, and handed her the box. "I'll talk."
She didn't, though. She stood at Maren's elbow and said nothing at all while Maren opened the plastic bag inside the box and leaned down toward the water, the way you'd lean to set something on a low shelf. There was no wind. The ash did not blow anywhere picturesque. It went onto the flat water in a pale gray skin and lay there, turning a little, and then very slowly began to go, not out to sea, but along the point, north, toward the gap between the ledge and the shore, the way the flood would have carried it if it had been running. It wasn't. It went anyway.
"Well," Ruthie said. "He always did know the way through there."
She blew her nose on a paper towel from the van. Down the shore one of the Palo Alto people had got the fire going, and the smoke went straight up, a single gray line, and the fog signal house ticked as its metal cooled. They stood until the ash was gone and the water was only water.
"Thirty-one cards," Ruthie said, on the walk back. "I'd have mailed them. Every year I told him. Every year he'd say she's got her life."
"I know."
"You don't. That's fine. You don't have to." She stopped at the van and looked up at the tower. "Get a cat. Mice are back. I can tell by your face."
The fog came in at twenty past ten. Maren watched it come from the kitchen window: first the green can off the channel went soft, then the lights on Owls Head, then the far end of the point, until the six-second flash was a wide white smear passing across nothing. The signal began, two tones, low and lower. Upstairs one of the guests said "Oh, come on," and someone else laughed.
She pulled on the gray fleece, filled the thermos, put two Werther's in her pocket, and crossed the wet grass to the oil house.
The ledger was on the workbench where she had left it that afternoon, still in its plastic sleeve with the Coombs price sticker on the corner: $6.49, green, cardboard corners, the cheap kind. She had bought it in August and had not opened it. She slit the plastic with a thumbnail.
On the cover, in pencil, she wrote VOL. 35. Her capitals were thinner than his. They leaned. She did not try to fix them.
She turned on the Icom. Channel 16, then 68. The radar came up green, and the sweep went around, and around, and the Hogsback sat at 041 where it had always been, a hard little smudge under the clutter. She took the leash out of her pocket and turned it over in her hand, and then, because there was nothing else to do with it, she hung it from the hook over the bench where the lamp cord went.
She uncapped the pen.
13 Oct 24. 2231. Fog thick, vis under ¼ nm. Wind S light. LW 0512. Watch set, 16 and 68. Four guests in the house, asleep, mostly. Nothing on the scope.
She looked at the line for a while. The squelch hissed. The fog signal groaned through the brick, and across the yard, in the end bedroom of the house, she knew the flash was sweeping the ceiling where she had lain in April counting it, and where, at five, before any of this, she must have counted it too.
She wrote one more word at the end of the entry, small, the way he would have.
Here.
At 2247 the radio opened, a burst of engine noise and a man's voice she did not know, young, nervous, from somewhere out past R4.
"Gannet Head, Gannet Head. Anybody keep a watch there anymore?"
She picked up the handset.