Three Long, One Short

By midnight the fog had eaten the point.

It came in off the bay around eleven, the way the weather service on her phone had promised it wouldn't, first as a softening of the bell buoy's edges and then as a wall that rolled up over the rocks and took the spruce, the woodpile, the oil house and finally the tower itself, so that from the kitchen window Maren could see nothing past her own reflection holding a mug of chamomile she didn't want. It was June 14. She had been in Maine nine weeks. In that time she had caught eleven mice, ripped out the downstairs bathroom with Gil's nephew, and not once looked out a window at night and seen nothing at all.

She went up to bed anyway, because that was the rule. She lay on her back in the end room and waited for the beam.

It came, every six seconds, but wrong. The fog took the white flash and smeared it, so instead of a clean bar sweeping the ceiling she got a slow brightening, like someone opening and shutting a refrigerator in the next room. Then the horn went. Two tones, low and lower, a groan she felt in the bed frame. Thirty seconds of silence. Groan again.

It was the silence that bothered her. No surf on the ledge, no wind in the spruce, no engines from the harbor. The fog swallowed everything except the Coast Guard's horn, which kept announcing a lighthouse to a bay that couldn't see it. Maren had read 412 of her father's entries. She had a spreadsheet with conditional formatting. She knew the Hogsback lay on a bearing of 041 at a quarter mile, and she knew how many times he'd written Coffee, and none of that told her what a person was supposed to do at 12:10 in the morning when the world went white and quiet and every boat in Penobscot Bay was, presumably, tied up and sensible.

Presumably. That was the word she'd have flagged in a code review.

At 12:40 she got up and put on the fleece over her T-shirt and stood at the bedroom window with her forehead nearly on the glass. The roll of Werther's was still on the legal pad in the oil house, untouched for two months. She hadn't eaten one. She hadn't thrown it out either.

The fog shifted. Not much, a seam opening somewhere off the point, a darker gray inside the gray where the water must be. And in it, low and to the right, a light.

It blinked. Long. Long. Long. A gap, then a quick short wink, then darkness. She counted it the way she'd counted the beam on her first night, out loud and barely above a whisper. Long, long, long, short. Dark for maybe four seconds. Then again.

She knew it. She knew it the way you know your own handwriting on an old envelope, before your brain catches up. In column G of the spreadsheet, the one she'd labeled NOTES/UNKNOWN, there were twenty-nine rows where her father had written the same shorthand, and she'd highlighted every one of them yellow because she couldn't work out what it meant.

0155. Thick. 3L 1S off the point. Answered. Talked him in. Cold.

Long, long, long, short. Out in the fog, somebody was asking for Walt.

She took the stairs two at a time and then remembered she was forty-one.

The oil house padlock was a new one from Coombs, the key on a shoelace around her neck, and she fumbled it in the fog with her phone flashlight clamped in her teeth. The Aldis lamp sat on the shelf below the logbooks, a gray metal thing like a cartoon ray gun, its cord running to a battery box the size of a car battery because that was what it was. She'd tested it once in April, pointed at the woodpile. She had not practiced. She lifted both, and the battery alone was a good forty pounds. She grabbed volume 22 off the shelf because three of her yellow rows lived in it, and went for the tower.

The tower stairs were iron, ninety-one of them, curling up the inside of the granite with a rope rail somebody had added in the seventies. She had climbed them maybe six times. Each time she'd stopped at the bottom, at the third step, which was where Ruthie had found him, and looked at it, and then gone up anyway. Tonight she didn't stop. She went up with the battery banging her shin every fourth step and the lamp hooked over her wrist by its strap, counting under her breath because counting was something to do.

At the top the hatch to the gallery stuck, then gave. The cold hit her in the face.

It was worse up here. The fog moved, which she hadn't expected, sliding past the railing in long wet sheets, and the horn went off directly below her feet so hard she felt it in her molars. Behind her the LED optic turned its six-second flash into the murk and lit nothing but water droplets. She set the battery down, clipped the leads on by feel, and opened volume 22 on the gallery floor under the flashlight.

0210. Thick. 3L 1S off the point. Answered. F/V Ruth Ann. Talked him in. Coffee.

Answered. Answered how? She flipped back four pages, forward six. Soundings. A sketch of the ledge with an arrow through the gap. A grocery list, for God's sake: eggs, Bag Balm, batteries D. Nothing that said what an answer looked like.

Out on the water the light went again. Long, long, long, short.

She put the lamp to her shoulder and aimed where she thought it was. The trigger worked a shutter inside, and she squeezed it, and the shutter clacked, and a fat white bar shot out into the fog and lit up a wall of nothing ten feet off the railing. She tried to send it back. Three long. Her first long was fine. Her second was too short because the wind shoved her elbow. The third she held so long it was probably a lecture. Then the short, which came out as two because her finger slipped. She tried again. Worse. The shutter clacked like a stapler.

Long, long, long, short, said the water. Patient. Or not patient. She couldn't tell from a light.

She sent it a third time, slower, saying the words out loud. Long. Long. Long. Short. Her hands were wet and her thumb had gone numb against the cold metal housing. She lowered the lamp and waited.

The horn groaned. Thirty seconds.

Nothing came back.

She waited through two more groans, then three, the flashlight beam lying across the open logbook where the pages had started to curl in the damp. The seam in the fog had closed. Low and to the right there was only gray, the same gray as everywhere else, and somewhere inside it a boat that had either understood her, or turned away, or was sitting out there on a quarter-mile of black water trying to work out what kind of idiot was up in Walt Brannock's tower.

Then, under the next groan of the horn, something else.

It was faint and it came from below, from the ground, from the open door of the oil house she had not bothered to shut behind her. A crackle. A burst of static and the ghost of a word, then nothing, then static again. In two months that radio had never made a sound except the hiss she'd heard the day she cut the lock, and she'd stopped hearing even that, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator.

She left the lamp. She left the battery and the logbook and went down the ninety-one steps faster than anybody should go down ninety-one iron steps in the dark, one hand sliding on the rope rail, the flashlight swinging wild across the granite. At the bottom she did not look at the third step. She ran across the wet grass in her slippers.

The oil house smelled like it always did, kerosene and old coffee and the faint sweetness of the Werther's. The Icom's display glowed green on the workbench. 68. The squelch broke open as she came through the door.

"Gannet Head. You up?" A man's voice, old, cracked down the middle like a dropped plate. A pause full of engine noise. "Walt? You there, Walt?"

She stood with her hand on the back of her father's chair. The microphone hung on its clip, coiled cord, a button on the side worn shiny where a thumb had pressed it for years. She had read the manual in April. She had read it the way she read terms of service, which was to say she knew where the information was and had retained none of it.

"Walt." Not a question this time. "I got fog right down on the water and I'm hearing surf off my starboard I don't care for. Come on, now."

There were several things she could say. She ran them like test cases. He's not available. As though her father were in a meeting. Who is this? Rude, and also stupid, because whoever this was had a boat and the rocks were real and she had a voice and a radio and a dead man's sketches lying open on a gallery ninety-one steps up. Wrong number. Ridiculous.

She unclipped the mic. Her thumb found the worn spot.

"This is." She let go of the button by accident, pressed it again. "This is Gannet Head. This is Maren. Walt's daughter." Her mouth had gone dry. "He's gone. He died in February. I'm sorry."

The static ran on long enough that she thought she'd done something wrong with the button. She checked it. Checked the channel. Still 68.

"I know it," the voice said. Quieter now. "I know he did. I was at the church." A breath, rough. "Habit, I guess. Forty-odd years of asking for him."

Then she knew the voice. Stubborn, a little sly, a man who'd been paid in pie.

"Mr. Thibodeau?"

"Ev. It's Ev." The engine note changed, dropped, as if he'd pulled the throttle back. "Saw your light up there. Didn't know what to make of it. Thought for a minute." He didn't finish. "Never mind what I thought. Your father'd have me in the harbor by now with the kettle on. I can't see my own bow rail, Maren, and I couldn't see it in daylight either. So you tell me. Is there anybody up there knows where that ledge is?"

Her eyes went to the shelf, to thirty-three green spines and one empty space.

"Hold on," she said into the mic, and then, because that didn't sound like anything a person on a boat wanted to hear: "Give me one minute. Stay where you are."

"Can't stay where I am. Tide's making."

She pulled volume nine down, and seven, and fourteen, because those were the ones where she remembered sketches, and laid them open across the bench on top of the radar manual and a dish of Werther's wrappers. The same ledge, drawn by the same hand over twenty years. A long lump like a loaf of bread, a cross for the rock that showed at half tide, a dotted line curving between the ledge and the point with an arrow at each end. In the margins her father had written things like keep R4 on port til bell and HB 041 / 2 cbl, which she had decoded on a Saturday in April at her kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold and had felt clever about. Clever at a kitchen table was different. Her hands knew that before she did.

"Ev. Can you see the bell? Is there a bell?"

"I can hear the bell. Seeing's not on offer."

"Okay. Okay. Keep the bell on your port side." She traced the dotted line with her fingernail. "And steer zero four one."

Nothing came back. The horn groaned outside, the long low note and then the lower one, and the Icom's display sat there green and unbothered. She counted. Eleven seconds. Fourteen. Something cold went through her stomach and stayed there.

"Ev?"

"Maren." His voice was very even, the way her mother's had gone when Maren was sixteen and backing the Camry toward a hydrant. "Zero four one off this bell puts me on top of it."

She looked at the sketch again. HB 041. Hogsback, 041. The bearing to the ledge, from the tower. From where she was standing. She had plotted the thing herself on the radar in April, at 0248, and logged it, and then sent a seventy-nine-year-old man straight at it.

"Sorry. I'm sorry. Don't. That's where the rock is." She pressed her free hand flat on the page as if the page might move. "Come right. Come back to the right."

"How far right?"

She didn't know. That was the truth, and it was a terrible thing to discover with your thumb on a transmit button. She dragged the laptop across the bench and woke it, and the radar sweep came up green on black, the point a solid smear at the bottom, the ledge a cluster of bright speckle where she'd tagged it. Out past the speckle, moving slow, a single fat return. Him. Much closer to the speckle than she liked.

"Ev, I've got you on the radar. You're." She measured with her thumb against the screen, which was not how anyone measured anything. "You're maybe two hundred yards off it. Turn right. Keep turning. I'll tell you when."

The return crawled. The silence went on long enough that she started to hear her own breathing on the open channel, which meant she'd been keying the mic without talking, which meant he couldn't answer. She let go.

"Coming right," said Ev, already mid-sentence, as if he'd been saying it for a while.

She watched the blip swing. She watched it slide along the edge of the speckle the way a drop of water slides along a counter, not quite touching. In the margin of volume fourteen, under the dotted line, her father had written when R4 abeam, straight in. Easy. She found she disliked him very much for the word easy.

"There's a red can," she said. "R4. When it's beside you, go straight for the harbor."

"I know where the harbor is, dear. I been going there since Eisenhower."

At 0209 the blip cleared the last of the speckle. At 0215 the radio said, "Open water. Hearing the bell astern. That'll do," and then, after a moment, "That'll do, Maren."

She didn't answer. She was already out the door and across the grass, and then up all ninety-one steps again with her lungs burning, and on the gallery she found the lamp where she'd left it and the logbook soft with damp. The fog had thinned toward the north. Down there, small and low, a red light and a green one and a white one above them moved away from her across the black, so slowly she had to look at the railing post beside them to be sure they were moving at all.

She stayed until there was nothing left to look at but the fog closing back in behind him.

The oil house was warmer than the gallery by about four degrees and smelled of hot electronics and old coffee. Maren put the damp logbook on the bench and peeled the cover open with two fingers, the way you'd handle a wet paper bag. Volume thirty-three. Her father's last entry, December 18, 2022, sat a third of the way down a left-hand page, and below it the green ruled lines ran on empty to the bottom and over onto the next sheet and the next, as if he'd simply stopped carrying this one up the stairs.

0605. Fog. F/V Wren, girl alone, plotter dark. Talked her in on 68. Knows the bell now. Cold.

She found a pen in the coffee can. Bic, blue, chewed. He chewed his pens. She hadn't known that, and she put the cap in her fleece pocket instead of in her mouth.

Then she sat for a while with the nib a quarter inch off the paper.

It was only a record. She had written ten thousand of them: incident reports, postmortems, a three-page document once about a cron job that ran on Pacific time when everyone else had agreed to UTC. You wrote down what happened so the next person didn't have to guess. The next person, here, was nobody. Or it was her.

She wrote it in his format because she didn't know another one.

0215. Fog thick. F/V Lisette, Ev. Three long one short off the point. Answered w/ lamp (badly). Talked him past the Hogsback on 68. Sent him at it first on 041. Came right in time. R4 abeam, straight in.

Her printing looked nothing like his. Smaller, slanted, the hand of someone who mostly typed. She reread it and it read like a confession, which she supposed it was. Then she added one word at the end, because he always did, and because it was true.

Sorry.

The horn went, long and then longer and lower, and the walls took it in. Maren looked at the five lines under her father's five lines and felt something she didn't have a name for that sat right behind her breastbone, the same place the cold had gone when Ev stopped answering.

If she left it, she was in the book. She was the person who'd answered the light. Whoever had bought that padlock at Coombs and left the radio warm and set a roll of Werther's on her legal pad would come in some night and read this, and they would know that the Brannock girl from California had picked up the mic. So would she, every time she opened the cover.

She drew a line through the first sentence. Then the next. One line each, ruled straight against the edge of the radar manual, so the words stayed legible underneath like a thing under ice. She stopped before the last line. Sorry sat there by itself at the end, uncrossed, and she couldn't make her hand do it.

She closed the book.

On the bench the Icom hissed softly on 68, the green numbers steady. Somewhere out past the point, in the part of the bay her father had drawn over and over like homework, the bell went on ringing for nobody she could see.