Sacramento Time

Her mother answered on the fifth ring, which meant she had looked at the screen and thought about it.

"Sweetheart. We were just talking about you. Gary, it's Maren." The phone went muffled against a shoulder and came back. "He says hi. He's got his leg up on the ottoman. They finally gave him a date for the left one, August twentieth, and the surgeon looks about twelve, I swear, he has one of those little..."

"Mom."

"...beards. What."

"I'm in Port Ellery. I just came from the library."

On the other end the sprinklers ticked around. Maren could picture the exact arc of them, the way they caught the edge of the patio table every third pass and Linda moved her coffee without looking.

"Well, that's nice. Are they still in that building by the..."

"I found the Courier-Gazette from October 1988. The Constance Grey."

"I don't know what you want me to say about that."

"I want you to tell me where Dad was."

There was a pause long enough for a sprinkler to come around twice. Then her mother said, brightly, to someone who was not Maren, "Oh, honey, you've knocked the ice pack off. Hang on. No, don't get up. Maren, I have to go, he's going to put his weight on it and undo six weeks of physical therapy. I'll call you back."

"Will you?"

"I said I would."

The call log said four minutes and eleven seconds. Maren sat with the phone in her lap and watched the traffic light go yellow over an empty intersection, and a man in a Co-op hat crossed against it with a bag of ice on his shoulder. Linda would not call back. Maren knew this the way she knew a service would time out before she saw the error. She had thirty-two years of data.

She drove home with the prints face down on the passenger seat.

---

The hasp on the oil house was still hanging by one screw where the flat bar had torn it out. Maren had bought a new one at Coombs that morning, and a box of three-inch deck screws, and she spent the afternoon putting it on. She drilled the pilot holes too big the first time and had to move the whole plate an inch to the left, into fresh brick mortar that crumbled like dry cake. It took two hours for a job Gil Haskell would have done in ten minutes while talking about the Red Sox. She didn't care. It kept her hands busy and her phone in her back pocket, where she could feel it not ringing.

At six she gave up and called again.

Linda picked up on the first ring and said nothing at all.

"Mom?"

Nothing. Not a hang-up, either. The line stayed open. Maren could hear a screen door on a spring, and then the specific hollow quiet of a person who has walked outside to stand by the side of a house where nobody inside can hear her. A dog two yards over. A car going by slowly, the way cars went by in that neighborhood, as if they had all night.

Maren sat down on the oil house step. She didn't fill the silence. It was the one useful thing she had learned in fourteen years of postmortems: when someone goes quiet, they're deciding, and the worst thing you can do is decide for them. The call timer on her screen ticked past one minute. Two. A gull landed on the ridge of the keeper's house and looked at her as if she owed it something. Three minutes. She could hear her mother breathing, small careful breaths through the nose.

At three minutes and forty-seven seconds, Linda said, "You had a fever."

Maren didn't move.

"You'd had it two days. Ear infection, we thought. I'd taken you to Dr. Pratt on the Monday and he gave us the pink stuff, the amoxicillin, you liked it, you used to call it the bubblegum medicine. And you seemed better. You seemed fine. My sister had just had Kyle, he was three weeks old and Joanne wasn't coping, and I'd been promising for a month to go up to Bangor and help. So I went up on the Thursday. Your father said go. He said you were fine. You were fine." She stopped. "Do you remember any of this?"

"No."

"Good." Linda's voice did something. "That's good."

"Mom."

"It went up in the night. He told me later he heard you making a noise, a sort of grunting, and he went in and you were burning up, and he carried you to the kitchen to get a cloth, and you went over. On the floor. By the stove. Your eyes rolled back and you were jerking and your lips were going blue and he didn't know what it was. He thought you were dying. He'd been in the Coast Guard eighteen years and pulled people out of the water and he told me he had never been so frightened of anything in his life."

Maren looked across the yard at the kitchen window. Four panes. She'd been meaning to replace the cracked one.

"He called me from the hospital in Rockland at ten past two in the morning," her mother said. "And I can't do the rest of this right now with Gary in the next room asking where the remote is. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'll call you."

This time the call ended from the other end. Eleven minutes, thirty-two seconds.

---

She did not go up the tower that night. She didn't go in the oil house either, though the radio was on standby and the fog was coming in low across the water by nine, a soft gray front that took the bell buoy first and then R4 and then the far shore. The beam swept through it every six seconds and lit nothing. Maren made toast she didn't eat. She found she had walked into the kitchen four separate times and stood looking at the floor by the stove.

It was linoleum, a pattern of tan and brown squares meant to look like tile and looking like linoleum, worn through to the black backing in a path from the door to the sink. She had no idea how old it was. The Coast Guard had owned the house until 2006 and nobody spends federal money on a kitchen floor at an automated station, so it was possible. It was possible she had been on this exact floor.

At 10:52 her phone lit up on the counter. MOM.

"I'm in the car," Linda said. "In the garage. Don't laugh."

"I'm not laughing."

"Gary's asleep. He takes the oxycodone at ten and he's out like a light. Like a..." A small sound that was not quite a laugh. "Well. Where are you?"

Maren looked down. She was sitting on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet under the sink, her knees up, the fleece zipped to her chin. She had not decided to sit there.

"In the kitchen," she said.

There was a long breath on the line. "Is it the same floor?"

"I don't know."

"Brown squares."

"Yes."

"Oh, God," her mother said.

The beam came round, crossed the window, and went.

"All right," Linda said. "All right. He called me at ten past two. I was on Joanne's couch with Kyle asleep on my chest, and the phone went in the kitchen and I knew. You always know. He said, 'She's all right, Lin, she's all right, it was a febrile seizure, they've got her temperature down, she's asleep.' A hundred and five point two, they'd measured her at. I said I'm coming. And I said, who's at the light? And he didn't answer."

"He left it."

"He left it. You couldn't wait for an ambulance out there, not in 1988, not in fog, it'd have been forty minutes just to get to you. So he wrapped you in the afghan off the couch and carried you out to the truck in his undershirt and drove you to Rockland himself. And when they'd got hold of you, he handed you to a nurse named Beverly. I met her afterward. She told me he kissed your forehead and ran. She said he was in the building eight minutes, if that."

Maren pressed the heel of her hand against the floor. It was cold, and very slightly gritty.

"The power had been flickering all evening," Linda said. "The wind was up before the fog came in. The line out to the point used to go down in any kind of weather, it went down two or three times a winter. And when it did there was a backup generator that was supposed to come on by itself. Most times it did. Sometimes the transfer switch stuck and you had to go down and kick it, and I mean literally kick it, he kept a particular boot by the door for it. Five minutes' work. He'd done it a dozen times. That night the line went down while he was on the road, and the switch stuck, and there was nobody there to kick it."

"How long?"

"Eighty-five minutes. He worked it out afterward from the clock on the panel, the one that stopped when the power went. Eighty-five minutes with no light on the Hogsback and no horn. And at twenty past two, while he was driving back up Route 1 doing God knows what speed in the fog, that boat came in from the east thinking the light was obscured, I suppose, thinking they were further out. Cal Pelletier had fished out of Port Ellery his whole life. He knew those waters as well as anyone. He'd have been looking for the light."

Maren had read the inquiry summary that afternoon, on the microfilm, through a smear on the glass where somebody before her had put a thumb. The vessel's master was evidently unaware of the outage.

"I got to the hospital about four," Linda said. "You were asleep with an IV in your hand, this tiny hand, and I sat with you. He came in at seven. He had grease to the elbows and his face was gray, and he sat down on the other side of the bed and he said, 'A boat's gone onto the Hogsback. Two men.' And that was all he said for about a day."

"And the log."

"The log." Her mother's voice went flat and businesslike, the voice she'd used for thirty years on parents who wanted their child moved to a different teacher. "The station log said he'd been on duty all night and the generator had failed and he'd spent the outage in the engine room trying to restore power. It said all that. He wrote it the next morning. And the inquiry read it and talked to him and talked to Ev Thibodeau, who'd been clinging to a rock all night and couldn't tell them anything except that it was dark, and they blamed the generator. Which was true. That's the thing. It was a true thing with the truth taken out."

"Did he ask you to lie?"

"He never asked me anything. Nobody asked me anything. I wasn't in the log." A car door, or something like it, a soft thump. "He said one thing about it. Once. At this table, at that kitchen table, maybe a week after. He said, 'Telling them won't bring those men back.' And I said, no, it won't. And I meant it. God help me, I agreed with him. You were five years old and he was the only paycheck and if he'd told the truth they'd have taken the station and the pension and probably the house we were sitting in, and where would we have gone? And I had your discharge sheet on the refrigerator. It was right there under a magnet shaped like a lobster. Admitted 0152. Every morning I'd get the milk out and there it was."

The beam crossed the window. Six seconds. Maren counted them without meaning to, the way she had counted them her first night here.

"You stayed four years," she said.

"I stayed four years."

"Why?"

"Because I thought it would pass. Because I loved him. Pick one." Linda breathed. "And because of you. He was good with you, you know. You don't remember, but he was. He used to let you ride on his shoulders up the tower and you'd count the stairs and you'd always lose track around sixty and he'd have to start you over."

Ninety-one, Maren thought.

"It didn't pass," her mother said. "It got worse. The next foggy night after the funeral, he went out to that brick shed with a thermos and the radio and he didn't come in till it lifted. And the next one. And the next. He'd have been automated in a year and out of a job and he knew it, and he still went out there every time it fogged in, all night, talking to boats. Talking to strangers. The way he never once talked to me about it. I'd lie in bed and hear him through the window on the radio, just this low voice going on and on, so patient, and he would come in at dawn and drink his coffee and say, 'Well,' and go to sleep. Four years of that. I couldn't share him with a rock in the water."

The kitchen clock said 11:20. Maren hadn't noticed it before. It was a cheap battery one shaped like a ship's wheel and it ran three minutes fast.

"So you left."

"So I left. September 1992. I packed you up while he was asleep after a fog night. I told him I was going. He didn't try to stop me. He carried your bed out to the car." Linda's voice cracked once and mended. "And then I did something else, and you need to hear this part too, because I've been sitting in this garage for half an hour trying to find a way to leave it out."

Maren waited.

"When you asked why he didn't call, I told you he was busy. When you were older I told you he was impossible. And then you stopped asking, and I let you stop. He called, Maren. The first year he called maybe a dozen times. He was terrible at it. He'd say 'Well,' and then nothing, just breathing, the way he'd breathe on that radio waiting for somebody to answer, and you'd stand there in the hall holding the phone and after a minute you'd hand it back to me. And I didn't make you take it. I could have. I could have told you who he was. I let you think he didn't care because it was easier than explaining why I'd gone." She stopped. "That's all of it. That's all I've got."

Maren found she was holding the phone against her ear so hard it hurt.

"I'm not asking you to say anything," Linda said. "I'm going to go in now. Gary wakes up around midnight to use the bathroom and if I'm not there he'll think I've been kidnapped. I love you. I'll call you Sunday. I mean it this time."

"Okay," Maren said. It was the only word she had.

Forty-one minutes, six seconds.

She sat on the floor for a long time after. Then she got up, stiff, and took her laptop off the counter and opened the folder of phone photos she had backed up twice, and scrolled to the back half of volume one, to autumn 1992. She knew the entry was there. She had logged it in her spreadsheet in April as nothing worth flagging: no vessel, no call, column F blank.

19 Sep 92. 0300. Fog. Nobody out. House empty. Cold.

She closed the laptop.

Then, because she could not help it, because it was what her brain did with a number it didn't like, she pulled up a map. Gannet Head to the old hospital site in Rockland: twenty-three miles by Route 1. In fog, in 1988, in a Ford pickup with a seizing child wrapped in an afghan, call it forty minutes at least. Forty there. Forty back. Eighty minutes on the road.

Eighty-five minutes dark.

Five minutes, then, to carry her in, and hand her to a nurse named Beverly, and decide. She ran it again and got the same number.