Chapter 15: All Souls

November came the way November always came to the coast of Maine — not as a month but as a withdrawal, the world pulling back from the land the way the tide pulled back from the shore, the warmth retreating, the light retreating, the color retreating, the green gone from the trees and the blue going from the sky and the gold going from the light, everything draining southward, following the sun, leaving behind the gray, the permanent gray that was November's color, the color that was not a color but the absence of color, the sky and the sea and the land all the same shade of lead.

The lobster season was ending. Colleen had begun pulling her traps, the fall ritual, the traps hauled for the last time, the bait barrels emptied, the gear stacked in the yard, the boat hauled at the boatyard in Rockland for bottom paint and engine work, the yearly cycle completing, the circle closing, and Colleen would spend the winter mending twine and painting buoys and complaining about the price of bait and waiting for April, when the cycle would begin again.

She came to the house on a Thursday with the last of the season's lobster — four bugs, she called them, hard-shell, heavy, the lobsters of late fall when the shells were thick and the meat was dense and the flavor was the deepest it would be, the cold water concentrating the sweetness — and she set them on the counter and sat at the table and Nora made tea and they talked, and the talking was the usual talking, the three of them, Eamon and Nora and Colleen, the talk of neighbors and weather and the town and the boats and the season and the year.

"Last haul yesterday," Colleen said. "Four hundred traps out of the water. My back is declaring independence."

"You should get help," Nora said.

"Help costs money. My back is free."

"Your back is going to quit on you one of these days."

"My back has been threatening to quit for twenty years. It's all talk."

Nora laughed. The laugh was real, was full, was the laugh that Eamon lived for, the laugh that was evidence, was data, was the barometer reading that said: the pressure is holding, the woman is present, the humor is intact, the self is here. And the laugh was followed by the tea and the tea was followed by the conversation and the conversation was normal, was routine, was the script of a Thursday afternoon in November when the season was ending and the lobsters were on the counter and the fire was in the stove and the world was gray outside and warm inside and the three of them were together.

And then it happened.

Nora was telling a story. A story about a student, a boy named David who had brought a turtle to show-and-tell and the turtle had climbed off the desk and walked across the classroom and the children had followed it in a line, single file, like a parade, and Nora had let them follow the turtle because the following was the lesson, the observation was the curriculum, and the turtle had walked to the window and stopped and looked outside and the children had gathered around the window and looked outside and one of them — a girl, a quiet girl whose name Nora did not say — had said, "The turtle wants to go home," and the sentence had silenced the room and the silence was the kind of silence that a teacher recognized, the silence that meant something real had been said, something true, and the truth was the girl's truth but it was also the turtle's truth and it was also the truth of every living thing that was not where it belonged.

Nora told the story and the telling was complete and the ending was the ending and the story was the story and then she stopped.

She stopped the way a clock stops when the spring winds down — not suddenly but gradually, the ticking slowing, the intervals lengthening, the mechanism losing its energy, and the stopping was visible on her face, the animation draining, the expression flattening, the light in the eyes dimming the way the light in the lantern room dimmed when the fog came, and the fog was coming, the fog was here, the fog was inside.

"Nora?" Colleen said.

Nora looked at Colleen. The look was the look from the path, from the morning in the fog, from the bedroom doorway when the kitchen was not the kitchen — the look of a woman who was seeing but not recognizing, who was present but not located, who was here but not here, the body in the chair and the mind somewhere else, somewhere that was not this kitchen, not this table, not this afternoon.

"Nora," Eamon said.

She looked at him. And the looking at him was the thing, the looking at him was the data, because the look she gave him was not the look of a wife looking at a husband but the look of a woman looking at a stranger, the eyes registering the face and failing to connect the face to a name, to a history, to a forty-four-year-old accumulation of shared experience, and the failure was complete, was total, was not a delay or a pause or a gap but an absence, a void, the place where the recognition should have been empty, and the emptiness was on her face.

"Who are you?" she said.

The words arrived in the kitchen and the kitchen absorbed them the way the tower absorbed the wind, the way the rocks absorbed the waves, the impact physical, structural, the force of two words spoken by a woman at a table to a man she had been married to for forty-four years, and the words were not angry and were not confused and were not accusatory, the words were simple, were genuine, were the honest question of a person who did not know the answer, who was looking at a face and could not place it, the way you look at a face on the street and think: I know you, I have seen you, I cannot tell you where or when or in what context, and the not-knowing is frustrating but not frightening because the face is a stranger's face, a face without weight, a face that does not matter.

But this face mattered. This face was Eamon's face. And Nora did not know it.

Colleen stood up. The standing was instinct, was the reflex of a woman who had spent forty years on the water reacting to emergencies — the rogue wave, the fouled prop, the man overboard — the body standing before the mind had finished processing, the readiness preceding the understanding.

"Nora," Colleen said, and her voice was steady, was the voice she used in weather, the calm voice, the working voice, the voice that said: we are in a situation and the situation requires action and the action begins with calm. "Nora, this is Eamon. Your husband. Eamon."

Nora looked at Colleen. She looked at Colleen and she looked at Eamon and she looked at the kitchen, the stove and the counter and the window and the clock and the table and the tea and the lobsters on the counter, and she looked at all of it the way a person looks at a museum exhibit, with interest and curiosity and no personal connection, the objects interesting but not hers, the room informative but not home.

"I should go," she said.

"You're home," Eamon said. "Nora. You're home. This is our kitchen. This is our house."

"I should go home. My mother will be worried."

Her mother. Her mother had been dead for seventeen years. Her mother had died in 2009, the same year the lighthouse was decommissioned, the two events unrelated except in Eamon's memory, where they were linked by the date, by the month, by the coincidence of two decommissionings in the same year, the lighthouse losing its light and Nora losing her mother, and the coincidence was meaningless but the link was permanent, was structural, was in the architecture of his memory the way the mortar was in the architecture of the tower.

"Your mother isn't waiting," Eamon said, and the words were wrong, the words were a correction, the words were the truth that the situation did not need because the truth was not therapeutic, the truth was not helpful, the truth was a cold wind on a warm wound, and he knew the words were wrong as he said them but he could not stop them because the words were the truth and the truth was his reflex, the keeper's reflex, the reflex of a man who read instruments and reported data and the data was the data and the data did not lie.

Nora's face changed. The confusion gave way to something else, something that was not recognition but was distress, was the distress of a person who was being told things that did not fit the world she was in, the world where her mother was alive and the kitchen was someone else's kitchen and the man across the table was a stranger, and the not-fitting was painful, the contradiction between what she believed and what she was being told was painful, and the pain was on her face.

Colleen touched Eamon's arm. The touch was brief, was a signal, was the touch that said: stop, let me, you are making it worse. And Colleen sat down and took Nora's hand and held it and said, "It's all right. You're safe. You're in a warm kitchen with people who love you, and the tea is getting cold, and there are lobsters on the counter, and everything is all right."

The words were not true. Everything was not all right. But the words were what Nora needed, the words were the fog signal, the words were the sound that said: here, here, here is the safety, here is the shore, and the shore was Colleen's voice and the shore was the hand on her hand and the shore was the kitchen, which was slowly, slowly, over a minute, over two minutes, over the longest two minutes of Eamon's life, becoming the kitchen again, the stove becoming the stove and the counter becoming the counter and the window becoming the window and the man at the table becoming — becoming —

"Eamon," she said.

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry."

"I didn't know you. I looked at you and I didn't know you."

"You know me now."

"I know you now. But I didn't. For a minute. For a few minutes. You were a stranger. You were sitting at my table and you were a stranger."

She was crying. She was not a woman who cried easily and she was crying, the tears on her face, the tears that were the crossing of the threshold, the tears that said: this is beyond the capacity to absorb, this is the loss that exceeds the threshold, this is the thing I most feared, the losing of the person I most love, not the losing of him to death or departure but the losing of him to forgetting, the worst losing, the losing that takes the person while leaving the person, that erases the face while the face is right there, sitting at the table, looking at you, known and unknown, present and absent, husband and stranger.

Eamon went to her. He knelt beside her chair. He took her hands. Her hands were cold, were shaking, were the hands of a woman in shock, and he held them and the holding was the only thing he could do, the only maintenance available, the only repair, the holding of the hands that had made the bread and tended the garden and held their son and held him and wound the clock and navigated the roads and done everything that hands do in a life, and the hands were shaking and he held them until the shaking stopped.

"I'm here," he said.

"I know."

"I'm always here."

"I know. But I'm not always here. That's the problem. You're always here and I'm not always here and when I'm not here, you're a stranger, and when I come back, you're you, and the coming back is — the coming back is getting harder. The coming back takes longer. And I'm afraid — I'm afraid that one day I won't come back."

Colleen was standing at the counter, her back to them, her hands on the counter, and she was crying too, silently, the tears of a woman who was not part of the marriage but was adjacent to it, who loved these people with the love of a neighbor and a friend, the love that was not spousal and not familial but was real, was structural, was part of the architecture of the life on the point, and the crying was silent because Colleen would not intrude, would not make her grief a part of their grief, would hold it separately, would carry it home in her truck and deal with it alone, the way she dealt with everything, alone, on her boat, in her house, the solitary competence of a woman who had learned to be sufficient.

Colleen left. She left quietly, the door closing softly, the truck starting, the taillights on the road, and Eamon and Nora were alone in the kitchen, in the house, on the point, in the gray November afternoon, and the fire was in the stove and the clock was ticking and the lobsters were on the counter and the tea was cold.

Eamon made fresh tea. He boiled the water and steeped the tea and brought Nora a cup, the cup hot, the tea strong, the milk a splash, and she wrapped her hands around it and the warmth went into her hands and the shaking was gone and the crying was done and the face was calm, was composed, was the face of a woman who had been through something and had come out the other side and was sitting in her kitchen drinking her tea.

"I want to cook the lobsters," she said.

"We don't have to tonight."

"I want to cook them. Colleen brought them. We should cook them tonight."

She cooked the lobsters. She boiled the water in the big pot, the pot that was heavy and black and had been boiling lobsters in this kitchen for twenty-six years, and she put the lobsters in the water and the water returned to a boil and the lobsters turned red, the shell pigments breaking down in the heat, the transformation from dark blue-green to bright red that every Maine kitchen knew, the color change that meant the cooking was done and the eating could begin.

They ate at the table. They cracked the shells with their hands, with the nutcracker from the drawer, with the picks that Nora had bought at a kitchen shop in Camden, and the meat was sweet, was dense, was the last lobster of the season, and they ate it with butter melted in a small pot on the stove and bread from the new starter and they did not talk about what had happened, did not discuss the minutes of not-knowing, the stranger at the table, the mother who was dead, the self who had been absent.

They did not talk about it because there was nothing to say about it that had not already been said, by Dr. Mehta and by Patrick and by Colleen and by Nora herself, in the bedroom and in the kitchen and on the phone and in the car, the same things said in different words, the same truth approached from different angles, the same fog described by different instruments, and the describing did not change the fog, the measuring did not change the pressure, the saying did not change the fact.

After dinner, Eamon went to the tower.

He climbed the seventy-two steps. He climbed them slowly. He was tired. He was tired in a way that the stairs could not account for, that the day could not account for, that the painting and the cleaning and the checking could not account for, a tiredness that was not physical but emotional, the tiredness of a man who had been holding for months, for years, holding the weight of the watching and the monitoring and the measuring and the recording, holding the weight of the fog signal and the barometer and the log and the lens and the tower and the house and the wife and the life, holding all of it, and the holding was heavy, and the heaviness was in his legs on the stairs, in his hand on the rail, in his boots on the treads, the heaviness of a man who was seventy-one years old climbing seventy-two steps to write in a log that no one would read about conditions that no one was monitoring at a lighthouse that no one had asked him to keep.

He reached the lantern room. He did not clean the lens. He did not check the gallery. He stood in the lantern room and looked at the lens, the two hundred and fifty-six prisms, and the prisms were dark because the light was going, the November light, and the dark was the thing that was coming, and the lens was designed to push back against the dark, was designed to take the light and amplify it and send it out into the dark, and the lens could not do this because the lamp was not lit, the lamp had not been lit since 2009, and the lens was a mechanism without function, a system without input, a keeper without a light to keep.

He went to the desk. He lit the brass lamp. He opened the log. He looked at the page, the column marked REMARKS, and the pencil was in his hand and the pencil was the same pencil, the same groove, the same desk, the same log, the same format that had been used for a hundred and fifty years.

He wrote:

1915. Gray. Calm. Temp 38. Barometer 29.82. Visibility 3 mi, haze.

He stopped. He looked at the entry. The entry was correct. The entry was data. The entry was weather and wind and visibility and pressure, the conditions as measured by the instruments, the conditions as observed by the keeper, and the conditions were what they were and the entry recorded them and the recording was the function of the log and the function was performed and the entry was complete.

But the entry was not complete. The entry did not contain the afternoon. The entry did not contain the two minutes. The entry did not contain the question — who are you? — or the answer — I'm Eamon, your husband — or the tears or the shaking hands or the cold tea or the lobsters on the counter or the daughter who was dead or the mother who was dead or the mind that was failing or the man who knelt beside the chair and held the hands that were shaking.

The entry did not contain any of this because the log did not contain any of this because the log was for the lighthouse, for the weather, for the data, for the conditions that could be measured and recorded and predicted, and the afternoon could not be measured and the two minutes could not be recorded and the future could not be predicted, not by the barometer or the anemometer or the rain gauge or the thermometer or any instrument on the wall or in the drawer or in the kit.

And yet.

Josiah Coombs, first keeper, 1874 to 1891, had written: Mrs. Coombs unwell. Three words. Three words in seventeen years. And the three words had survived for a hundred and fifty-two years, had been read by Eamon in the cellar of this house, had produced in Eamon a wondering about Mrs. Coombs and her illness and her husband and his decision to break the format and write the personal in the official record, and the wondering was the purpose, the wondering was the function, the three words doing after a hundred and fifty-two years what the three words had done on the day they were written, which was to say: something happened today that was not weather, something happened today that was not wind, something happened today that the instruments could not measure and the format could not contain, and the keeper wrote it anyway because the keeper needed to write it, because the writing was the keeping, and the keeping was not only the keeping of the lighthouse but the keeping of the life.

Eamon picked up the pencil. He placed it below the entry. He wrote:

N. Bryce experienced significant episode of disorientation and non-recognition, approx. 14 min duration, beginning 1430. Failed to recognize keeper. Failed to recognize home. Believed her deceased mother was alive. Episode resolved with intervention by C. Drury. N. Bryce distressed but coherent following episode. Keeper distressed.

He looked at the entry. Keeper distressed. Two words. Two words that broke the format the way Coombs's three words had broken the format, the personal entering the official, the man entering the log, the feeling entering the data, and the two words were true, were the truest thing he had written in fourteen years of entries, truer than the barometer readings, truer than the wind speeds, truer than the visibility measurements, because the barometer and the wind and the visibility were conditions of the atmosphere and the distress was a condition of the man, and the man was the keeper and the keeper was the log and the log was the record and the record, for the first time, contained the keeper.

He set the pencil in the groove. He closed the log. He sat at the desk in the light of the brass lamp, the warm yellow light, and outside the tower the November night was on the bay and the dark was on the water and the stars were behind the haze and the fog signal was sounding, the automated signal, the two seconds on and the thirteen seconds off, the signal going out into the dark, into the fog, into the night, and the signal was the keeper's voice, the keeper's warning, the keeper's refusal to be silent, and the keeper sat at the desk and listened to his own signal and the signal said: here, here, here.

He blew out the lamp. He descended the stairs. He crossed the yard. He went into the house. The kitchen was clean. The lobster shells were in the compost bucket. The pot was washed. The clock was ticking.

Nora was in bed. The light was on. She was not reading. She was lying on her back, looking at the ceiling, and the looking was the looking of a person who was thinking, who was present, who was here, and the here-ness was solid, was real, was the here-ness of a woman who had been gone and had come back and was holding on to the back with everything she had.

"Eamon," she said.

"Yes."

"Say your name again."

"Eamon."

"Eamon Bryce."

"Eamon Bryce."

"My husband."

"Your husband."

"The keeper."

"The keeper."

She turned off the light. He got into bed. They lay in the dark, side by side, and the dark was the November dark, and the sea was on the rocks, and the clock was in the kitchen, and the fog signal was sounding, two seconds on, thirteen seconds off, and the signal was for the ships and the signal was for the shore and the signal was for the woman in the bed and the man beside her, the signal saying: here, here, here, still here, still keeping, still sounding, still present, still the keeper, still Eamon, still yours.

She reached for his hand. She found it. She held it. The holding was the holding of a woman who knew what she was holding and why she was holding it and the knowing was present and the knowing was real and the knowing was now, this moment, this night, and the night would end and the morning would come and the light would come and the fog might come and the forgetting might come and the stranger at the table might come again, but not now, not tonight, tonight the knowing held, tonight the hand held, tonight the name held.

Eamon. Eamon. Eamon.

She said it in the dark, three times, like a signal, like a prayer, like a fog horn sounding across the water, the name going out into the dark, into the fog, into the night, and the name was the light, and the light was the keeping, and the keeping was the love, and the love was the name, spoken three times in the dark by a woman who was holding on, who was here, who was still here, and the dark was the dark and the fog was the fog and the name was the name and the name held.

For now.

For now the name held.