Chapter 3: Seventy-Two Steps

Colleen Drury came on Thursday with a pot of chowder in one hand and a six-pack of Allagash in the other, and Eamon met her at the kitchen door because he had seen her truck on the road from the gallery, where he had been inspecting the flashing panels for hairline cracks, a task he performed monthly, running his fingertips along each pane of glass, feeling for the imperfection that would admit moisture and moisture would become ice and ice would become fracture, the progression from flaw to failure as predictable in glass as it was in everything else, in hulls and engines and joints and minds, and he did not find any cracks, which was the expected result, which was the point.

"Brought you supper," Colleen said.

"You didn't have to do that."

"I know I didn't have to. I wanted to. There's a difference."

She set the pot on the stove and the beer in the refrigerator and sat at the kitchen table as though she lived there, which in a sense she did, the way a neighbor of twenty years lives in your house — not as a resident but as a presence, a person whose body knows the chairs and the table and the angle of the light through the windows, whose hand reaches for the correct cabinet without thinking.

Colleen was sixty. She had the face of a woman who had spent forty years on the water — the skin darkened and creased, the eyes narrowed to permanent half-squints, the jaw set in a way that suggested opinions held and not always withheld. She was five foot four and a hundred and thirty pounds and she hauled five hundred lobster traps by herself from a thirty-six-foot boat that she maintained by herself and she had been doing this since she was twenty, first with her father, then with her husband, then alone, and alone was how she preferred it, she said, because a boat is too small for two people who don't agree on where the traps should go.

"Where's Nora?" she said.

"Napping."

"Good day or bad day?"

"Good day."

Colleen nodded. She did not ask for details. She never asked for details. This was one of the things Eamon valued about her, the restraint, the understanding that information volunteered was different from information extracted, that a man would tell you what he needed to tell you in his own time and that asking was a form of pressure and pressure was what you applied to things that needed shaping, not to people.

"Patrick's coming tomorrow," Eamon said.

"That's nice. Nora will be happy."

"She's planning a menu."

"Of course she is."

Eamon opened two beers and set one in front of Colleen. They drank. The kitchen was quiet. The clock on the wall ticked, an old schoolhouse clock that Nora had bought at an auction in Blue Hill, the kind with a pendulum and a white face and black numerals, the kind that hung in every schoolroom in New England for a hundred years, and Nora had put it in the kitchen and wound it every Sunday and it kept perfect time, had kept perfect time for the twelve years it had hung there, and Eamon sometimes thought that the clock was like Nora herself, a thing designed for a specific purpose — to measure time, to keep time, to tell you where you were in the day — and the clock did not forget its purpose, the clock did not lose its function, the clock ticked and the pendulum swung and the hands moved and the time was always correct, and the clock would go on being correct until the spring broke or the gears wore or some mechanical failure intervened, and then it could be repaired, because it was a machine, and machines could be repaired.

"You're thinking," Colleen said.

"I'm drinking a beer."

"You're drinking a beer and thinking. I can tell because you're looking at the clock like it owes you money."

"I was thinking about the clock."

"The clock."

"Nora winds it every Sunday."

"I know. She's told me."

"She hasn't missed a Sunday in twelve years."

Colleen drank her beer and said nothing, and her silence was not the silence of someone who had nothing to say but the silence of someone who knew that what she had to say was not what Eamon needed to hear, or not yet, and so she waited, the way you wait for the tide, which comes when it comes regardless of your preference.

Eamon said, "Patrick wants to talk about something."

"I expect he does."

"You know what it is."

"I expect I do."

"And you think he's right."

Colleen set her beer on the table. She looked at Eamon with the directness that was her primary quality, the quality that made her a good fisherman and a difficult friend and an indispensable neighbor, the quality of a woman who would not tell you what you wanted to hear because she respected you too much for comfort.

"I think Patrick loves his mother," she said. "And I think you love his mother. And I think sometimes two people who love the same person can't agree on what love requires because they're looking at the person from different distances."

"That's diplomatic."

"I'm a diplomat."

"You're a lobsterwoman."

"Same thing. You have to know which traps to haul and which to leave. You haul the wrong one, you lose the bait. You leave the right one too long, the lobster walks out."

"I'm not sure the metaphor works."

"The metaphor always works," Colleen said. "The question is whether you want it to."

They drank their beers. The sun was lowering over the Camden Hills, the light coming through the kitchen window at the angle that lit the room in gold, and the pot of chowder was warming on the stove, the smell of it filling the kitchen — cream and potato and clam, the clams that Colleen dug herself from the flats at low tide, a chowder made without shortcuts, without substitutions, without any ingredient that had not come from within twenty miles of this kitchen, and this was Colleen's ethic, the same ethic that governed her fishing, which was an ethic of proximity, of locality, of knowing exactly where everything came from and what it cost to get it.

Nora came into the kitchen. She had been sleeping and her face showed it, the softness of sleep still on her, the hair pressed flat on one side, and she saw Colleen and smiled and said, "I thought I heard you."

"Brought chowder," Colleen said.

"You're an angel."

"I'm a lobsterwoman who made too much chowder."

"Same thing," Nora said, and Colleen laughed, and Nora sat at the table and Eamon poured her a glass of water — she did not drink beer, had never liked it, a preference he had accepted forty-four years ago the way he had accepted that she folded towels in thirds and he folded them in halves and there was no resolving this difference and no need to resolve it.

"Patrick's coming tomorrow," Nora said.

"Eamon told me."

"I'm making a pie. Blueberry. From the freezer, the ones we picked last August."

"He'll like that."

"He always liked blueberry. Even when he was small. He'd eat them straight from the bush and come home with his mouth purple and I'd pretend to be angry and he knew I wasn't angry and we had this whole performance, this ritual, the scolding and the not-meaning-it, and it was — it was one of the best things. One of the best things about being his mother."

Nora's voice had changed. Not in volume, not in pitch, but in quality, the way a radio signal changes when the atmospheric conditions shift — the same station, the same frequency, but the clarity fluctuating, the signal fading and returning, and you leaned forward and adjusted the dial but there was no dial to adjust, there was only the signal and the atmosphere and the distance between them.

"He ate a quart one time," Nora said. "A whole quart. And then he was sick in the car coming home, all over the back seat, and you — " She stopped. She looked at Eamon. "You were there."

"I was there," he said.

"You cleaned it up."

"I cleaned it up."

"You didn't say anything. You just got a bucket and a sponge and you cleaned it up and then you took the seat covers off and washed them and put them back, and you didn't say a word, and Patrick was crying because he thought he was in trouble and you put your hand on his head and you said — you said — "

She stopped again. The sentence was there, he could see it, hovering at the edge of her reach, a thing she was trying to grasp, and her hand was closing on it and the thing was moving away, not fast but steadily, the way a boat moves away from a dock when the line has been cast off, the gap widening, the boat still visible, still close, but no longer reachable.

"I said it was just blueberries," Eamon said.

"It was just blueberries," Nora said, and the relief on her face was the relief of a person who has found the thing she was looking for, who has reached the boat before the gap became too wide, and the memory was complete now, restored, the circuit closed, and she smiled and the smile was the same smile she had smiled on the day it happened, thirty-eight years ago, in the car, with Patrick sick in the back seat and blueberry on the upholstery and Eamon with a sponge saying it was just blueberries.

Colleen was watching. Eamon could feel her watching the way he could feel the wind on the gallery, without seeing it, a pressure on the skin. Colleen was not a woman who missed things. She fished alone in open water and she had survived forty years of it by not missing things — the shift in the weather, the change in the current, the set of the waves that meant a ledge was close, the sound of the engine that meant a bearing was going — and she did not miss this, the pause in Nora's story, the reaching, the almost-losing, the rescue of the memory by the husband who carried a copy of it.

They ate the chowder. Nora heated bread to go with it, the bread she had made the day before, sliced and toasted with butter, and they ate at the kitchen table with the last of the sun coming through the window and the clock ticking and the bay going dark outside, and Colleen told a story about a tourist who had motored his rented boat into her trap line and gotten his propeller tangled in the warp and had to be towed in by the harbormaster, and Nora laughed, a real laugh, full and unguarded, and Eamon laughed too, and the evening was easy, the evening was a good evening, the kind of evening that felt, if you did not look at it too closely, exactly like every other evening they had spent in this kitchen, the three of them, the two of them, the forty-four years of evenings that had accumulated like entries in a log, each one recorded, each one stored, each one part of the continuous unbroken record of a life lived in this house on this point beside this tower.

Colleen left at eight. She washed her pot and took it and refused the offer of bread — "You keep it for Patrick" — and she said good night to Nora and then stood on the porch with Eamon, the two of them looking at the water, the buoys invisible in the dark but known, each one in its place, each one marking a trap that Colleen would haul tomorrow at dawn.

"She's good tonight," Colleen said.

"She is."

"You know that doesn't mean anything."

Eamon said nothing.

"I'm not saying it to be cruel," Colleen said. "I'm saying it because you read the good days like they're forecasts. They're not forecasts. They're just days."

"I know that."

"You know it up here," Colleen said, and touched her own forehead. "You don't know it here." She touched her chest. "There's a difference."

"When did you become a philosopher?"

"I was always a philosopher. I just expressed it through lobster."

She went down the porch steps and across the yard to her truck. The truck was a 2009 F-150, rusted at the wheel wells, the bed scarred by trap frames and bait barrels and the general abuse of a working vehicle that had never been washed because washing a lobster truck was like combing the hair of a man going into the ocean. She started the engine and backed out and the headlights swept the yard and the tower and then she was gone, the taillights on the road, and then the road was dark and the yard was dark and the tower was dark and Eamon stood on the porch and listened to the sea and thought about what Colleen had said.

You read the good days like they're forecasts.

She was right. He knew she was right. He read Nora's good days the way he read the barometer — as indicators, as predictors, as signs that the system was stable, that the conditions would hold, that tomorrow would be like today. But the barometer measured pressure, which followed patterns, which could be predicted, and Nora's condition did not follow patterns, or it followed a pattern so large that the daily fluctuations were meaningless, the trend visible only from a distance that he could not achieve because he was in it, he was inside the weather, he was the house on the point that could feel the wind but could not see the storm system on the satellite image, the shape of it, the direction of it, the certainty of it.

He went inside. Nora was in the sitting room, reading. The same book. She was fifty pages further than she had been the night before, and he thought: she is reading. She is engaged. She is following a narrative, tracking characters, holding the thread of a story, and these are cognitive tasks, these require memory, these require the capacity to carry information from one page to the next, one chapter to the next, and she is doing it, and this is a sign, this is a reading, this is data.

But Colleen had said: they're just days.

"I'm going to check the tower," he said.

"You checked it this morning."

"I want to check the gallery drains. There's rain coming tomorrow."

"The forecast says sun."

"The barometer's dropping."

This was true. He had noted it at the last log entry — 30.04, down from 30.06 at noon, the decline slight but real, the kind of decline that meant a system was approaching, not tomorrow perhaps but the day after, and the gallery drains needed to be clear because water on the gallery froze in winter and cracked the decking, and it was not winter and the water would not freeze but the drains needed to be clear regardless because you did not wait for the problem to arrive before preparing for it, you prepared in advance, you maintained in advance, and this was the difference between a keeper and a caretaker, between maintenance and repair — maintenance was the anticipation of failure, repair was the response to it, and Eamon was a maintainer, had always been a maintainer, and the gallery drains would be clear.

He crossed the yard. The tower door was oak, the original door, the iron hardware forged at a foundry in Portland in 1874, the same year the tower was built. He had restored the hinges in 2018, removing the rust with naval jelly and treating the iron with linseed oil and rehanging the door on its pins, which were brass and had not corroded because brass does not corrode the way iron corrodes, because brass has copper in it and copper forms a patina that protects rather than destroys, and this was one of the things that Eamon admired about brass, the way it defended itself, the way its response to the environment was not deterioration but adaptation, the green patina that said: I have been here, I have been exposed, and I am still here.

He opened the door. The tower was dark. He did not turn on the light — the overhead fluorescent that the Coast Guard had installed in 1972 and that still worked because fluorescent bulbs last twenty thousand hours and Eamon had replaced this one only twice in fourteen years. He did not need the light. His feet knew the stairs.

He climbed.

The seventy-two steps were a count he did not keep because the count was in his muscles. Twelve steps to the first landing, the equipment room. Twelve more to the oil room, where the kerosene had been stored before the electrification, the room still smelling faintly of fuel though no fuel had been in it for ninety years, the scent embedded in the brick, ineradicable, a memory held in the walls the way a memory is held in the mind, persistent, independent of use, present long after the purpose has gone.

Twenty-four more steps to the watch room. He paused here. Through the narrow windows he could see the bay, the dark water, the lights of Camden across the water, the running lights of a boat heading south, red and green, port and starboard, and he thought about the thousands of boats that had passed this point in the dark and seen the light and adjusted their course and arrived safely and never thought about the light again because the light was not memorable, the light was functional, the light was the thing that prevented the memorable thing, the disaster, the wreck, the drowning, and you did not remember the absence of disaster, you remembered the disaster itself, and the light's success was its own erasure, and this was the paradox of the lighthouse, the paradox of all prevention, that the better you did your job the more invisible you became.

He climbed the last twenty-four steps. The lantern room. He did not look at the lens. He went directly to the gallery door, a heavy brass door with a marine seal that he had replaced in 2017, and opened it and stepped out into the night.

The gallery was a platform, four feet wide, circling the lantern room, enclosed by a brass railing that was thirty-six inches high, the same railing he had inspected that morning. The decking was cast iron, painted with non-skid marine enamel, perforated with drain holes at regular intervals to prevent water accumulation. He knelt and checked each drain. There were eight. He probed them with a piece of wire he kept in his jacket pocket for this purpose, a six-inch length of stainless steel wire that he had bent into a hook at one end, and he inserted the hook into each drain and cleared the debris — bits of lichen, fragments of bird guano, the residue of salt spray that accumulated and hardened over time into a cement that blocked the drain as effectively as a plug. He cleared all eight. He stood.

The view from the gallery at night was different from the view at dawn. At dawn, the world was revealed. At night, the world was suggested. The bay was a darkness punctuated by lights — the lights of the towns, the lights of the boats, the lights of the buoys flashing their coded sequences, each one a message, each one saying: here, here, here is the danger, here is the channel, here is the way. And the lighthouse, his lighthouse, was dark, its message withdrawn, its code silenced, its contribution to the conversation of lights terminated, and the bay went on without it, the boats navigated, the dangers were known, the channels were marked, and the lighthouse stood on the point in the dark and said nothing.

He looked up. The stars were thick, the Milky Way visible from horizon to horizon, the kind of sky you only got on a point, away from the towns, away from the light pollution that erased the stars the way — the way what erased what. He stopped himself. He was making metaphors. He made metaphors when he was tired, when his defenses were down, when the precise vocabulary of the log and the lighthouse could not contain what he was feeling, and the feeling leaked out in comparisons, in analogies, in the human habit of saying one thing was like another thing when the truth was that nothing was like anything else, each thing was itself, the stars were stars and the disease was the disease and the lighthouse was the lighthouse and his wife was his wife, and none of them were metaphors for the others.

He went inside. He descended the stairs. In the keeper's office he opened the log:

2130. Clear. S 5. Temp 46. Barometer 30.02, falling slowly. Gallery drains cleared. All systems satisfactory.

He closed the log. He went to the house. He locked the door. He checked the windows. Nora was in bed, the light off, her breathing even. He undressed in the dark and got into bed and lay on his back and listened.

The sea on the rocks. The clock in the kitchen. The wind in the eaves. The sounds of the house at night, the sounds he had been hearing for twenty-six years, since they moved to the point in 2000, the sounds that constituted the baseline, the normal, the conditions against which deviation was measured, and tonight the sounds were correct, the baseline was holding, the deviation was zero, and Nora was sleeping and the lighthouse was standing and the lens was clean and the drains were clear and the log was written and the barometer was falling but slowly, and everything was in order, everything was maintained, everything was as it should be.

He slept.

In the night, Nora got up. He heard her — he always heard her, the way a keeper always hears the signal, the way a watch always hears the bell — and he opened his eyes and saw the bathroom light under the door and heard the water run and then the light went off and she came back to bed. She lay down. She was quiet.

"Eamon," she said.

"Yes."

"What time is Patrick coming?"

"Friday. Afternoon."

"I need to make the pie."

"You can make it tomorrow."

"The blueberries need to thaw."

"I'll take them out of the freezer in the morning."

"Will you remember?"

The question hung in the dark room like the sound of the fog signal hangs over the water — present, unavoidable, meaning exactly what it means, no interpretation necessary. She was asking him if he would remember. She was asking him because she was not sure that she would remember, and she needed someone to carry the memory for her, to be the backup system, the redundancy, the second keeper who takes over when the first keeper cannot keep watch.

"I'll remember," he said.

"Thank you," she said, and she turned on her side, away from him, and her breathing slowed, and she slept.

Eamon lay in the dark. He thought about the gallery drains, clear now, ready for the rain that the barometer said was coming. He thought about the log, the entries written, the record maintained. He thought about Colleen's chowder and Nora's bread and the blueberries in the freezer and the pie that would be made tomorrow and the son who was coming on Friday to say the thing that needed to be said in person.

He thought about seventy-two steps.

He had climbed them twice today. He would climb them twice tomorrow. He would climb them the day after that and the day after that, morning and evening, the ascent and the descent, the spiral of iron and stone that connected the ground to the light, the life to the work, the man to the purpose, and the climbing was the thing, the climbing was what made him a keeper, not the lens or the log or the signal but the climbing, the daily physical act of going up, of ascending, of moving from the ground where the life was to the top where the light was, and then returning to the ground, and then going up again, and each time the stairs were the same and each time his body was a little older and each time the view from the top was the same — the bay, the islands, the horizon — and each time it was enough.

Seventy-two steps. He counted them sometimes, in the dark, instead of sheep, the numbers ascending as his consciousness descended, one, two, three, the spiral staircase of sleep, the iron treads growing softer, the rail growing warm under his hand, the lantern room getting closer but never arriving, the light always ahead of him, always one step more, and then he slept, and the house was quiet, and the lighthouse was dark, and the sea was on the rocks, and the barometer fell, slowly, through the night.