Chapter 4: Patrick

Patrick arrived at three in the afternoon on Friday, driving a Subaru wagon that was newer than Colleen's truck but not by much, the kind of car that a marine biologist drove because marine biologists did not make the kind of money that bought new cars, and Patrick had never cared about cars, had never cared about any object except the ones he studied, which were not objects but organisms — phytoplankton, zooplankton, the microscopic life of the ocean that was invisible to anyone who was not looking for it, the way the work of a lighthouse was invisible to anyone who was not at sea in the dark.

Eamon was on the ladder, touching up the northeast corner of the tower where the wind had worn the paint thin, and he saw the car on the road before Patrick could have seen him, the advantage of elevation, of the long view, of being seventy feet above the ground on a ladder braced against a tower that had been standing since Ulysses Grant was president. He set his brush across the paint can, which was nested in the ladder's tray, and descended.

Patrick got out of the car. He was forty-three but he looked younger in the way that thin men look younger, the leanness of him preserving something boyish in the face, the jaw still sharp, the eyes — Nora's eyes, the same blue — still carrying the quality of attention that had characterized him since childhood, the quality of a boy who looked at tide pools the way other boys looked at baseball cards, with a focus so intense it was almost aggressive, a looking that was also a kind of claiming, a taking-into-himself of what he saw.

"Dad," he said.

"Patrick."

They shook hands. They had always shaken hands. Eamon's father had shaken hands with his sons and Eamon shook hands with his, and the handshake was not coldness but formality, the formality of men who felt things deeply and expressed them through the grip of the hand rather than the words of the mouth, and the grip said what needed to be said, and what it said today was: I am here, I am glad you are here, and I am afraid of what you are going to say.

"You're painting," Patrick said.

"Northeast corner. Wind got to it."

"You painted that in September."

"Eight months ago. The salt air does a job on the northeast face. Always has. Coombs painted it three times a year, according to the log."

"Coombs had the government paying for his paint."

"I don't mind paying for paint."

Patrick looked at the tower. He had grown up in this house — not in this house, they had lived in Camden when he was a boy, and then in Rockport, and they had not moved to the point until 2000, when Patrick was seventeen and leaving for college, so he had not grown up here but he had grown up adjacent to here, adjacent to the lighthouse and the bay and his father's obsession with both, and the lighthouse was part of his childhood the way the ocean was part of his childhood, not as a place he lived but as a place his father went, a place that pulled his father away from the dinner table and the living room and the normal architecture of a family and toward the water, always toward the water, and Patrick had followed him because that was what sons did, they followed their fathers toward the water and then one day they kept going, past the father, past the shore, into the open ocean of their own lives.

"Where's Mom?" Patrick said.

"Kitchen. She's been cooking since this morning."

"How is she?"

"It's a good day."

Patrick nodded. The nod was careful, measured, a nod that acknowledged the information without accepting its implications, and Eamon recognized the nod because it was his own nod, the nod he gave when the barometer dropped but the sky was still clear, the nod that said: I have the data, and the data and the evidence do not agree, and I will wait.

They went inside. Nora was at the stove, the chowder she had made from Colleen's recipe, her version of it, with more potato and less cream, and the kitchen was warm and smelled of the chowder and the bread that was cooling on the rack and the blueberry pie that was in the oven, and Nora turned from the stove and saw Patrick and her face opened the way a flower opens, not gradually but all at once, the full expression arriving complete, and she said, "There you are," and she held him and he held her and Eamon stood in the doorway and watched.

"You're thin," Nora said.

"I'm the same as always."

"You're thin. You don't eat."

"I eat. I eat a lot."

"You eat fish. You eat whatever fish you're studying. I know you."

"I study plankton, Mom. I don't eat plankton."

"You would if you could. Sit down. Eat something."

She gave him bread and butter and a bowl of chowder and sat across from him and watched him eat the way she had watched him eat when he was five, with the intensity of a woman who believed that feeding was a moral act, that the preparation of food was a form of love so fundamental that it preceded language, preceded thought, preceded everything except the body's need and the mother's response to it.

Patrick ate. He was hungry, or he ate as though he were hungry, which was the same thing in Nora's kitchen, where the food was so good that hunger was irrelevant, the food creating the appetite rather than the appetite demanding the food.

"This is the best chowder," Patrick said.

"It's Colleen's recipe."

"It's better than Colleen's."

"Don't tell Colleen that."

"I'm going to tell Colleen that."

"You will not. She'll stop bringing us chowder and then what will we do."

"You'll make your own chowder, which is better."

They went on like this, the banter, the familiar exchange, the mother and son performing the ritual of the homecoming, the ritual that was the same every time and that derived its power from its sameness, from the repetition, from the knowledge that this conversation had happened before and would happen again and that each iteration was both unique and identical, the way each wave is unique and identical, the same water, the same shore, the same pattern, but never the same wave.

Eamon watched. He was outside the ritual, as he had always been outside the ritual of Nora and Patrick, not excluded but positioned differently, the way the lighthouse is positioned differently from the shore — on it but not of it, attached but elevated, seeing the pattern from above rather than from within. He had always been the observer in the family. Nora had been the participant, the engager, the one who entered the child's world and inhabited it, who played the games and read the stories and attended the plays and the concerts and the science fairs, who was present in the way that presence requires — fully, bodily, without reservation. Eamon had been present in a different way, the way a lighthouse is present — constant, visible, structural, but not interactive, not warm, not the thing you went to when you were afraid or happy or confused but the thing you saw from a distance that told you where you were.

He knew this about himself. He had known it for a long time, since Patrick was a teenager and had said, during an argument about something Eamon could no longer remember, "You're like the lighthouse, Dad — you're always there but you never come down," and the sentence had struck him with the force of a wave hitting a hull, the cold shock of truth arriving without warning, and he had said nothing because there was nothing to say because Patrick was right.

They ate dinner at six. The chowder, the bread, the pie. Patrick talked about his work — a study of phytoplankton blooms in the Gulf of Maine, the way the warming water was changing the timing and composition of the blooms, the cascade effects on the food web, the copepods that fed on the plankton and the herring that fed on the copepods and the whales that fed on the herring, the whole system linked, interconnected, each organism dependent on every other organism, so that a change in the temperature of the water at the surface altered the life at the bottom, altered the life at the top, altered everything, and Patrick talked about this with the passion that Eamon recognized because it was the same passion he felt for the lighthouse, the passion of a person who had found the thing that organized their attention and gave it purpose.

"The blooms are shifting earlier," Patrick said. "Two weeks earlier than twenty years ago. The copepods haven't shifted. They're still on the old schedule. So there's a mismatch — the food is there but the eaters aren't ready for it, and by the time they're ready, the food is gone."

"A timing problem," Eamon said.

"A timing problem. The whole system depends on timing, and the timing is off, and nobody can fix it because nobody controls the timing. The ocean controls the timing. The temperature controls the timing. And the temperature is changing and the timing is changing with it and the organisms can't adapt fast enough."

Nora was listening. She was following the conversation, her eyes moving between Patrick and Eamon, her head tilting in the way it tilted when she was engaged, when the information was interesting and her mind was working on it, making the connections, seeing the patterns, and Eamon watched her follow the conversation and thought: this is a good evening. This is an evening for the log. This is an evening when everything works.

After dinner, Patrick said, "Let's walk."

"It's getting dark," Nora said.

"We won't go far. Just to the rocks."

"I'll clean up," Nora said, and the way she said it — without protest, without the suggestion that she join them — told Eamon that she knew, that she had known since Patrick called on Wednesday, that she understood what was coming the way she understood everything, with the clear-eyed comprehension of a woman who had spent her life reading the unspoken, the unstated, the things that children and husbands and fathers communicated not through words but through silences, through pauses, through the decision to walk to the rocks at dusk.

They walked. The path from the house to the rocks was granite, the same granite that the tower was built from, the bedrock of the point exposed by a hundred and fifty years of foot traffic and weather, the surface worn smooth and pale, and they walked it in silence, father and son, the lighthouse behind them and the water ahead, and the light was going, the sky above the Camden Hills turning from blue to violet to the deep indigo that preceded darkness, and the air was cool, the temperature dropping the way it dropped on the coast when the sun went behind the hills, the land losing heat faster than the water, the air flowing from land to sea, the evening offshore breeze that the old sailors called the land wind and that smelled of spruce and moss and the particular sweetness of the Maine coast at the end of a warm day.

They sat on the rocks. The rocks were granite, flat-topped, angled toward the water, the same rocks that the surf had been working since the last ice age, and the surface was rough with barnacles and smooth with wear and cold under their hands, and the water was fifteen feet below them, rising and falling against the base of the ledge, the sound of it steady, rhythmic, the sound that was not silence but was what silence sounded like on a point in Penobscot Bay.

Patrick said, "I talked to Dr. Mehta."

"When?"

"Last week. I called him."

"You called Nora's doctor."

"I called Mom's doctor. Yes."

Eamon looked at the water. A cormorant was diving near the ledge, the black body disappearing and reappearing, the bird working the rocks for fish, and he watched it because watching it was easier than looking at his son.

"He told you about the last appointment," Eamon said.

"He told me what he told you. That she's progressed. That the medication is helping but not as much as before. That the — that the trajectory is what it is."

"The trajectory."

"His word."

"I know the trajectory, Patrick. I live with the trajectory."

"I know you do. That's what I want to talk about."

The cormorant surfaced with a fish. It tossed the fish in the air and caught it headfirst and swallowed it and dove again, the motion efficient, practiced, the motion of an organism that had been catching fish this way for sixty million years and would go on catching fish this way until the fish were gone or the cormorant was gone, and neither of them was going anywhere, not yet, not this evening.

"Dr. Mehta mentioned a facility," Patrick said.

The word arrived the way a wave arrives at a hull — the anticipation of it almost worse than the impact, the seeing of it coming, the knowing of what it will feel like, and then the feeling of it, which was different from the knowing, which was physical rather than mental, which was in the chest rather than the head.

"He mentioned it to me too," Eamon said.

"What did you say?"

"I said no."

"Why?"

"Because she's my wife and she lives in my house and I take care of her."

"Dad."

"That's my answer."

"That's not an answer. That's a position."

"What's the difference?"

"An answer responds to the question. A position ignores it."

Eamon looked at his son. Patrick was sitting on the rock with his knees drawn up and his arms around them, the posture of a boy, the posture he had adopted on these same rocks when he was seventeen and looking at the water and thinking about college and the future and the ocean and all the things he would study and discover and become, and Eamon had sat beside him then and said nothing because saying nothing was what he did, it was his contribution, his form of support, the steady silent presence that said: I am here, I am not going anywhere, you can go as far as you need to go and I will be here when you come back.

"The question," Eamon said, "is whether your mother is safe."

"The question is whether your mother is cared for."

"She is cared for. I care for her."

"You care for the lighthouse," Patrick said, and the sentence was not an accusation but a description, a statement of fact delivered with the precision of a scientist presenting data, and the data was accurate and the description was correct and Eamon could not argue with it because it was true.

"I care for both," he said.

"You can't. Not forever. Not as she gets worse."

"She's not worse. She's having good days. Today was a good day."

"Today she asked me three times what I wanted to eat. Three times in an hour. And each time she acted like it was the first time she'd asked."

Eamon said nothing. He had not been in the kitchen for those three times. He had been on the ladder, painting the northeast corner, forty feet above the ground, maintaining the tower while his wife repeated herself in the kitchen below, and he had not known, and not knowing was its own kind of failure, the failure of the keeper who is in the tower when the danger is in the house.

"She forgot the word for colander," Patrick said. "She was holding it and she looked at it and she said, 'the thing with the holes.' She's used a colander every day for forty years."

"People forget words."

"Not like this."

"You're not here every day. You don't see the full picture."

"That's exactly my point," Patrick said. "I'm not here every day. You are. And being here every day means you don't see the change because the change is gradual. It's like — it's like the blooms. The shift is two weeks over twenty years. You can't see it day to day. You can only see it in the data. And the data, Dad — the data is clear."

The water rose and fell against the rocks. The cormorant was gone. The sky was dark now, the stars appearing, the same stars that Eamon had seen from the gallery an hour ago, the same stars that Josiah Coombs had seen from the gallery a hundred and fifty years ago, and the stars did not care about the conversation on the rocks, the stars were indifferent to the question of care and the question of capacity and the question of what a man owed his wife and what a son owed his mother and whether those debts were the same debt or different debts.

"What are you proposing?" Eamon said.

"There's a place in Rockland. Harbor Hill. It's — it's good. I visited it. It's a memory care facility. It's not a nursing home. It's not — it's not what you're imagining."

"You don't know what I'm imagining."

"I'm imagining what you're imagining because I imagined it too. I imagined a place with linoleum floors and fluorescent lights and people in wheelchairs staring at a television. That's not what this is. This is — it's a house, basically. A big house. With staff. With people who know what they're doing. People who are trained for this."

"I'm trained for this."

"You're trained to maintain a lighthouse."

"I'm trained to take care of things."

"She's not a thing, Dad."

The sentence landed. It landed the way Patrick's sentence about the lighthouse had landed when he was a teenager — you're always there but you never come down — with the precision of a boy who had inherited his mother's ability to see and his father's inability to look away from what he saw.

Eamon stood. He stood because sitting was no longer possible, because the rocks were cold and the conversation was cold and he needed to be vertical, he needed to be standing, the way he stood on the gallery, the way he stood at the helm, the posture of a man who was in command of something even if the something was only himself.

"I'll think about it," he said.

"Will you? Or will you say you'll think about it and then not think about it?"

"I'll think about it."

"Talk to Mom about it."

"I'll talk to your mother."

"She has a say in this. She should have a say while she can still — while she can still say."

The word he had not said hung between them, the word say standing in for the word he meant, the future tense of loss, the time that was coming when Nora would not be able to say, would not be able to choose, would not be able to participate in the decisions that were being made about her life because her life would have narrowed to the point where the decisions were no longer hers, and this was what Patrick was saying without saying it — act now, while there is still a now, while the person you are deciding for is still a person who can decide.

"I know," Eamon said.

They stood on the rocks. The bay was dark. The lighthouse was dark. The lights of Camden were across the water, steady, domestic, the lights of houses where families were having conversations that were not this conversation, where the word facility had not been spoken, where the evening was ordinary, and Eamon envied them with a ferocity that surprised him because he was not a man who envied, he was a man who endured, and endurance did not admit envy because envy was a comparison and endurance was solitary, endurance was the lighthouse on the point taking the weather without reference to any other structure.

"Let's go in," Eamon said. "Your mother made pie."

They walked back. The path was dark but their feet knew it. The kitchen light was on, the warm yellow square of it visible from the rocks, the window a beacon, the house a lighthouse, the woman inside it the light, and they walked toward it, father and son, and neither of them spoke, and the silence between them was not the silence of anger or the silence of agreement but the silence of two men who had said what they needed to say and were now carrying the weight of it back to the house, back to the kitchen, back to the woman who had made a pie and was waiting for them to eat it.

Nora had set three plates. Three forks. Three glasses of milk, because blueberry pie required milk, this was one of her rules, one of the hundreds of small rules that constituted her domestic philosophy, and the rules were still intact, the rules were among the last things to go, the deep grammar of a life so thoroughly lived that the habits persisted even as the consciousness that had formed them receded.

"How was the walk?" she said.

"Good," Patrick said. "Cold."

"It's always cold on the rocks. Your father forgets that people who don't live on a point get cold."

"I don't forget," Eamon said. "I just don't get cold."

"You don't get cold because you're made of the same material as the lighthouse. Granite and brass."

She cut the pie. The blueberries were dark, almost black, the color of them intense against the golden crust, and the smell of them filled the kitchen, the smell of August preserved in the freezer and released in June, the smell of the past arriving in the present, and Nora served the slices and poured the milk and they ate, the three of them, at the pine table in the kitchen of the keeper's house on the point in Penobscot Bay, and the pie was perfect, the fruit sweet and tart and the crust flaking under the fork, and Nora watched them eat it with the satisfaction of a woman who had done what she set out to do, who had planned a menu and executed it and fed her son and her husband and the feeding was complete.

Patrick stayed until Sunday. On Saturday, Eamon took him up the tower. They climbed the seventy-two steps together, Patrick ahead, Eamon behind, and Eamon watched his son's back as they climbed and thought about the times they had climbed these stairs before, when Patrick was a boy, when the stairs were an adventure, when the lantern room was a castle and the gallery was a parapet and the lens was a jewel, and the boy had pressed his face to the prisms and looked at the world through them, the world broken into colors, fragmented, reassembled, and the boy had said, "Everything looks different through the glass," and Eamon had said, "Everything is different through the glass. That's the point."

In the lantern room, Patrick stood before the lens. He had not been up here in two years. He touched the brass housing the way he touched the specimens in his lab — carefully, with respect, with the awareness that he was touching something that had a history longer than his own.

"You keep it beautiful," he said.

"I keep it clean."

"Same thing."

"Not the same thing. Beauty is incidental. Cleanliness is functional."

"The light doesn't work, Dad. There's no function."

"There's function. The function is maintenance. The function is keeping it ready."

"Ready for what?"

Eamon looked through the lantern room windows at the bay, at the water, at the islands, at the horizon where the sky met the sea in a line so clean it looked drawn, and he did not answer because the answer was too large for the question, the answer was not about the lens or the light or the lighthouse but about the principle that underlay all of them, the principle that readiness was not contingent on use, that maintenance was not contingent on function, that the act of keeping something in working order was its own justification, its own purpose, its own reward, and if you waited for the crisis to justify the maintenance, the crisis would find you unprepared, and the maintenance would have been meaningless, and the keeping would have failed.

"Ready," he said. "Just ready."

Patrick left on Sunday afternoon. Nora packed him bread and pie in a cooler, the same cooler she had used to transport the sourdough starter twenty years ago, and she hugged him on the porch and told him to eat properly and he said he would and they both knew he would not and the exchange was the ritual and the ritual was the love and the love was the thing that persisted, the thing that did not erode, the thing that was not subject to the weather or the disease or the progression that Dr. Mehta called a trajectory.

Eamon shook Patrick's hand. The grip said what it always said.

Patrick drove away. The Subaru went down the road and turned onto the highway and disappeared, and Eamon and Nora stood on the porch and watched the place where it had been, the empty road, the absence.

"He wants to put me in a home," Nora said.

Eamon turned to her. She was looking at the road, not at him, her face calm, composed, the face of a woman who had been a teacher for thirty-one years and had learned to deliver information without editorializing it.

"He mentioned a place in Rockland," Eamon said.

"I know. He told me."

"When?"

"This morning. While you were in the tower."

Eamon said nothing. Patrick had told Nora. Patrick had gone to Nora directly, had said the thing to her that needed to be said to her, and he had done it while Eamon was in the tower, while Eamon was seventy-two steps above the ground cleaning a lens that did not need to shine, and the thought of it — of Patrick sitting with Nora in the kitchen, saying the word facility, while Eamon polished glass — produced in him a feeling that was not anger and not shame but something between them, something that had no name in the vocabulary of the lighthouse, no column in the log, no instrument on the wall.

"What did you say?" Eamon said.

"I said I'd think about it."

"And what do you think?"

Nora looked at him. The late afternoon sun was on her face, the light that came over the Camden Hills at this hour, warm and golden, and her eyes were clear, the blue of them present, focused, and she said, "I think I'm standing on the porch of my house looking at the bay and I know where I am and I know who you are and I know what day it is and I know my son just drove away in a car that needs washing, and I think that's enough. I think today that's enough."

She went inside. Eamon stood on the porch. He stood on the porch until the sun was gone and the bay was dark and the first stars appeared and the lighthouse tower was a shadow against the sky, and then he went to the tower and climbed the seventy-two steps and sat at the desk and opened the log and wrote:

1930. Clear. SW 8-12. Temp 51. Barometer 30.08. Visibility unlimited. P. Bryce departed 1500. All systems satisfactory.

All systems satisfactory.

He closed the log. He sat at the desk for a long time, in the dark, in the tower, and then he descended the stairs and crossed the yard and entered the house, where his wife was sitting in the chair by the window, in the dark, not reading, not sleeping, just sitting, looking at the place where the bay was, the dark water she could not see but knew was there, and he sat in the chair beside her and they sat together in the dark and did not speak and the house settled around them, the old house, the keeper's house, and the sea was on the rocks and the clock was in the kitchen and the night was on the point and the light in the tower was dark and the woman in the chair was his wife, his wife, and she was here, and he was here, and for now — for now — that was enough.