Chapter 7: The Summer Light

The solstice came on a Wednesday, and Eamon noted it in the log the way the keepers before him had noted it — not as a celebration or a marker but as a fact, a datum, the point on the calendar when the light was longest and after which it would shorten, one minute at a time, two minutes, the decline accelerating through July and August until the equinox in September when the light and the dark were equal and then the dark would win, the dark would keep winning until December, and then the light would begin its return, and the whole cycle would start again, as it had started again for as long as there had been a planet tilted on its axis, which was to say: always, which was to say: longer than lighthouses, longer than keepers, longer than the logs that recorded the conditions under which the cycle occurred.

0443. Sunrise. Summer solstice. Clear. SW 3-5. Temp 59. Barometer 30.18 steady. Visibility unlimited. Longest day.

He had added "Longest day" as though the log needed the annotation, as though the date alone were insufficient, and he looked at the two words and considered crossing them out — the log was not for commentary, the log was for data — but he left them because they were true and because the truth of them extended beyond the astronomical fact, beyond the sixteen hours and two minutes of daylight that the solstice provided at this latitude, into the other meaning, the personal meaning, the meaning that had to do with Nora and the summer and the days that were good and the knowledge that the good days, like the long days, would shorten.

The summer had been kind. June had been clear more often than not, the fog staying offshore, the bay open and blue and busy with boats, and Nora had been herself more often than not, the episodes — the word Dr. Mehta used, the clinical word that reduced the terror to a category — infrequent, manageable, brief. She had forgotten where she put her glasses twice. She had called Colleen by her sister's name once, her sister Margaret, who lived in Vermont and who looked nothing like Colleen but who occupied a similar place in Nora's architecture, the category of women-who-are-not-family-but-are-close, and the substitution was a category error, not a personal one, the filing system mislabeling a folder rather than losing its contents, and Eamon had noted it and said nothing and Nora had corrected herself immediately, the correction arriving with a small laugh and an apology that was more embarrassment than alarm, and Colleen had said, "Margaret's better-looking," and they had moved on.

But the summer was turning. He could feel it the way he felt the barometer, the subtle shift in pressure that preceded the change in weather, and the change in Nora was like the change in the atmosphere — not visible, not dramatic, not the sudden storm that announced itself with wind and cloud and the sharp drop in pressure, but the slow slide, the gradual softening, the almost imperceptible transition from one state to another that you could not pinpoint, could not say here, this was the moment, because the moment was not a moment but a process, the way dawn was not a moment but a process, the dark becoming less dark becoming gray becoming light, and you could not say when the night ended and the day began because the ending and the beginning were the same thing, were happening simultaneously, were one continuous event that language divided into two because language needed boundaries and the world did not.

He had noticed it in the bread. Nora still made bread every other day, still maintained the starter, still measured by weight, still shaped the loaves with the sure hands that had shaped them for twenty years. But twice in the past week she had forgotten the salt. The bread had risen, had baked, had come out of the oven looking correct, smelling correct, and when Eamon had eaten a slice he had tasted the absence, the flatness, the missing dimension, and he had said nothing and Nora had eaten a slice and said, "I forgot the salt," and he had said, "It's fine," and it was fine, the bread was edible, the bread was food, but it was not her bread, it was not the bread she had been making for twenty years, it was bread with something missing, and the something was small, was a teaspoon, was a weight on a scale, but the absence of it changed everything, the way the absence of any small essential thing changes everything, the way the absence of a fuse disables an amplifier, the way the absence of a light changes a coast.

He had not told Patrick. Patrick called every Sunday and asked how Nora was and Eamon said "Good" or "Fine" or "The same," and these were not lies exactly but they were not the truth either, they were the truth compressed, the truth run through the format of the log, the data reduced to a single word that captured the category without capturing the detail, and the detail was where the change was, the detail was where the salt was missing, and the detail did not fit in a phone call, did not fit in the word "Fine," did not fit in anything except the continuous, daily, moment-by-moment observation that only a person who lived with Nora could perform, and Eamon was that person, and the observation was his, and he held it the way the log held the weather, as a record, as a duty, as the keeper's watch.

The solstice day was warm. Seventy-one degrees by noon, a temperature that constituted a heat wave on the coast of Maine, where seventy-one degrees in late June was as warm as August in other places, and the bay was flat, windless, the surface polished, the lobster boats leaving wakes that held their shape for minutes, the water so calm that the wakes were records, histories, the path of each boat inscribed on the surface and slowly, slowly dissolving, the water closing over the record the way time closed over everything, but slowly, and while the record lasted it was there, visible, legible, a line drawn on the water that said: something passed here, something moved through this space, and you can see where it went.

Eamon painted the gallery railing. He had sanded it two days ago, working by hand with 220-grit paper, removing the old paint down to the brass, and today he applied the new coat, the marine enamel, working with a two-inch brush, loading the bristles and drawing them along the rail in long, even strokes, the paint going on thin, covering but not obscuring the metal beneath, and the painting was meditation, as always, the brush moving and the mind going where it went, and today it went to the bay below him, to the water, to the boats, to the schooner that was anchored off the point with its sails furled and its passengers on deck eating lunch, and he thought about the passengers and what they saw when they looked at the lighthouse, whether they saw a working thing or a dead thing, a lighthouse or a monument, and whether the distinction mattered.

From the gallery he could see the keeper's house below, the white clapboard, the green shutters, the porch where the Adirondack chairs sat facing the water, and he could see Nora in the garden. She had a garden on the south side of the house, a small plot enclosed by a fence that Eamon had built from cedar posts and wire mesh to keep the deer out, and she grew tomatoes and beans and lettuce and herbs — basil and thyme and rosemary, the rosemary in a pot that she brought inside in October because rosemary did not survive the Maine winter, and the garden was her domain, her territory within the territory of the point, the place where she maintained things, where she performed her own version of the keeper's work, the daily attention, the watering, the weeding, the monitoring for pests and disease, the constant vigilance that gardening required and that gardening rewarded with food, with growth, with the tangible evidence that attention produced results.

He watched her move among the tomato plants. She was tying them to stakes, the twine in her left hand, the plant in her right, the motion sure, practiced, the motion of a woman who had been gardening for decades and who knew the tomato plant the way Eamon knew the lighthouse — not abstractly but physically, through the hands, through the feel of the stem between the fingers, the resistance of the twine, the angle of the tie, tight enough to support but not so tight as to constrict, and the judgment was in the hands, was automatic, was the kind of knowledge that resided not in the mind but in the body, and the body remembered, the body maintained, even when the mind began to let go.

He finished the railing and came down. He cleaned his brushes and stowed the paint and went to the garden. Nora was on her knees in the dirt, weeding. The weeds came up easily in the warm soil, the roots shallow, the plants small, and she pulled them with the efficiency of a woman who had been pulling weeds for longer than some of the weeds had been species, and she piled them beside the row and they wilted in the sun.

"The railing looks good," she said.

"You can see it from here?"

"I can always see the lighthouse from here. That's the point of a lighthouse."

He knelt beside her. He did not garden. Gardening was Nora's work, and they had divided the world this way early in the marriage, not formally but organically, each of them gravitating toward the work that suited them, Eamon toward the mechanical and the structural, Nora toward the living and the growing, and the division was not rigid — he cooked sometimes, she painted sometimes — but it was real, and they respected it the way they respected each other's silence and each other's need for it.

"I was thinking we could walk the point tonight," he said.

"Tonight?"

"After dinner. It's the longest day."

"Is it?"

"The solstice. June twenty-first."

"I know what the solstice is, Eamon. I taught third grade for thirty-one years. I taught the solstice every year."

"I know."

"I made a model. With a lamp and a globe. The children would tilt the globe and watch the shadow change, and they understood it, they understood why the days got longer and shorter, they understood it better than most adults because children accept mechanics. They don't ask why the earth is tilted. They accept that it is and they work from there."

"Do you still have the model?"

"It's in the attic. The globe with the axis. And the lamp — a desk lamp, not your brass lamp, a modern one with a flexible neck."

"We could take it out."

"Take it out for what? Who am I going to teach?"

The question was not plaintive. It was practical. She was sixty-nine years old and she had retired from teaching eight years ago and the retirement had been voluntary, or voluntary enough — she had felt the first forgetfulness, the first lapses, and she had decided that a teacher who could not remember a student's name was not a teacher who should be teaching, and she had retired before the decision was made for her, the way Eamon would have retired from the Coast Guard before they could retire him, the way any person who valued competence above employment would choose to leave rather than be found inadequate, and the dignity of the choice was important to her and Eamon understood this because dignity was important to him too, the dignity of maintenance, the dignity of the voluntary work that no one required and that he performed to the standard of the required work, without accommodation, without excuse, without the allowance that the world made for things that were no longer official.

"Nobody," he said. "You don't have to teach anybody."

"Then why would I take it out?"

"I don't know. I thought you might want to see it."

"I don't want to see it," she said, and the sharpness in her voice was new, or not new but more frequent, the impatience that surfaced when she felt the edges of the disease pressing against the walls of her competence, when a question felt like a probe, a test, an instrument inserted into the conversation to take a reading, and she was tired of being read, tired of being measured, tired of being the barometer that everyone checked each morning for signs of change.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't be sorry. Just don't ask me to look at things I used to use. I know what I used to do. I don't need the artifacts."

He weeded beside her in silence. The garden was warm, the soil dark, the plants bright, the beans climbing the poles in their spirals, the tomatoes thickening on the vines, the lettuce spreading in its rows, and the work was simple and the silence was simple and the afternoon passed the way the afternoon passed on the coast of Maine in late June, slowly, broadly, the sun taking its time on its longest arc, and the shadows grew but slowly, and the light held, and the light held, and the light held.

They ate dinner on the porch. Eamon grilled fish — haddock that Colleen had brought, filleted on her boat, the flesh still smelling of the ocean rather than of the fish counter, and he grilled it over charcoal with lemon and butter and served it with Nora's bread, the bread that had salt today, the bread that was correct, and they ate on the porch in the long light and the bay was golden and the islands were dark against the gold and the schooner had sailed away and the lobster boats were at their moorings and the bay was empty and full at the same time, empty of boats and full of light, and the light was the solstice light, the light that lasted, the light that lingered.

"Let's walk," Nora said.

They walked the point. The path was granite, the bedrock of the coast, the same rock that the tower was built from, and it led from the house along the ridge of the point to the end, where the rock dropped to the water and the barnacles began and the rockweed lay in its sheets and the tide pools held their small worlds — the periwinkles and the sea urchins and the crabs and the anemones, the organisms that Patrick had studied as a boy, that had drawn him to biology, that had shown him the life that existed in the margin between the land and the sea, the life that was neither terrestrial nor marine but both, the life that endured the tides, the exposure, the cold, the heat, the battering of the waves, and survived, and persisted, and was there every day, in every pool, on every rock, regardless of whether anyone looked.

They walked slowly. Eamon adjusted his pace to Nora's pace, which was slower than it had been a year ago, the steps shorter, the footing more careful, the body conserving energy, conserving balance, the gait of a person who was aware that the ground could not be trusted, that the rock could be uneven, that a misstep could mean a fall, and a fall could mean — could mean many things, none of them good, and the awareness of the risk had changed the walk from a stroll to a navigation, and Eamon walked beside her and did not take her arm because she had not asked him to take her arm and she would ask when she was ready and until then the not-asking was its own form of strength and he would not undermine it.

They reached the end of the point. The rock sloped down to the water, and they sat on the flat ledge where they always sat, the ledge that was worn smooth by their sitting and by the sitting of everyone who had sat there before them, the keepers and the keepers' wives and the keepers' children and the visitors and the lovers and the fishermen who had rested on this rock and looked at this water and seen the same horizon, the same islands, the same sky, the same endless repetition of the sea meeting the land, the land meeting the sky, the sky meeting the sea.

The sun was low. It was eight-thirty and the sun was still above the Camden Hills, the solstice sun, the sun that would not set until eight-forty-seven, and the light it cast was the light that photographers called golden hour but that was not an hour, was two hours at this latitude on this day, the light warm and horizontal, the shadows long, the colors saturated, the bay deep blue and the islands deep green and the sky a gradient from blue to gold to the red that was building at the horizon where the sun would set.

"This is my favorite time," Nora said.

"The solstice?"

"The evening. The light in the evening. When everything is — when everything is still here."

He heard the emphasis. Still here. The word still carrying its double meaning, the meaning of yet and the meaning of unmoving, the reassurance and the qualification, the presence and the tentativeness of the presence, and he understood that she was talking about the light and also about herself, that the evening light and the evening of her mind were the same thing to her, both beautiful, both fading, both still here but aware of the not-here that was coming, and the beauty was intensified by the awareness, the light made more golden by the knowledge of the dark.

"Tell me about the first time you saw this point," she said.

"You were there."

"Tell me anyway."

"It was 1998. We drove up from New London. Patrick was in the back seat, asleep. You were navigating. You had a paper map — this was before GPS, before everyone had screens — and you were reading the map and telling me to turn and I was turning and we were looking for the lighthouse, and we came around the bend in the road and there it was."

"There it was," she said.

"The tower. White against the sky. And the bay behind it. And the rocks. And you said — "

"I know what I said."

"You said, 'That's where we're going to live.'"

"I said that."

"And we did."

"Two years later."

"Two years later. I retired and we moved here and the lighthouse was still active, the Coast Guard was still maintaining it, and I would go up and watch the keeper — Hank Brosius, the last Coast Guard keeper before they automated it fully — and I would watch him clean the lens and check the signal and write the log, and I thought: that is the job. That is the only job. Everything else is noise."

"Everything else is noise," Nora repeated, but she was not repeating for emphasis, she was repeating because the phrase had caught in her mind the way a phrase catches in a song, the hook, the refrain, the line that the mind loops because the looping is how the mind processes significance, and the significance of the phrase was not its meaning but its truth, the truth that Eamon had discovered and Nora had understood and they had both lived by, the truth that the essential work was simple and daily and repetitive and invisible and the world was full of things that seemed important but were not, and the lighthouse was the antidote to all of them, the lighthouse was the thing that said: this matters, this here, this light, this work, this daily climbing of the stairs, this daily cleaning of the lens, this daily writing of the log, this is the work, and everything else is noise.

The sun touched the Camden Hills. The bottom edge of it flattened against the ridge, the shape distorting as the atmosphere bent the light, the same principle as the Fresnel lens — light bending when it passed through a denser medium — and the sun was not round but oblong, not golden but orange, not setting but being swallowed, the hills taking the light the way the sea took the land, the way the disease took the memory, gradually, from the bottom up, the foundations going first, the structure following, and the light that remained was the light at the top, the last light, the light that was still there, still shining, still above the line.

"I can feel it changing," Nora said.

He did not ask what. He did not need to ask. He sat on the rock beside his wife and looked at the sunset and felt what she felt, the change, the turning, the solstice, the pivot point after which the days would shorten and the light would diminish and the summer would become the fall and the fall would become the winter and the cycle would continue, as cycles continue, as the earth turns and the light changes and the weather changes and the sea changes and nothing stays and everything stays and the staying and the going are the same motion, seen from different distances.

"I know," he said.

"I don't mean the season."

"I know."

She leaned against him. Her shoulder against his shoulder, the weight of her, the warmth of her, the physical fact of her body beside his body on a rock on a point in Penobscot Bay on the longest day of the year, and the sun was half below the hills now and the light was going and the bay was changing from gold to bronze to the deep purple-gray that preceded darkness, and the lighthouse tower was a silhouette above them, the keeper's house a shape below, and the world was contracting, the visible narrowing, the horizon darkening, and the stars would come and the dark would come and the night would come, as it came every night, as it came regardless of the solstice, regardless of the longest day, the dark coming because the dark always came, the dark coming because the earth turned, and the turning was not malice but mechanics, and the mechanics were the mechanics, and the keepers accepted the mechanics and lit the light.

But the light was not lit. The lighthouse was dark. The Fresnel lens caught the last of the sunset and refracted it and the colors flared in the lantern room and then the sun was gone and the colors died and the lens was dark and the tower was dark and the night came.

"Let's go in," Eamon said.

They walked back. The path was darker now, the rock less visible, and Nora reached for his arm and he gave it, his left arm, the arm she always took, and her hand settled into the crook of his elbow the way it had settled a thousand times, the grip familiar, the weight of her hand familiar, the pace they walked together familiar, and they walked to the house in the dark, the house with the kitchen light on, the house with the clock ticking, the house with the bread on the counter and the garden beside it and the tower above it, and they went inside and the screen door closed behind them and the night was on the point and the bay was dark and the lighthouse was dark and the keeper and his wife were home.

He went to the tower at ten. He climbed the seventy-two steps in the dark, his hand on the rail, and in the keeper's office he lit the brass lamp and sat at the desk and opened the log and wrote by the warm yellow light that moved on the page, on the pencil, on his hands:

2200. Clear. Calm. Temp 56. Barometer 30.16. Visibility unlimited. Summer solstice. Sunset 2047. All systems satisfactory. Gallery railing painted — first coat. Fog signal tested — satisfactory. Lens clean.

He looked at the entry. He looked at the lamp. He looked at the log, the pages of it, the years of it, the century and a half of entries that recorded the conditions under which the lighthouse had operated, the conditions under which the keepers had lived, and the entries were uniform, were consistent, were the same data in the same format year after year, decade after decade, and the consistency was the point, the consistency was the record, the consistency was the evidence that the work continued, that the maintenance was performed, that the keeper climbed the stairs and cleaned the lens and sounded the signal and wrote the log, and the writing was the last act of the day, the final entry, the notation that closed the watch, and the watch was closed and the day was done and the longest day was over.

He blew out the lamp. He descended the stairs. He crossed the yard. He went into the house. The kitchen was dark. The clock was ticking. Nora was in bed.

He stood in the kitchen for a moment, in the dark, listening to the clock, the tick and the tock, the pendulum swinging, the time passing, and outside the window the bay was dark and the stars were out and the lighthouse was dark and the night was the solstice night, the shortest night, and after this the nights would lengthen, one minute at a time, two minutes, the dark expanding, and the expansion would bring the fog and the fog would bring the fall and the fall would bring the winter and the winter would bring the cold and the short days and the long nights and the storms and the ice and the decision that was coming, the decision that he was not ready to make, the decision that the longest day had held at bay the way the light held the dark at bay, not permanently, not finally, but for a time, for this time, for the length of this day, which was the longest, which was the most the light could give, and which was over.

He went to bed. Nora was sleeping. He lay beside her and listened to her breathe, the regular rhythm of it, the two-second inhale and the three-second exhale, the pattern as steady as the fog signal, as reliable as the pendulum, as faithful as the tide, and he lay in the dark and listened and the listening was the keeping and the keeping was the love and the love was the light and the light was the longest it would be and the light was ending and the dark was beginning and he listened, and he listened, and he kept watch.