The Lightkeepers. Abby Geni
to believe that anything can exist beyond that cold edge.
Through the window, I saw that Galen and Forest were on alert. Dressed in their typical, ludicrous gear—waterproof pants, bright orange jackets, hats with earflaps—they were heading toward East Landing. I knew the drill. Captain Joe would approach as close as he dared. One wrong turn, and the ferry would find itself torn apart on the jagged cliffs. Galen and Forest would lower the Billy Pugh. Captain Joe would load it up with our groceries, toilet paper, and toothpaste. Galen and Forest would respond by sending back our outgoing mail. In truth, the whole thing reminded me a bit of space travel. Captain Joe would blast off from his native soil, his cargo hold stocked with supplies for the crew at the space station. The journey from California could take as long as six hours each way. Galen and Forest would meet him at the boundary line, where the crane would bridge the empty air. At any moment, something could go wrong. Someone could be injured, or worse.
Captain Joe is not the first ferryman to service the islands. I have recently discovered that there were others before him—many others. Most of them quit the moment they found easier work. A few fled after being hurt on the job; broken bones and concussions were common. One drowned. Five years back.
Our oceanic view is the most dangerous stretch of water on the Pacific coast. In places, the sea is only fifty feet deep. The tides sweep in and out at a quick, breathless eight knots. Powerful currents wind through the ocean with their own internal logic, like rivers carving banks into water, rather than earth. There are monstrous waves. Boats slosh and tumble like marshmallows in cocoa stirred by a spoon.
Soon Captain Joe was on his way home. Galen and Forest headed back toward the cabin, loaded down with boxes of groceries, tampons, batteries, and all the mail that had been piling up for us in the post office in San Francisco. The ferry motored smoothly away from the shore. I watched it go with a sense of desolation. The emotion passed quickly, but for a moment I felt like an abandoned child. Watching a parent retreat into the distance. Alone in a hostile and unfamiliar place.
On board that ferry was a postcard for my father. I had been on the islands for nearly two months, and during that time, I had prepared only one piece of mail to send to the mainland. On it I had written, Proof of life.
This has become a running joke between Dad and me—the cryptic postcard. (He doesn’t know about the letters I save for you, of course.) My postcards to my father tend to be as brief as telegrams. I will amuse myself by communicating my meaning in as few words as possible. 110° in the shade, I wrote during my month-long stint in the Sahara. From Paris, where I was sent to photograph the piles of skulls in the catacombs beneath the city, I wrote, Beaucoup de dead people. And when I was living in the arctic circle, throughout the eerie summer months, when the sun neither set nor rose—when it skimmed the horizon in bewildering revolutions, drifting higher and lower like a balloon caught in the breeze—I wrote simply, Bright.
Dad has gotten into the spirit himself, omitting unnecessary verbs and articles. It is a game we play, trying to top each other. Office a madhouse, he will write. Overworked. Printer ink dangerously low.
I am aware that my relationship with my father is unusual. Home has been a constant point on the compass since my childhood. For my work, I have bounced around the globe, rootless and unmoored. A month in Costa Rica. Three weeks in Taiwan. Half a year in Australia. Sleeping on couches and bare floors. Letting my stomach tie itself in knots over the local cuisine. Photographing birds and geckos, shacks and trees, people and gravestones. Photographing everything.
And then, like a swallow to Capistrano, I have returned to my father’s sprawling two-story house. He has never had the chance to transform my old bedroom into a study or a storage area. I have continued to use it, sleeping on that narrow mattress beneath the mobile of the solar system I built back in middle school. I have kept my own books on the shelves, my own clothes in the drawers. My father and I have transitioned into companionable roommates.
The whole thing is both logical and odd. Most of my old friends from school have mortgages of their own by now, not to mention husbands and kids. But I have never lived anywhere long enough to justify paying rent, let alone buying furniture. Besides, I like my father’s house. I help him with the garden. I do most of the cooking. I know the surrounding neighborhood like the back of my hand. Dad and I have our own rhythms and routines, built over years, honed and perfected. His book club. My soap opera addiction. His morning run. My evening walk. His workbench in the basement, strewn with sawdust and tools. My darkroom in the attic, foul-smelling and secret, baths of chemicals shimmering in the gloom. The photos of us on the wall.
That house is where I remember you best. I remember your thin shape curled on the couch, book in hand. I remember your voice raised in song, echoing down the hall from the shower. Each room is a treasure trove of unexpected recollections. Any little thing—an object, an odor, a sound—might trigger a memory, jolting me into the past. A laundry basket might remind me of your hands, working deftly to fold the clothes. The squeal of a cabinet opening might bring back a chance conversation you and I once had while sitting in the kitchen. The sky on a stormy afternoon, clouds mounting outside, might call up an image of you dashing around the house, closing all the windows in anticipation of a hard rain.
There was a postcard for me on board the ferry, by the way. Miss you, my father had written. Two words only.
THE NEXT DAY, I found myself on the roof. There was a good reason for this: a leak had appeared in the cabin. At noon, a storm struck without warning. It rained wildly, desperately, as though the sky had something to prove. The gutters overflowed. The air was filled with so much moisture that when the wind blew, it rippled like the sea. Lunch was spoiled by a miniature waterfall. Though Charlene and I knew nothing about carpentry, we were the two who could be spared to tackle the problem. Lucy had disappeared on Bird Watch as soon as the storm blew over. Mick wanted to check on an injured sea lion and document its progress—to record whether it would survive or perish. Forest had finally solved a glitch in the video camera and was hoping to catch a few sharks on film. Andrew was probably asleep. Galen handed me the necessary items: tar paper, tiles, a hammer, and a sad collection of bent, mismatched nails. He explained where to find the ladder. As an afterthought, he reminded me not to fall.
To be honest, I didn’t mind being up there. In fact, I wished I could have brought one of my cameras. Any new perspective on an established landscape can shake loose inspiration. The sea, the seals, the coast guard house—they all looked diminished now, unreal. The pictures would have been striking. But I could not risk dropping my camera from such a height. It would never survive the fall, and I did not think I would be able to tolerate the death of another of my precious instruments.
Charlene and I crawled around, crablike, hammering down anything that seemed loose. She had brought a caulking gun, which she squirted at the slightest provocation. The shingles were rough to the touch. We found a few chinks that required maintenance. We got into a confused debate about which rooms were beneath us at any given time. We discovered a chimney. Then we relaxed for a while, gazing across the sea.
As always, I was slightly baffled by the fact that I could not see California. I could see nothing beyond the ocean’s edge. There is nowhere more alone than the Farallon Islands. The rest of the world might disappear—the human race wiped out by a pandemic, a meteor strike, a zombie uprising—and we would be the last to know anything about it. We would be the only ones spared. The day was fine, despite a cold, breathy breeze. October had crept in without my notice. The grass was yellowing at the corners like mildew on cloth. The mice were spending more time underground now, their scuffle and scamper less constant. The two trees near us were wilting, no longer embracing. Maroon leaves tumbled across the stones.
For the first time, Charlene opened up to me. In the manner of the very young, she chattered on about herself, never realizing that she hadn’t asked me any questions. This was not exactly narcissism. She was at the age in which her own personality fascinated her so much that it eclipsed everything else. Her own capacity for creativity. Her own brand of intelligence. She did not seem to heed the unspoken rule that talk of the past was verboten here. I heard about her family’s farm in Minnesota. Without guile, she mentioned something about an aunt who had disappeared for a time and returned with