The Lightkeepers. Abby Geni
in hand. Rain and wind do not deter her. She is the bird girl, and her knowledge is encyclopedic. Whenever a feathery shape flits across the sky, she can, without even sparing it a second glance, identify it as auklet, cormorant, gull, or puffin. She rarely sits down. Her meals are eaten as she stands at the bookcase, flipping through a reference tome or gazing out the window, her expression wistful, like a house cat wishing to be let into the garden. Still chewing, she will throw on her jacket and hurry toward Sea Pigeon Gulch.
In the evenings, we all tend to drop off early. (It is remarkable how the internal clock aligns with the circadian rhythm—if there’s absolutely nothing to do after dark.) But Lucy does not doze. She cleans. I can hear you spluttering that of course the woman is the one doing the mopping and sweeping. And yet, in Lucy’s case, it’s more than that. Nobody can venture outside safely at night, on the slippery shore, on the uneven slope. It is tricky in broad daylight, impossible in darkness. I learned this the hard way during my first week in this place. Trapped indoors, Lucy must do something else with her excess vitality. As she wipes down the countertops and scrubs the pots, her eyes shine with purpose.
Andrew, on the other hand, is bone-lazy. He can’t be bothered to rise before ten a.m. Out here, that is an eternity of time wasted, the entire morning gone. He is a bird specialist too—he and Lucy met in a biology seminar—but he does not walk the grounds with her. He stays inside where it’s warm, writing notes for a research paper that never seems to reach completion.
A few other details that might interest you:
1. Andrew and Lucy have sex every day. Every day, without fail, rain or shine. I sleep directly above them, and each sigh and moan passes right through my floorboards.
2. I don’t think I have ever seen a woman adore her man more. Her sun rises and sets on him. That kind of devotion is unsettling.
3. I do not like Andrew. I don’t like him at all. There is something about him that I do not understand or trust. A deadness behind the eyes.
THROUGHOUT THE MORNING, I wandered the grounds. I cannot explain the joy I was feeling. Everything about the islands seemed exquisite to me. The salt-infused air. The crash of the surf. The shimmy of the mice darting across my peripheral vision. The granite that crackled and fragmented away beneath my boots.
I wanted a picture of the light on the water, broken up by islets. I had learned from my fall and injury. My camera now hung on a secure strap around my neck. I knew to stop in my tracks, plant my feet, and check my surroundings before I succumbed to the beauty of an image. I was in the process of framing the shot—settling myself like a tripod—when I looked down and gasped.
The islands had given me a present. There, between my feet, lay a seal stone. These were rare and precious things, left on the shore by the elusive fur seals. Gastroliths, they were called. Mick had described them to me, but I had not expected to find one myself. I had not thought I was worthy of such a miracle.
I knelt down and picked it up. It felt wonderful in my hand. Perfectly round. Smooth and dense. It looked as though it had been inside a polisher. It was made of something darker and more compact than the flaky granite of the islands. The fur seals ate these stones, maybe for ballast, maybe for digestion. No one knew why. Up to ten pounds of rocks in the gut. Grinning, I turned it over in my palms.
I slipped it into the pocket of my coat. There was something reassuring about its weight, its heft. Its perfect sphericality. Its wildness. It had been carried in the belly of a seal until it was rendered flawless.
There was a noise behind me. I whirled around and saw Andrew. Crimson hat. Hands in pockets. Smirking face. He was a little too close. I hadn’t heard him until he was almost on top of me. I stood up quickly, dusting off my hands.
“You want to be careful,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
His eyes were so blue. They looked like windows, as though I were seeing through him to the sky behind.
“You don’t want to get hurt again,” he said. “A little thing like you.”
I was gripping my camera like a shield. Andrew smiled and sloped off, shoulders hunched, heading for the cabin. I watched him go with relief.
Then a hint of motion caught my eye. There was someone else outside—a shape on Lighthouse Hill. I thought it was Lucy. But the figure was gone so fast that I could have been mistaken. It could have been a trick of the light.
WE ARE DEEP into Shark Season. I came to the islands in late summer, and my arrival coincided with a vast influx of white sharks. (The great, I have learned, is only used by ignorant nonbiologists.) On my travels, I have encountered dreadful creatures before—leeches with a penchant for armpits, crocodiles masquerading as logs, irate lions. For nearly five months, I once lived in the rainforest; I slept in a hut and bathed with a bucket. The rules of my visits were strict: no littering, no hiking except on the designated trails, and, whatever the provocation, no destruction of any living thing. This included venomous tarantulas and foot-long centipedes. I loved that place as a photographic object, but by the end I was dying for a cup of real coffee, a change of clothes, and the feel of a stiff breeze on my skin. I found that, of all things, I missed the look of straight lines. There were none in that eruption of greenery.
But the white sharks have a lethal charm all their own.
Galen and Forest are our shark specialists. In the past month, I have learned a bit more about these two, but my initial impression of them has not changed all that much. Galen is white-haired, venerable, and never in a particularly good mood. He still strikes me as being an elderly god of the sea—possibly omnipotent, probably omniscient. He knows everything that happens here. He watches the tides. He organizes repairs on the cabin, the boats. He can recite the history of the Farallon Islands with the scholarly air of a college professor. He has a thousand animal facts at his fingertips. Though his raison d’être is the sharks, I have seen him sitting on the porch beside Lucy, helping her to dissect the wing of a dead cormorant like a trained veterinarian. He can read the coming weather at a glance.
Forest, on the other hand, is an enigma. A dark-haired, cold-blooded naiad. Galen’s right hand. Forest eats, sleeps, and breathes work. I have yet to hold a conversation with him that has not centered on something to do with biology: the anatomy of harbor seals, the local varieties of comb jellies, or the weather patterns as related to bird migrations. The one time I dared to ask him where he’d grown up, he shot me a withering look, like a Victorian butler reprimanding an impertinent housemaid. Like the others here, he seems to have no past, or a distinct unwillingness to discuss it. Once, long ago, I read that all nuns who joined a convent were forbidden from speaking about their lives before. The Farallon Islands seem to be a religious order in their own right, with a similar vow of silence.
Galen and Forest catalog and track the population of white sharks. Throughout the autumn, the two men rise at four-thirty in the morning to start the watch. During every hour of daylight, one of them is in position in the lighthouse, keeping an eye out for blood on the water. Against every basic human instinct, they hurry toward a feeding frenzy. They board one of the boats and head out to sea, armed with video cameras, tagging equipment, and the “dummy,” a surfboard painted like a seal to lure the sharks in closer. The two of them live to make contact with these creatures. Galen and Forest are lunatics, to put it frankly. Galen has mentioned that he dreams about the white sharks every single night. Forest sketches a shark’s silhouette—lean, rough, and spiked with fins—on any nearby surface. He does this unconsciously, doodling on the table, on a book I once left open on the couch.
At this time of year, there can be two or three kills a day. The sharks eat the seals and sea lions. There is enough prey here to sustain a massive host of predators. The birds will mark the spot like an X on a map. Watching from the lighthouse, Forest or Galen will spy a collection of gulls diving over a patch of sea. The cry will go up. Boots are thrown on—coats flung over shirts—a thunder of feet on the stairs. Forest uses a child’s scooter with streamers on the handlebars to make his downhill