CHAPTER 18
I HAD WALKED AS far north as the beach allowed, for here the rocks met the ocean in a wall that entirely blocked my path and my view of the coast beyond. However, the water was shallow, so, abandoning my shoes and stockings on the sand, I began to wade around the barrier. I needed to find out what lay past it. Perhaps we weren’t so alone here as the Lighthouse Service booklet and the Crawleys claimed. Maybe there was a village tucked in the hills that I hadn’t been able to see from the tender. The thought of finding a nest of Portuguese fishermen or even of Chinese shrimpers sustained me as I waded deeper into the cold water, wetting my skirt as far as my knees. Beyond the rock wall were more sharp black rocks, though these were low enough to climb. I picked my way over them and over and around the enormous tangles of bleached logs they’d snagged. The rocks bruised my feet, but I was determined to go as far as I could, to put the Crawleys and Mr. Johnston and even Oskar behind me, at least for a time.
A tide pool arrested me at last, a pool far more brilliant than any I’d seen before. It was wider and deeper, for one thing, and full of water almost clearer than the air, water that magnified the creatures beneath it. The colors were those of precious jewels, unnatural to an eye accustomed to the soft hues of the East. Violet balls of sea urchins, lustrous as Christmas ornaments, nestled in tufts of emerald algae. An orange crab, alarmed by my shadow, scuttled into hiding.
The pool was not only far removed from the light station physically, but also in tone. I remembered Mrs. Crawley marching out of the fog from this direction that first morning, but it was difficult to imagine her, brisk and businesslike, pausing to admire such treasure. I was sure I’d found a place that none of them knew.
The wind carried a dense animal smell as three seals heaved themselves onto a flat expanse of rock a short way out in the water. They joined two others that were already sunning themselves, their bodies like rolled rugs. And then all five of them abruptly, swiftly shimmied across the rock and poured themselves over the far side into the waves. They’d been startled by a new smaller black head that had surfaced nearby.
This animal didn’t climb out on the rock; it remained bobbing among the waves. It wasn’t, I determined, another seal but some other species with a nose less pointed and coloring more variegated. I couldn’t decide whether I was looking at the back of the head or the front before it disappeared below the surface, and although I waited five minutes, at least, I got no second look.
I knew nothing about tides. Though I’d read about the ocean advancing and retreating according to the pull of the moon, I never considered that such rhythms might affect me. It hadn’t occurred to me that the rocky stretches—slick with algae and crusted with mussels, periwinkles, and closed anemones—over which I’d walked would soon be under water. I did notice that the waves were beginning to reach close enough to throw their spray into the pool at my feet. I began to retrace my steps over the slippery rocks. There were stretches, I realized, where the water would eventually meet sheer walls. I might be trapped for hours—or worse.
I leaped when I dared, crawled when I had to, and slipped often enough to soak my dress and bruise and scrape my knees and elbows. At last, I reached a place where the rocks were too steep to climb, and I was forced to wade back into the water that now crashed in waves against them. When I’d started out, the water had merely tugged at my ankles, but now it rushed toward me, icy and unrelenting, wrapping around my waist. It shoved me toward the rocks, then dragged me into deeper water, first lifting my skirt and then trying to pull it from my body. I staggered around the bend and could see, far to the south, our morro with its cluster of doughty buildings upon it.
I pushed toward the beach, tripping in my haste so that for a moment even my head dipped into the brine. Streaming cold water, I regained the sand. The shoes and stockings that I’d left there were gone. Bitterly, I concluded that their loss did not matter, for they were nearly useless; there was nowhere for me to go. I’d verified what I’d already known to be true: the nothingness of rock, mountain, and sea stretched far, far beyond the distance my puny legs could travel.
The sun was setting by the time I staggered to the top of the morro. My feet were bleeding, and I was shivering so violently that my head ached, but most terrible of all was the fierceness with which I longed to be home, my mother calling for Gustina to bring hot water, my father shaking his head fondly at my rashness. My loneliness overwhelmed me like one of the waves, and I gasped and closed my eyes against it.
When I opened them, I saw Mrs. Crawley. I’d hoped to slink inside, unobserved by any of them, but there she was, swinging her arms mannishly as she came down the path toward me, preparing to bark a thing or two at me about lighthouse life.
She must have seen me from her window, for she’d brought a navy blanket, property of the Lighthouse Service. She wrapped it around my shoulders. “What’s happened to you? We worried.”
I sobbed then. I couldn’t help myself. “I’ve ruined my dress.” This was not at all my concern, but I couldn’t bear to voice any other, truer sorrow.
“For heaven’s sake, the dress will wash.”
I blotted my tears on the blanket’s rough wool.
“The husbands were afraid you’d fallen off the morro. I told them you weren’t so stupid. You went for a swim, though, I see.”
I told her how far I’d walked, about the purple pool and the relentless tide. “And I saw a strange animal. Not a fish, I don’t think, and not a seal. Its head was small and black, but there was a little brown on it, too.”
“An otter, I’ll bet, like the other. There must be a community of them, then. Good.”
We were quiet for a moment, remembering the pup.
“Go inside,” she said, resuming her old briskness, but in a way that warmed me. “Tell that husband of yours to make you a good hot bath.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Crawley.”
“And now you’ll know better than to go wandering off, won’t you?” Although her voice was kind, I could hear the flint beneath it. “You have to think about protecting your baby. Don’t forget, there are many things here that you don’t yet understand. This isn’t Minnesota.”
“Wisconsin,” I said weakly. She was right. I’d had no idea about the tide. I knew so little about this place. “I understand, Mrs. Crawley.”
“Euphemia,” she said. She gave me a little push toward our front steps, as if I were a child who needed direction, and then stepped to the bell outside her own door to summon her family to dinner.
? ? ?
Oskar was sorry. He begged me to forgive him in words that washed around me like a warm bath. He’d advised against the literal bath, instructing me to take off my clothes and lie beside him in bed, skin to skin. It was the best cure, he insisted, for hypothermia. I was sorry in return not to have been more careful with his pages.
He claimed that he couldn’t re-create the diagrams. The solution to the wireless telegraph, the proper combination of magnet and mercury, wire and glass, he said, had come to him in a flash, almost in a dream; he couldn’t call it back. Although I urged him to reapply himself, he refused. It was true that, having never felt inspiration myself, I didn’t understand its fits and starts. Could he really have lost everything with those few pages? Or was it an excuse to jettison another project he feared would fail?