SLEEP DOESN’T COME easily anymore, and I don’t particularly care for dreaming.
I pour a mug of tar-black coffee, listen to the shipping forecast, roll a cigarette. I imagine Cora beside me, her button nose tilted upward, exasperation in her eyes. “Awful dirty things,” she called them, my smokes. She didn’t care for the nicotine stains on my fingertips, said it wasn’t nice to see mammy’s fingers all yellow, or ‘lello’ as she used to say.
How many times had I promised to stop? Too many. Broken promises strewn about our lives like the fragments of seashells she collected and stuck together to make her little picture frames. Cora was clever that way, making use of the lost and broken things she found on the beach, carrying them triumphantly home in heavy clacking pockets. “Look, Mammy! Look!” She loved to turn them back into something useful, painting her seashells until they became more beautiful than the original. If she found half a hinged shell she would look for a matching half and stick them together. Forever fixing and mending. Perhaps she always sensed something was missing.
My breath catches in my chest at the thought of her.
Cora. The sun to my cloud. The calm to my storm.
I walk over to the table, pick up the log book, and slump into the window seat, my back pressed against one side of the thick walls, the soles of my boots pressed against the other. A perfect fit if I bend my knees. Da used to say it was like the lighthouse was built around me it suited me so well. I understand things here, always have. The routine and order make sense to me: the ebb and flow of the tide, the rising and setting of the sun, the coming and going of ships and storms, all carefully recorded in the log book. Walls whitewashed. Lamps cleaned. Delivery of supplies. Two persons saved from the wreck of a fishing vessel. Painted windows and stairs.
I miss the old routines since automation has taken away the last of my duties. There are no oil reservoirs to be refilled. No clock mechanisms to be wound. No wicks to trim. Now, I turn the lamps on and off with a simple flick of a switch. They call it progress. I call it nonsense. Like a child all grown up, the lighthouse hardly needs me anymore.
Nobody does.
Apart from Matilda perhaps. Matilda Emmerson, with her pale little face and glistening hair, black as mussel shells. So full of doubt and questions. So unsure of herself. Just like I was at her age. I’m not sure what I expected when I agreed to her coming here—intrigue getting the better of my common sense—but there’s something comforting about the lilt of her accent and the smell of turf fires captured in the fabric of her clothes. Matilda carries the echo of a life I thought I’d left behind; a life that perhaps isn’t done with me after all.
I ADD TODAY’S entry to the log. Lamps lit at 8:43 p.m. Seas calm with a slight swell. Light breeze from the east, then I flick over the crinkling pages, all of them filled with my memories. Cora caught a crab! Cora saw a shooting star. Cora said Mammy. Cora’s fever broke. I can barely remember the woman who’d written these words. Back then, I wrote as much about Cora as I did about the tides and the weather, family life captured in a few simple words that concealed so much more. If I’d written down everything I wanted to say, I’d have filled a dozen log books a year.
Just after four thirty, Joseph Kinsella, the Assistant Keeper, arrives. I fill him in on the night’s events, as few as they are, pull on an old oilskin coat, and make my way outside, my boots crunching over the shale path. Freeing the rowing boat from her moorings, I take a last drag of my cigarette, crush the stub beneath the heel of my boot, jump into the boat, and push off with an oar against the landing wall. I scull around the island, toward the bay, the light sweeping across the ocean, regular as a heartbeat: a warning light to those in danger, a light of remembrance to those who couldn’t be saved. By the time I reach the shore, the first rays of sun streak across the water, illuminating the boat and the notches etched into the wooden seat. Twelve in total. One for each life saved.
Only one—the most precious to me—lost.