Lightning

The heat broke on the thirty-first of July with a sound like a door being kicked in.

It had been a week of weather like a held breath. The air stood motionless over Gull Harbor, thick, yellow, wet as a washcloth, and even at dawn the sea lay flat and glassy under a sky the color of dishwater. Gulls sat in rows on the roof and did not scream. The pines dripped resin. Corinne worked in the study with the windows thrown open and a wet towel around her neck, and by Thursday afternoon she had stopped trying to hold a thought for longer than a sentence, and sat at the desk in her slip with her chin on her fist, watching the horizon go bruise-colored in the west.

“It’s going to be a big one,” Emory had said that morning, standing on the porch with his hands on his hips and his head tipped back. He sniffed the air like an animal. “Forecast says severe by nine. Wind off the water, thirty, forty knots. I’m going to check the shutters, and the generator, and the lightning rod on the tower. Then I’ll be back with something for dinner.”

“What something?”

“A surprise.” He grinned. “It’s the one thing I do well. Don’t leave the house.”

“Where would I go?”

“Nowhere. That’s what I’m counting on.”

He had kissed her, and driven away in a swirl of dust. It was now twenty to seven. The light in the study had gone the color of a tarnished penny, and a low roll of thunder, far to the south, sounded like furniture moving in an upstairs room.

She saved her file and closed the laptop. She stood, stretched, and went to the window.

The sea had turned black.

It had happened in the last ten minutes, as if some great hand had drawn a curtain across it. The horizon was gone. In its place stood a vast slate-purple wall, towering, silent, shot through with a sickly green that she had seen only once before, as a child in Worcester, in the minutes before a tornado touched down two towns over. The wind had stopped. The leaves hung limp. Not a bird called. And out beyond the cliff, faint and far, a flicker of white lit the cloud from the inside, like a bulb behind a paper shade, and went out.

One, two, three, four, five, six —

Seven, eight, nine. The thunder rolled in on the ninth count. It came up the cliff and went through the floor, a deep slow tremor she felt in her teeth.

“Right,” said Corinne, aloud. “Shutters.”

* * *

She was halfway through the second one when the sky split.

There was no gradation. There was the dark, and the dead hush, and the green stillness of the air; and then the clouds came apart with a crack that felt like the end of the world, and the rain arrived all at once, not in drops but in sheets, in solid white walls of water slung sideways across the cliff by a wind that seemed to have been waiting its whole life. It hit her like a thrown bucket. She had been standing on the porch with a shutter hook in her fist and the next moment she was soaked to the skin, gasping, blinded, her dress stuck to her like paper. The wind tore the shutter from her hands and slammed it against the wall. A branch cartwheeled across the lawn. Somewhere behind the house, with a long splitting groan, a tree let go.

She fought the last shutter closed, and fell through the door, and wrestled it shut behind her with her whole weight, and stood in the dim hall dripping and laughing, her heart going like a rabbit’s.

Then the lights went out.

They didn’t flicker. They went. There was a soft sigh from the refrigerator, a dying whine from somewhere in the walls, and the house sank into a darkness so complete that she could see nothing at all, not her own hands, not the stair. The roar of the storm rose to fill the silence. The old stone shuddered. And through the narrow fanlight over the front door, with a white and stunning violence, a bolt of lightning lit the hall like a camera flash, and showed her the umbrella stand, the coat pegs, her own reflection in the mirror, a drowned woman with her mouth open, and then went out.

She was still blinking spots out of her eyes when she heard the knock.

Three raps. A pause. One tap.

She had never been so glad of anything in her life.

* * *

“I told you not to leave the house,” said Emory.

“I didn’t leave the house. I went to close it.” She had flung the door open, and the wind had blown her back against the wall, and he stood in the roaring dark on the porch with the rain running off him in streams, in his yellow oilskin, with a canvas bag held high over his head. His hair was plastered to his forehead. His eyes shone. Lightning cracked behind him and the whole cliff turned white, and he looked, for one dizzy half-second, like an illustration of the Day of Judgment, if the Day of Judgment had been drawn by someone who was fond of the man. “Come in!”

“I’m coming.”

“You’re dripping on the floor.”

“So are you.”

“I’m meant to be wet. I’m the one who’s been outside.” She hauled him over the threshold and slammed the door behind him. The wind shrieked in the keyhole. The house shook. “How did you get here? The road’s a river.”

“Drove through the ditch. The truck made a face.” He set down the bag, tore off the oilskin, and shook out his hair like a dog, and laughed, a rich, open, wonderful sound. Then he looked at her, and stopped.

In the faint blue flicker from the fanlight she was a spectacle. Her sundress clung to her body. Her hair was a dark rope down her back, streaming. Water ran from her chin, her fingers, her hem; it pooled around her bare feet on the old boards. She was shivering a little, from the cold of the wind and the heat of the day, and she had never in her life felt so entirely alive.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing.” His voice was low. “I’m just trying to decide if I’m allowed to say it.”

“Say what?”

“You look like a woman who’s been struck by lightning and enjoyed it.”

“Is that a good look?”

“It’s the best one I’ve seen.” He took her hand. “Come on. We have to get you dry before you catch your death, and I’m going to feed you something that you’ve been telling me about since March.”

* * *

She had mentioned fiskesuppe once.

It had been on a Tuesday in April, over her morning tea, in the course of a rambling story about the Bergen fish market where she had spent two weeks in a graduate seminar twelve years ago. She had said, in passing, that the fish soup there was the best thing she had ever put in her mouth. Thick with cream, she had said. Leeks and carrots and chunks of salmon and cod, with a spoonful of dill on top and a heel of dark bread. She had eaten it every day in a stone cellar near the harbor and been so happy she cried. She hadn’t thought of it again.

He had made it in the dark.

By candlelight, on the camp stove, in the kitchen of Fennimore House, with the storm hammering the shutters and the lightning pulsing blue through the cracks. He had lit six candles and stood them in saucers around the room. He had hung her wet dress over the oven door and wrapped her in the white wool blanket and sat her at the oak table like an invalid, and he had stirred a battered iron pot with a long wooden spoon, humming, while the kitchen filled with a smell so rich and creamy and herbal that she nearly wept before it touched her lips.

“It’s from a recipe,” he said, over his shoulder. “I got it from a woman in Bergen. I wrote her an email. I asked if she had one that was really good, and she sent me three pages, with a letter about her grandmother. You have to add the cream slowly, off the heat, or it splits. It took me four tries.” He tasted from the spoon, frowned, added a pinch of salt. “The first three were a disaster. I fed them to Ned Pratt’s cat.”

“You wrote to a woman in Bergen.”

“I used my Norwegian. It was terrible. She was very polite.” He ladled the soup into a white bowl and carried it across to her, and set it before her with a flourish, and a sprig of dill laid across the top. “Eat. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

She took a spoonful.

The taste was cream and leek and the sweet clean flesh of the sea. It tasted of cold stone cellars and the clang of a harbor bell and a younger self who had not yet learned how much was going to be taken from her. She put her spoon down. She put her hand over her mouth.

“Oh, no,” said Emory. “Is it —”

“It’s perfect.”

“You’re crying.”

“I’m aware I’m crying.” She laughed, and wiped her face with the blanket, and picked up the spoon again. “Emory. It’s the exact one. It’s the exact soup. How could you possibly —”

“I listen,” he said simply. “That’s all.”

She ate every drop. She ate two bowls. She tore the dark bread with her fingers and used it to wipe the china clean, and he sat across from her with his chin on his hand, and watched her with an expression of deep, uncomplicated contentment, as though he had just been given a medal. Outside, the storm roared on. The shutters rattled. The candle flames bent and straightened in the drafts.

“Rule eight,” she said, with her mouth full. “She lets me feed her.”

“Rule eight.”

“I would like it noted that I have complied.”

“It’s noted.” He reached across the table with a napkin and wiped a drop of cream from her chin, with great gravity. Then, holding her gaze, he licked it off his thumb.

Her whole body went warm.

* * *

He dried her hair.

It was an act of such gentle absurdity that she would remember it, afterward, long after she had forgotten the particulars of the storm. She sat on a stool at the end of the kitchen table with the blanket round her shoulders, and he stood behind her with a towel. He worked slowly, patiently. He took the heavy wet rope of it and squeezed out the water, strand by strand. He rubbed the ends in the folds of the towel. He combed it out with his fingers, working from the tips upward, the way you would comb out a child’s hair after a bath, and the sensation of it at her scalp made her close her eyes.

“My mother used to do this,” she murmured. “On Sundays. I’d sit on the toilet lid, and she’d sit on the edge of the tub. She’d sing.”

“What did she sing?”

“Chet Baker.” She smiled. “Badly.”

“Sing it for me.”

“I will not.”

“Please.”

“I can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

“I don’t need a tune.” His fingers moved in her hair, slow, warm. “Just the shape of it.”

So, to her own amazement, she sang. It came out in a low husky thread, cracked at the top, barely audible beneath the storm, a couple of bars of an old slow song, with half the words wrong and none of the right pitch. He stood behind her with the towel in his hands and did not move. When she stopped, there was a silence, and then he bent, and pressed his mouth to the crown of her head.

“I’ll remember that,” he said.

“I’m sure you will.”

“I remember everything. You know that.” There was something in his voice, a roughness. He turned her gently on the stool so she faced him, and knelt, and took her hands. “Corinne. There’s something I want to show you. I’ve been saving it. I didn’t think I’d be able to do it tonight, in this weather. But the storm — it’s — I think it’s right.”

“What is it?”

“The lamp.”

She stared. “The lamp? The one at the top of the tower?”

“I finished it.” He said it simply, as a man says a thing he’s rehearsed to himself for months. “Three days ago. The clockwork. The motor. I’ve been running it in the dark, a few revolutions at a time, to see if it’d hold. I didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to wait for a night that mattered.” His grip tightened. “I want you to see it, Corinne. The first night. I want you to be there when it turns.”

“In this?”

“There’s a way.”

“A way?”

His eyes were shining. In the gold light of the candles he looked like a boy on Christmas Eve.

“Do you trust me?” said Emory.

* * *

The tunnel began in the cellar, behind a wall of shelves.

She had been down there before, a dozen times, to look at the furnace and fetch jars: a low, vaulted, dripping stone room, hung with cobwebs, smelling of earth and kerosene. She had never looked at the back wall. Emory set his lantern on the floor, and put his shoulder to the tall wooden rack of preserves, and it swung outward on a pivot without a sound.

Behind it lay a low arched door.

It was made of oak and iron, black with age, set deep in the stone, and its latch had been oiled until it shone. A cold breath came from the crack beneath, smelling of salt and rust and something older: the damp, secret odor of the underside of the world.

“The keeper’s tunnel,” said Emory. “It goes straight to the tower. A hundred and ten feet. They built it so the lighthouse man could get to the lamp in a blizzard without going out of doors.” He glanced at her, a shy flash of teeth in the half-dark. “I found it in March, when I was looking at the pipes. I thought — I don’t know. I thought you’d like it. I always meant to show you.”

“You’ve known about it since March?”

“I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“You keep surprising me.”

“It’s a character flaw.”

She laughed, and her laugh bounced off the stone and came back strange. She took the second lantern from the hook. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, and stepped over the threshold into the dark.

It was the most extraordinary place she had ever been.

The tunnel was barely tall enough to stand in. It ran straight and low, vaulted in rough-cut granite, glistening with wet. Water dripped from the ceiling in slow, regular drops, each one clear as a note. The air was cold and close, and their lanterns threw wavering golden circles on the walls, flickering over names and dates scratched into the stone by men who had walked here a century ago: J. HALE 1883. MAINE FOREVER. E.F. LOVES A.W. Overhead, muffled by yards of earth, the storm went on thundering, a vast deep drumroll, and every few seconds a seismic shudder passed through the rock.

“It’s like walking inside a cathedral,” she whispered.

“Wait until you see the top.”

“How many people have been in here?”

“Not many.” He walked ahead of her with the lantern held low, his shadow huge and leaping on the wall. “Hal Fennimore, in the old days. A couple of Coast Guard men. Me.” A pause. “Mom, once, when she was pregnant. Dad took her through, to show her. She said she never wanted to do it again.”

“Why?”

“She said it felt like being buried.”

“It does a little.”

“Are you scared?”

“No.” She looked at his back, the broad wet shoulders, the dark curling hair, the bobbing light. “I’m with you.”

It was a thing she’d said without thinking. She felt him go still for a moment in front of her. Then he turned around in the narrow passage, and the lantern light fell across his face, and his eyes were enormous.

“Say that again.”

“I’m with you.”

“Once more.”

“Emory, I —” She laughed, shaken. “I’m with you. I’m not scared. Come on. I’ve been waiting my whole life to walk through a secret tunnel with a man holding a lantern. Don’t make me stand here and get sentimental. I’ll catch cold.”

He looked at her a long moment more. Then he turned and walked on, quickly, with his head down.

They passed a door.

It was set into the left-hand wall about two-thirds of the way along: a squat iron thing, painted green, rusted at the rivets, with a heavy padlock the size of her fist hanging from its hasp. Emory did not slow. He lengthened his stride, very slightly, and put out his hand to the lantern in a way that sent the light skittering across the opposite wall.

“Storeroom,” he said over his shoulder. “The old oil room. It’s full of junk. Paint, mostly, and the generator. It’s not safe, the floor’s gone. Don’t go in there alone.”

“Why would I go in alone?”

“No reason. It’s a habit.” His voice was easy. “Mind the step. It floods.”

She minded the step.

* * *

The spiral stair took ten minutes.

It rose in the dark, around and around and around, iron treads ringing under their feet, the whitewashed walls streaked with green in the lantern light, until her calves ached and her breath came short and the thunder grew louder with every turn. The air got warmer. It smelled of oil and brass and hot metal. Somewhere high above her a faint, steady, mechanical ticking was audible over the roar of the wind, a rhythm like a clock the size of a house.

“Is that —”

“The clockwork,” said Emory. “Come on. Last twelve steps.”

They climbed through the trapdoor into the lantern room.

She stood up slowly, and stared.

The lens was lit.

It was lit, and it was moving. He must have lit it before he came, before the storm broke, while she sat in the study with her wet towel. He had lit the great oil lamp at the center, a small white flame in a brass chimney no bigger than a teacup, and the lens surrounding it had caught that flame and multiplied it, and thrown it outward in four enormous blades of light. The whole glittering dome of prisms was turning. It turned slowly, with a faint silvery whisper, on its bed of mercury, around the little flame at its heart, and from every angle of every prism a shaft of light went out through the storm-streaked glass and raked across the sea.

It was beauty of a sort that had no business existing. The beams swept the black water in great bright slow arcs, cutting through the rain, and lit the underbellies of the clouds, and plucked from the darkness, one by one, the cliffs and the waves and the trees. Rainbows crawled over the ceiling. Spangles ran across the floor like water. Lightning broke over the bay, white and gold and violet, and the lens caught it, too, and flung it back from a hundred little facets at once.

“Oh,” said Corinne.

She said it without sound. She walked forward as if in a dream and laid her fingers against the cool glass of the lantern-room window and looked out at the sea. Four hundred prisms. Seventeen Saturdays of someone else’s patience. The lamp that Desmond Wolcott had rebuilt twenty-four years ago was swinging its long white arm across the Atlantic, in the worst storm of the summer, for the first time in more than twenty years; and somewhere out there, in the pitch-black rain, a lobsterman or a fisherman or a Coast Guard cutter looked up, and saw it, and thought, the light’s on at Fennimore.

Something went through her chest, and she understood, quite suddenly, that it was a sob.

“I thought of you,” said Emory, from behind her, “the whole time.”

“You —”

“Every night I worked on it. Every bolt.” His voice was rough. “I thought: if I can get this to turn, she’ll see it. And then maybe it’ll be — enough. A proper light. For the sea. For the house. For you.” He came up beside her. “I wanted you to come home to a house with the light on.”

She didn’t answer. She was staring at the beam as it came around.

It swept across the headland, a long pale blade, and then through the glass and across the face of the lantern room itself, over the floor, over her hands, over his upturned face. She felt it pass over her skin like a breath. And with it came something else: a memory, flickering, faint, so unlikely that she thought it was another trick of the light.

“I saw this,” she said slowly.

“What?”

“The first night. March the fourteenth. I came out of the bath, and I looked up at the ceiling in the bedroom, and there was a — a sweep. A pale sweep of light, across the plaster. Just once. It went across and was gone, and I thought I’d dreamed it.” She turned. “It was this. It was this, wasn’t it? This light. It’s exactly the same.”

For the length of one heartbeat, Emory said nothing at all.

Then he smiled.

“I was testing the bulb,” he said. “That week. I’d put in a new filament and I wanted to see if it’d hold. I must have run it for a few seconds. I’m sorry — I didn’t know it would carry to your window. I didn’t think anybody was there yet.” A pause, and a rueful lift of the shoulders. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I wasn’t frightened.”

“No?”

“I thought it was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.” Her voice shook. “I thought, if there’s a ghost in this house, she’s kind.”

“Then it was the right thing to do,” said Emory, softly.

* * *

She did not decide to say it.

It rose in her like the tide, and arrived whole. She stood at the center of the lantern room, in the whirling light, in her blanket, with her damp hair curling about her face and the storm beating at the glass. Rainbows ran across her hands. The lens turned, and turned, and turned. And she looked at the man who stood a pace away from her, in his wet shirt, with the pulse beating at his throat and his hands held out a little from his sides as if he were afraid to touch her; the man who had made her soup, and a pencil box, and an entire summer; and she thought, simply: there is nothing left to be afraid of.

“Emory,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

The lamp turned. The thunder rolled away across the bay.

He did not move. He stood absolutely still in the shifting light, with an expression on his face that she would remember all her life: not triumph, not surprise, not even joy, but a vast, quiet, almost reverent recognition, the face of a man who has watched a clock for a very long time and heard it strike the hour.

“I know,” said Emory.

She blinked. “You know?”

“I’ve been waiting a long time to hear it.” His voice was low and perfectly steady, and his eyes were wet. “I wanted to be sure that you’d say it first. On your own. Without me asking. I wanted it to be yours.” He took a step. “Say it again.”

“A long time?” She laughed, shakily. “Emory, it’s been four months.”

“Has it?”

“It’s been four months —”

“Say it again.”

“I love you,” said Corinne. “I love you. I love you. God help me, I do, I love you so much I can’t see straight.”

He crossed the space between them in one stride and took her face in his hands and kissed her.

It was not like any of the kisses before. It had a weight in it, a finality, as of a door shutting on a long room. He kissed her as though he were drinking, deeply and slowly, with his eyes closed and his thumbs tracing her cheekbones. When he drew back, an inch, she saw that his lashes were wet.

“Mine,” he said. It was no more than a breath.

“What?”

“Nothing. Say it again.”

“I love you, you madman —”

“Again.”

She said it again. She said it nine times. By the ninth, she was laughing and crying at once, and he lifted her off the floor, and spun her in a circle in the middle of the whirling rainbows, and the lens went on turning and the storm went on raging and neither of them noticed, either, for a long while, that they had stopped being frightened of anything at all.

* * *

They made love on the floor of the lantern room, in the light.

He spread the white blanket on the boards, under the great turning dome. The air was warm up there, close and humming, scented with brass and hot oil. Over their heads, the beam wheeled slowly and a thousand little rainbows slid across their skin, red, gold, green, violet, an endless soft kaleidoscope. Outside, the lightning cracked, and the glass sang, and the whole tower shuddered. She lay on her back in the colored light, with her arms around his neck, and he knelt over her, and looked down at her as if she were something he had made by hand.

He undressed her very slowly. She let him. He drew the damp cotton over her head, and the wet cloth fell away, and she lay under his eyes with her scar, and her small breasts, and her pale soft stomach, and felt not a trace of fear. He kissed the scar. He kissed it all the way along, from one hip to the other, with a patience that made her breath catch, and when he lifted his head the rainbow lay across his mouth.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Stop.”

“Never.” He moved up her body, kissing, unhurried. “I’m going to say it every day. I’m going to say it when you’re ninety and have no teeth.”

“I’ll have teeth. I floss.”

“I’ll still say it.”

She laughed, and pulled his head down, and kissed him until she forgot the joke.

What she felt, then, was not exactly desire, though desire was in it. It was something deeper and quieter, a settling, as of a long journey arriving at last. Every touch of his hands was an echo of something she’d known. Every sound she made was met by one of his. They moved together on the boards, slowly, and the light turned, and in the roar of the storm she heard her own heartbeat and his, locked in a single rhythm, like two tides in one bay. His skin was hot under her palms. She traced the lines of him: the hard planes of his shoulders, the ridge of his spine, the old thin scar beneath the left blade, the flat taut muscle of his belly. He shivered under her hands.

“I love you,” she said into his throat.

“I know.”

“I love you. I love you.”

“I know,” said Emory, and his voice cracked. “I know. I’ve known. I have always —” And he did not finish the sentence, but buried his face in her neck, and she felt the great slow wave of him gather and rise.

When it broke she cried out, and the beam of the lamp swept over her, white and gold, and she saw, through half-closed eyes, the whole lens glittering above them like the inside of a diamond, throwing out its light to the black and heaving sea. She had never been so happy. She had never been so seen. She held the weight of him against her, in the middle of the storm, with the light going around and around and around, and she thought of nothing at all.

* * *

Toward midnight the thunder retreated.

It rumbled off to the north, in long slow footsteps, and the rain gentled to a patter on the glass. Overhead, the lens went on turning, sending its pale spokes across a sea that was finally beginning to calm. She lay with her head on his chest and the blanket over them both. His fingers drew idle circles on her bare arm. Neither of them had said anything for a long time.

“Emory,” she murmured.

“Mm.”

“Did you mean it? What you said, about waiting?”

“Yes.”

“Four months isn’t a long time.”

“No.” He kissed her hair. “But I’m patient.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I know what I’m waiting for.” The words were drowsy, tender, content. “Go to sleep, Corinne.”

“We can’t sleep here.”

“We can for an hour. I’ll carry you down.”

“The lamp —”

“It’ll burn till morning. I filled the reservoir.” He pulled the blanket up over her shoulder. “Look. Look at the beam. Every time it comes round, count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Then it comes again. It never stops. It never forgets where you are.”

She watched the long white arm swing over the water. She counted. One, two, three, four.

Somewhere in the counting she slept.

Once, near dawn, she surfaced for a moment and found that he had not. He was sitting up with her head in his lap, his back against the brass housing, one hand spread on her hair. His eyes were open, and very bright, fixed on her face; behind his head the light went round and round like a halo on a wheel. “Sleep,” he whispered, and she did.