Susan Wiggs - The Lightkeeper

An angel had died on his beach this morning. Never mind that her halo was fashioned of kelp and endless tangled strands of dark red hair. Never mind the constellation of freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose.

This face, this pale face with its lavender bow of lips, was the one sculpted by every artist who had ever tried to turn marble to poetry. The face envisioned by hopeful dreamers who believed in miracles.

But she was dead, back in the realm of angels where she belonged, where she never should have left in the first place.

Jesse didn’t want to touch her, but his hands did. His idiot bridegroom’s hands. They took her by the shoulder and tugged gently, at the same time rolling the mast to which she was still tied. He saw her fully now, head to toe.

She was pregnant.

Rage charged like a thunderbolt through him. It was not enough that a beautiful young woman had been taken. But the sweet, round swell of her stomach, that dark mystery, that whispered promise, had been claimed, too. Two lives had been snuffed out by the merciless breath of the wind, by the wall-size waves, by the uncaring sea.

This was the start, Jesse thought as he unbound the ropes and gathered her in his arms, of a journey he had no desire to undertake.

The corpse flopped forward like a rag doll. A cold hand clutched at Jesse’s arm. He reared back, leaving her on the seeping brown sand.

She moaned and coughed out seawater.

Jesse Morgan, who rarely smiled, suddenly grinned from ear to ear. “I’ll be damned,” he said, ripping off his mackintosh. “You’re alive.”

He settled the plaid wool coat around her shoulders and picked her up in his arms.

“I’m…alive,” she echoed in the faintest of whispers. “I suppose,” she added, her head drooping forward, “that’s something.”

She spoke no more, but began to shiver violently, uncontrollably. She felt like a large fish in its death throes, and it was all Jesse could do to keep from dropping her.

Yet even as he bore his burden up the impossibly steep slope, running faster than he’d ever run in his life, he knew with stone-cold dread that this day had brought something new, something extraordinary, something endlessly fascinating and frightening, into his world.

Panic rushed over him in huge, nauseating waves. Why him? Why now? He held her very life in his hands, yet saving a stranger and her unborn child was the last thing he was prepared to do.

At the same time, he knew he must rescue her. Twelve years ago, he had dedicated his life to watching over the shoals and keeping the light burning. He had taken an oath as head lightkeeper. He had no choice. No choice.

He ran swiftly, mounting the sinuous path toward the station, then racing down the other side of the promontory and into the woods where the lightkeeper’s house was located. The dead weight of her dragged at him. He took the steps two at a time, pounded across the porch, shoved the door open with his shoulder.

Plunging into the dimness of the quiet house, he brought the woman to a room off the kitchen and deposited her on the bed. The mattress was musty with disuse, the ticking worn and yellowed. He plundered a tall cabinet, finding a few old quilts and a tattersall blanket that had seen better days.

He covered the woman. She didn’t stir. He tried to get her to drink something—water, whiskey—but the liquid merely trickled over the sides of her mouth and down her neck. She was out cold.

He rushed to the porch to ring the big brass bell, summoning Magnus Jonsson and his wife Palina from their bungalow a quarter mile down the woodland path. He stirred the banked coals in the kitchen stove and filled a kettle with water, setting it on to boil. Then, bracing himself for the task ahead, he returned to the woman.

He had to get the wet dress off her. Had to touch her. Gingerly, he lifted the layers of blankets. His hand shook a little as he brushed aside a sodden strand of hair and found the top button of her dress.

The act of disrobing a woman felt alien to Jesse. Yet at the same time, it seemed unbearably familiar, as if he were that bridegroom once again.

He set his jaw and undid the row of buttons. She lay unconscious, oblivious to his clumsy manipulations as he peeled off one sleeve, then the other, rolling the flimsy wool garment over her arms and legs, dropping it on the floor.

Beneath it she wore a simple shift that had once been white. Her breasts and belly stood out in pale relief against the thin fabric. With his teeth tightly clenched, he forced himself to honor her modesty and cover her, working the shift off by touch alone. Yet he didn’t need his eyes to detect her graceful curves, the smooth texture of her skin.

Her skin was dangerously cool.

In his blind haste, he tore the shift as he finished dragging it down the length of her. He added it to the pile on the floor, tucked the blankets more securely around her and stood up.

He was shaking from head to foot.

Back in the kitchen, he filled canteens and bottles with hot water and placed them around her, insulated by the blankets. That done, he leaned against the rough-timbered wall of the room and closed his eyes briefly. Finished. That phase, at least, was over. The difficult part lay ahead.

The lightkeeper’s house was less a home than a refuge. The one-and-a-half-story dwelling, embraced by a towering forest, had been enough for Jesse, who needed little except to survive from one moment to the next. Yet now, with the light spilling through an east-facing window and slanting across the unmoving form on the bed, the house felt small, cramped. Dingy, even.

The birth-and-death room off the kitchen was designed with the idea that a patient lying abed should be close at hand, where the heart of the house beat the strongest. In all the years Jesse had lived here, no one had occupied this room, this bed.

Until now.

She lay unmoving beneath the blankets and quilts. Her face was pale and serene. Her dark red hair fanned out in untidy hanks, stiffened by salt. She held one perfect hand tucked beneath her chin. Her delicate eyelids were webbed with faint blue lines.

I’m alive. I suppose that’s something.

The words she had uttered so quietly on the beach whispered through his mind. He had thought he detected an accent of sorts, a lilting inflection that was hard to place. She hadn’t opened her eyes.

He caught himself wondering what color they were.

“Who are you?” he whispered, his voice harsh. “Who the hell are you?”

She was Sleeping Beauty from the fairy tale. Her bed should be a sunlit arbor entwined with roses, not a crude bedstead with a sagging mattress. She should awaken to Prince Charming, not to Jesse Kane Morgan.

He forced himself to turn away. It hurt to look at her, the way it hurt to look directly into the sun on a summer day. Better for all concerned if she were simply whisked away, still unconscious, never knowing who had pulled her from the sea.

Yet he had an urge to sink to his knees beside the woman, to grab her by the shoulders and plead with her to live, live.

He began to pace, wondering what was keeping the Jonssons. Trying to shove aside a jolt of urgency, Jesse observed his house through new eyes, trying to see it as a stranger would. Sturdy pine furniture, hand-hewn. A plain wag-on-the-wall clock, its long pendulum measuring the moments with unrelenting reliability. The shutters were open to the morning. Palina had offered to make curtains, but Jesse had no use for frills.

The longest wall in the keeping room was lined with books. Novels by Dumas, Flaubert, Dickens. Essays and stories by Emerson, Thoreau. When Jesse left the world behind, the only possessions he’d brought along were his books. He read constantly, voraciously, escaping into worlds of make-believe. In the early years, after the tragedy had first happened, he had clung to the books like a lifeline. The babbling voices of fictional characters had blocked out the howl of emptiness that screamed through his mind. The books kept him from going insane.