Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

To be honest, I didn’t mind being up there. In fact, I wished I could have brought one of my cameras. Any new perspective on an established landscape can shake loose inspiration. The sea, the seals, the coast guard house — they all looked diminished now, unreal. The pictures would have been striking. But I could not risk dropping my camera from such a height. It would never survive the fall, and I did not think I would be able to tolerate the death of another of my precious instruments.

Charlene and I crawled around, crablike, hammering down anything that seemed loose. She had brought a caulking gun, which she squirted at the slightest provocation. The shingles were rough to the touch. We found a few chinks that required maintenance. We got into a confused debate about which rooms were beneath us at any given time. We discovered a chimney. Then we relaxed for a while, gazing across the sea.

As always, I was slightly baffled by the fact that I could not see California. I could see nothing beyond the ocean’s edge. There is nowhere more alone than the Farallon Islands. The rest of the world might disappear — the human race wiped out by a pandemic, a meteor strike, a zombie uprising — and we would be the last to know anything about it. We would be the only ones spared. The day was fine, despite a cold, breathy breeze. October had crept in without my notice. The grass was yellowing at the corners like mildew on cloth. The mice were spending more time underground now, their scuffle and scamper less constant. The two trees near us were wilting, no longer embracing. Maroon leaves tumbled across the stones.

For the first time, Charlene opened up to me. In the manner of the very young, she chattered on about herself, never realizing that she hadn’t asked me any questions. This was not exactly narcissism. She was at the age in which her own personality fascinated her so much that it eclipsed everything else. Her own capacity for creativity. Her own brand of intelligence. She did not seem to heed the unspoken rule that talk of the past was verboten here. I heard about her family’s farm in Minnesota. Without guile, she mentioned something about an aunt who had disappeared for a time and returned with a new name, claiming to have suffered amnesia. Before I could process the oddness of this — particularly when described in Charlene’s upbeat cadence, as though it were not odd at all — she had already moved on. She was free-associating, leaping from idea to idea. She told me about her college roommate at Berkeley. She told me about the sweet-tempered boyfriend she had left behind, perhaps permanently, perhaps not.

This seemed like a good opportunity. When she paused for breath, I broke in. With every semblance of nonchalance, I asked if she had any idea whether Mick might be single.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Really?”

“Really.” Charlene shot me a worried look. “In fact, I’m sure he isn’t.”

“Ah.”

“Why do you ask?”

“Oh,” I said. “No reason. Still learning about everyone.”

There was a pause. Charlene was playing with her bangs. Her hair was the sort of fiery red that always made me do a double take. Day by day, I felt the need to check the pallor of her skin, the profusion of her freckles, trying to verify whether such a shade could possibly be real. I did that a lot here generally. The islands were a place that seemed to exist in fantasy, ever-changing and harsh.

Suddenly Charlene stiffened. A look of horror crossed her face. Gazing past my shoulder, she murmured, “Oh no.”

“What?”

She pointed behind me. I pivoted with some care, trying not to dislodge any shingles. My feet scrabbled for purchase on the slanted roof.

In the distance, I glimpsed a boat on the water. The Lunchbox was bobbing in the calm surf near Mirounga Bay. There was only one passenger. To my surprise, I saw that it was Lucy. Evidently she had rowed out alone.

“I hate it when she does this,” Charlene said. “I just hate it.”

I peered at the rowboat’s faraway contours. Lucy’s work — observing, tagging, and cataloging the birds — did not necessitate travel on the water. Galen and Forest, the shark boys, could often be found on the briny blue, but in Lucy’s case, a pair of binoculars would suffice. Still, her inquisitiveness might have gotten the better of her. Maybe she had decided to row to the Drunk Uncle’s Islets. Maybe she wanted to visit Arch Rock, which was shaped like a gigantic lock with an old-fashioned keyhole. From there, she would be able to see the burrowing owls and cormorants right under her nose.

And yet, as I looked closer, I saw that Lucy was wearing a neoprene wetsuit. Her body seemed different, wrapped in rubber. Usually she obscured her curves beneath layers of clothing, but now I could see the fleshy arc of her hips, the full measure of her generous bosom. She held a snorkeling mask up to her eyes, adjusting the strap. Beside her on the deck was a bulky breathing apparatus, a snaky hose coiling among the benches. Lucy lifted the end of this tube and stuck it between her teeth. Then she sat down and tugged on a pair of bright blue flippers.

“Is she doing what I think she’s doing?” I asked.

Charlene sighed. “It’s her hobby, believe it or not. She’s a diver. She goes down there and looks for anemones. She collects sea urchins and shells. She likes to see them up close.”

With a splash, Lucy plunged into the water. For a moment she was visible in the surf, pushing her mask into a better position. A swell washed over her, and she disappeared.

“But the sharks,” I said.

The rowboat, abandoned, slid back and forth on the waves. I could hear the smack of the surf on the hull. Lucy’s breathing hose was unrolling slowly, spooling over the side.

“We’ve all tried to talk her out of it,” Charlene said. “Especially Galen. He put his foot down. Big arguments in the kitchen. Lucy was polite, but she wouldn’t budge. She asked us to show her in writing where it said she wasn’t allowed to do it. And we couldn’t. There aren’t any rules for this. Nobody thought to make a rule about recreational diving.”

“It’s crazy,” I said.

Charlene bit her lip. “She doesn’t do it that much. Only a few times since I came. I did ask her about it once. She said it was something she had to do.”

The sea was opaque. Slippery waves. Drifting shadows. A clamor of sunlight glinting off the surface. The water did not allow me to pick out a human shape.

THAT EVENING, THERE was tension in the air. Lucy had not returned. I found it difficult to settle to anything. A cat on a hot tin roof. I was amazed that Galen and Forest could sit with their heads together, poring over a tidal chart. I was amazed that Charlene could focus on her book, pencil at the ready, occasionally underscoring an important word with two precise lines.

In my travels, I have learned that biologists are a strange breed. A certain kind of individual is drawn to this work. I have grown accustomed to the type. In Texas, I met a herpetologist who caught wild rattlesnakes with his bare hands for fun. In northern California, there was a botanist who enjoyed free-climbing the giant redwoods, scaling those massive trunks with no ropes or harnesses. In Greenland, I encountered an ichthyologist who imitated Jesus, walking on water. Born and bred in that climate, he was able to determine the density of the ice by sight. I often watched him, heart in my throat, as he strode over the surface of the ocean, sending out ripples in the layer of standing water above the deeper core of dark, porous frost.

In short, Lucy’s behavior was not that far beyond the pale. Still, as the evening passed, the clock ticking, the breeze brushing the windows, I was worried. The sea was rough and cloudy. Visibility was limited. It was starting to get dark. Lucy was down there alone, armed with nothing but a wire basket in which she liked to collect interesting shells. In my mind, the water teemed with white sharks, thrashing against one another in the rush to get to her exposed figure first.