Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

The attack itself was never handled with sensitivity. You would cover my eyes during the worst of it, but I was still able to get the gist. There was always too much exposed flesh, the camera lingering on a T-shirt being ripped off, lacy lingerie tossed to the floor. You used to comment that it was unsettling and exploitative. Invariably, when the assault was over, the victim would dash into the shower. Even as a child, I found this irritating. Everybody knew about DNA. Everybody knew to go to the hospital, where the nurses would get out the rape kit and find all the evidence written on the body. But no — that would have been too simple. If the victim had behaved logically, the show would have been over in ten minutes. Instead, she would crouch, shivering, in the shower, scrubbing beneath her fingernails where her attacker’s skin cells had collected when she scratched him. She would shove the sheets into the washing machine. She would burn the clothes she had been wearing. In the end, it would be up to the police, our heroes, to verify her story by interviewing witnesses and double-checking alibis.

That was how things struck me back then. But now I know better.

My first clear memory after the act is of sitting in the tub, clutching a sea sponge in both hands. A cold sprinkle pattered my shoulders. There was only one bathroom in the cabin, and the shower had plainly been tacked on as an afterthought, held to the wall by a suction cup. That night, there was no hot water. We had used it up doing dishes earlier. The frigid stream was peppered with flakes of rust. My teeth were chattering. My fingers were so numb that it was hard to manage the sponge. If someone had asked me what I was doing, I am not sure what I would have answered. Some powerful internal instinct had taken over, and all I could do was obey. Cleanliness. Safety. A rite of purification. A little more soap.

When I climbed out, my lips were ghost-blue in the mirror. It looked as though I had aged a hundred years. I stumbled to the toilet and threw up. I voided dinner, then lunch, then breakfast. I sank to the floor and vomited until the sides of my stomach banged together. It felt good to flush that mess away, watching it swirl down the drain.

I BARELY REMEMBER the days that followed. By morning, I had come down with a roaring fever. I can tell you this much: I was out of my mind.

The Farallon Islands were not designed for illness. Cuts and bruises, yes. Colds, no. There was no medicine in the cabinets. Our stock of aspirin had expired. I was too sick to go foraging anyway. I lay beneath the covers, limp and bewildered. The light through the blinds was a knife in the temple. The others had no sympathy at all. Galen and Forest refused to get anywhere near me. Even Charlene only poked her head in to flash a cheery grin, maintaining a safe distance.

It was Mick who kept me going. Without him, I probably would have died of malnutrition, dehydration, and loneliness. But he was tireless in his compassion. He came rushing to my aid, toting crackers and soup. He laid his calloused hand on my forehead and assured me that I would be better in no time.

For three days, I did not leave my room. Part of this was the illness — I was almost too weak to stand — but the greater part was Andrew. He had not varied his routine one bit. He was everywhere. He was always in the cabin. I heard him typing. I heard him in his bedroom right below me, humming as he flipped through a book. I heard him in the kitchen laughing with the others. If anything, his spirits seemed lightened.

I cannot explain what it was like to be so close to him. I might as well have been a rabbit trapped in a burrow. All the runs leading straight into the fox’s mouth. The fear was overwhelming. Even Mick noticed something amiss. A window would bang shut in another room, and I would jump out of my skin. The only solution I could come up with was to hide. For those three days, I did not shower. I did not even visit the bathroom. Instead, I made use of the old, dusty bottles and jars that had been scattered around my bedroom for decades. I would fill a glass container with amber liquid, which Mick, believe it or not, obligingly disposed of.

Looking back, I must conclude that Mick was raised by women, rather than men. A pack of three sisters, perhaps. A single mother, maybe. Somebody had taught him the kind of benevolent unselfishness that most women are schooled, in childhood, to offer unquestioningly — and few men ever attain. Throughout my illness, Mick was unflinchingly heroic. He sat on the end of the bed and watched me, making sure I ate my soup. He told me silly jokes to keep my spirits up.

On the third day, my fever spiked. Mick stayed close, bathing my brow with a cool washcloth and wrestling the covers back onto the bed whenever I threw them off. After a while I grew delirious. I shuddered and wept. I told him that I was scared. I said it over and over: I’m scared, I’m scared . It seemed vital that he understand this simple fact, yet I could not be sure I was making myself clear. Mick hurried out to soak the washcloth in cool water again. He stroked my hair. He told me that anyone who tried to hurt me would have to go through him first.

“I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Don’t worry, Mel. I’ll handle it.”

ON THE THIRD night, I ran away. Mick had left me alone, tucking me in and heading off to do a bit of note-taking in the daily log. I lay beneath the quilt, staring out the window in a daze. Throughout my illness, I had continually lost time. It reminded me of the aftermath of your funeral — days torn from the calendar. I would blink and find that an hour had gone by. I would inhale and exhale, and in that instant, the sky would darken. Now I watched the clouds billowing across the horizon, moving with the speed of stop-motion video. The wind brushed the glass.

And then I heard it. A moan. A squeal of bedsprings. A gusty sigh. Andrew and Lucy were having sex downstairs.

I limped down the hall to the bathroom. I leaned over the toilet, attempting to throw up again, but nothing happened. I shuffled back to my room. I was weak enough that even this little jaunt exhausted me. Still, without pause, I bundled myself up under half a dozen sweaters. I hummed under my breath to block out any ambient sounds that might drift up through the floorboards. Gripping the banister, I descended the stairs. I left the cabin through the front door.

Even at the time, I was aware that this was a terrible idea. We all had been warned so many times. It was easy to get turned around at night on Southeast Farallon. The cabin and the coast guard house were not useful landmarks — dark shapes against a dark sky. The swiveling beam of the lighthouse was inconstant, disorienting. The roar of the sea came undistinguished from every point of the compass. There was no paved path. Many of the biologists had been injured, dislocating a knee or fracturing a wrist. I myself had been gutted by a sharp stone, and that was in broad daylight. I still bore the scar. Once, an intern had become so befuddled that he had spent an entire night hunched beside a boulder, unable to locate the cabin again, unwilling to imperil himself further by abandoning the meager shelter he had found. He had nearly succumbed to hypothermia before Galen discovered him the next morning.

And, of course, there were people who had disappeared. In the old days, when the eggers and pirates had overrun the islands, one or two men had vanished every season. They would go for a walk and were never seen again.

After a few minutes, I started shivering. There was a mist in the air, collecting against my skin like gauze. The moon was bright that night, bathing the flat surfaces in a blue glow. I thought I saw a figure ahead of me. It seemed to be moving toward the coast guard house. I squinted, my heart beginning to pound. But the shape melted away. There was no one else on the grounds. The fog often played tricks like this on the mind, tangling the moonlight in bright pockets, coating the air in planes of iridescent sheen.