Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

“No,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes,” Galen said, with a look of pure dislike.

The doctor took off his glasses and polished them thoughtfully. “For a moment there, I thought I had it.”

Galen’s blush had begun to curdle, turning an angry red. I was amazed at the doctor’s pluck — or else his obliviousness. I would never have dared to antagonize Galen to this extent.

A hand touched my shoulder, making me jump. Mick was sinking onto the couch. He pushed a glass of water toward me. I drank it down without registering much beyond the iron taste of the pipes. On the other side of the room, Forest was in midflow, pointing to Charlene’s prone form, and the window, and the sea. His reedy voice filled the small space. On her stretcher, Charlene gave a little, fluttering sigh, like a sleeper in the middle of a not unpleasant dream.

LATER ON, I watched the helicopter zipping across the water. The sun was still high, pinned to the silken air like a brooch on a collar. The helicopter moved at a brisk pace. I squinted, trying to keep track of its dark frame, the whir of the rotor.

Gradually, before my eyes, the sea began to change. Something was happening far out, scarcely visible. I caught a splash of spray, a gleam of silver. Shapes were bursting through the surface and ducking under again. Eventually I realized that it was a pod of gray whales. They were passing to the east of the islands, frolicking in the deep water. In the manner of their kind, they had all come up to breathe at once. I saw a shiny torso, a fat snout. Charlene’s helicopter passed above them, and their bodies shifted in concert, fins and tails in motion, as though waving goodbye.

I COULDN’T SLEEP THAT night. I lay awake for a long time. My ceiling has become unpleasantly familiar; I know every stain, every scrap of peeling paint. One crack trails out of the corner and sketches a shape that, from a certain angle, looks like a horse’s head. I stared up at this equine outline, my mind in a tumble. I could not shake the image of Charlene on the hill. Charlene stumbling, falling. The lurch of her hands. The spray of her red hair. The impact of her body on the granite slope. I could see it as though I had been there. The way her flesh must have skidded and torn. The ground crunching and cracking beneath her. The look on her face as the lights had gone out — blank, empty.

Earlier on, Mick had tucked me into bed. He had brought me a hot water bottle, insisting that I put it against my spine. “Back, not belly,” he repeated several times. He did not seem terribly concerned about Charlene. He had explained, as though to a child, that these things happened. In his tenure on the Farallon Islands, he had seen bruises, twisted ankles, and concussions. I myself had gashed my stomach. I had been with Forest when he had sliced open his calf. Once, another intern had fallen so badly that he’d suffered a compound fracture — nasty, nasty, Mick said, refusing to go into detail. What happened to Charlene had been an accident, he said.

I fell asleep with that word in my head— accident, accident. I must have dreamed. There was another sound. A mewling. A baby’s cry. I wrenched myself out of sleep, bewildered, reaching instinctively for the lost seal pup.

The stillness was deafening. The islands had settled, the sea bedding down, the wind heading off to do its wailing elsewhere. Even the elephant seals seemed subdued. For the first time in my memory, they were inaudible. Lucy was not humming in her sleep downstairs. Galen was not snoring. The only thing I could hear was a mouse inside the wall, tearing at something. The cabin was so quiet that I could differentiate between the individual noises of its teeth and its claws.

I hefted myself out of bed and threw on a sweater. I would hunt through the living room for a reference book of some kind. There was no better cure for insomnia than one of those brick-sized tomes, full of Latin names and anatomical terminology, guaranteed to bore me back to sleep.

On the stairs, however, I was brought up short. A lamp was burning in the living room. I bit my lip. Nobody would have left the lights on needlessly; we did not waste electricity on the Farallon Islands.

“Hello?” I called.

There was a scuffle. Galen appeared, tucked inside the armchair, gazing at me with wild eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You scared the life out of me.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I was not surprised to find him there. Galen was often active in the middle of the night. I had once read that as people aged, they required less sleep. Galen was living proof. I had grown accustomed to hearing his light step reverberating throughout the cabin, touching the edges of my dreams.

Still, even for him, it was late to be up and about.

“Can’t sleep?” I said.

He shook his head. “Insomnia is a beast. Surely there’s a line from Shakespeare that would apply here. The death of sleep. Murdered sleep. Something from Macbeth .”

It was cooler downstairs. A draft pooled around my ankles. The white walls of the living room had a snowy appearance, and Galen’s hair stood up in tufts, like icicles. As I approached the bookcase, I felt myself shiver. I had the momentary sensation that Galen himself was radiating a field of intense, damp cold.

“Chilly?” he said, as though answering my thought.

I shot him a nervous look.

Running my finger along the spines of the books, I glanced over the titles. The Private Life of Sharks. Pinnipeds: A Study. Seabirds of the Pacific . The clock ticked in the corner. The sea was louder now, a dull, insistent boom.

There was a flicker on the coffee table. I glanced across the room to see Oliver in his tank. His skin was a muddy orange. His tentacles were in motion. He was palpating the glass with his suckers, working systematically from one end of the aquarium to the other. I frowned. He was still trying to find a way out.

“I know why I can’t sleep,” Galen said. “Why can’t you?”

“I think too much.”

“About what?”

“Nothing. Everything.” I shrugged. “Can you recommend a book for me?”

He did not respond. His brow was knotted. I could not tell if he was looking at me or peering at something over my shoulder. For an instant, I imagined that the ghost was hovering behind me in silence. I resisted the urge to pivot and check.

“Can you recommend a book?” I repeated, each word distinct.

He didn’t answer. I was beginning to feel alarmed. I glanced behind me at the empty staircase. Then I shook Galen’s shoulder.

“You there?” I said.

He sighed, coming back to life. “Something to read? No, I can’t think of anything in particular.”

“Are you all right?”

He gave a mirthless chuckle. “Not even a little bit.”

“Oh,” I said faintly.

We stayed that way for a minute, my hand on his shoulder. He stared up at me. The expression on his face was one I recognized — the biologist’s gaze, detached and dispassionate, studying me, storing away the data.

“Your name is Miranda,” he said.

“Yes.”

“But the others call you Melissa, and Mel, and — what is it — rat girl?”

“Mouse,” I said. “Mouse girl.”

“You’ve been here for months. You haven’t corrected them. Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

I stepped back, putting a few feet of cold air between us.

“That’s not an answer,” Galen said.

“Does it matter?”

“Everything matters.”

The chill in the room had increased. I wrapped my arms around myself, half expecting to see my breath coalesce into frost on the air.

“I have to decide what to do,” Galen said.

“About what?”