The Lighthouse That Blinked Back

"You'll catch your death standing out in that," Nana calls from the kitchen.

Wren stays at the porch rail. Three days of storm, and tonight the wind drops enough to see across the bay. The lighthouse is doing what it always does. On, off, on.

She lifts her flashlight and clicks it twice, as she has every night since she was six.

The lighthouse answers.

Two blinks. A pause. Three.

The flashlight nearly goes into the wet grass. She clicks twice more, and two blinks come back across the water, and a pause, and three.

"Nana."

"What."

"It's answering me."

Nana comes out drying a plate and looks where Wren is looking.

"That light's had no keeper on it in forty years," she says. "It runs off a timer. There's a switch in a box and the box does what it's told."

"It never did this before."

"Then the switch is wearing out."

"It's been the same count my whole life. A switch doesn't wear into a better one."

"Things wear into all sorts."

"Two for my two. Three after. It waits until I've finished."

Nana dries the plate a good while longer than the plate needs.

"Water'll be flat by morning," she says. "Take the oars, not the outboard. And be off that rock before the tide turns."

The bay comes up gray and glassy at six. Wren rows out past the point, where she has been told a hundred times never to go alone, and half a mile out the starboard oarlock jumps its pin with a clatter and drops the oar in the water. She goes flat over the gunwale after it. The boat swings broadside and takes cold sea over the rail and down her collar, and she gets the blade back in both fists, and rows the rest of the way with her boot jammed hard on the pin to hold it in.

The tower comes up out of the smudge. White paint flaking off in sheets, black railing rusted at the joints, two boards gone from the dock.

She ties up and climbs. One hundred and twelve steps, and she counts them out loud, because counting is something to do with legs that shake. At the top the hatch has swelled into its frame, and she puts her shoulder into it four times before the old wood cracks and lets her up.

The lamp room is empty.

Dust on the brass. A broken chair on its side. Gull feathers over the boards, no keeper, nobody behind the lens, and the great glass going around like a clock in an empty house.

"Hello," says Wren. "It's me. It's the two blinks."

The lens goes around. On, off, on.

Wren sits down hard on the boards. Out of everything she has carried across a mile of water, not one piece of it is up here.

She does not go back down. She goes around the room on her knees, hands into every gap the boards will give her, under the chair, behind the burner housing, along the sill where the rain has got in, and at the shelf where the logbooks used to sit her fingers close on a corner of paper.

The ink has browned, but the hand is looping and old-fashioned and easy enough to read.

"To whoever finds this. I kept this light forty-two years and never once believed anybody was looking back at it. My wife signalled me from the widow's walk on Corbin Street. Two blinks for goodnight, three for I love you, and I answered her if I could make out her lamp through the fog. She has been gone eleven years. I have set the mechanism to keep sending her count out over the water, in case somebody someday sends it back and wants an answer. If that is you, then hello. You are not signalling into nothing."

Wren reads it twice, then folds it small and puts it in her jacket.

Her flashlight has her name scratched down the barrel, and she pushes it into the crack where the paper was, batteries in, switch left loose enough for cold fingers to find.

The tide has turned and the chop is up again by the time she casts off. She takes it on the bow and rides each one up and down the other side, and her palms are raw before she is past the point.

"You're bleeding on my step," Nana says at the door.

"I need the storm lantern."

"You've got a torch."

"I left it up there."

"On purpose?"

"On purpose. For whoever gets up there next."

Nana gets the lantern off its hook and puts it in her hands without a word about the price of it.

That night Wren stands at the rail and swings the lantern shutter twice. She waits. She swings it three times.

The lighthouse blinks back. Two. A pause. Three.

"Anything?" Nana says from the door.

"It waited until I finished."

"Goodnight," says Wren, out over the water.

"Goodnight," says Nana behind her, and does not ask who else she is talking to.