Why, then, had Jan broken their vow and gone to her father behind her back to ask for this enormous favor? At first she’d thought it had to do with her own plans to enter into partnership in a Los Angeles graphic arts firm next year. Although she would be establishing the Northern California branch of the company, the work would entail a lot of traveling to L.A. She’d asked him if that was his reason, and he’d said of course it was: “You won’t have time for lighthouses after you become a big executive.” But he’d said it so readily that she wondered then if it wasn’t just a convenient excuse, if there was some other explanation for the puzzling urgency of his request to her father. When she’d tried to question Jan further, he’d become closed off and unreachable, unable or unwilling to talk to her about it.
Her father was saying something. She said, “I’m sorry. Dad, what was that?”
“I said, everything is all right, isn’t it?”
She hastened to reassure him it was, gave him a brief description of the lighthouse, and promised to call him and her mother when they were more settled. After the conversation ended, she sat on the lumpy, overstuffed couch that, along with two equally lumpy chairs and a couple of end tables, comprised the living room furniture. It was dark beyond the small windows; she peered out at the night, thinking about her family and her home, about Jan’s drop-everything need to start writing his history of lighthouses that had brought them so many miles from all that was familiar.
But she didn’t sit there for long; there was nothing to be gained by brooding. Besides, Jan was waiting upstairs. And tonight he was all she really needed.
Alix
Late the next morning, they went into Hilliard to buy supplies and propane tank refills.
It was another cold day, overcast and windy; the daylight had a dull, steel-gray quality. Alix drove, bundled up in her pea jacket, a wool scarf, and a pair of gloves. Even with all that clothing, and the Ford’s heater turned up high, she couldn’t seem to get warm. Last night hadn’t been bad, cuddled up with Jan in the big old-fashioned four-poster, but this morning… God, the watch house living quarters had been like an icebox when they woke up. The heaters did little to dispel the damp chill, and the woodstove in the living room had started smoking as soon as Jan lit the fire. And of course the stove in the kitchen had run out of propane before the coffee was even hot.
It had not been a good morning for those reasons and because Jan seemed to have lapsed into another of his depressed moods. It was odd, considering how cheerful he’d been yesterday, how exuberantly he’d made love to her last night. The only reason she could find for it was that he was suffering another of his headaches. She knew he was because of the way he moved, the pinched look of his face, the controlled wince she would catch now and then in his expression; but when she had asked him about it, he shrugged it off and refused to talk about it. He hadn’t said twenty words to her, and he sat silently now, slouched against the passenger door, rumpling his beard and wincing whenever one of the tires bounced through a pothole.
That’s what I get for marrying an academic and semi-genius, she thought, and smiled a little and then sighed. His depressions worried her, as did his headaches. For the past few years he had been seeing their friend Dave Sanderson, a neurologist on the staff at Stanford Hospital, for treatment of them. Dave had prescribed a variety of drugs-ergotamine, propranolol, codeine pain relievers, different kinds of tranquilizers-but the headaches and the depressions continued to recur. When Alix finally suggested he might want to consult somebody else, perhaps even a psychiatrist, Jan’s reaction had been negative. More than once she’d considered going to Dave herself, asking him to explain the problem to her. But Jan. if he had found out, would have considered it a breach of trust. Just as she considered his going to her father behind her back a breach of trust.
He worried her in other ways as well. While she knew that the dark side of his personality was caused by problems in his past-his mother running off when he was only a baby, the hideous murder in Wisconsin-she couldn’t believe they were the only factors that made him so often silent and unreachable.
For one thing, he’d come to terms with those problems; they’d talked them out before they were married. But still there was a part of him that he kept hidden; and even though she knew some of the difficulty was in her inability to understand it, it also seemed that he couldn’t or wouldn’t let her see that side of him, even after eleven years of marriage. A part he seemed to retreat into more and more of late, so that she seemed constantly to be reaching and tugging him back out of himself.
With the silence heavy in the car, she negotiated a turn near the rise where she and Jan had stopped for her first view of the Cape Despair Light. On the other side of the turn, she was surprised to see an old green Chevvy pulled off on the grassy verge. A youth of about twenty in a plaid shirt and jeans and a teenaged girl-no more than sixteen-were leaning against the Chevvy’s hood, staring at the station wagon as it came into view. Then they both seemed to relax and the girl waved casually; she wore a bold-figured blue-and-white Indian poncho, and her thick auburn hair was pulled back with a beaded leather headband.
Alix returned the wave as she drove past, then caught a glimpse of what the young man was holding in one cupped hand and understood the reason for their initial tension. It was a hand-rolled cigarette-marijuana, no doubt. She smiled wryly, glancing sideways at Jan.
“Oregon’s not so different from California, is it,” she said.
“What?”
“Those kids back there. Smoking dope out in the country just like they do back home.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
The silence resettled between them, remained unbroken all the way to the junction with the county road that looped off Highway 1 eight miles away, became Hilliard’s main street, then looped back out to rejoin Highway I further north. Most of the terrain here was flattish sheep graze, strewn with prickly broom, small stands of trees, and hundreds of placid black-and white-faced woolies. All the sheep, Alix supposed, belonged to the owners of the big ranch a half mile or so to the south, off the county road. There were no ranches out on the cape itself, no private dwellings of any kind; the land that didn’t belong to the one sheep rancher was controlled by the state.
A weathered metal sign, pocked with dents and holes made by kids (adults, too, for all she knew) out plinking with rifles and handguns, loomed to one side of the intersection. Alix glanced at it again as she turned north onto the country road.
Despite the rather forbidding wording, Alix thought it wouldn’t keep adventurous tourists from wandering out there for a look at the lighthouse. Most of them would come in summer, but a few would no doubt show up in the off-season months as well. A few hundred yards to the south of the turnoff was a rest area with public toilets and a pay phone; the lighthouse, clearly visible from there, would attract a fair number of those who stopped. She and Jan would just have to deal as politely as possible with any who grew bold enough to come knocking on the door asking questions.
The county road was reasonably well paved; it hooked downward toward the bay, past a weathered gray Victorian house and ramshackle garage set on a low promontory and a smaller, squarish building in the foreground near the road. The smaller building bore a sign that said Lang ‘ s Gallery and Gifts in ornate blue lettering.