I flipped to the next page in the book, recalling myself to my work. There was an illustration at the top of the chapter: a man with a devious expression and a handful of orbs clutched against his chest. An egger.
At the time the lighthouse was built, no one had officially laid claim to the archipelago. Vast portions of the United States were still unowned. So the eggers had overrun the islands. The situation among these men amounted to something between a black market economy and outright piracy. The lightkeepers were caught in the crossfire. As they slept in their shack and made the trek up the hill to work the mechanism, they were aware of squabbles taking place on the other side of Southeast Farallon. Eggers versus eggers. Fistfights were common. Now and then, knives or guns would make an appearance — at which point the lightkeepers would signal the mainland for help. Soldiers would be sent to break things up.
From there, the situation continued to deteriorate. The avarice of the eggers was unending. Once, after a skirmish, an enemy faction decided to hide out in Great Murre Cave and pretend they’d fled the islands. While inside, they were showered by guano. Soon, there was so much ammonia in the air that it became toxic. Driven by greed, the men refused to leave, and so they died there, one by one.
I resettled myself, trying to accommodate the baby’s girth. The eggers had begun to remind me of the gulls I saw outside every day — motivated by voracity and anger, bent on the ruthless extermination of all others. The gulls, too, would risk their own safety, even their own lives, to attack an intruder.
The lightkeepers, on the other hand, seemed rather like the biologists. They did not intervene in the natural world. They observed and recorded without interfering. They tended the lighthouse and left the animals alone.
Eventually — inevitably — the eggers had turned their attention to the lightkeepers, too. The eggers had damaged and defaced the government’s property. They put up signs warning the lightkeepers not to set foot on their turf. They insisted that the lightkeepers pay for every murre egg they ate. Perhaps the strain of the long war had affected the eggers’ minds. At last they attempted to oust the lightkeepers entirely. There was a skirmish in which several people were injured.
The murre population was, by then, in a downward spiral. There were fewer and fewer eggs on the ground — and chickens had finally begun to appear en masse in California. There was nothing left to fight for. But the eggers fought anyway.
In 1881, the government took action. Soldiers came and removed the eggers in one clean sweep. Only the lightkeepers remained.
I WOKE TO a knock at the door. I did not realize I’d dozed off until I opened my eyes. I was still in the chair, spine molded against the wooden slats, book in hand. One finger held my place. There was a crick in my neck.
Mick appeared in the doorway, his hair sticking up. His face was burnished brown from a day in the sun.
“You’re busy,” he said.
“No. Come in.”
I laid the book aside. Mick wandered around the room for a minute, touching things in what appeared to be a random way. He seemed nervous. He spent a while examining the knob of my closet door, fiddling with a loose screw.
Finally he turned to me.
“I was thinking about our conversation,” he said.
“About the gulls?”
“No.” He pointed to my belly. “About this.”
His expression was hesitant. He sat on the edge of the bed, a safe distance away, his weight making the mattress slope.
“You haven’t told anyone else, have you?” he said.
“No. Just you.”
“Good,” he said.
He bit his lip. He seemed to be struggling with an idea — something weighty, out of character with his usual sweetness and jollity. I waited. Mick’s mind moved in slow, determined shifts, like the changing of the tides.
“Say it was me,” he said.
“What?”
“Say it was me,” he repeated. “To the others.”
Still, I did not understand. Mick clicked his tongue impatiently.
“Galen and Forest,” he said. “And especially Lucy. We’ll tell them I’m the father.”
He reached across the empty air between us and collected my hand, pressing it between his hot palms.
“I want to do this for you,” he said. “I can’t do much, but I can do this.”
“I don’t—” I began.
His grip intensified, crushing my fingers.
“Please,” he said. “I mean it. You can tell everyone it was me. Even your family. Your dad. Everyone. It’ll make your life easier, won’t it? No more questions to answer?”
I could not speak. I threw myself forward, landing against his chest. We nearly tumbled off the bed. Mick burst out laughing. His arms closed around me, holding me, steadying me.
LATER THAT NIGHT, as I drifted off to sleep, I found myself thinking about Galen’s book again. The eggers. The lighthouse. The sea. It occurred to me that the book had not used the term “lighthouse keepers.” I was glad of this. To do so would have implied that the primary task of those people had been to maintain a building, a human structure. Instead, the book had referred to them as the keepers of the light itself. There was something important in that. Something fundamental. My pillow was warm, the radiator grunting, the air thick with steam. Perhaps there were only two kinds of people in the world — the takers and the watchers — the plunderers and the protectors — the eggers and the lightkeepers. Just as I felt myself on the verge of an epiphany, the wind outside gave a deep sigh, and I slipped into sleep.
35
I HAVE NOT FELT the desire to write to you as often lately. I have not been aware of your absence in the same way I used to be.
After your death, the lack of you was all-consuming. I thought about it constantly. It was as though I’d lost something basic, like my sense of smell or my ability to laugh — the sort of thing I could live without but might not want to. I felt like a tuning fork that when struck rang out loneliness instead of music. I felt as though I’d been halved. These are the things I wrote in my letters to you — and mailed, every few days, to the Dead Letter Office.
Now, however, all that has changed. I am no longer halved. In my pregnancy, I am doubled. That is what occupies my mind nowadays. I can’t marinate in my loss anymore. I can’t dwell endlessly on your absence. Not when I am overwhelmed by the presence of the baby.
I think about it all the time. I think about him all the time, since I have become convinced that the fetus is a boy. There is a maleness about him, all elbows and knees. Sometimes, when I lay my hands on my belly, I will experience a kind of mental shock — the emotional equivalent of static electricity. A baby. A boy. The two words might well be synonyms, interchangeable. That is how sure I am.
At night, I often dream about him. There he is in a diaper and hat. There he is in my father’s lap — my father altered by his sudden elevation to grandfather, smiling in a peaceful way that I have not seen since you were here. I imagine my aunts, your twin sisters — I imagine them leaning over a basinet, faces soft. I see my son in the bath. Seated in a red wagon. On the playground. There he is, learning to go down the slide by himself, his mouth a startled O. I imagine the weight of him on my thighs, his head against my breastbone, warm and sleepy, as we turn the pages of a book together. I hear him cry, a piercing siren. I enjoy these dreams. They have given me the chance to get to know the baby before I meet him. He is here with me now. He is filling the absence you created twenty years and a thousand letters ago.