One. The Winter of the Big Blow

The light was the last thing Maren Warren could fall asleep to and the first thing she woke inside of.

She would remember, for the rest of her life, that she had been born into it: the low thumping of the mercury bath as the great lens turned on its bed of quicksilver, the slow tick of the clockwork weight unwinding toward the floor, the particular sigh the wind made when it came around the north corner of the tower and found the gallery rail. The sound went through the walls of the keeper's house like a heartbeat through a chest. When they had lived in the town, in a house with a piano and a neighbor with a dog, she had never once been able to sleep without it, and she had decided, somewhere around the age of six, that this was the family's due, the way other families owed a mortgage or a mother-in-law.

The house at Thrush Island consisted of the tower and the keeper's quarters joined by a short stone passage, and the whole thing sat on the shoulder of a granite hill like a man sitting on a fence post waiting for a train. Below it, the island fell away in ledges of scrub and wind-bent spruce toward a beach of pale stones. Above and behind it there was nothing but sky and the two hundred yards of cliff where the fog came in and sat.

"Maren." Her father did not look up from the lens. He had been polishing the first-surface prisms since breakfast with a chamois and a bottle of turpentine, one at a time, the way a man counts rosary beads. "That is the fourteenth time you've come through here."

"You said eight o'clock."

"I said eight o'clock in the spring."

"It is eight o'clock."

"Clocks lie. Trim the lamp."

Trimming the lamp meant lifting the glass and drawing the charred mantle out with the tweezers and turning it so the flame would not scorch the burner, and it meant the smell, which was the smell of the world she lived in: hot brass, paraffin, dust, and something sweetish and destructive like burned sugar. The mantle had to go on the last of the oil. The oil came up from the mainland in a sealed drum on the supply boat, twice a month, if the weather let the boat come at all, and the winter supply was in the shed behind the fog-signal house: two hundred and forty gallons of paraffin in a tank that had to be pumped by hand, a chore she had been assigned since she was nine and could now do in the dark, blindfolded, with the hose heavy and the smell of it going up her nose.

She trimmed the lamp and set the mantle and put the glass down and watched the wick catch.

Her father turned his head a few degrees without standing. "Good."

"You're not going to say it."

"I don't say it."

"You always say it."

"I said it when you were ten. You were ten and you wanted to hear it and you were ten." He set the chamois down on the cloth and looked at her — the look she had learned to read in the years when he was teaching her the things she was supposed to know. "Twelve is the number of the clockwork. Twelve hours it turns on one weight, and it must be wound before the weight touches the floor, or it stops dead. Twelve hours. And you can do it in eleven, and I'll not complain if you do it in eleven, but you do it in twelve, because the day is long and the light doesn't care how tired you are."

He went back to the prisms.

Her mother called from the kitchen: "Elias. She's been out on the rocks since before light."

"She has."

"Since before light."

"Then she's in a mood," Elias Warren said, "and the rocks are good for that."

---

The Big Blow came the third week of November, and after it the island was a different shape.

Maren had been in the schoolroom at Gulls End on the mainland for two days when the weather closed, and she came back on the tail of the gale with her father's boat and the mail, and the whole seven miles of water between them was white as a road with salt on it. The wind had taken the top of the spruce at the north end and laid it flat in a long fan. It had torn the door off the fog-signal house and put it on the roof of the oil shed. It had moved the little white boat — Ada Beausoleil's boat, the Wren — forty feet up the beach and left it sitting in the wrack like a toy.

And it had moved the marker at the top of Warren Light.

Every light on that coast had a marker: a tower of iron, a ball, a cage — something to be seen in fog by a vessel that could not see the tower itself. Warren Light's was a triangle of white-painted boards above the cliff, and after the Big Blow one of the boards had swung free and hung by a single bolt, turning in the wind so that it showed its edge and then its face and then its edge again.

"She'll look after it," Ada Beausoleil said.

Maren had been on the rocks with Ada Beausoleil every day since she was old enough to walk, which was a longer sentence than it sounds, because Ada Beausoleil lived in the fog-keeper's cottage at the north end of the island, three-quarters of a mile from anyone, and had for longer than anyone could remember.

"She'll look after it," Ada said again, and then put down the trowel and stood up in the cold and looked at the tower on the hill with her hand shading her eyes, though the sky was bright with the low winter sun.

Ada was eighty-four. She was small and straight and wore a man's navy cap — an actual keeper's cap, with the badge on the front, which she had bought herself in Portland in 1938 for eleven dollars and which she still wore in weather that would have sent a person with sense inside.

"You'll have the painter out," Maren said.

"I'll have the painter out. And I'll have the painter out whether the painter wants to come or not, and then I'll have you paint it, because you mix the colors wrong and it doesn't matter for a board, does it."

"Mix them wrong how."

"Too much white. You want it to look like snow in a photograph, not like snow."

Maren sat down on the flat rock and took the trowel and looked at the daub of white on Ada's left hand. Ada had been the keeper of Warren Light from 1929 to 1938. That was a fact stated on a painted board in the tower and a fact that no one in Maren's family had ever said out loud, because Ada did not care to be said out loud, and because there was a version of it that people in the county preferred to leave alone.

The County of Light — the Board of Lighthouse Commissioners, three elderly men in Augusta who met in an upstairs room above a hardware store and who had not, in Maren's lifetime, visited any light they administered — had ended Ada's appointment in 1938 as an economy measure, the minute said. The post of keeper at Warren Light had been combined with the post at the fog signal and the wage cut from eleven hundred to nine hundred dollars, and the new keeper had been a man named Halloran who took the job in April and lived in the keeper's house for six years and moved away in 1944 for a job on a ferry and was, Maren's mother had said once, not a bad sort but not a man who looked at the weather.

Ada had fought it. That was the part everyone remembered. She had walked to Augusta, twice, on the mail boat, to argue with the Board, and had lost, and had come back and lived in the north cottage with a position the Board could not describe and therefore paid her nothing for, as assistant keeper of the fog signal, a post that existed on paper and consisted of one person and a woodstove.

"Assistant keeper," Ada said, reading Maren's face, because Ada read faces the way she read engines — by their sound. "Don't. I know what that mouth is doing."

"You're not, though."

"Not what?"

"A keeper. Not officially."

Ada Beausoleil took the trowel out of Maren's hands, wiped it on her coat, and looked down the beach at the tide coming in over the pale stones with that slow, unhurried, entirely purposeful way that water had.

"Officially," Ada said, "the light is lit and the log is written and the oil is burned. That's the whole of it. Whether my name's on the page at the top of the log or whether it's your father's name, the light doesn't change color."

"Father's name is on the page."

"His name is on the page because he was the keeper."

"After you."

"After me."

Maren pulled her knees up. "You lit it anyway."

"I lit it anyway," Ada agreed, "because a light's no use to nobody if it's dark."

---

She was in the kitchen at Thrush Island that evening when her father came in with the log-book under his arm, and he set it on the table with the particular care of a man carrying water in a cracked cup.

The log-book was a ledger of gray board, the standard government issue, ruled in columns, one page for each month, each night ruled off with a line and a number of hours. Maren knew its pages the way she knew the stairs. She knew which of the nights in 1961 and 1962 had been marked with a small ink blot where her father had spilled tea, and she knew that he wrote his entries in a fine slanted hand that got worse when he was tired and much worse when he was worried, which she could tell by the way the letters leaned.

"Fog at dusk," he said, reading back the line he had just written. "Wind SW, force six, backing. Light lit 4:41 p.m. Visible one mile, fog signal in operation."

"You weren't here Thursday."

"Thursday I was in Gulls End getting the mail and the coal."

"You were here Friday."

He set down the pen. He looked at her, and then at her mother in the doorway with the dish towel, and Maren understood that she had crossed a line she hadn't been able to see, and that her father was standing on the other side of it deciding whether to come back.

"Maren," her mother said. "Your father is tired."

"I just want to know why the light was on Thursday night if he was in Gulls End."

"You saw the light."

"I saw the light on. And I was awake, and I was at the window, and I was awake because I was cold and I couldn't sleep, and the light was going, and Papa was in Gulls End."

There was a silence with the wind in it.

Her father turned the ledger around and slid it across the table to her, and put his finger on a line.

21 Nov. Fog, dense. Light lit 3:52 p.m. Extinguished 8:10 a.m. Second light burning 11:40 p.m. to dawn, unaccounted.

"Unaccounted," said her father. "That's the wording they taught me, in the office in Portland. When something happens that I can't account for, I write it down as unaccounted, and I don't leave it blank, because a blank line is a lie and a line that says unaccounted is a truth with a hole in it." He put his finger on the second half of the line. "Ada was up north. Ada went up and lit it. I know this because I saw her boat on the water at eleven-forty, coming down from the cove, and I could see her lamp from the gallery."

"She didn't have a key to the tower."

"She has never needed a key to the tower."

"She could have rung you up on the mainland."

"She could have," said her father. "She did once, in 1951, and it was a two-hour conversation about the price of coal."

Maren's mother put the dish towel down on the back of a chair. "Elias."

"I'm being straight with her."

"You're being straight with a thirteen-year-old over the supper table."

"She's thirteen and she keeps my log for me when I go to Gulls End, and if she's going to keep my log she can read what's in it."

Maren looked down at the page. The entry for the twenty-first of November sat in the neat ruled rows with all the other entries, and it said unaccounted, and it said second light, and she thought about Ada Beausoleil on the rock with the trowel in her hand and the white paint on her knuckles, painting a board so a ship wouldn't break itself on the cliff.

"If she lit it," Maren said, "why doesn't she sign the log?"

Her father took the ledger back. He closed it, and squared the edges against the table, twice, the way he did everything.

"Because she's not the keeper," he said. "And I'm not going to have her made into something she isn't, on paper, for the convenience of a file in Augusta."

He picked up the pen and went back to his evening entry, and the lamp outside began its long turning of the dark, and Maren sat at the table and looked at the closed ledger and thought that something in this house was being written twice, in two different hands, and that only one of them was allowed to keep a copy.