Seventy-Four Steps

You last eleven minutes.

You sit on Hep's couch with the porch light on, and you watch the beam sweep across the fog every few seconds, a slow white wing, and you feel ridiculous. A grown woman. A woman who has pitched to rooms full of executives. Sitting in the dark because someone she met yesterday asked her to leave a light on.

Lois's casserole dish is drying in the rack. Heavy blue enamel. L. MAHONEY written on masking tape on the bottom.

Marin brought it. You should return it to Marin.

That's a perfectly normal neighborly reason to put on your boots.

The road to the point is one long gray tunnel. You use your phone's flashlight and feel the fog bead on your eyelashes. The sea is close on your right, invisible, breathing. Every few seconds the beam passes overhead and the whole world goes silver and then dark again.

Then the tower rises out of nothing. White brick, impossibly tall this close, its top lost in the cloud. Beside it, the keeper's house: two stories, white clapboard, a red door, every downstairs window lit.

A hand-painted sign by the door: GULL ROCK LIGHT MUSEUM. OPEN WHEN THE KEEPER'S HOME. KNOCK LOUD.

You knock loud.

The door opens and an enormous orange cat walks out, looks at you with total contempt, and walks back in.

"That's Fresnel," Marin says, appearing behind him. She's in socks and a gray sweater, the braid loose now, a pair of reading glasses pushed up on her head. "He doesn't like people. Don't take it personally. He doesn't like me either."

"He let you name him after a lens."

"He let me feed him. The name was a negotiation." She looks at the dish in your hands. Then at your face. "You walked a mile in the fog to return a casserole dish, Ava."

"I was raised right."

"You were raised by Hep two months a year. That's not the same thing." But she steps back to let you in, and there's that almost-smile again, there and gone.

The downstairs is the museum. One big room, low-beamed, smelling of woodsmoke and old paper. Glass cases of brass lamps and logbooks. Black-and-white photographs of keepers with enormous mustaches. A big wooden board with the names of every keeper since 1857 painted in gold.

"Hep made me do the lettering," Marin says. "I have terrible handwriting. Look at the fourth one."

You look. Ebenezer Wardwell has a slightly wobbly W.

"It's charming," you say.

"It's a crime." She takes the dish and sets it on a shelf. "Do you want the tour or do you want tea?"

"Is the tour long?"

"Seventy-four steps."

You look at her. She looks back, perfectly serious, sea-gray eyes catching the lamplight, and something flips over in your stomach that has nothing to do with stairs.

"Tour," you say.

The stairs spiral up the inside of the tower, iron, painted black, each step worn to a dip in the middle by a hundred and sixty years of boots. Marin goes first. You count. You stop counting at forty because your thighs are screaming and she isn't even breathing hard.

"You do this every night?" you gasp.

"Twice. Up at dusk, check at midnight."

"Why? Isn't it automatic?"

"Mostly." She glances back. "Mostly isn't good enough on a night like this."

At the top, a little iron hatch, and then you climb through into the lamp room and stop.

It's like standing inside a jewel. The lens is taller than you, a great glass beehive of prisms, rings and rings of cut crystal catching the lamp at the center and throwing it outward in one fierce white blade. The whole thing turns, slow and silent, on a bed of brass. Light slides over Marin's face, over yours, over the curved glass walls running with condensation, and out into the fog, where it becomes the thing you watched from the couch.

"Oh," you say. That's all.

"Fourth-order Fresnel. Made in Paris in 1856." Her voice changes when she talks about it. Softer. "Coast Guard took it out in eighty-six and put in a plastic beacon on a pole. Hep bought the station in ninety-four. It took me two years to get this one turning again."

"You did this?"

"I'm good with engines." She shrugs. "It's an engine that makes light."

She opens a small door, and cold air pours in, and she steps out onto the gallery. After a second you follow. The iron railing is wet under your hands. Below, nothing. Gray. The sound of water on rock. You're standing in a cloud with a woman you met yesterday, and the light passes over both of you every few seconds like a slow heartbeat.

"Hep brought you up here," Marin says. "The summer you were ten."

You turn. "How do you know that?"

She takes her phone out, scrolls, and holds it up. A photo of a photo: a faded snapshot, a skinny ten-year-old with a gap in her teeth and wind-wrecked hair, standing exactly here, grinning like she owns the sea. Hep behind her, one hand on her shoulder.

"It's in the museum. Third case on the left. She wouldn't let me move it." Marin puts the phone away. "She told everyone who came through. That's my niece, Ava. She's going to live here someday."

You look out at the fog so she can't see your face.

"I was going to," you say. "Then I wasn't."

"Mm." Not judgment. Just a sound that holds the door open.

"Do you get lonely?" you ask. "Out here?"

"No." She considers. "Sometimes. In February. Then Lois makes me come to card night and I remember I'd rather be lonely."

You laugh, a real one, and she looks pleased with herself in a way she's clearly trying to hide.

"So," she says, after a while. Lightly. Too lightly. "How long are you staying, Boston?"

"The surveyors come Thursday."

The light passes over her. In the bright slice of it you see her face close, gently, like a door eased shut so it won't slam.

"Thursday," she repeats. "That's fast."

"That's the idea."

She nods. She doesn't say anything else. After a minute she says, "You're cold, Ava," and she's right, you're shaking, and she leads you back down all seventy-four steps without another word about it.

She walks you home. She doesn't ask; she just takes the lantern off its hook and falls into step beside you on the road, and you don't argue, because the fog is thick and you don't have a lantern and also you don't want to.

You don't talk much. The lantern swings. Your shoulders brush once, twice. At the gate, she stops.

"Porch light," she says, nodding at it, still burning.

"I left it on."

"I saw." A pause. "Thank you."

Then she's gone, the lantern shrinking up the road into the gray.

You go inside. You take off your boots. You lie down on Hep's spare bed with all your clothes on and watch the beam slide across the ceiling, and you think about a ten-year-old who was going to live here forever.

On the nightstand, your phone lights up.

Marin.