Part 1:

She wore her smile as a kind of responsibility –in the kitchen, in bed, in the dining room. The only time she didn’t smile, which corresponded directly to when she felt most free, was in her garden with the monarda, the apple tree, the chamomile. But her husband's vocation was not on the mainland, where trees and flowers wanted to grow. The marriage had promised a refuge –a future bathed in light– that it could not deliver. If it was indeed a refuge at all, it did not give her the freedom to frown.

With stubborn cheerfulness, she grew vegetables and herbs out of a series of raised beds her son had built for her, with soil she hauled in bags on the little dinghy they used to access the mainland. During the day her husband slept, having maintained the kerosene light through the night.

Then she herself would journey up to the Watch Room, where her husband had spent much of the night before, and keep vigil over the bay, ready to blow the fog horns should the morning fog grow too thick. If the morning was clear, then she could do the chores early, and tend to her garden, which was in a perpetual state of replanting, for the humid sea air could reach below freezing any time of year, and kill every fragile thing overnight.

When she lost her cabbage crop for the 3rd time in a summer, her husband scoffed: "all that time you wasted out there wind or rain, you might as well be a sailor."

Her son put his hand on her shoulder.

"Be careful out there, mama, it’s so cold."

She had already begun seeding her next tray of echinacea, by the light of the stairwell window.

The son, having spent his first twenty winters and summers on this rocky outcrop by an ocean, had imaginary friends into his adulthood. They were named for the little life that could grow on the rocks –oysters, seaweed, starfish. When he spoke of them, it was difficult for his mother to distinguish the real animals from the imaginary ones. Invisible starfish would sit with him at breakfast, and seaweed would go with him to bed.

His father regarded him with a judgmental unease. He knew men to be stony, sweaty, battered by labor – not this wide-eyed, willowy boy who talked to rocks, and could be still for too long.

"The boy isn’t good anywhere else," his mother whispered early one morning. It was the time of day when the feeble love between husband and wife would emerge as a hushed and worried conversation in bed --her husband falling asleep, and herself preparing to rise.

"But he has no knack for it. He doesn’t even know how to oil the lamp."

"That can be taught. Being out here –he knows the sea, her temperament– he’s not afraid in a storm."

The lighthousekeeper considered.

"I’ll take him up tonight." 

Peter had been in the lighthouse tower before, but never up to the lantern room. He had been forbidden by his father. It was said his fingers could smudge the lenses, and the gallery was too dangerous for a child. But Peter sensed a deeper reason: the lantern was at the center of things. And being a child who believed in the unseen contracts between things, he took this mandate to stay away from the center very seriously.

"Here’s the kerosene tank. You'll have to load it up the stairs twice a day. It’s heavy. You’ll start today."

And so their son was required to learn the craft of his father, because he didn’t belong anywhere else.

At first he faced the loss of his mornings sitting on the rocks, where he would feel the changing shapes of the sky on his face. Sometimes the sun was diffuse and omnipresent, sometimes muted and stingy, or otherwise entirely absent. 

But he found the night had sensations of its own. The full moon’s improbable brightness glinting on the swells fifty miles out, or the sound of one or two gulls in the distance, and the silence between their calls. And there was the way sound seemed to travel more clearly, more starkly, at night. The waves, as they broke on the rocks below, sounded as though they could swallow their little island– but then the sound would crumple into a comforting hiss. 

And he began to love the faint smell of burning kerosene–the pantheon of light with its blinding flashes that vanished before one’s eyes could catch up. 

They only tended the lighthouse at night, keeping watch for the intermittent fog that could disorient even the best navigators. And a sandy shoal stretched miles into the sea, where sailors were often wrecked. In the early mornings, Peter and his father sat quietly at the table eating the dinner his mother had prepared the night before. His father, as with most mornings, was weary and dim-faced, eating his pork and potatoes and somehow draining the room of energy with his own exhaustion. From his mother Peter learned to wear a smile as a shield.

One night, his father was unusually talkative, drinking whiskey and coffee. Usually his father communicated in grunts and nods, expecting Peter to follow closely behind him. Tonight he pointed out into the darkness.

“See that ship there? They could see our light from there. That’s about two miles away.” 

“So why do they never come?” Peter asked. “We’ve got plenty for them to eat here.”

His father laughed, believing his child to be joking. “Your mother would have quite a terrible time hosting all those sailors –ha!”

“But really, father, why not?” 

"I should think the shoals would stop them before they reached us here."

"But what's the point of a lighthouse if it doesn't invite people in?"

Then the wind –mischevious and blustering as always– blew an open window shut, cracking part of the pane. His father rushed to mend it, and never managed to answer Peter’s question.