Authors: Alexis M. Smith
On my way back for the box of groceries, I noticed a glow among the swaying trees—not the moon, which hadn’t risen yet. A light in an upstairs window at Rookwood, the big old house across the lane. I wasn’t completely alone on the far side of the island.
Weary from the drive and the long ferry ride, I went straight to bed, up the ladder to the loft in the eaves. The ceiling was so low, I crawled to the pallet bed on my knees.
When I was a kid, I could walk upright if I tucked my head. Every night I read until I fell asleep with the lamp on. So Dad started calling it my lighthouse. He could see my windows from down by the shore where he cleaned crab pots or smoked salmon or drank beers with Mom and talked about the things they didn’t want me to hear. When they came back to the cottage, he would climb up the ladder to kiss me good night and turn off the light. I remembered the smell he brought in with him: night, alder smoke, an abalone wetness.
I woke early. Woolly fog wrapped around the small windows, and condensation dripped down the wooden sills, the white paint puckering and peeling away. The ceiling was still blue, with faded golden stars painted all over the slats. Once there had also been paper stars hung from the beams with fishing line. I listened to the muffled lap of the waves against the dock below and guessed that the tide was high.
As I climbed down the ladder as gracefully as I could, creaks sounded out from the rungs that I used to flit up and down like a chickadee. In the morning light, I saw everything I had missed the night before: Grandma Lucia’s lace curtains still hanging in the east windows, a row of agates along each sill, the wool rag rug in the living room—worn to threads in places. The smell of wood smoke was in everything. It had already seeped into my hair, though I hadn’t built a fire. I knew by the note Mom had left on the closet door that there were
extra coats, hats, etc
. inside, but when I opened it, I took a step back. They were Dad’s coats, boots, vests. A box full of knitted caps, rain hats, work gloves. Some of them had been Grandpa Whit’s first. I closed the door and tore the note down. Then I went around tearing all the notes down.
After the earthquake and Dad’s funeral, it took all the money we had to get to Seattle to Mom’s parents’ place. Mom signed up with a temp agency as soon as we unpacked our things. There were ruins everywhere and plenty of work in reconstruction. She did anything they offered her, directing traffic for utilities crews, sorting salvage at warehouses where people could haul loads of debris. Eventually she worked in the office of a property developer. She supported us with that work, within a few months finding us an apartment, acquiring health insurance, sending me to the parish school, Our Lady of the Lake. And repairing the cottage. Making sure the county didn’t condemn it and tear it down, like so many other buildings rattled by the quake. She used what she learned working for the developer to sidestep occupancy requirements, to get waivers and stays, to hold on to Dad’s childhood home. It hadn’t been ruined, just abandoned.
Not abandoned,
she had told them,
just temporarily vacant
. Reconstruction all over the region took years, but it wasn’t long before people wanted to get away from the city and the glassy, haunted look it could have, when everything new just reminded them of what had been there before. Mom started renting out the cottage to pay for taxes and utilities. Occasionally a friend of mine would report that she had slept in my lighthouse room. I would change the subject. I would avoid that friend for a week.
There was a new mirror above the sink; the old medicine cabinet had come off its rusted hinges and crashed in the quake. I had not been tall enough to see most of myself in it then. I was unrecognizable now, eyes cottony with sleep, hair flared up on the pillow side, ponytail askew. I had fallen asleep in long underwear and a wool cardigan with elbow patches. I looked like the morning after a wild L.L. Bean catalog shoot. I had friends in Seattle who cultivated this look. They showed up to work like this—wherever they worked: hair salons, universities, butcher shops, ad agencies. I preferred to look like I had my shit together, even when I didn’t.
Mom sometimes told me I looked like Grandma Lucia, Dad’s mom, with her wavy black hair—she wore hers in a bob—and big brown eyes and high cheeks. I understood this to mean that I looked like my father, too, but that she couldn’t bring herself to mention him. I combed out my hair with my fingers, washed the sleep from my eyes.
I sat in front of the stove on a cedar stump, staring through the dark opening into the cold iron belly. My mother had insisted (House Rule #2: Replenish Supplies) that the fire box always be full, and it was: dry kindling, extra-long strike-anywhere matches, and a Sunday paper from over two years ago, wrinkled and crisp.
A fire needs three things,
I told myself. My dad used to say it all the time.
I rifled through the box and pulled out the paper. Seattle headlines: the new socialist mayor, raising the minimum wage, the lawn wars, the first of what would be several years of summertime droughts, the year of the worst wildfires in Washington’s history. It was the year protesters camped out on golf courses and organized the guerrilla gardening of food plants and fruit trees all over the city. I had reported on it for
The Stranger
. I had followed a group of anarchist gardeners as they planted by night, with work gloves and headlamps, hauling old pillowcases full of homemade compost and worm castings to weedy parking medians and abandoned lots all over the south end of Seattle. In the light of day, their gardens were sloppy but darling; touring the city in the morning, you never knew what you would see, what formerly trash-dotted roadside scab of broken concrete and dirt would suddenly be speckled with squash seedlings and hand-painted signs in rainbow colors with slogans like
FOOD NOT LAWNS
and
OCCUPY THE SOIL.
It hadn’t been my first feature, but it had been my first to lead the region’s media coverage of anything. The paper in my hand had come out a full month after my article. I turned to the inside page and there he was: Matthew Cartwright, the locavore chef and food activist who asked me out over a bucket of homemade fish head fertilizer. His handsome, bearded mug—the same one that led my own story—had sold urban homeowners all over the city on tearing up their lawns and starting worm bins. We had been lovers for over a year after that, and during that time I had stopped reporting on anything related to the movement. I had spent weekends tearing up blacktop, amending soil, digging holes for a public fruit and nut arbor on Beacon Hill, and hours helping him with the onslaught of media that came in the wake of my piece.
After all that work, all that time on his projects, I didn’t measure up. When I let go of my own work, my own priorities, I lost the qualities he had been attracted to in the first place. That’s how he put it. He loved the woman I was before I was in love with him.
Since the breakup, I had worked for two papers and been laid off by both. Freelancing and adjunct teaching were not paying the bills. I couldn’t afford my apartment anymore.
I tore the article into long strips, visualizing my dad’s method, twisting handfuls into long bunches with flares at each end. I shoved Matt’s smug face to the back of the stove with a stick, piled other sticks around it. For a full minute, the fire scuttled through the paper, licking at the wood. The kindling crackled but didn’t catch. Smoke swallowed the log. I could almost hear my dad sucking air through his teeth the way he did whenever I insisted on doing something without his help, even if I didn’t really know how.
A fire needs three things:
a dry bed, fuel, and room to breathe
. Maybe I hadn’t given it enough room to breathe.
Everything in the cottage seemed closer than it ought to be. I pulled too hard on drawers; I ran into the corner of the cutting board with my hip. I opened a sticky cupboard door straight into my forehead. It felt like it would bruise. I sat in a kitchen chair and laid my head on the table, cheek on the cold Formica. Beside me, my workbag held my computer, notes for articles I had pitched or was thinking of pitching. Since Mom had handed over the deed to the cottage, I only had one story on my mind. It was a more personal story than I was used to writing: this trip back to Orwell and Marrow; how the two islands had changed since the disaster. I had pitched it to an editor at the
Pacific Standard
who wanted more—visuals and an arc.
There was an envelope sticking out of the front pocket of my bag, a letter from my only childhood friend from the islands, Katie. We met at Orwell Village School when we were eight, when my parents moved back into Dad’s childhood home and he took a job at the ArPac Refinery on Marrow Island. I was an only child; Katie was, too. They lived a mile away through the woods, and over the years we wore a path through the trees between our yards. She became a kind of sister I would find and lose and find again over the years, after Mom and I moved away, through high school, when we went off to college. I had thought I lost her for good a decade ago. But then this.
I pulled the letter from its pocket. There were other papers behind it, in a manila envelope: the deed to the cottage I was sitting in. I dragged everything out, spread it out on the table.
Mom had given me the deed and Katie’s letter at the same time, in a little bundle tied with string. We were sitting in the atrium of Café Flora, drinking mimosas at our monthly brunch. I had opened the envelopes, confused: the deed, with my mother’s signature and the stamp of a notary, the address and a description of the cottage on Orwell Island; then the beat-up letter with the return address simply
Kathryn Paley, Marrow Island, WA 98297
. The postmark on the letter was three weeks old.
Orwell and Marrow were two separate islands, but they were often mentioned together because they were so remote from the other islands in the San Juans—right up against Boundary Pass and Canadian waters—and they relied so much on each other. Before the earthquake, the only ferry service to and from Marrow had been from Orwell. After the quake, there had been no reason to go to Marrow at all, only reasons to avoid it.
Unless you were someone like Katie.
“I guess she’s still living out there on the commune?” Mom had nodded at the letter, tipping back the rest of her mimosa. Mom had never trusted Katie and had once told me she reminded her of a feral cat. “I guess she finally settled down.”
“You’re giving me the cottage,” I had answered.
“It was always yours, Lucie.”
“We both know that’s not true,” I’d said.
We had looked at each other for a long time, and the bright expression she was wearing faded. There were so many lines on her face. There had been times over the years when I knew she wanted to be rid of the cottage, when it was a burden to her. And to her new husband, who worked for a developer and saw the “potential” in tearing the place down and building something modern.
“You can always sell it.” She had leaned toward me, put her hand on mine. “I know you could use the money.”
I had thought about texting her before I left for Orwell, letting her know I was going to check on the cottage. But I didn’t. I had written to Katie, though. A postcard, mailed a few days before the trip, telling her I was coming.
I pulled on my boots and one of Dad’s old coats from the closet, took my coffee and Katie’s letter out to the porch. I sat on the steps and reread the letter, looked over Katie’s tight cursive—tall, compressed letters strung together and tilting across the unlined paper so that I tipped my head to the right as I read.
Dear Lucie,
I’ve tried your old address & the e-mail at the newspaper. No luck. I’m assuming your mom & stepdad haven’t sold their house on the lake, so hopefully they’ll get this to you. I’ll keep this short, just in case. I’ve written a few long letters that came back to me.
I’ve read your articles and I’m so proud of you. You always knew what you wanted to do, and you went for it. I always admired that about you. I think I was jealous, even. I never knew what I wanted to do, so I tried everything
.
Things changed for me at the Colony. It was supposed to be a three-month externship, but I knew I belonged here. There’s too much to explain, but you would be interested in the work we’ve done here. Your interest in the state of the planet, your sense of justice. You always needed to see things put right. I want you to come see what we’ve done on Marrow. It hasn’t always been easy, but the work we’ve done here is unprecedented. We’ve transformed the island, Lucie. The island everyone abandoned. Have you even been back to Orwell in the last twenty years? You should come home, Lu.
I’ve been here for almost ten years & I’ve thought of you every day. How could I not? How could I have thought I was putting distance between us? Sometimes I even think I see you, down at the end of the table at meals, like at summer camp, or wandering the shore with your head down, looking for agates. Then I blink, and you’re gone. I know how it sounds—but there it is. I’m saying it because you probably won’t even read this.
I miss you, Lu.
Katie
Squinting into the fog, I could make out a faint light still shining from the window at Rookwood, but the mist and trees obscured most of the house. It had been the summer home of Maura Swenson, an artist and heiress of a lumber and mining fortune. The Swensons were lumber millionaires, maritime industrialists. Maura built Rookwood in 1918, in the Arts and Crafts style, as a showcase of Pacific Northwest materials. Great fir beams and limestone flagging from her father’s mills and quarries, stones from the Skagit and Snohomish riverbeds, hardwood carvings of ravens and pine boughs in the eaves. All handcrafted. Every inch. Grandpa Whit and Grandma Lucia had been the caretakers. Maura willed them the cottage and the land it was on when she passed away.