He lets out a small laugh, and it makes me smile.
I can still make him laugh.
“How did you find Hazel?” I ask, determined to keep things normal. Natural. Easy.
“I was driving to get some groceries. I like the bigger store in the other town,” he says. “Wanted to cook something a little bit different. Have developed a taste for pad Thai.” He laughs like this is some crazy thing to have developed a taste for Thai food. “And they don’t carry that kind of stuff at the local grocery store.”
“Oh, I know,” I tell him. “Pad Thai, huh?”
“Yeah. Have you had it?”
It’s my turn to laugh as he fiddles with the kettle.
“Of course I’ve had pad Thai. I don’t live under a rock. I just live near the rocks.”
I gesture to the jetty outside. Well, I can’t see it, but we both know it’s there.
He smiles.
“Why did you learn to cook pad Thai?” I ask. “There’s so many good Thai restaurants.”
“I like cooking,” he says. “Slowly relaxes me. I don’t know, gives me something to do with my hands while my brain sorts things out. Like that light.”
His eyes jerk upstairs to where the malfunctioning light looms overhead.
I lick my lips, thinking about the glowing sigil that was there just last night. And I wonder how it is I’ve ended up back at this lighthouse two nights in a row, mostly against my will.
Caleb’s turned around again, and I study the broad set of his shoulders. The effective way that he moves around the kitchen. Even though he hasn’t lived here for many, many years, we both still know exactly where everything’s kept.
He pulls out the cup that used to be my favorite, and likely still is, of his uncle’s. It’s a porcelain mug with navy blue whales on it. The names of the whales written in script underneath.
“I’ll never forget how you thought narwhals were fake,” he says, tapping the narwhal on the side of the mug.
I burst out laughing, surprised at the memory and the warmth of it, because it was absurd. I was much too old to think narwhals were fake, but after a life spent knowing unicorns were fake, a giant mammal in the ocean with a giant horn seems just as unlikely.
“Well, I know they’re not fake now,” I tell him, and we both laugh.
“You never went in for make believe,” he says, “even when it would be easier to imagine.”
He starts to say something else, but whatever he’s going to say doesn’t come out.
We’re both quiet. Gunner’s nails click against the floor. Thick raindrops splatter noisily against the glass, and in the distance the furious crashing of waves against the beach and the jetty.
I wrap my arms around myself. The skin at the top of my arms cold to the touch and slightly damp.
“I should get a towel,” I say, realizing I’m dripping water all over the floor.
Caleb turns around abruptly, pushing the glasses up on his nose, staring at me like he’s just now noticing we’re both wet.
“I can get a towel for you. You don’t have to do that. Just sit down. Make yourself at home.”
Something about the way he says it makes me feel acutely uncomfortable. It’s too akin to what you would say to someone you just met, who’d been in your house for the first time.
We haven’t just met. This house might be his home now. Or will be for a little while, I suppose, until the lighthouse is automated and the lighthouse keeper’s quarters are turned into something else entirely.
But it was our place. It was my home just as much as it was his growing up. The secret place we’d go. Where his uncle would make us peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches. Where we’d eat ripe raspberries straight from the farm until our fingertips were dyed red and the juice would dribble down our chin as we laughed at each other’s jokes and stories.
I never thought I’d feel less like this was my home than the moment he told me to make it mine.
