The noise is a slurry around me. Where one wave crash ends, the next gale begins. My ears can’t contain it all. Thoughts fall out to make room.
The vast darkness closes in. Every step forward could reveal more flat rock, a drop into the surf, or a tree trunk if I’ve turned myself around. I take small steps and turn toward what I imagine is the ocean.
“Ahoy!” I call out, but the wind snatches my words. I could stumble over a sailor and not know him from a rock. I turn back and realize my mistake.
I’ve moved far enough to lose the lighthouse entirely. The light still isn’t shining. If I turn any more, I’ll have no idea which way is forward or back.
I close my eyes to concentrate. The waves crash on my left, so I must be facing the lighthouse. I make a quarter turn and shuffle in such smallmovements the sun may rise before I find anything or anyone. If I can make it to sunrise.
My foot sinks, and water speckle-sprays my face. I taste salt. My mental map of the island isn’t perfect, but the rocks beside the lighthouse are my well-trodden ground. I should’ve had a few more meters between me and the waterline. Must be the storm surge.
I imagine the island gobbled up by the sea. Despite logic—I would also be gobbled—there’s a morbid serenity to that thought. A natural cycle.
I feel calling while the water swishes around my boots. I can’t name how I feel it within me, yet now it’s as though it’s always been here. My blood wants to flow out to join it. It wants me closer. Into the water. The gale softens against my ears, and the cold numbs.
Is this the same instinct that helped me overcome Chamomile? Her blood-soaked body flashes in my mind, and the calling dissolves like sea-foam. The furious sound returns too. My cheeks burn.
I keep my path along the edge of the tide at the angle where I think I saw the ship from the lightroom. The lantern’s wick is so low I can barely see the burning threads beneath its reddened flame. Fine cracks in the glass edges or a weak spot in the adhesive could splutter the flame out if the wick doesn’t wear down first.
When I was collapsed against the storage room door, breaths rattling, I prayed to see my sister again. While it was Elle’s courage that saved me, I still hope there’s something blessed leading her. The godliest acts can also be fearsome: burning bushes, bellies of whales, angels whose faces we can’t behold. God seems to act in only the subtlest of small favors or the greatest of terrific miracles.
If there’s anyone to act as his miraculous vessel, it’s Elle. Though if she’s touched with grace, why keep that from me?
I stick to what I know. I prayed to see my sister again, and I could finally breathe in her arms. It’s worth trying again.
“Dear Lord.” I can’t hear my own voice. Even so, the prayer flows out of me smoother than any has before. “Lead me to who needs saving in your grace. May any soul I find become safe in your keeping, as you have kept me safe. Amen.”
The moment theamenleaves my lips, I’m knocked off my feet by another quake. As though the island were rearing back, kicking me off. I lose my grip on the lantern. I don’t hear the smash, but my hands slam down on broken glass. I cry out, a tearing sound I feel within my throat. My arms tremble to hold me up. Icy wetness blooms where my nightgown meets the rock under my knees. Exhaustion covers me in a heavy blanket.
The lantern’s wick flickers inches from my face, mocking me with hope, before it’s gone.
I half expect to see a fissure open in the ocean itself when the shudders cease, but it’s damnable, suffocating nothing.
The cold seeps in from my bleeding palms and bruised knees. Cold. I’d laugh were my teeth not chattering so hard I might break a tooth. I was so concerned with the cold within me. With freezing Elle out. Now it’s come to claim me.
Can she see me from the lightroom? I turn, but there’s still no red light.Why isn’t it lit?Ice pellets spray my face as tiny razor cuts. I hang my head back down, struggling to keep even breaths.
What will Elle find when she comes downstairs, when she can’t force the void inside the lens to burn? Chamomile’s body, slumped and soaked. Her shocked expression, the clumps of ash falling from her throat. Her dress soaked dark with gore.
Are my hands still covered in her blood? Or has the lantern’s glass replaced hers with my own? I can’t tell in the dark. Its warmth down my fingers is my only sign it’s not just water.
The waves pulse. Are they closer? I need to get up, move, find survivors. Or give up and find shelter. Even the cover of the forest would fight off the biting winds.
I kneel carefully so the coat covers as much of me as possible. I pick out a few embedded pieces of glass in my palms. Is it a bad sign that there’s no pain? Even the salt water doesn’t sting. When I can’t feel sharp edges, I look out into the dark again. Am I facing the lighthouse or away?
I concentrate on the waves again, the only known left. The decisiveness, so rare a trait, grants strength to my limbs as I follow the shore’s compass.
The cold has lessened. Is the storm subsiding? Or is this a last stand before death?
I take a shaky step forward, then another. I imagine a ship, oaken and broad-sided, as though the idea of it will lead me to its location.
The rocks are slick with ice, but the lighthouse keeper’s boots keep their grip. I spot something—a glint? Metal from the ship, perhaps? Something’s in the water ahead.
A few more steps reveal a recess in the shore like a miniature bay. This isn’t part of my mind’s map of the island, but I don’t have my landmarks—the rock that looks like a large warty toad, the outcropping of red maple with good cover during games of hide-and-seek, and the rickety dock. The shapes of this island I know so well, now lost. The glint is gone. Was it a trick of the light? Yet what light is there in a night storm?
As quick as the storm threw its full weight at me when I stepped out of the lighthouse, it quiets. My head buzzes, and my ears pop. It’s a ring of calm at the edge of the ocean. Rain still pelts my back. I look up to where the moon shines through a hole in the snowy void. I’m in the eye of the storm.
I take in every detail. The gray waters before me are mirror-still. Too calm. There’s no ship. Was I turned around? Am I on the wrong side of the island? Did I never see a ship? There’s no debris floating on the surface of the water, yet this bay feels like the right place.
