Swan Light: A Novel, page 24
The shoal moaned, greedy and thunderous, towering above her, holding her tight at the bottom. She thrashed and kicked but its hold was too strong, the soft sand below its rock absorbing her feet when she tried to kick against it, bringing her deeper the same way it had brought the pieces of Saint Gray and Swan Light.
Sand could keep things safe for a century, or it could kill them in minutes.
Mari grabbed at the rock, trying to pull herself free.
Below her fingers, the rock just laughed.
Swan, 1913
“Where is she?” Cort asked. But his eyes were uncertain now, darting to the ceiling in fear, and in the glow of the lens Swan saw Arthur van Gooren in his face. A boy standing by a roaring fire, complaining about the water dripping onto his shoes.
“Cort, please,” Swan said, and Arthur van Gooren’s features resolved back into Cort’s. Those blue Norman eyes met his as the tower shuddered again, another loud crack echoing below their feet. This time the jolt was so pronounced that Swan and Cort both stumbled, and the ocean tilted closer before Swan’s eyes. The breath left his lungs. But again the tower stopped, sagging at an eighty-degree angle, leaning like a broken limb toward the water.
Cort was holding on to the iron base of the lens. Oil was dripping onto his feet, but the fire still burned, the lens still spun, the room for all the world unchanged except for its view. It wouldn’t last long. Soon the angle of the fire would start to blacken the lens, filling the room with smoke and the windows with soot. The stone whined.
And Swan thought—knew—that he still had time to run.
He could leave Cort here and get himself out. Make sure Evangeline and Stay were safe, and let the tower go. Cort was the one who shouldn’t be here. Cort was the one who had charged in, who hadn’t listened. By all rights Swan should have been asleep in his own house by now, shouldn’t have known there was anyone to save. Certainly not this specter of Arthur, high in a lighthouse that Nico had never seen.
“Cort,” Swan said. One last try. But Cort was frozen, the pickaxe loose in his fingers, his eyes on the slant of the sea. It was no use. He’d been beyond reason, and now he was terrified. And Swan leaned forward, clinging to the rail for balance, and pried the axe away.
He lifted it high.
And he slammed it into Cort Roland’s head.
Mari, 2014
The sandbar gnarled and gnashed as Mari’s vision went blurry. She pushed against it, expelling precious breath in a flurry of bubbles. Her nerve endings felt like they were on fire, her fingers hyperaware of the press of the stone. Everything was dizzyingly clear, the seafloor more real than it had ever been from behind a mask. Was this what it felt like to drown?
She pushed her hands into the rock as hard as she could and finally it freed her, freed her to drive fingers and toes into its cracks, to climb it like an underwater cliff. Higher and higher.
And then her childhood nightmare sprang from the darkness.
It was so quick she almost missed it, so real she almost let go of the rock. There among the swirling silt below her, beckoning like fingers, were three cracked timber beams.
The rip current swelled and they were gone, washed back below the sand. But Mari stayed frozen, her little remaining air dying in her lungs. Her vision was darkening at the edges, the glass-clear world going blurry, and still she couldn’t bring herself to move, paralyzed by the weight of the shape beneath the sand.
Another gust of water came in, exposing a second row of wood lined like stunted, gruesome teeth along the bottom of the rock.
And perched at the end of it was a boy.
Swan, 1913
Swan descended the stairs slowly, heart thudding, arms shaking under Cort Roland’s weight. The man was taller than Swan, heavy in the best of circumstances, even more so when he was unconscious. His head sagged against Swan’s shoulder, already swelling where Swan had hit him with the pickaxe. He’d hear about that from Abigail, Swan thought ruefully. But it was the only way to get him out of the lighthouse in time.
The tower groaned around him and dropped again, and Swan lost his footing and stumbled into the wall. And when he and his unwieldy cargo reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw to his horror that the stone arch of the doorframe was nearly half a yard lower. The force of the drop had crushed the door diagonally in its frame, leaving a large gap at the top and an impossibly small one at the bottom. Swan dragged Cort the last few steps down and, using the momentum, hoisted the man high enough to shove him through the opening. He heard the man’s body land on the other side. Safe.
And his legs gave out from under him.
Swan sank to the floor, his entire body shaking. “Stay,” he called reflexively, before remembering that he’d told the dog to wait in the house. Wheezing, he tried to hoist himself through the gap. He collapsed again before his feet even left the floor.
The door loomed above him, insurmountable.
But it was only wood. If he couldn’t climb it, maybe he could break it.
Swan went back up the stairs hand over hand, crawling like a child. The mechanism in the clockwork room was straining now, gears grasping for purchase across their new angle, and the panes of the lantern were steadily turning black. The pickaxe had slid from where he’d dropped it, resting handle-first against the wall. Swan hefted it, gagging on the smoke, and pushed open a windowpane to suck in the cold, clean air. Outside, moonlight shone on the waves hitting the bar, giving the impression of something dancing across the darkness.
The tower groaned.
Mari, 2014
Mari wasn’t aware of letting go of the bar, of drifting back downward, of her fingers going warm and numb. There was only the shattered wooden spine below her and the boy with his fingers reaching out.
He was going to pull her into the wreck. This was how it was always meant to be, she thought. She could do it. She could follow him down into those twisted ruins and let the darkness swallow her deep. She was warm and she wasn’t afraid. The lines in the sea had been a dream, but never a nightmare, not really. They were like the lighthouse. A welcome or a warning. You chose what you saw in it. And you followed it as best you could.
She followed it down.
The boy’s fingers met hers, and he was pulling her upward, his calm face suddenly intent, almost angry. He pushed her, hard, away from the wood. “Ow,” she murmured, and closed her eyes. They rose higher and higher until there they were, the gold pieces from Saint Gray spread out above them like stars. Mari’s mouth was full of salt and slime and she didn’t care, and the boy gave her one last push as the golden circles expanded. Bright and bold, their edges sparked and blurred until they were glowing, a single bright beam painting the water, pulling her home. But when she reached up to touch it, it was gone.
Swan, 1913
The tower groaned.
And then stopped.
In its place rose a new sound, a single musical note, crystal-high and pure. And Swan knew that this was his warning. The light’s goodbye. It was waiting for him, would hold as long as he needed to get out. He pressed a hand to the stone. His throat was tight with tears that suddenly, painfully, pushed their way out. “You’ve been too good to me, brother,” he whispered.
Francis Norman’s words came back to him again. What would a lighthouse have done to help? Given them something pretty to watch on their way down? But then the other words were there too. Old and new, good and bad, the complicated mess of trying to help and coming up short, trying not to and coming up shorter. Words unspooling, distilling, into what was and always had been enough.
I don’t need to stop every bad thing. Just this one.
Here, Soph, a gift from the cove.
He thinks it’s an invitation.
I’m going to name her Count Your Lucky Stars.
Your brother was a good man, Swan.
Silvy! You want to swim home, then, yes?
Storm coming in, I’d think.
His heart was racing, impossibly heavy, stopping and starting, out of time, out of sorts, and there was a tearing pain in his left arm. He took a step and it overwhelmed him, the world spinning sideways, and he sank to the stone floor. And from his knees, his forehead pressed to the glass, he heard it. A voice screaming through the darkness, still far away but getting closer step by step. “Mr. Swan!”
Clara.
If she reached them, he knew, she would find a way in. She always did. And there wasn’t time for that.
He’d thought he couldn’t be responsible for another life out here.
He’d been wrong.
But he couldn’t be responsible for another death.
And there it was, the one thing he had always been able to give. Something pretty to watch on the way down. But also something bright enough to want to watch at all. Something that could fight the darkness. Something that could make it disappear. Swan closed his eyes and uncurled his hand along the window, his raging heart finally, mercifully, motionless. This was going to be enough.
It was time to let go.
Rose-Olive Cooper, 1913
At the edge of Norman Cliffs, Rose-Olive Cooper knelt on her bed with her window wide open, both arms crossed on the sill and her chin propped against them, heedless of the winter chill. She’d seen a crow in the garden that day as they’d walked to church, her and Mama with new baby Gerald tied cooing to her chest, and it got her thinking of phoenixes and the way maybe they only hunted at night when no one could see them. Now she couldn’t sleep and was dreaming awake of great beasts roaming the skies; staring off into the darkness, humming, her eyes pleasantly out of focus as the great warm beam that had watched her all her life swung past . . . past . . . past . . . She was staring away from the cliffs, out into the velvet of the ocean, when the line of light painted against it dipped abruptly, as if someone had picked up the lighthouse and pointed it downward, and she turned her eyes to the brilliant circle in time to see it dip again, flare brightly, and then go dark.
Mari, 2014
Drowning was warmer than she’d imagined.
Louder too.
Mari flinched as a flurry of beeps went off beside her, afraid to open her mouth and have seawater pour back in. The shattered bones of the shipwreck gaped behind her eyelids, broken beams rising from the sandbar to pin her and pull her and swallow her whole. She murmured as the beeping got louder, louder—“Dr. Adams?” the shipwreck asked.
Mari opened her eyes.
“I admire your commitment,” the voice said. “But there were easier ways of visiting me than getting admitted to the hospital yourself.”
“Evangeline!” Mari propped herself on her elbows, ignoring the bandage on her arm and the pounding in her head. The old woman smiled from the bed beside her, her face pale and drawn but her blue eyes bright. “You’re awake! Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better,” Evangeline said. “But I was feeling much sorrier for myself before you got hit in the head with a boat.”
That explained the throbbing. Mari raised her non-bandaged hand to her forehead and felt a lump swelling tight under her fingers. The rest of their room was empty, the sky dark through the window. Mari thought back to the water, but hard as she tried she couldn’t summon up any memories past those wooden beams on the seafloor, the gold pieces in the bar, the boy keeping watch over all of it. The boy hadn’t been real. So how much of the rest had been? “What happened?” she asked.
“As I understand it, a member of Teach hauled yourself and Mr. Henry aboard after they wrecked your boat,” Evangeline said. “A big fellow with a very deep voice. Evidently he draws the line at murder. Mr. Henry was thrown into their ship’s path while you were pulled under by the bar and came up right underneath it. But the doctors assure me you’ll both be fine.”
Mari remembered the golden light, her body drifting upward toward the sun. And then, through a throb, she remembered what she’d known for a week, the week Evangeline had slept through: Pictured at the site March 3 1914 with his wife, Ruby, and their children.
“You’re a Norman,” she blurted. Evangeline settled back into her pillows, eyes unreadable. “You’re Cortney Roland’s daughter.”
“Very good, Mari,” Evangeline said. “Even Teach never figured that out.”
“But I still don’t understand,” Mari said. “Why go through all of this?”
“Silvestre Swan,” Evangeline said. “Did you find any record of him after 1913?”
“We’re still going through Clara Vettrey’s diary,” Mari said. “The later pages about her life with Louis Roland are clear, but the early pages are in bad shape, and that’s where her record of that night is more likely to be. We still don’t know what happened to Swan.”
For a moment the room was silent, nothing but the beeping of the machines and the hum of the wind outside. “I do,” Evangeline said softly, closing her eyes. “I was there. It’s my first memory, I think.”
Mari’s breath caught. “At Swan Light?”
Evangeline nodded, eyes still closed. “I didn’t know. Not until later. We moved to the United States when I was very young. I didn’t learn about Norman Cliffs until after my father’s death, when my brother Philip and I went through his things. We found letters between my mother and father from when he came to Charleston before the rest of us, to set things up. The first one was from December 1913.”
“Right after the lighthouse fell,” Mari said.
“That’s right,” Evangeline said. “In the letter he wrote about a man who’d saved his life, a man named Swan. And that’s when I realized.”
Mari twined her hands in her blanket, so tight her fingertips turned red. “Realized what?”
“His eyes,” Evangeline said, and the quiet room seemed to go even quieter. “He had very sad gray eyes. He told me his name was Swan. ‘I need you to listen,’ he said. And I did. I sat in that house with his dog and I didn’t move. I’ve always remembered that moment. But I didn’t know where it came from, not until the letter. I sat with it for years, wondering, and eventually I couldn’t live with not knowing for sure. That’s when I tracked down Katherine Mettle and heard the legend of the lighthouse keeper.” She pulled in a shaky breath. “I don’t know why I was on the cliff that night. But I think Silvestre Swan saved my father’s life. And I worry it may have cost him his own.”
Mari’s fingers were going numb beneath her twisted blanket, but she pulled it even tighter. “You’re saying you think Silvestre Swan was in the lighthouse when it fell?”
“I don’t know,” Evangeline said, her voice a near whisper. “Where was my father while I was in the house? Why did Silvestre Swan make me wait inside, and where did he go? Why did my father come back, but there’s no record of Silvestre Swan at all after that night?”
“There might be,” Mari said. “Evangeline, why didn’t you just tell me this at the beginning? We could have gotten Clara Vettrey’s diary sooner if you’d told us what you were really looking for.”
But Evangeline was already shaking her head. “It was a childhood memory, so many years later,” she said. “I didn’t know which parts were real and which parts were in my mind. I needed someone who didn’t know anything at all to be the one to find out. Someone who wouldn’t pander to my theory to get my money but would find the unbiased truth. Although,” she said, and a smile quirked her mouth, “I imagine you’ve discovered why you were the one I reached out to?”
“Californian,” Mari said. “You knew your uncle was on it before it sank.”
“I did,” Evangeline said. “And I meant what I said: I admire your work looking for it. The shipwreck sponsor circle is not large, and your friend Stuart Noble has been bragging about you for a while now. But I’d planned on needing to tell you about the Californian connection, as a motivator to look into Uncle Lou and find Aunt Clara. And then you ended up making the connection on your own.”
“You wanted someone who wouldn’t stop looking,” Mari said. “Californian was a carrot you could dangle to make me look deeper.”
Evangeline smiled. “That’s one way to look at it, yes.”
“But why now?”
“Nearing the end of your life has a tendency to make you reevaluate what came before it,” Evangeline said, waving her hand when Mari tried to protest. “It’s the one small thing I can do,” she said. “To make sure that the man who saved my father’s life won’t be forgotten. This is the least I can do.”
Before long a doctor came to check on both of them, declaring Mari free to go and fussing over Evangeline before whisking her away to see an internist. “I’m fine,” Evangeline said, waving Mari away as she tried to come along. “I’m one hundred and four; I assure you my internals aren’t any worse now than they were when this started.”
Mari gathered her things and went along the hall until she found Julian’s room. He looked terrible, bandages wrapped around his head and one shoulder and a leg up in a sling, but his eyes lit up when he saw her. “Come here,” he said, and she slid into the narrow bed beside him. He draped his free arm over her shoulder and pulled her close. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Have you seen Evangeline?”
“We’re okay,” she said. “They took Evangeline to run more tests.”
He nodded, then rested his cheek on her head, and she moved closer, breathing him in. And here, safe, she let herself think about the boy she’d seen on the ruined beams on the bar. A figment of her imagination, obviously, something her oxygen-deprived brain had summoned in shutting down. And yet . . .
And yet she knew a ship that had wrecked on the sandbar, and the captain who’d gone down with her. Hazel and Nico Swan. And if it was all in her head, the boy and the wreck should have been the last thing she ever saw. The pressure of the bar had been immense, stronger than a person could fight. It should have killed her. How had she been able to kick her way up if she hadn’t had help?
