lifeboats or swam to shore, dragging their ice-encased bodies to the lighthouse. Many died once they got there. For days, the dead washed up, the island overrun with frozen bodies. But something moved in the window. A shadow? Sadie tried to look away, retain her nature-gaze. She couldn’t stop herself from standing, moving toward the bluff, through the high grasses and weeds surrounding the solemn structure. Despite the blue sky, the 80 degrees of sunshine, the building radiated cold. Blinded, Sadie entered the darkness inside the open lighthouse. Almost immediately, a sound came, a rustle. Her breath quickened. “Is there someone here?” she called into the emptiness. “Only me,” a weak voice whispered. “Only who?” Sadie whispered back. “Iris.” A girl emerged, younger and smaller-looking than Sadie, with pale skin, long stringy hair and dark nondescript clothes “You have such beautiful hair,” Iris said, causing Sadie to touch what she thought was a tangled wad of dirty blonde. “What are you doing here?” Sadie asked. “I’m waiting for my mother, Vera Sanders,” the strange girl said. “Do you know her?” Sadie did not. “Where is your mother?” Iris asked. Sadie started to feel like she was going to choke. “She died. ” “How?” “Cancer.” She had grown used to telling people, telling herself. Iris repeated the word cancer softly. “You look like you could use a hot meal.” “I’m not hungry anymore. I have been waiting for my mother for so very long. Would your grandmother know about her?” “Why would my grandmother know?” “My mother and I were passengers on the sunken steamer, the Larchmont. Do you know about it?” Sadie backed, step by step, out of the lighthouse. Iris grew smaller and smaller. Sadie stopped believing in things a long time ago, after she prayed Sadie had grown accustomed to small pleasures, short respites from grief. Waking each day at the first shafts of light through the window, she needed to rise and move, riding her bike along the Cornneck Road, the ocean over one shoulder, the breeze in her face. She pushed her pedals all the way to the end, to the stretch of beach leading up to the North Lighthouse. There, she’d perch on a rock and survey the many stacks of stones worn smooth by the sea, totems erected by tourists and other visitors to this place. She watched and listened to the seagulls above, the ferries and cargo ships crossing in the distance, the seals poking their little black noses out of the choppy waves. This was about as much peace as she could get. She didn’t normally want to get close to the lighthouse, avoiding its forlorn windows, blinkless eye. She didn’t want to imagine what it had seen and heard, all that death, the screams of distress and panic. Her great great grandmother, Sybil, had witnessed the Larchmont disaster with her own two eyes. The steamship, headed from Providence to New York, facing icy winds and large waves, hit a schooner and sunk, killing almost 150 people. Some 40 or so passengers made it to the beach on No. 116 her mother’s cancer would stay in remission, and it came back anyway, after she prayed the treatment would keep the cancer from spreading further, and it spread anyway, and after she prayed that the keeping of her mother alive as long as possible would be enough, and it wasn’t. The memory of her father telling her still played out in her mind. He sat on the side of her bed and said the words she didn’t want to hear. He said them into the darkness, with his solid, usually comforting hand on her heaving back. He said them into the completely-devoid-ofMom house, the same house that had been so full of her, the house that stood in the background of all the photos of Sadie growing from baby to teenager. Dad confessed that day he didn’t want to go back to his accounting job. He didn’t want to live in their old house where the memories of Mom’s illness were so powerful. He wanted to take a break, he wanted to go home, he said, to Mom’s home, to Block Island. Sadie’s grandmother, Addy, believed in memory, in keeping the dead close, in the circle of life. She taught Sadie how to talk to her mother, ART BY JASON WHITE
31 Publizr Home