Laney

AND HERE I am, out on the lantern deck, not touching the railing, I can’t tolerate that, but with my back again to the lantern room and the bay stretching away in every direction, like Noah looking out at the flood. It’s the last place I’d have said I would come, yet when Ginger said I’d be wanting the key, I saw this was the graveyard I needed to visit. I expect what she says is true: she does know me better than I know my own self.

The light is well past dawn this time. We’ve missed the awakening that was such a beautiful thing that morning after we went gut-running, when we were exhausted and wet from boating all night, and not much drier for the time we spent warming in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage. I’m comforted by the murmur of Betts’s voice from below me, and then Ginger’s. My friends, with me without being all over me, as I remember Mia (that coward) standing just here where I’m standing: a younger, thinner Mia leaning out over the rusted railing in a way that would panic me now, after twenty years of trying to keep my children from talking to strangers, and riding with friends who’ve been drinking, and leaning against high railings that just might not hold.

It’s daylight and I can see so many things I couldn’t see back then.

It was still dark when we circled the heavy black teardrop of counterweight again and again, heading up to the watch room on legs less weary than mine are now despite the scotch we were drinking even as we climbed. We were trying to hold on to the boat-racing buzz we’d already lost, I expect.

“Let me get the beacon,” Trey said at the top of the stairs. “I’m not taking responsibility for you girls going blind.”

We paused on the final steps while Trey disappeared into the lantern room, the bright light flashing onto the stairway giving way to a darkness that left me dizzy, imagining my skull crashed onto the ornate inlaid marble of the counterweight well 136 steps below. It seemed forever before I could begin to make out the dark form of Ginger on the stair above me, before we continued on past the glass darkness of the lantern and out to this higher view of the night.

The air was cold and damp, the taste of salt mingling with the aftertaste of scotch. An almost-full moon was setting to the west. Mia, though, went to the rail facing the eastern horizon, the lightening sky.

“Look, the sea is violet,” she said in a hushed tone, as if she’d just seen Jesus rise.

Purple water? But she was right: a hint of violet shone from the black water.

I took a sip of scotch and held the sharpness on my tongue, thinking I was the painter, I was the one who was supposed to be noticing color. Mia the Savant and Betts the Funny One, even Ginger the strong-willed Rebel. But I was just the Good Girl, the one without courage even to break a rule.

“Sunlight scatters differently at sunrise and sunset because it comes at a tangent to the earth, through a bigger slug of atmosphere,” Trey told Mia. “More of the shorter blue and green light waves are knocked off before they get to us, so more of what we see—what our brains perceive—is the longer-wave-length red.”

In lumine tuo videbimus lumen.

“Hence the red sky,” he said. “And as any kid who ever dyed an Easter egg can tell you, when you mix red and blue—”

“But why isn’t the ocean red then, like the sky?” Mia asked. “Isn’t its color just reflected light?”

As Trey explained that clean water absorbs red light—that’s why water usually looks blue, but in coastal zones with high concentrations of matter like this it’s more complicated—I considered this side of Trey: a man who cared about the different ways the sun’s rays appear at dawn and noon and four, who imagined children dyeing eggs the colors of the changing sky. It was a side of him I’d never seen at Tyler & McCoy.

Mia nodded eagerly as Trey spoke, having no worldly idea that thirty years later she would write a six-page piece for the Sunday magazine about how satellite images of ocean color indicate increasing levels of pollution at our shores.

“Think about it,” Trey had said. “If it weren’t for Rayleigh scattering—light’s interaction with air molecules—when we looked up at the sky we’d see the black of space.” Then he started on about the optical illusion that made the moon appear big as all outdoors at the horizon, talking about upside-down Ponzo illusions and our brains seeing the sky as a flattened dome. I braced myself for another Trey Humphrey monologue. But he grew silent, then, watching with the rest of us as the moon sank into the earth.

It was the end of a long and wonderful night running through the island streams under a vast, dark sky. The beginning of a third day of a whole week enjoying life with my best friends before we set off our separate ways. It was going to be the first in a string of long and wonderful nights with Ginger’s brothers and friends, smart fellas who could teach me something about the sun and the moon and the sea, the creatures on the island, the stir of life I hadn’t much noticed in law school, or perhaps ever. How often in my whole life had I just relaxed and enjoyed a moment without any thought to how it would appear on a résumé that would get me … what? Someplace my parents had always expected me to wind up, even if it would surprise the rest of the world to bump into a black girl there.

If Trey had been a bit off-kilter in that conversation in the Lightkeeper’s Cottage about the crabs, it was beginning to seem just another piece of something innocent and unthreatening, a fella who tried to understand his world. If I was finding something sinister in that, surely I should be looking inside myself.

After the last sliver of moon disappeared, we turned back to the east, our arms touching as we joked about how sturdy the lighthouse might be and whether it could take all this weight on one side—at the top, no less. The horizon continued to brighten with our laughter, and the sky reddened, and the water purpled until the first lovely smack of sunlight shocked our eyes.

Doug sang out then, “Morning has broken,” his voice joining the lap of the bay and the fading crickets, the rising clamor of morning birds. Beau’s voice joined Doug’s after a moment, followed by Frank’s and Trey’s. And then we joined in, too, even Betts moving her lips to the words. It’s hard to describe how lovely it was. I’d forgotten that: how really lovely it was.

We went back to Chawterley and fixed breakfast, all eight of us crammed into the kitchen, as on top of each other as we’d been in the skiffs. We made griddle cakes and sausage we ate in the Sun Room, and after breakfast I found a sketch pad and charcoal pencil in the Painter’s Studio. I took them back into the Sun Room and sketched with Ginger observing over my shoulder. I remember the sensual odor of salt air and sausage and scotch clinging to her long hair, which was loose for once, not confined in a barrette but hanging long and untamed all the way to her fanny.

“I wish I had all your long, long hair, Ginge,” I said.

She reached down and fingered the edge of my sketch pad. “I wish I could draw, but Beau took all the artist genes.”

Beau, stretched out on the floor, raised his head to protest, but it was true: Ginger’s drawing would never be any better than my hopes for fanny-brushing hair.

Mia came and sat next to me on the couch, admiring my sketch with Ginger: the pier, the twin boats, the bay, and the endless horizon.

“I wish we could stay like this forever,” she said.

We all looked at her for a fond moment before Betts said, “ ‘I wish that I had duck feet. And I can tell you why …’ ”

We laughed, looking down at our feet as Betts hopped up and duck-walked around, and Frank obliged her with a comic quack. We were at that point you get to when you’ve been up all night, when you aren’t exactly drunk anymore but you aren’t exactly sober, when life seems full of endless hope. Betts kept duck-walking, tapping on heads now, saying, “Duck. Duck. Duck.” But Mia was the one who shouted, “Goose!” She leaned over and tapped Beau’s head and then hopped up and sprinted out the back door and down the stone path, Beau a puppy dog at her heels.

He trapped her at the end of the pier, playing like he was going to push her into the water to join his sleeping bag lost on the murky bottom all those years ago. Betts’s freckled face was so full of disappointment and frustration and longing as she watched them that I moved closer to her, thinking poor Betts, pitying this friend I knew even then was truly extraordinary. Pitying her in a way I don’t expect I ever would have pitied a fella. Why did we do that to ourselves? Why did we buy into the notion that the fella we married was as important, or more, than the people we were our own selves?

I fell asleep in the Sun Room not much later, my head and Ginger’s feet against one armrest of the sofa, my feet and her head at the other end. I woke sometime in the early afternoon to find us covered with a light blanket. Betts was asleep on the other sofa, lightly covered, too, and the fellas were stretched out on the carpet, fast asleep.

I picked up my sketch pad and charcoal and slipped out, heading for the Painter’s Studio, thinking I’d poke around there while everyone else slept. I heard soft voices as I approached, though: Beau standing at an easel while Mia curled up on the window seat.

“Right there, just like that,” Beau was saying. “The light catches the gold in your hair and makes your eyes laugh.”

Mia giggled lightly, her head tipping back and her hair falling away from her face so I could see her blushing from her cowlick to her tiny ears to her narrow chin. “Makes my eyes laugh?”

As I edged backward from the doorway, I wondered if I’d ever seen her look so happy with Andy. And yet Andy was such a great fella. Andy was so good to her. We all wanted an Andy back then.

I went back later that day to sneak a look at Beau’s sketch. It was charming, effortless, the way I wanted to draw but could never quite manage to. He’d caught the light in Mia’s hair and in her eyes, even limited by the gray of the charcoal. He’d caught the sweep of cowlick at her forehead and whatever it was in her expression that made her both joyous and vulnerable. I remember thinking for the first time that maybe Mia was the prettiest Ms. Bradwell, at least in that moment. I remember wishing I were in love with someone who loved me back, and thinking it really was time to let go of Carl, time for me to let go of the bitterness I’d clung to for a whole long year by then.