pretend it’s not a thing between us. I tell myself I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know. In less than two weeks he’s leaving the island. Period. That hasn’t changed.
He says, “You’re quiet over there, Captain.”
“Sorry.”
“Bram and Shirley loved you.”
“I loved them, too.”
And I think: Love complicates everything. It makes you hurt and it makes you doubt and it makes you wish you didn’t love. It makes you want to be watchful so that nothing bad or surprising ever happens. It makes you never want to love anyone again because they’ll only hurt you too.
“Do you want to ask me about Montana?”
“Not really.”
It’s one thing to joke about NASA and the CIA; it’s another to know the truth, because the truth means having to picture him across the country doing what he’s meant to do. While I’m in New York making new friends and meeting other boys. And Miah’s in Montana making new friends and meeting other girls. And let’s not forget Saz in Chicago making new friends too. And my dad in Ohio, and my mom somewhere other than Ohio, and everyone separate everywhere.
Suddenly all the things I’ve been not thinking about are right here. The drawbridge comes up. The gate comes down. I sit in my fortress, looking out. I can see him but he can’t see me.
“Okay.” He slows, stops, turns the truck around, and now we’re heading north again.
“Where are we going?”
“There you are, Captain. I thought you’d left.”
“I’m here.”
“Then come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“I want to show you something.”
* * *
—
Past Bram and Shirley’s, the lighthouse sits at the very northern tip of the island, red and weathered, as if it’s been there from the beginning of time. This is where Clovis’s daughter Aurora Samms took over for her father and brothers after they died at sea. The foundation of her house is still there, a large square of stone and brick, no more than an outline in the grass.
We get out of the truck and Miah has a blanket, and the wind tries to pick us up and carry us away. “That was Aurora’s house,” he shouts as we run past the foundation.
“Where did it go? Did it burn down too?”
“Aurora was the last one to live in it. She died sometime in the 1970s, and the Park Service just let it fall down.”
We race through the wind, holding on to our clothes, to ourselves, to the lighthouse itself. He jimmies the door, which is warped from the wind and the weather, and finally it swings open. Inside, there is a smell of damp, of a hundred years of rainstorms and hurricanes, but it’s quiet and still. We step in and the light is dim. He closes the door on the wind, which beats against it, trying to get in. I half expect him to keep us in the dark, to prove that we can adjust our eyes, but he has a flashlight because Miah is always prepared.
The stairs curve upward from the entryway, and Miah starts to climb. I follow him, twisting up and up. We pass little rectangular windows, which rattle in their casings and look out over the black of the ocean. This is the darkest part of the island, and I try to imagine this young woman, Aurora, living here by herself, tending to the light.
“How much farther?” My voice comes out cross and grumpy, the voice of a child, but this isn’t how I’m actually feeling. My voice should sound confused and far away.
Miah says, “All the way to the top.”
I look down below and the spiral of the staircase is like a seashell. It narrows the higher we climb, until, two hundred stories later, it finally dead-ends into a wooden floor, worn and scuffed and threadbare in places. The room is perfectly round and all windows. In the center is the light itself, sitting like an enormous blind eye, black and silent.
Miah hands me the flashlight and spreads out the blanket. “Come here, Captain.”
I don’t want to come there because I want to stay here, in the fortress. I don’t want him to think I’ve fallen in love with him and that I’m going to miss him. I want him to think I’m three hundred percent cool and fine and Whatever happens, happens. This is what I promised him, after all.
He turns off the flashlight. The windows rattle, and on the other side of them the wind howls, but in here we’re safe.