The Lantern
By ten past three my mother had stopped being an emergency, and I was in the hall outside 114 with my car keys in my fist and the largest tooth of the largest key pressed into my palm. Deb, the day nurse, had pushed the morphine and something for the panic and turned the oxygen up to five liters. She told me, in the level voice they all seem to learn, that my mother's saturation had dropped to seventy-one at 2:44 and was ninety-one now. Seventy-one was a number she would have preferred not to see. She didn't say whether I should expect to see it again, and I didn't ask.
I had been in the Meijer on the south side when Marisol called, with a phone charger and a package of mouth swabs in my basket. I left the basket in the aisle. I drove to Birchwood in eleven minutes and remember one red light on Division that I did not stop for.
Marisol came up the hall with a stack of folded sheets against her chest and stopped a few feet off. Her lanyard hung where it always hung, on her left shoulder, and her hair was in the elastic she uses on doubles. Since the night in her car she had brought my mother ice chips and brought me nothing, and I hadn't asked her for anything, and we had kept to that.
"She's out," she said. "She'll sleep now."
"Thank you for calling me."
"It's my job." She shifted the sheets. Then, to the sheets, "Your husband was here."
I said nothing. I had heard it perfectly well.
"Your mom told me who he was, after the phone. He was in there when it started. The alarm went and I came out of the med room, and I saw him from down the hall, coming the other way, and I didn't speak to him. I had somewhere to be." She looked up. "He left when she started."
I have been angry with Adam perhaps four times in nine years, and each time I could have itemized it: the anniversary, the ladder left across the walk. This did not itemize. I stood in a hospice corridor beside a cart with a cup of ice chips going to water on it and wanted, quite specifically, to hit something.
I called him from the hall. It rang five times and gave me his voice, which says the name of his business and nothing else. I didn't leave a message. I put the phone in my pocket and went in and sat down.
The window in 114 faces the lot. I hadn't opened the blinds since Sunday, and I didn't open them.
By seven Deb had gone home and Renata had come on, and at nine they turned my mother while I waited in the corridor, and at eleven I told Renata I would sleep in the chair, and she brought a blanket and a pillow that smelled of whatever dryer sheets a hospice buys by the pallet. I didn't sleep, but sat with my hand on the bed rail, not on my mother, and listened to the concentrator make its two-part noise.
At ten to one her eyes were open.
Renata had told me to expect it, quietly, in the hall, like a warning about weather: some of them get an hour. I hadn't believed in the hour. My mother's eyes went around the room once, to the ceiling and then to me, and stopped, and they were clear. Not bright. Clear, like a windshield after the wipers, with the streaks left at the edges.
"Claire."
"I'm here."
"I sent it."
"I know."
She watched me for the length of several breaths, hers and the machine's. Her hands lay on the blanket, and they were a bookkeeper's hands, square, with the nails cut straight across, and the skin on the backs had gone the color of wax paper.
"Marisol didn't know what it was for. Don't do anything to that girl."
"I won't."
"I kept books thirty-one years." She stopped for air. I waited. "Let me do it in order. I've had it in order since Tuesday."
"Mom, you don't have to."
"Yes, I do." She swallowed, and it took effort. "I found Nell's lantern under your bed. The morning after. Your window was wide open, and it was forty degrees. I put it back. I didn't know yet what it was."
The concentrator pushed and hissed. I looked at her hands.
"The day after that, a deputy stood in my kitchen with his hat in his hands and asked was there a light. Young man. He had a—" She stopped, and her eyes went to the ceiling and stayed there. "What was I saying."
"The deputy, Mom. The light."
"The light. Yes. I said she'd have taken the boathouse lantern. She always did. And I knew where it was. It was upstairs, under my other daughter's bed." Air. "That night I took it down the back stairs and out to the end of the dock and threw it as far as I could."
"I saw you," I said. "From my window. I thought it was a bottle."
"That would have been reasonable," my mother said.
I didn't say anything to that.
"I had one left. I did the arithmetic. If it was found in that house, they'd ask who took it out of the boat, and there was one person in that house who could have." She turned her head a little on the pillow. "You never asked me. Nineteen years. I thought if you asked it would be because you wanted me to say."
"I didn't want you to say."
"No."
She was quiet long enough that I thought she had gone. Then she said, "You brought him to the restaurant. In Traverse. Voss, west shore. I went to the ladies' room and held on to the sink. And after, in the kitchen, I said, do you know who they are. You said yes."
"I remember."
"That was all. Seven years, and I didn't ask you why. I thought you were keeping him the way I kept the lantern." Her mouth worked. "I should have asked you why. I've watched you look at him since."
There was a cart going by in the hall, a wheel with a tick in it, and we both waited for it to pass.
"He came here," she said. "Three times. Sat right where you're sitting. The second time he asked me did she have a light, and I couldn't answer him, because any answer I gave was you." Her eyes stayed on mine. "So I sent you a message. It was a coward's thing. I wanted him to say it to you and I couldn't say it myself. And I wanted a few more Sundays before you knew what I was."
She shut her eyes and opened them. "He came today. He started to say it, and I knew what was coming, and I hadn't the breath to stop him. All I had was her name." Her fingers moved on the blanket. "I said it to him. That wasn't fair."
I did not tell her what Marisol had told me in the hall, that he had left when she started.
It was the chair she had told me about on the eighteenth of October, when she said Adam had sat in it and I told her Adam had never been here. I did not move to the other chair.
"I have one question," my mother said. "It's the reason I'm awake." She drew in air and it rattled, and she waited for it to settle. "Did she call anyone? In the water. Your window was open. You were awake."
I didn't answer.
The concentrator pushed and hissed. I counted eleven of them, because I count, and my mother watched me not answer, and somewhere in the eleventh she understood that I was not going to, and she let it go. It went out of her face.
"All right," she said. "Then this. Don't give him the lantern from under your bed. Let him keep it. He's carried it this long."
"I already told him there was a light," I said. "On Monday. I told him I put it in the boat myself and lit it for her."
My mother looked at me.
"Good," she said.
It was the word she used to say over a column that came out even. Her eyes closed. I sat and watched her chest until I was sure of it, and then I sat and watched it anyway.
At ten to three I went down the hall to the family room, because I couldn't stay in that chair. There is a sleeper sofa in there, and a Keurig a volunteer keeps stocked, and a jigsaw puzzle of a covered bridge with the edge pieces done and the rest in a heap. I left the overhead off. The vending machine gave enough light to sit by.
I said once that there was a part of that night I don't tell. This is where I tell it.
For nineteen years I have been able to give it in one sentence, and the sentence is in the file: C. Marsh (13), sister, states she was asleep and heard nothing. I read it at twenty-two, on the floor of a rented room in Allendale, and underlined the line above it and not that one. I was thirteen. I was not asleep, and I have not heard anything so clearly since.
Nell woke me at ten past eleven with her hand on my shoulder. She had her coat on and her hair pulled back, the red of the Kool-Aid she dyed it with in the upstairs bathroom sink, which had stained the grout for a year. Sean was waiting at the landing in his car. It was four miles to the landing by road and about six-tenths of one by water, and she had no car, because at nine o'clock our mother had taken her keys and her phone and said, Go, then. See how far you get without a car. So she was going to row. She said it to me the way she'd tell me the time.
We carried her backpack down to the dock between us, one strap each. I said please. I said don't leave me here with her. I said it three or four ways, none of them good, because I was thirteen and had run out of reasons and was down to the sound of my own voice. She set the pack in the stern and turned around and said, "You'll be fine. You're the one she likes. Don't be a baby."
That was the last thing she said to my face.
She took the lantern down off its hook in the boathouse, our lantern, the yellow battery one that had gone out on the water with every one of us at some point, and set it in the bow, and ran back up the lawn for the duffel, the heavy one she had stashed on the porch. I stood on the dock alone. The lantern was in the bow, off. I remember the black slide of the switch. I remember thinking that she wouldn't dare go out on the lake without it, and that she would come back down and find the hook empty and the boat dark and have to stay. I have gone over my reasons the way I go over a loss, and they come to two. I wanted her to stay. I wanted her to be sorry.
I lifted it out by the wire handle. It weighed less than I expected. When I heard the kitchen door close I went up the side of the lawn along the hedge, and in through the mudroom, and up the back stairs, close to the wall, where they don't creak. I pushed it under my bed. Then I opened my window, all the way, because I wanted to hear her come back up the lawn swearing, and it was forty degrees, and the north wind came straight in across my floor.
She came down with the duffel at about twenty-five to twelve. I watched from the dark with my forearms on the sill. She threw the duffel in and untied the boat and pushed off from the dock with an oar, and she did not look at the bow. She looked back once at the house, not at my window, at the window of the room where our mother was asleep on the couch. Then she rowed. A quarter moon was going behind cloud and the wind was straight down the lake into her face, and she rowed north, slowly, and swung out wide around the weed bed off Heron Point, and the shape of the boat went into the dark and I couldn't find it again.
I had not planned for her to go.
I stayed at the window. My arms went stiff. There was a sound I took for a while to be my own pulse, and then it was an engine, a big one, coming across the water from the west and swinging north up the shore, and I looked for its lights and there weren't any. It went past below the house, out beyond the boathouse, quick and even, and on toward the Point. Then a crack. A dry, hollow crack, a plank going across a knee, and after it the engine cut. The wind went on. Water slapped against something out there.
She called out. Twice. I knew what she was calling.
I didn't move. I have thought about what a person's body is doing in a moment like that and I can only tell you what mine did, which was nothing, at a speed I could not have matched on purpose.
Then there was a light on the water. A white beam, low, laid out across the surface toward the middle of the lake, held perfectly still. I counted three. Then it went out. I saw the light and not what it lit. I have written that the last thing I saw of my sister was a light on the water. The last I saw of her was a boat going into the dark around a point.
I told myself she had another light. A flashlight, out of the kitchen drawer, where there was one then, beside the takeout menus. I told myself she was fine and she was standing up in a swamped boat with a flashlight yelling at me about the lantern. An engine started, and went off west, and got small. I put my pillow over my head.
I slept. I want that on the record too.
In the morning the boat was gone from the dock and there was a note on the kitchen table in Nell's handwriting, Don't look for me. N., and my mother stood at the window with her coffee going cold, and nobody asked me a single thing. She called Sean's mother at four. She called the sheriff at six. I sat on the stairs and listened to her do both. Sean Pike had waited at the landing with his headlights off until one in the morning and gone home thinking he'd been stood up. It says so in the file.
They found the rowboat at noon on the sixteenth, swamped in the reeds at the south end, two miles down the lake. That afternoon the same deputy came back and stood in the kitchen and said to me, gently, because I was thirteen, "Honey, did you hear anything the other night?" I looked at my mother's back and then at him and said, "I was asleep. I didn't hear anything."
That night at two I stood at my window and watched my mother walk out to the end of the dock with something in her hand and throw it. It made almost no sound. I told myself it was a bottle. On the seventeenth they found Nell in twenty-two feet of water off the Point, and that night I got down on my knees and looked under my bed, and there was nothing there but dust and a sock. I decided I had imagined putting it there.
On Monday I stood on a fire lane and told my husband I had put that lantern in the boat myself and lit it for her. It was in the boat for about five minutes, and I wasn't the one who put it there.
There was no lantern in that boat.
If he had seen a light, then there had been one, and it was not the one under my bed. If he had seen nothing, then the only light she had was the one I took. That was what I had married him to find out. On Monday, on a fire lane, he told me, and I handed it back to him.
I have never let myself ask what the light was.