The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 51

The first one out of bed, at a quarter to six, Amy showered and dressed. She fed Nickie and took her for a walk while Brian prepared for the day.

The sun hadn’t appeared with the dawn. Gray clouds smeared the sky. They looked greasy.

In the oceanside park, the immense old palm trees barely stirred in a breeze as languid as the ocean off which it came. As if wounded, colorless waves crawled to shore and expired on sand ribboned with rotting seaweed.

When you believe life has meaning and can glimpse patterns that seem to suggest design, you risk seeking signs instead of waiting to receive them as a grace. Omens seem to be scattered as extravagantly as litter in the wake of a wind storm, and in the rain of reckless imagination, portents spring up in mushroom clusters.

After the telephone call from Sister Jacinta, Amy did not trust herself, for the time being, to recognize the difference between a true pattern and a fancy, between a significance and an iffiness. The coincidence of Nickie’s name, her behavior, the business with the slippers, Theresa’s reference to wind and chimes-all of that had been peculiar, suggestive, but not clearly evidence of otherworldly forces at work. A phone call from a dead nun, however, qualified as a higher order of the fantastic, and you tended thereafter to see portentous messages in every face that Nature turned toward you.

Movement drew her eye to a rat that scurried up the bole of a great phoenix palm and disappeared into the fringe of folded dead fronds beneath the green crown.

A rat was a symbol of filth, decay, death.

Here, on the sidewalk, a large black beetle lay on its back, legs stiff, and swarming ants fed on the leakage from it.

And here, beside a trash can with a gated top so loose that it creaked even in the sea’s faint exhalation, lay an empty bottle of hot sauce with a skull and crossbones on the label.

On the other hand, three white doves arrowed across the sky, and seven pennies were arranged on the rim of a drinking fountain, and on a bench lay a discarded paperback titled Your Bright Future.

She decided to let Nickie’s instincts guide her. The dog sniffed everything, fixated on nothing, and exhibited no suspicion. By the golden’s example, Amy found her way to a less fevered interpretation of every shape and shadow, and then to a disinterest in signs.

In fact, skepticism crept over her, and she began to question whether the conversation with Sister Jacinta had actually occurred. She could have dreamed it.

She thought she had awakened from a nightmare of wings moments before the phone rang, but maybe she only moved from a dream of Connecticut to a dream of a dialogue with a ghost.

After the call, she had faced Nickie, put her arm around the dog, and had gone to sleep again. They had awakened together in that cuddle. If the call only happened in a dream, she had merely turned to Nickie in her sleep.

By the time Amy returned to the motel room, she had decided not to tell Brian about Sister Mouse. At least not yet. Maybe when they were on the road.

Before he had gone to bed the previous night, Brian had sent an e-mail to Vanessa. While Amy had been walking Nickie, Vanessa sent a reply.

She gave the address of a restaurant in Monterey at which she wanted Amy and Brian to have lunch.

They grabbed breakfast at a fast-food joint and ate on the move again, northbound on Highway 101. They should be in Monterey by noon.

For the first three hours, Brian drove. He said little, and most of the time he stared at the road ahead with a grim expression.

Although he was eager to gain custody of his daughter, he must be worried about the condition in which he would find her and about how much she might hold him responsible for her suffering.

Amy tried more than once to lure him out of the glum currents of his thoughts, but he rose to the conversation only briefly each time, and then swam down again into brooding silence.

Forced by his introspection into some self-analysis of her own, she admitted to herself that skepticism had not been the real reason she hesitated to tell Brian about the telephone call from Sister Jacinta. Her dismissal of the visitation as just a dream had been insincere.

The truth was that relating the content of her conversation with the nun would require her to tell Brian the rest of the story she had been too exhausted and too emotionally drained-too gnawed by guilt-to finish the previous night. She had broken off that narrative with the death of Nickie at Mater Misericordiæ she tried to summon the courage to tell the rest of it.

After they parked in a lay-by to stretch their legs and to give Nickie a potty break, Amy drove the last two hours to Monterey. She had to keep her eyes on the road now. She had reason not to look at him directly while she talked, and this gave her confidence to return to the past.

Nevertheless, she could still only approach the monstrous event obliquely, and in steps. She began with the lighthouse.

“Did I ever tell you, I lived in a lighthouse for a few years?”

“Wonderful architecture in most lighthouses,” he said. “I would have remembered your lighthouse years.”

His tone implied that he knew she also would have remembered having told him, and that he recognized the false casualness of her revelation.

“With satellite navigation, many lighthouses aren’t in service anymore. Others have been automated-electricity instead of an oil brazier.”

“Some are bed-and-breakfast inns.”

“Yeah. They renovate the caretaker’s house. Some even offer a room or two in the lighthouse itself.”

This lighthouse had stood on a rocky promontory in Connecticut. She had been twenty when she moved there, twenty-four when she left.

She did not explain what brought her to that place or mention whether she had been there alone or with others.

Brian seemed to sense that questions would inhibit her and that the wrong question, asked too soon, would halt her altogether.

She spoke of the rugged shore and the thrilling seascapes, of the spectacular views from the lantern room at the top of the tower, and of the charming details of the lightkeeper’s house.

She dwelt at length on the beauty of the lighthouse itself, the walnut paneling of the round vestibule, the ornate fretwork of the circular iron staircase. At the summit, in the lantern room, waited the marvelous Fresnel lens, oval in shape, with integrated series of prismatic rings at bottom and top, which reflected the rays of a one-thousand-watt halogen bulb to the center of the lens, amplifying them. Thus concentrated, the light was beamed outward, across the dark Atlantic.

They arrived at the restaurant in Monterey as she finished telling him that, in the early nineteenth century, Fresnel lenses were so heavy, the only way to turn them-and make the beam sweep the coast-was to float them in pools of mercury. Extremely dense, mercury will support great weight and reduce friction to a minimum.

Mercury is highly toxic. Gradually, mercury flotation was phased out in favor of clockworks and counterweights, which were subsequently replaced by electric motors.

Before then, however, some lightkeepers were driven insane by mercury poisoning.