I remember that the summer we moved up to Gin Ridge from the smoky little house at the back of Gearhart was the summer the strange yellow lights hovered over the ocean every night for weeks. I was twelve, my brother Ryan only nine, and the lights were spooky enough to keep us from paying enough attention to our mother.
There were several changes that summer, too many; I think she wanted to get them all over with at once. For starters, she finally wrapped up the divorce from our father, which had been stumbling forward, on and off again, for five or more years. And right away she married Ken the Cowhand, as my father, a pediatrician, called him, and moved into that spanking remodeled four-bedroom house with a claw-foot tub in every bathroom. Ken was a real cowboy, sort of; he’d been a ranch hand back in Redmond and now he worked at the local meat company, Reed & Hertig. Though he was pretty nice, I don’t know how my mother could stand the smell when he came home; it made the hair stand up on my arms.
The real name of Gin Ridge was South Ocean Avenue. The locals called it Gin Ridge because most of its houses were second homes for Portland’s rich, who only came down for golf when the Oregon weather permitted. They rode our Fourth of July parade in elaborate floats, with Ray-Bans and drinks that already needed a new umbrella by ten a.m. and pointy-nosed schnauzers who got to ride right up in the front of all that papier-mâché. Our own dog, Waller, was a brown Lab, too big for everything but trotting alongside our bikes. That summer my mother let Waller sleep with Ryan every night, even though he wasn’t technically allowed in the bedrooms.
The new house had a square face on the ocean side and an upper deck along a row of long narrow windows like the teeth of a grinning whale. When I was little and we’d take bike rides up here I called it the Whale House, and I’m fairly certain that’s what got my mother to pay attention to it and, finally, to covet it. I think that for a long time she didn’t know that coveting doesn’t have to be done quietly, doesn’t have to be of the unattainable.
She purchased the house with money from the divorce settlement. She took her favorite Turner print from where it had always hung in our bathroom and propped it right up on the new mantel.
Our father remained in our old smoky house—the chimney sagged just enough to funnel the wind inside if it blew the wrong way—and Ryan and I rode our bikes with the dog to see him every day for a few weeks. He could have afforded a new house, as my mother reminded him, but he wouldn’t move now for the same reason they never had, when they were happy: it was the family home. At first, he put his foot down about us staying with our mother and Ken the Cowhand, but custody was difficult for fathers to get, as he had to explain to us, and Ken was nice and the new house was nice and even our mother was nice now, all smiles and the voice she used for children, and my father was too nice to divide us any further.
The night we moved in she sat us down and explained how our lives wouldn’t be that different.
“Your dad’s still your dad,” she said. Ryan fidgeted. I put my hand on his knee. “You can see him and stay with him anytime you want, as long as you get permission from both of us so we know where you are.”
“From you and Ken?” Ryan asked. He seemed plenty old at the time, when we were fighting epic battles over the TV or rigging treehouses with our old next-door-neighbor, Lane, but in the pictures from that summer he looks like a kindergartener, a baby.
“No, honey, from me and your father.” Mom frowned. “Well. From Ken too, of course.”
Ken was in the background, sitting on the arm of the couch. He never made a lot of noise, but you always knew he was there. A way he had of making his presence felt, warm and solid, so as not to spook the horses. I thought that this was responsible for making my mother better; she had the placid calm of a horse around him. She didn’t weep anymore in the afternoon, or take us out of school to shop the little boutiques.
“And you don’t have to call Ken ‘Dad,’” she added. She smoothed her blonde hair back and the bracelets on her wrist whispered. “But you should feel like you can ask him for whatever you need. Understand?”
We nodded. Unsure of how to proceed with this day, we settled for uneasy compliance. We wanted life back the old way, but the new didn’t seem too bad, either, and we thought it wise not to make any enemies.
“The upstairs floors have just been refinished, so no dog or shoes upstairs. And no eating in your bedrooms on the new carpets.” She looked from my face to my brother’s. She put on her dentist’s smile, the one for the little kids who’d had a bad cavity experience under a less kind drill. “But seriously, guys, nothing’s really going to change. I’m still going to work at my office, your dad’s still going to work at his. We’ll still do birthdays together, and Christmas—I guess we’ll––” She looked over her shoulder at Ken, who nodded and gave an encouraging smile. “You can stay with whoever you like for Christmas, or maybe we’ll do presents all together.” She brightened. “But that’s miles away, summer’s just started! We’ll have to start thinking about getting the fireworks and decorating the bikes for the parade.”
I glanced sidelong at Ryan to raise my eyebrows. We’d seen Mom upset a lot, but not flustered; she was a fast talker and always had everything planned out. Ryan looked grave. He pushed a brown lock off his forehead. “Can I have some ice cream now?” he asked.
Mom cast her eyes to Ken, lifting her shoulders. He gave her the same smile and stood, spreading his hands. “Come on, kiddo,” he said, “let’s go get you a bowl.” He stopped in the doorway and looked at me. “You want anything, Ellie?”
I shook my head. “Nope, thanks.”
“No, thank you,” Mom corrected, but I just looked at her and Ken moved off into the kitchen. She lifted her drink from the side table. Gin in a real martini glass, the kind we hadn’t had in the old house because Ryan and I broke them all trying to build a glass tower. She sighed and tipped the drink toward me like a toast.
“This isn’t so bad, is it?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t, but she and I both knew you shouldn’t ask questions like that, either.
That night I heard them in the hot tub, a bitty two-person bucket on the deck, splashing and laughing quietly and setting their drinks down and down again so late into the night that I had to crawl into bed with Ryan and Waller just to get some sleep. The heavy noise of their breathing drowned my mother out. My father had asked me to tell him if she started drinking too much. But I knew what she would say to that: it wasn’t his business anymore, was it? If you’d asked me in the daylight whether twelve was too old to sleep with your little brother, I’d’ve said yes. But in the long night it was different. All three of us slept with our faces turned toward the window to feel the stars.
* * *
Gearhart was just a two-mile town with two main parallel roads: Marion, which ran along the beach dunes and from which Gin Ridge sprouted, where we lived now with our mother and her new silver and restained floors, and Cottage, which ran along the woods that separated our world from the highway, where we’d lived as a family with our hooked rugs and sad chimney.
Ryan and I were allowed to roam the town all day while our parents—the three we’d been gifted with now—were at work. Sometimes I’d leave Ryan with Waller and see a girlfriend, Lindy or Sara, but mostly we spent the days as we always had, with the neighbor kid, Lane. Dad had given us new copies of the key to let ourselves in anytime we liked during the day, but we stopped after a while. It was too quiet. He’d gotten a new refrigerator that whirred soundlessly, and he never had enough clothes to fill the dryer or pots to fill the dishwasher. All the chairs were waiting for us to sit in them and it got too tiring, making the rounds. We felt like we had to stroke everything we passed by, to let it know we still cared—that it was still our chipped nightstand, our backwards faucet handle, our mantel studded with tack holes from Christmas stockings. Our sagging chimney, which, an appraiser had informed us, was dangerous and a drag on the house’s value, and which my father had been planning on fixing any day now since Ryan was in diapers.
It was more exciting to hang out with Lane now that we couldn’t just see him through our windows, besides. He had plenty of new things to tell us. He told us that his mother had coached him to act as if nothing had happened in our family, as if we were still living next door, as always. He told us that his older sister had a friend whose knockers you could see bouncing around despite the big T-shirts she wore to bed when she slept over. That’s what he called them, knockers. Lane was eleven, closer to my age than Ryan’s, and an avid reader of his father’s books: he had an endless, if dated, vocabulary when it came to certain body parts and classes of cars.
He always saved the best information for last; one day, he promised he had something incredible and then swerved into a long prediction about what middle school would be like. (Having just finished the sixth grade, I’d already told him a million times: it wasn’t nearly that bad. Like most tests you dreaded. I could only hope that the next ones—period, driver’s test, sex, graduation, marriage, childbirth, and divorce—were similarly disappointing.) After a few minutes of this we started flicking his bare shin and threatening an Indian burn if he didn’t tell us the incredible news.
“Okay,” he said, bouncing once on the bed to cross his legs. He smirked. “I’m surprised you guys haven’t heard about it already.”
“Maybe we have,” I said. “What do you know, Lane.”
“Right. So you’ve seen the lights.”
“Yes,” Ryan whispered. He had a look on his face like he’d been trying to tell everyone something crazy and he’d found someone who believed him.
I turned to him. “What lights? You know what he’s talking about?”
“My window faces that way,” he said. His bedroom at the new house was in the southwest corner, which meant his view was of Tillamook Head rising from the sea and the cove it created, where the cool locals surfed year-round. My room was in the northwest corner, looking out on the beachgrassed dunes and the park.
Lane’s smugness had given way to eagerness. “How many nights have you seen them?”
“Only last night,” Ryan said.
“Why didn’t you tell me about them?” I asked. They were sitting side-by-side, close. Sometimes I felt cut off from them, for being a girl.
“You were sleeping.”
“So they started last night,” Lane said. “No one else saw them before that, I asked.”
“Saw what?” I slapped my palm on the bedspread hard enough to make the TV remote bounce.
“No one’s sure,” Lane said. “Not that many people saw them. Robert McGraw’s mom told him about it, and my dad heard a bunch of people talking about it on the golf course.”
“So what did they see?”
“Weird lights, hovering over the ocean kind of by the cove, in the middle of the night. A bunch of them, like seven? Ryan?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I only woke up for a second.”
“What kind of lights?”
“Nobody knows. Everyone who didn’t see says it was just shooting stars.” Lane was pleased with himself. He grinned and I noticed he wasn’t as bucktoothed as he used to be. “But I’ll tell you what they are. We’re finally having our own UFO sighting right here in Gearhart. They like to come to rural areas, you know. To scope us out without being spotted.”
Ryan’s face showed nothing but he held too still; he’d always had that fear of things like yowling firetrucks and lightning storms and sonic booms: strange, insurmountable powers. I wanted to laugh at the idea, to reassure him, but I was too envious. I’d always wanted to see a UFO.
We heard Lane’s mother coming up the stairs; she worked bar hours at the golf course inn and could be counted on to wake up around lunchtime and fix a plate of sandwiches.
“Are you guys hungry?” she asked, pushing the door open with her toe.
“You saw them, Mom, tell ’em,” he said. “The lights last night.”
She set the plate on the bed. “Lane’s been talking about this all day.” She raised a confiding eyebrow. “I have to admit it was pretty strange. I saw them when I was heading into the parking lot after work. It had been a long night. I thought maybe I was just really tired and seeing things. I waited till Ginny came out and asked her if she saw them, too. I couldn’t find my glasses at first and I kind of thought it might be a boat on fire, you know, out on the water, so then Ginny wanted to call the Coast Guard because it looked maybe like flares? Like a boat really was in trouble? That’s what the Coast Guard’s for, anyway. But the lights had already been up too long to be flares. We watched for about five minutes, and then they just winked off. But we were talking, you know, we weren’t really looking that hard anymore, and it was hard to tell if they disappeared or if it was just stars in the first place and then it got cloudy or something.”
“So many excuses,” Lane shook his head. “Classic behavior after a UFO sighting.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Mendell,” I said, picking up a sandwich, and nudged Ryan.
“Thank you,” he echoed.
“Sightings often continue for two or three nights in a row,” Lane said. “I read that. I bet you a buck it happens again tonight.”
Part Two
All of Gearhart was up that night, waiting by the windows––we could tell because by midnight every household light winked out and the night held an expectant hush. We had never seen it so dark. Even the streetlamps dimmed in respect. Lately my mother had been staying up most of the night anyway, so she sat with us and watched. She made me uneasy, the way she was so excited. In the morning, I knew, she’d barely be able to open her eyes to get to work. She kept jumping up to peer out each window in turn, telling us stories about aliens she’d heard as a kid.
“Roswell was such a big deal when I was a kid, you have to understand,” she kept saying, tapping her nails against her glass. “Even my dad thought it was the real deal, and boy was he a skeptic.” Tappety-tap.
It was strange, to be awake so late with her. The town had always felt safe at night—we could have wandered barefoot and without fear, since it was hidden from the highway and the nearby tourist towns. The bakery and the grocer and the ice creamery and the antique shop all closed up at five sharp, and the light at the only four-way stop winked steadily through till morning. But now it no longer felt like our town. We could feel a hundred people awake around us, see the expectant breaths against every neighboring windowpane.
It was hard to note the actual moment the lights appeared. We’d given up searching the sky and were gazing listlessly at the seashells and figurines on the windowsills when they emerged, or were emerging, as if someone tightened the focus on a camera we hadn’t realized was careless. They were far away and bright, six singular gems. We expected them to move at any moment; their stillness seemed uncertain, unlike the stars.
Ryan turned to our mother. “What are they?”
I retrieved the binoculars from their case on the coffee table and pressed them against the window—I’d never gotten the hang of keeping my hands steady. Closer up, the lights were beautiful, warm and difficult to focus on. They reminded me of lit windows. Little panels of welcome.
“Wow, honey, I have no idea,” Mom said. She yelled for Ken. “You have to see this, baby! I mean really!”
Ken had been going to bed earlier and earlier as a way, I assumed, of letting my mother know he didn’t approve of her staying up all night, walking the house or whatever she did. They’d argued about it before leaving for work that morning. He appeared at the top of the stairway, mussed and undershirted. He whistled, though, when he saw the lights.
“We should call Dad,” Ryan said. His face, with its pointed forelock, was transfixed—both anxious and excited, the way he looked the moment before I slapped him in a game of Tag.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so, sweetie,” she said. “We don’t want to wake him. He might be mad you all are still up.” She handed the binoculars to Ken, who stood behind us all. Holding them to his face, his forearms were tense and strong in the moonlight.
Sometimes he looked much younger than my father, which I supposed he was. Though all adults seemed middle-aged and unreachable to us, Ken was becoming less old to me as the summer wore on. Sometimes I would imagine that my mother wasn’t there, that I was older, that Ken noticed I had come seamlessly into womanhood. I couldn’t explain it to myself, though I’d try, about to fall asleep at night. Sometimes it was the smell of the meat company on him, that made me think that way.
“It reminds me of the painting,” she breathed, flapping a hand behind her at the Turner on the mantel. The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons. She’d seen its companion at the Tate on her trip abroad before college, she used to tell us, but this one was always her favorite. It showed a fire in the night sky, a fire that looked like the end of the world. “They’re so beautiful.” When she took the binoculars back from Ken and pressed them to her eyes I saw that she was about to cry.
* * *
By the time we saw Lane the next day, he had already bicycled the length of Gearhart and heard every story. We met him at the ice cream shop, where we overheard a few vacationers saying they’d come earlier than usual this year, for the lights.
“Practically everyone saw,” he huffed, out of breath. We walked alongside his bicycle. “My dad took me up to the park to see last night. I tried to get him to call a news channel but he wouldn’t do it.”
“So we don’t know what it is?”
“Well.” He quirked his mouth to one side. “A few people did call the Coast Guard. And the Coast Guard said thanks but they already got a few calls, and it was nothing to worry about, that they’re just testing their flares.”
“Oh.” We drew up short at the park and looked out at the waves beyond the dunes. Another calm day, sunny and breezy along the beach grass. We had often come here at sunset when the wind died down to play tag or soccer, a long time ago, with our parents––and now with Mom and Ken. You could stand on the park bench and get a panoramic view of the sky blazoned with seared clouds. It was hard to imagine seeing anything out there now. I could see my own new bedroom window from where we stood.
“I guess that could be it,” I offered after a minute. “Coast Guard flares.”
“You know what my dad says? He says that’s what they always say about stuff like that. He says even if they were testing flares they only last a minute or something and they don’t hold still like that.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re testing them,” Ryan said. “A new kind of flare.”
I could see him clinging to this: the safe, the unmagical. For a minute I was mad. I figured I’d told him too many spooky stories in the tree fort at the old house when we were growing up. I’d scared him before he was ready, and now he was a disappointing thumbsucker. But I could count on Lane, at least.
“My dad said they’re in cahoots with whoever’s in those UFOS. Or it could even be one big UFO, the mothership, all those lights,” he said. “But I think they’re just trying to keep people from panicking. I bet they didn’t have any idea this was going to happen, or they would have made them go farther away where we wouldn’t notice them.” He lowered his voice and looked straight at Ryan. “They have ways of making you forget things. They could be abducting us in our sleep and we wouldn’t even remember. They could do it every night.”
Part Three
The next night, and the night after, they did look like flares to us. A new kind of flare. They were warm, almost orange in color, and indistinct. And, as far as we could tell, in a different formation every night. Ryan drew a picture of their constellation one night, and we tried to match them up on the window the next, but it was difficult to feel certain about where we’d been standing, what we’d seen.
The Signal ran a story about the lights. As the town gears up for its annual Fourth of July parade, it said, tourists flock to our coast to witness the nightly appearance of what many believe are UFOs. And locals are reporting some strange happenings. Extra traffic accidents, from sleepless drivers, but also claims of drained car batteries, unusual skirmishes among children at the daycare, women calling the local radio station to request songs and weeping.
“That could be Mom,” Ryan said when I cut the article out, and I flicked his shoulder.
Ryan gave up after a few nights and started going to bed at nine, but he left his light on all night, and Waller guarded the window with a steady thumping tail. I felt guilty staying up without him, but I burned each night to know if the lights would come back.
My mother stayed up night after night as June dwindled, but not with me. Sometimes they had friends over, younger friends I’d never met, laughing in the hot tub till the stars began to fade. Other nights it was only her: her nightgown swishing on the newly-stained floors and her smoke coming through the screen door. As a dentist she’d always been fastidious about her teeth, but every once in a while she would revert to these smoking jags, these wild-eyed long nights followed by exhausted naps during her lunch hour at work or after she picked us up from school. Our father would always be gentle and angry with her, by turns, when she was like this, and I didn’t want to tell him now in case he wanted us to leave her. She seemed to need protection.
* * *
One night, Ken came up and sat beside me on the couch. He nodded toward the lights out the window.
“I think you might be the only one watching those things anymore.” He had his elbows on his knees and the tips of his fingers templed together. “Do you worry about them, Ellie?”
I shrugged. “Not anymore, I guess,” I said. “I like looking at them.” I leaned over to give him a surreptitious sniff, to see if he smelled like blood or cowhide like I sometimes thought, but he just smelled like skin, like men’s shampoo and light sweat.
“What does your dad say about them?
“Not to worry.”
“They are beautiful, aren’t they,” he said quietly. “You know, I used to work with this fisherman, a really old geezer, who’d been all over the place. He’d met some of the last Indians who lived traditionally and didn’t have much to do with our society. He’d been ice-fishing in Wisconsin and he said the Fox Indians thought that lights in the sky were omens of war and famine. They thought the lights were angry spirits of old enemies who were trying to rise up and come back for them.”
I pictured these angry, formless spirits setting mansions in the sky alight like signal fires to warn their enemies: they were coming to take revenge. If I squinted, the lights over the water almost danced like flame.
“I guess it scares a lot of people, huh,” I said.
Ken smiled halfway. “Some, yeah. But not everyone. The fisherman had a dozen other stories about what old cultures thought of phenomenons like this, lights in the sky. The Eskimos taught him that the sky was a haven for spirits after death but that to get there you had to cross a long and dangerous bridge over the water. So the spirits already in the sky would hold torches to guide the feet of the ones who were still crossing. And that’s what the lights were.”
I looked out at the lights. “When I was little, I got the idea that the stars were people you’d loved who’d died, and that they stayed up there to watch over you and shone a light so you’d know they were there. I picked one to be Grandpa George and I used to pray to him every night and tell him what I did that day and stuff.” The dark of the upstairs living room made me brave but as soon as I said it I felt stupid. “I was still a baby though,” I muttered.
He patted my knee. The flannel of my pajamas against my skin felt comforting. “That’s pretty smart for a baby,” he said.
“Did the old fisherman ever see lights like this?”
“I’m not sure. I think the lights the Indians were talking about were mostly the northern lights. You ever seen those on TV?”
I shook my head. “I know they don’t look like this.”
“I’ve never seen ’em in real life. Always wanted to. But I think the northern lights to them are like these lights to us, anyway. Something they weren’t able to explain for a long time. You can put any explanation on it you want, but what matters is whether you decide to be scared or just appreciate it. And now we all know what the northern lights are made of when humans used to think it’d be a mystery forever.”
He patted my knee once more, then stood and stretched. “Feel better?”
“I felt fine the whole time,” I said, hurt. So I’d been talking to a father, not a friend.
“You’re a smart kid,” he said as he started down the stairs. Then I heard him stop. “Do you notice anything different about your mother?”
I remembered something my father had yelled at her once—that she didn’t even hide it well. Whatever it was he meant, I saw it too. And if Ken couldn’t see it maybe that was better, maybe that was what she needed.
“No,” I said.
I tucked my knees up to my chest and kept my eyes on the lights, not watching him go. The lights beamed back at me. I wanted them to be real, something the Coast Guard couldn’t explain. Maybe they would tell me where to go.
* * *
It seems like all the summer days were mild when I was that age, warm and almost windless, just enough breeze to lift the morning fog from the water by the time we were waking up. Just as it seems there was the barest sprinkling of snow every Christmas, and power outages in the winter that would last a whole week. I know now that town’s a cold and rainy place most of the time, sheltered from heat and snow alike by the mountains, that power outages never last more than a few hours and require neither lanterns nor blanket forts—but I can’t explain the difference between that life and this.
When I imagine that my mother lived in this world, the cold one, while we were in the spell of that town, I think I begin to understand her. The way her heart worked––and how easy, for it to beat its way out of the spell. How easy, for us to pretend she’d make her way back in.
* * *
After Ken left that night I was determined to stay up till my mother went to bed, but I fell asleep on the couch to the smell of her smoke curling through the screens.
I couldn’t be sure if I dreamt this––I was so scared I stiffened up all over and didn’t move. I thought I woke to all the lights shining in the living room and someone, my mother, whipping around in her white nightgown with her cigarette in her hand, nostrils flared and sniffling. I can’t stand all these lights off all the time, she was saying. She stopped and stood over me and pressed her hand to my forehead, hard, with a sweaty palm. I couldn’t move, or speak, but she saw that my eyes were open and forced an apologetic smile, and there in all the streaming white glare of the lamps I saw that her nose was bleeding, that her teeth were stained in ridges with thin fresh blood.
It’s ok, she soothed, I’m not an alien, you’re just having a dream, you’re safe.
Part Four
On the night before the Fourth of July, the lights were brighter than ever. From my perch on the couch I saw upper-story lights go on and off; through the screen I heard balcony doors open and jackets zip up. I squinted at the lights, held the binoculars steady against the glass. They looked bigger, closer; they seemed to burn colder. I tightened the binocular hinge until the lights became tiered and blurry, till they looked again like a house in which every window was lit.
My father came over in the morning to help us decorate our bikes with red and white crepe paper. Ken was on the deck with a cup of coffee, but our mother was still in bed. She hadn’t left her room yesterday; every few hours I’d crept to her door and pressed my ear against it to hear even breathing, the covers shuffling. But I heard nothing.
The floats that year were spectacular. Not because they were giant or carefully painted, but because they were all about the lights: women stood in backseats with drinks in one hand and squirt guns like laser blasters in the other; men with gin-blossom noses drove cars decorated like flying saucers, high beams on. A big green alien rolled by, holding a sign that said I’m just testing my flares.
Every kid in town, whether local or vacation, rode their bikes behind the floats, one-handed, dog leashes looped around the handlebars, tossing candy from a basket to the spectators on the sidelines, or catching candy tossed back into the parade. This was the one time of year when Gearhart was filled with people not our own; well-dressed tourists down from Portland for the holiday stood side-by-side with our parents and cheered us along as if they loved us, too. After a few minutes we all just unhooked the dogs and they got in on the excitement too, gobbling candy and galloping alongside the bikes, sniffing jerkily at the cards slapping our wheel spokes. Once we neared the four-way stop they all ended up sitting forlornly on their haunches, anyway, howling at the wailing fire trucks bringing up the rear of the parade. Ryan threw his bike down outside of the ice cream shop and sat right next to Waller, who licked his face between howls. He always covered his ears when the trucks started up. I nudged him and pointed to where I’d finally spotted our dad—across the street, staring out over the tail of the parade, standing next to Ken. They had their arms crossed, not speaking. We waved.
Behind us I saw Julie Parker coming out of the ice cream shop with her sister. I thought Julie, who was my age, was an obnoxious know-it-all, but her mother was a truly nice person, always stopping me and Ryan when she ran into us to tell us how much she loved sending her kids to the dentist now that they’d started going to our mother. Even Ryan and I liked going there for our cleaning every six months. Mom had stars on the ceiling above the exam chair and an array of cool sunglasses to choose from when she turned the bright light on. She spoke in a soft sparkly voice and sent kids home with pastel toothbrushes and chocolate-flavored toothpaste. Our father often reminded us that it was hard for some kids, being in a small town, and if I’d thought about it I’d say I was grateful that our mom didn’t do anything embarrassing like get sued for malpractice or bag groceries at the Safeway or only blow into town once in a while.
We said hi to Julie, but she had a lopsided blue bow in her hair that made her look like a stuffed animal and I must have given it a look, an up-and-down that girls know the meaning of from the time they start kindergarten. She stopped, blocking the door.
“Guess what?” she said. “My mom says we’re not going to your mom anymore because she’s crazy. She cancelled my appointment last week and flat out didn’t even show up for it yesterday.”
Something squeezed inside my hand, an awful, tingling, electric-eel convulsion, and I jerked Waller’s leash. He watched us from beside Ryan’s fallen bicycle with a benevolent smile.
“Why should I care?” Ryan said, getting up, and brushed past her. Between blasts from the fire truck I heard the bell on the door jingle. I was so proud of him, but I could barely get my own mouth to work. Julie’s sister wandered away and Julie started after her. I grabbed her arm.
“She has the flu,” I said. “Like that’s such a big deal.”
I followed Ryan inside before she could say anything else. I hoped I looked regal but inside I was a scurrying mouse, giving Ryan money for his waffle cone but not ordering for myself. I put a hand on his shoulder to try to tell him things you don’t even know you feel at that age: that you admire someone fiercely, that you pity them, that the need to protect them is love’s most terrible burden.
“Listen, Rhino,” I said, “wait here for Lane, okay? I forgot I promised Sara I’d meet her at the hot dog stand.”
“Sure.” He sucked at the top of his cone, cheeks caving inward.
“You can take Waller, okay?”
“Sure.”
I left him there before he’d even come fully out the door, pointing a finger at the ground to get Waller to stay. My father and Ken were gone; I searched for their white shirts against the crowd but everyone looked the same. The air buzzed with heat and laughter and the smell of charcoal from the barbecue at the fire station across the street. I pushed past starched polo shirts and crepe-papered handlebars until I found a clear path on the sidewalk, past the spectators bringing up the wake of the fire trucks. I stopped at the gate to our yard, when I saw that my father and Ken, standing outside the front door.
Watching my father from this distance reminded me of how I used to hate visiting his office. It was uncomfortable, somehow, to see my father with other children, balancing chubby babies on his knee or pressing the stethoscope tenderly to the chest of a girl my age. When I saw my mother talking to her kid patients, I could tell that it wasn’t her real smile, that she left something reserved for us. But with my father I couldn’t. He looked at us all with the same comfort and kindness, as if he couldn’t tell any of us apart.
At first I thought they were arguing, the way Ken shook his head. But my father had his hand to his head and he pressed the bridge of his nose with his fingers for a long time, the way very tired people do. Finally he looked up at Ken and smiled, the stretched smile he gave us when we came home with an abysmal spelling test that didn’t matter, he’d say, not really, because I still love you.
Over Ken’s shoulder he saw me, and for a long moment we just stared at each other. Then Ken turned and my father beckoned me over.
“Why aren’t you at the barbecue?” he said.
I shrugged and the shell of my Styrofoam helmet, whose straps I still clutched, clattered against my knee.
“What’s wrong with Mom?” I asked. “Why is she missing her appointments?”
Ken sat down, on the refinished stoop. My father glared at him, but Ken raised his hands, palm up. “I didn’t say anything,” he said.
I’d never seen them so close before. I could see why my mother liked Ken; he had a handsome cowboy mustache and his chin was still tough, while my father’s face was hidden by the full sandy beard he’d had all my life. But it was my father I went to, who sat and opened his arms and pulled me on his knee though I was at least four times too big for that now.
“She’s sick again,” he said into my hair. “And we’re going to try something different this time. She’s going to a place to get better, like a vacation. She needs to be somewhere calm and quit working for a while and this place is going to help her do that.”
Sick. I knew about drugs from health class; I’d even read a thriller about high school girls who got dangerously hooked on cocaine because it felt so good and drove a red car right off a cliff. But I could never link my pretty smiling mother to the few people I’d see around town with glazed eyes or trembling hands or, even, sniffling noses. I knew it was different with her. Every family had a secret life when the lights went off in their windows.
My father pulled away a little and lifted my chin. “I don’t want you to worry. She’ll be back soon. And in the meantime you and Ryan can come stay at the old house for a while. We’ll spend some good time together.”
“When is she going?” I left my father’s knee, remembering the silence in her room the day before. “Did she already go?”
“She left last night,” Ken said, not looking at me. “When you guys were asleep.”
“We were going to wait till after the parade to let you know,” my father added. “I don’t want you to worry about this. You should head back to the barbecue with Ryan and we’ll pack your stuff later today.”
“You didn’t tell us all morning? How long will she be gone?”
“Just a month,” Ken said, as my father said, “Not long at all.” My father stood and stepped toward me. “Let’s walk over and get a hot dog with Ryan.”
I took a step backward. “We want to stay one more night here,” I said. “I don’t want her to think we just left.”
My father started to shake his head and then looked at Ken, who shrugged. “I’d be happy to have them if it’s all right with you,” he said.
My father took a long breath. “If that’s what you want,” he said finally. “But I wish you would come home. We really need to be together.”
But I left my father there with Ken, outside the empty house. Let them have it, I thought. Let them have each other. Since they didn’t do my mother any good.
Part Five
That night I stayed in my room until everyone was asleep and then lifted the window sash. Even the house’s casements had been replaced, so it glided up without a sound. I heard Waller groan softly in Ryan’s room across the hall as I slipped out. At our old house our bedrooms were upstairs and I never would have dared, but here I stepped right down on the grass and followed the moonlit street. Overhead clouds scooted northward; the wind had been picking up steadily all evening.
Lane was waiting for me in the park. Maybe he didn’t know yet, or maybe his own mother had coached him again to pretend like everything was the same, that my mother’s office wasn’t closed up and our suitcases packed. We sat with our knees touching and plucked at the furled buds of English daisies. He said, “I bet no one even cares about those lights anymore.”
“I do,” I said. “I came, didn’t I? And what about all that UFO stuff at the parade? They all saw how bright they were last night.”
But they were later coming out this time. Lane pointed when they began to distinguish themselves from the stars. We were close to shivers by that time. Their lights seemed thinner, almost brittle. The blackberry bushes flanking the park shifted in the wind. Lane slipped closer and hung an arm across my back.
“Have you ever French kissed anyone?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to try?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tracy from school let me kiss her, and she said I was pretty good at it.”
He nudged his nose at the air the way puppies do when they’re waiting for you to call them. I leaned over and let him mash his lips against mine, our noses flattening too. I kept my mouth closed and for a second, with Lane’s bony arm around me, I thought of Ken and the way he looked when he rose from the hot tub to get my mother a drink, like he was finished growing, not slipping flabbily past it like my father, or still weedy like Lane, or my brother, or me. When I got the sense that Lane was working up the courage to slip me the tongue—I felt it poking his own cheek—I pulled away.
“I have to get back before Ken checks on us,” I said. I walked away before he’d even stood up. I knew he’d be embarrassed, but my heart was beating too fast to let me care. My breasts tingled with the beat of my blood against my polo shirt. They’d started to appear that summer, though it’d been easy not to notice it. I felt like my mother would notice, now; I felt her watching me. I knew what I had to do.
I walked past Ryan’s window and went right in the front door and up the stairs, which hadn’t been replaced and still creaked the way they must have for the family before us. I watched the lights hovering over the water—they seemed to grow brighter and more hazy, for me. And then I rummaged in the kitchen drawer for a clean dishtowel and wrapped it around the tip of a log from the fireplace we hadn’t even used yet, even though we’d had fires almost every summer night at the old house. I found my mother’s matches slipped into the plastic jacket around her pack of Parliaments on the mantel. I positioned my torch on the windowsill. I wanted her to see it. I wanted to light her way home.
I’d only lit matches a few times before, from the boxed kind for candles or fireworks, and the first few only ripped and smelled of sulfur. When one finally caught I burnt my fingers pressing it to the towel, which charred and curled and finally caught in a tenuous square of flame. I didn’t notice I was crying until Ken came in the room, shirtless, wrapping his arms around me to slap the flame out with his bare hands. He whipped me around and the torch fell to the floor with a clatter I was sure would wake Ryan. I felt the bruise already on my arm and cried out.
“What the hell, Ellie? Are you crazy? Your dad’s going to kill me. What do you think you’re doing?”
I shrugged, eyes shut and nose running.
“Answer me, Ellie. Were you trying to burn the house down or what?”
“No.”
“You should have stayed with your father,” he said. Then he took his hands from my shoulders and pulled a throw from the couch, cashmere, which we were not allowed to use, wrapping it around my shoulders. He hoisted me up, pressing me to his chest, and walked with me to the deck door, tripping a few times on my dangling legs.
“It’s okay,” he said, opening it. He’d told me once that you have to keep talking to a horse to let it know you’re there, and to never walk directly in front of it or behind it without telling it, slowly and gently, what you’re going to do. “We’re just going to clear the smoke out of this room so your mother doesn’t know we’ve been ruining her new house, all right?”
He set me down in front of the railing and stood beside me, one hand on my head, fixing the blanket back up on my shoulder whenever it slipped. The wind was high by now, and probably cold on his skin.
“Are you going to tell me what you were trying to do?”
I shook my head.
“I’m not going to tell your father.”
“Thanks.”
He sighed. “I wonder if those lights are ever going to leave.”
* * *
You can see how I’d think it was my fault, even now. That I called it into being.
We’d only been outside a few minutes when Ken saw the orange glow coming from the back of town. At first we thought it was coming from inside our own house, that he hadn’t put the torch out. But then we saw that it was the chimney ablaze on the roof of another house. Ken ran inside to call the police, and then he was out the door, with me tailing him as fast as I could run. Even though our fire department was just right across from the ice cream store he still beat everyone to the source of the fire: our old house. He dislocated his shoulder breaking through the windowpane to pull my father out. He even started to give my father mouth-to-mouth, I saw when I ran up, trailed by those monstrous firetrucks, but the chimney had kept the fire bottled pretty well and it turned out my father was only drunk, not smothered. When I saw this I began to hope Lane had gone straight home and fallen asleep. I didn’t particularly want to hear his recounting of this story.
Around me I felt the presence of people, neighbors, drawn into their shawls like I was, eyes fastened on the light. The smear of fire against the blue night darkened our surroundings and made our house look like the only one on the block, exposed and lonely. The ceiling beams were cast into relief, the teacups silhouetted on the windowsills. Sparks showered from the chimney, lit in the needles of the pines, glowed and faded. The needles and the trucks and my father and the other men were two-dimensional figures, etched against the blaze. I wanted to tell my mother that she was wrong, that this was what the Turner painting looked like. A beacon. I recognized what she saw in it. It was beautiful.
The fire chief crouched down before my father when they’d gotten him sitting up and the fire was mostly quenched. “You should’ve had that chimney replaced a goddamn decade ago,” he said, but he closed his mouth when he saw me, still clutching my blanket against the wind. Ken and my father blinked at me, exhausted, sooty-faced, full of love. I let them hug me to show that I was okay, that I wasn’t scared, careful not to charcoal my mother’s cashmere throw. And I decided then that I would forgive my father. For he was the one to build the beacon, to light her way home when I had failed. He could still guide her. He wanted her back, I saw, even more than I did.
