The Lighthouse

“What are you doing here?” he said.

Not a promising beginning. “Obviously I came to see you.”

“I told you not to.”

“I had to come, Jan.”

His eyes shifted away from hers, to the glass on the floor beside the couch. “Well, I see you’ve made yourself at home.”

“Yes. Can I get you a brandy?” God, she sounded assured. And all the while she was like jelly inside.

His mouth twitched: the ghost of a smile. He wasn’t put off enough not to appreciate what he often referred to as her “sassiness.” He said, “No, I’ll get it. You want another?”

“Yes.” For courage.

He returned after a minute with the drinks, then went back to the kitchen and brought out a straight-backed chair. So he wasn’t even going to sit on the couch beside her. Another bad sign.

“Why are you here?” he asked again.

“Oh, Jan, you know why I’m here. Let’s not play games with each other.”

He was silent, looking down into his glass.

“I love you and I don’t want to lose you,” she said. “But I don’t know how to keep that from happening because I don’t know what’s wrong, why you’ve… changed toward me all of a sudden. Was it something I did?”

No response.

“I don’t think it was,” she said. “First you told me not to come to Boston; you were busy, you’d drive down to New York at the end of the semester. Then you had to work on an article over semester break. I offered to come up here; you didn’t think that was a good idea. Next you promised you’d meet me in Connecticut for the weekend, but you cancelled at the last minute. You haven’t written or called in the last three weeks. Jan… is there somebody else? Is that it?”

He looked up. “There’s no one but you, you know that.”

He had spoken the words softly, apologetically, but they only served to anger her. “How can you say, ‘There’s no one but you’? There isn’t even me anymore! You’ve forced me out of your life and I want to know why.”

“I’m trying to do what’s best for you-”

“What’s best for me? Don’t you think I have the right to make that decision?”

He sighed and finished the rest of his brandy. Then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, rolled the empty glass between his big hands. He said slowly, “Look, Alix, I’m not an easy person to be around all the time. Not an easy person to be close to. I tend to brood-”

“I know that-”

“No, hear me out. This past year you’ve seen the best side of me. I’ve been happy and that’s allowed me to open up to you in a way I never have to anyone else.”

“So why should that change now?”

He went on as if he hadn’t heard her question. “What you didn’t see this past year was the other side of me. I’m prone to periods of depression-severe depression. I wouldn’t ask anyone else to suffer through one of those periods, least of all you.”

“I don’t understand. What brings on this depression?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, it isn’t as if something goes wrong at the university, or I have a bad day otherwise, and I get the blues for a while. It’s not that simple. My depression is chronic and cyclical.”

“Why? What causes it?”

“There are things in my past,” he said. He spoke even more slowly, still rolling the glass between his palms.

“What kind of things?”

When he met her gaze again his eyes, even with the protection of his glasses, revealed a vulnerability that touched her deeply. “I told you my mother died,” he said. “And it’s true; she died over ten years ago. But what I didn’t tell you was that years before that, when I was only three, she left my father and me, ran off with another man.”

“Oh, Jan, I’m sorry.”

“His name was Petersen, he worked for the creamery in Baraboo that bought most of our milk. He was from Minnesota, some town up by Duluth; that was where he and my mother went.”

“Did your father try to get her back?”

“No. He disowned her completely, would never even mention her name. I was twelve before I found out the truth. A kid on one of the neighboring farms told me. He laughed about it; I thought at the time that everyone must be laughing and I felt humiliated. Indirectly, that’s one of the reasons I became interested in lighthouses: I spent most of my time with books, after that.”

She wanted to say something comforting, but no words came to her. None except, “But that was such a long time ago… ”

“No, listen. I know it’s irrational, but all my life I’ve felt that the people I cared most about were going to abandon me, just as my mother did. And they have: my father died when I was in college. The only other woman I’ve loved besides you broke off our two-week engagement to marry someone else. I can’t even keep a cat. They get sick and die or run off.”

“So you’re afraid I’ll leave you too, eventually.”

“Yes. Somehow, in some way. Tragedy of one kind or another has plagued me all my life, Alix.” He paused, looked away from her again. “I didn’t tell you about the murder, did I.”

A small chill settled between her shoulder blades; she sat up straighter. “Murder?”