Lighthouse Bay by Kimberley Freeman Page B

spiraling staircase to a small, low-ceilinged room. There is a sink, a round table with a single chair, a cast-iron cooker. A smell of cooked fish and tobaccolingers in the air. He slides her onto the chair. She sees the wooden chest, still tied in the petticoat rope, sitting by the door on the bare floorboards.
    Isabella sits quietly. The lighthouse keeper is in charge now; she can stop. He goes to a chest under his sink for a box of first-aid supplies, then lights a lantern and positions it on the table close to her outstretched palm. While he cleans and dresses the wound, he doesn’t meet her eye. His head is bent in concentration, so Isabella has ample opportunity to study him: his dark curling hair and neat beard flecked with gray, his serious eyebrows, his agile fingers.
    “Where are you from?” he asks her, at last.
    “I can’t say.”
    “What was that box on your back?”
    “A burden I soon hope to rid myself of.”
    He bends to look at the chest, and she flies from her seat and throws herself in front of him. “You mustn’t touch it.”
    Startled, the lighthouse keeper recoils. He speaks to her as he might speak to an injured animal, palms held up gently. “Steady,” he says. “I won’t touch it if you don’t want me to.”
    Isabella is desolate and uncertain. She feels as though her edges are dissolving, as though she is made of sand and the wind is eroding her. “I’m so hungry,” she says.
    He nods, then stands and moves to the cooker. She stares at her bandaged hand, and can’t remember how she cut it. She strains her memory. Flashes come to her. Eating lizard. Hunting berries. Pushing her feet up the beach. Then she remembers that she cut her hand just hours ago, climbing up the rocks. The fact that a hole seems to have opened up in her memory makes her panic. What is happening to her mind? She shoots out of her seat again and begins to pace.
    The lighthouse keeper turns to her with a plate of steaming soup. He watches her pace and he stands very still, as though his stillness can infect her. Eventually she stops, blinking at him in the growing dark.
    “My name is Matthew Seaward,” he says.
    “I’m so hungry,” she says again.
    He nods towards the table, and she sits. The lighthouse cottage smells oily and hot: trapped air, old seaweed, moldy wood. She doesn’t mind. She breathes in the present, and it fills her lungs brightly. She is safe, for now. The soup is salty and thick. Her mouth and her stomach are in heaven. She eats her fill, then washes it down with a cup of clean, cool water. Her mind slowly seems to reassemble itself. She settles.
    “I have nowhere to stay,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”
    He leans back on his sink, his gaze traveling from her hair to her dress to her hands and then finally to her eyes. “Your eyes are haunted. What have you seen?”
    She shakes her head. “Please don’t ask me.” She sinks forward onto the table and puts her face on her outstretched arms.
    The lighthouse keeper allows the silence to stretch between them, and then finally he speaks. “The town is just a half-mile from here. I’m sure somebody will take you in.”
    “I can’t go looking like this.”
    “There are clothes in the bedroom, left over from the previous keeper’s wife. And shoes. There’s a big house at the nearest end of the main street. Pale pink boards. Mrs. Katherine Fullbright. She will take you in.”
    Isabella’s stomach drops with disappointment. She doesn’t want to go to town. She wants to stay here, completely still, on this stool. The ordeal is supposed to be over, but clearly it is not. And now she considers it, the ordeal will never be over. She was brokenbefore the ship went down, now her pieces have become muddled.
    When he speaks he is infinitely gentle, despite his size and obvious strength. “Mary, you can stay here tonight. Tomorrow, you can bathe and make yourself presentable. Mrs. Fullbright stands on ceremony and a torn dress and