The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter Signs Nothing

Chapter 2 The Long Way Home

It took me three hours to get home. The road from the bluff to Bar Harbor was dark and winding, and the temperature had dropped below freezing, and I didn't have gloves. But I walked anyway, because I needed the cold. I needed it to remind me that I was still alive, that I had a body, that I had spent nineteen years building a life that no Ashford could take away from me.

By the time I reached my cottage, my fingers were numb and my nose was running and I was so angry I could taste it.

I didn't bother with the lights. I went straight to the workshop, turned on the bench lamp, and picked up the soldering iron. The copper sconce was still there, half-finished, its shade pierced with a pattern of gulls and waves. I had been working on it for two weeks. It was going to be beautiful.

I worked until three in the morning. When I finally went inside, I fell asleep on the couch with my clothes on and didn't dream.

Sunday came faster than I expected.

I spent the morning cleaning the cottage, which was something I almost never did. I swept the floors. I wiped down the counters. I put fresh sheets on the bed in the loft, which I had never used for anything but storage, because I had never had a guest. I was not a person who had guests.

At noon, I heard the sound of a car on the gravel outside. I looked out the window and saw a black SUV, expensive and out of place, and Julian Ashford stepping out of it in jeans and a sweater, which was the most casual I had ever seen him. He was holding a duffel bag.

I opened the door.

"You found it," I said.

"GPS," he said. "Your address is surprisingly hard to find."

"That's the point."

He stood on the porch, looking at the cottage. The wind was blowing, and the sea was gray and choppy beyond the bluff, and the sky was the color of old pewter. He looked cold. He looked uncertain.

"Come in," I said. "You're letting the heat out."

He stepped inside. He looked around at the workshop, which took up most of the ground floor, at the benches and the tools and the half-finished sconces hanging from hooks. He looked at the wood stove in the corner, which was doing its best to heat the whole place, and at the stack of firewood beside it.

"This is where you work," he said.

"This is where I live," I said. "And work. Same thing."

"It's... small."

"It's mine."

He set his duffel bag down. He looked at the couch, which I had covered with a clean blanket, and at the kitchen, which was one counter and a hot plate and a sink.

"I don't have a spare room," I said. "The loft has a bed, but the ladder is steep. The couch is probably safer."

"I'll take the couch," he said.

"Good. Are you hungry?"

He hesitated. "I don't know."

"Have you ever cooked for yourself?"

"I've had people cook for me."

"That's not what I asked."

He looked at me, and for a moment, the careful distance in his eyes slipped. "No," he said. "I've never cooked for myself."

"Then you're going to learn," I said. "Take off your coat. I'll show you where the knives are."

We made stew. It was nothing fancy, beef and carrots and potatoes and onions, the kind of thing my mother had taught me to make when I was eight years old. Julian stood at the counter and chopped vegetables under my direction, and he was clumsy and slow and he almost cut his thumb twice, and I didn't help him.

"You're watching me flail," he said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you've spent your whole life being taken care of," I said. "I want to see what happens when you're not."

He chopped in silence for a while. Then he said, "You hate me."

"I don't hate you," I said. "I don't know you."

"That's worse."

"Maybe."

He set the knife down. "I was a baby," he said. "When you left. I don't remember you. I've seen pictures, but I don't remember you. And I've spent my whole life being told that you chose to leave."

I stirred the stew. The onions were starting to soften, and the smell was filling the cottage, warm and homely and nothing like the Ashford house.

"I didn't choose to leave," I said. "I was told to go."

"Grandmother says she gave you an apartment in Portland. She says she offered you money. She says you refused."

"She offered me money to disappear. I refused. But I still disappeared. That's the part she leaves out."

Julian was quiet. I ladled the stew into bowls and set one in front of him. He sat down at the little table by the window, and I sat across from him, and outside the wind pushed against the glass.

"Eat," I said.

He ate. For a few minutes, neither of us spoke. Then he said, "Why did you marry him?"

"Your father?"

"Yes."

I thought about it. I had been thinking about it for nineteen years, and I still didn't have a clean answer.

"Because he was charming," I said. "Because he said he loved me. Because I was young and I had never been anywhere or seen anything, and he showed me a world that glittered. And because I thought I could be someone different. Someone better."

"And then?"

"And then I got pregnant, and the glitter went away, and he was just a man. A weak man. A man who couldn't stand to be challenged. And his mother was a woman who had spent forty years making sure no one ever challenged her."

"He hit you," Julian said.

It wasn't a question.

"Once," I said. "Right after you were born. I told him I wanted to name you after my father, and he didn't like that. He hit me. And then he apologized. And then he told his mother, and she told me to leave."

Julian set his spoon down. He looked at me, and his eyes were wet.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't," I said. "I don't want your pity."

"I'm not pitying you. I'm—" He stopped. "I don't know what I'm doing."

"Neither do I," I said. "But you're here. That's something."

He looked at me. "Is it?"

"Yes," I said. "Now finish your stew. We have work to do tomorrow."

The week passed faster than I expected.

I took Julian out to the bluff and showed him the tide pools, the starfish and the anemones and the hermit crabs that scuttled sideways across the rocks. I took him into the workshop and gave him a hammer and a piece of copper and taught him how to dome a sheet of metal. I took him into town and introduced him to the woman who ran the diner, who looked at him like he was a stray dog that had wandered in from the cold.

I didn't know what I was doing. I only knew that I had spent nineteen years building a wall around myself, and that the wall was starting to feel less like protection and more like a cage.

On the third night, Julian asked me to tell him about his father.

We were sitting on the porch, wrapped in blankets, watching the sun go down over the water. The sky was streaked with red and gold, and the wind had died, and the world felt still.

"He was smart," I said. "That's the first thing. He was really, really smart. He could have done anything. He could have been a scientist or a writer or a diplomat. But he didn't want to do anything. He wanted to be rich."

"He was rich."

"He was born rich. There's a difference. The people who build things, the people who make things, they have something to lose. Charles had nothing to lose. He had everything given to him. And so he never learned how to want anything. He just drifted."

Julian stared at the water. "I'm like him," he said.

"You're not," I said.

"How do you know?"

"Because you're here," I said. "You're sitting on my porch on a Tuesday night, eating stew and asking questions. Charles would never have done that. He would have sent a lawyer."

Julian laughed. It was a small laugh, but it was real.

"You don't like me," he said.

"I don't know you," I said. "But I'm starting to."

He looked at me, and something in his face softened. "I'm starting to know you too," he said.

"Good," I said. "Now go to bed. We're going into the woods tomorrow. I want to show you where I get my firewood."

On the fifth day, a car pulled up to the cottage.

I was in the workshop, finishing the sconce, and Julian was outside splitting wood, which he was terrible at and which he insisted on doing anyway. I heard the car, and I heard Julian stop, and I looked up.

Constance Ashford's assistant, Elaine, was standing on the gravel. She had a folder in her hand.

"Mrs. Ashford is failing," she said. "She sent me to bring Julian home."

Julian came around the side of the cottage, the axe in his hand. He looked at Elaine. He looked at the folder.

"I'm not done," he said.

"Mrs. Ashford's doctors say she may not have another week."

"Then she can call me," Julian said.

Elaine blinked. "She's dying."

"I know," Julian said. "But I made a deal. I said I would stay a week. I'm staying a week."

Elaine looked at me. I looked back at her and said nothing.

"I'll tell her," Elaine said, and she got back in the car and drove away.

Julian went back to splitting wood. I went back to my soldering iron.

But something had changed. I could feel it in the air between us, thin and bright and dangerous.

On the sixth night, Julian asked me about the lantern.

"The double-faced one," he said. "The one Father bought."

"It was the first piece I ever sold," I said. "I made it in a rented room in Portland. I was broke. I didn't have a torch, so I used a propane camp stove. I burned my hands so badly I couldn't work for a week afterward."

"Grandmother said he kept it in his study."

"He kept it on his desk. I saw it once, years later, when I went to the Foundation to deliver another piece. He didn't know I was there. I saw it in the window and I stood on the sidewalk and looked at it for ten minutes."

"What did you feel?"

"I felt like I had left a piece of myself in that house," I said. "And I had. And I never got it back."

Julian was quiet.

"I want to give it back to you," he said finally.

I looked at him. "What?"

"The lantern. When I inherit the estate, I want to give it back. It belongs to you."

"It doesn't belong to me," I said. "It belongs to the house. To the collection. It's not mine anymore."

"It was never theirs," he said. "They just bought it. You made it."

I didn't know what to say to that. So I said nothing.

On the seventh day, Constance Ashford died.

We got the call at dawn. Julian was already awake, standing on the porch with a cup of coffee, and he took the call with his back to me. I watched his shoulders, which were shaking, and I knew what it was before he told me.

"We have to go back," he said.

"Yes," I said.

We drove in his SUV, back up the winding road, past the frozen ponds and the bare trees and the old stone walls. The sky was clear and cold, and the sun was low and pale, and the house on the bluff looked like a photograph of itself.

The foyer was full of people. Lawyers, assistants, Foundation employees, a man in a black suit who I assumed was a funeral director. They all looked at me the way Elaine had looked at me, with that particular mix of curiosity and dismissal that wealthy people reserve for the people they've been told are beneath them.

Julian went upstairs. I stayed in the foyer.

The lawyer approached me after ten minutes. He was a thin man with wire-rimmed glasses and a tie that was just slightly too wide.

"Mrs. Ashford," he said. "I'm Mr. Keene. I represent the estate. We need to discuss the waiver."

"I know what it says," I said.

"Have you decided?"

I looked up at the staircase, where Julian had disappeared. I thought about the week, about the stew and the wood and the tide pools, about the lantern he had promised to give back.

"No," I said. "I haven't."

"We need a decision by end of week," Mr. Keene said. "The Foundation is waiting."

"The Foundation can wait," I said. "I've been waiting for nineteen years. I think they can spare another hour."

Mr. Keene opened his mouth to respond, but before he could, there was a commotion on the stairs.

Julian came down. He was holding a wooden box, the kind that people kept in offices to hold important papers. He walked through the crowd of lawyers and assistants and Foundation people, and he didn't look at any of them. He only looked at me.

"This is for you," he said.

He opened the box. Inside was the lantern.

The double-faced lantern, the one I had made in a rented room with a borrowed torch and a propane camp stove, the one I had sold for four hundred dollars and never seen again. It was beautiful, even after all these years. It was the best thing I had ever made.

"It's yours," Julian said. "It was always yours."

The room was silent. Everyone was looking at us.

I reached out and touched the lantern. The metal was cool and smooth, and the tiny gulls and waves that I had pierced into the copper caught the light and threw it back.

"I don't know what to say," I said.

"Say you'll stay," Julian said. "Not for the money. Not for the house. For me."

I looked at him. I looked at the lantern. I looked at the room full of strangers who had spent their lives making sure that people like me stayed in our place.

And I made my choice.

"I'll stay," I said. "But not in this house. I want you to come back to Bar Harbor. I want you to learn to live in a place that isn't full of people waiting to tell you what you want. And I want to keep this."

I held up the lantern.

Julian smiled. It was a real smile, the kind I hadn't seen on an Ashford face in nineteen years.

"Deal," he said.

Mr. Keene cleared his throat. "The waiver—"

"I'm not signing it," I said. "Not today. Maybe not ever. You can tell the Foundation they'll have to wait."

The lawyer looked at Julian. Julian looked at me. And then he said, to the room, "You heard her. The waiver's off the table. I'll take it up with the trust myself."

There was a murmur of voices, a flutter of papers, a general sense of a room full of expensive people realizing they had lost.

I didn't care. I was looking at the lantern.

We drove back to Bar Harbor that night. Julian sat in the passenger seat, and I drove, because I wanted to be in control of something. The lantern was in the back seat, wrapped in a blanket, and every time I hit a bump I flinched.

"You're going to be fine," Julian said.

"I know."

"You're worried about the Foundation."

"No," I said. "I'm worried about you."

He was quiet for a mile. Then he said, "I'm worried about me too."

"Good," I said. "That means you're paying attention."

We drove the rest of the way in silence. When we got to the cottage, the lights were on, because I had left them on, because I had known, somehow, that we would be coming back.

Julian unpacked his duffel bag. He put his clothes in the little dresser that I had cleared out for him. He made up the couch with the blanket.

And then he came into the workshop, where I was setting the lantern on the shelf above my bench, and he said, "What do we do now?"

"We work," I said. "We eat. We sleep. We figure it out."

"That's not a plan."

"It's the only plan there is," I said.

He looked at the lantern. "Can I learn?" he asked. "Can you teach me?"

I looked at him, at his father's jaw and his grandmother's eyes and something else, something that belonged to neither of them.

"Yes," I said. "I can teach you."

And so we started.