Miss De Weese had let us out a whole thirty minutes early on Friday. It was the last day of school until fall and she’d said she didn’t think she could hold our attention a minute longer anyway.
Ray and the few other boys who’d stayed in school on account they didn’t have farms to work with their fathers went off into the schoolyard with bat and ball to play a game of baseball. Hazel and her group of friends went to sit along the side of the game to watch.
As for me, I wasn’t inclined to sit on the grass and pretend to be interested in either a game I would never be allowed to play or whatever it was those girls might talk about while they watched.
And I sure didn’t want to go home where I knew I’d be all by myself.
Instead, I went to the library.
Mrs. Trask sat at her desk, her head hanging forward so her chin rested right on her chest. It wasn’t the first time I’d caught her snoozing and I’d learned it was best to let her wake up on her own. Otherwise she’d just get confused and then embarrassed. So I made my way to a shelf where I knew I could find a good book or two. That day, like most others, I wasn’t disappointed with what I’d found.
The sun beamed in through the half-open window, warming me as I sat, spread out, on the seat built right next to the glass. If I listened close enough, I could hear the cracking bat and the hollering boys from the baseball game.
I read of a woman named Ida who lived in a lighthouse on a rock right along where the ocean met the land. It was her job to keep the lights burning whenever it was too dark for the folks on the ships to see the jagged beginnings of the shore.
Seemed no matter how bright the light that spun around and around in the tip-top of the lighthouse, boats would still crash into the rocks somehow. Whether during a storm or because somebody wasn’t paying enough attention, they’d wreck their ships and end up bobbing along in the waters, floating on pieces of wood.
When that happened, Ida would get right into her rowboat and paddle her way to them. No matter how strong the winds or how wild the waves, she’d get in that boat of hers.
I imagined her bringing the folks back to the home she made in the lighthouse. She’d wrap wooly blankets around their shoulders and heat up homemade bone broth for them to sip.
“You’ll stay here until morning,” she’d tell them. “Then it will be light and the storm will have passed. Then you’ll be able to find your way home.”
The folks she saved would sleep deep and easy and they’d wake to a day that was just as Ida’d told them it would be.
I wondered if when they reached home it looked a little different to them. A little more beautiful, a bit more warm.
That night I dreamed I lived in a lighthouse. One very much like Ida’s, with the light spinning on top and a boat tied to the dock, bobbing up and down until I was ready to hop in it.
A storm had stirred up the waves. High winds caused the lighthouse to sway here and there, to and fro. I stood looking out the window at the ocean as it rose and fell, splashing up on the rocks and pulling at my small boat as if it wanted to steal it away from me.
The crashing waves sounded like cymbals, the moaning wind like trumpets. Rain pittered and pattered on the roof like the tinkling of piano keys and thunder roared and banged like a drum.
There outside my window folks were paired up and dancing to the rhythm, getting drenched by the storm. The waves reached up every now and then, grabbed hold of a couple and pulled them into the ocean.
“Come in,” I screamed, holding the door open.
But my hollering couldn’t break through the ba-ba-booming. The music of the storm out-shouted me.
Again and again, the hungry waves took another and another. The water splashed up, wetting my shoes, my stockings, the hem of my skirt. I had no choice but to slam the door shut, leaving what few pairs remained out in the storm.
Still, they kept on dancing.
“The music,” I whimpered. “It doesn’t make sense.”
We make it up as we go along, I heard Opal’s voice along a howl of wind.
Finally, the waves licked at the legs of the one last dancer. She had curly dark hair and a dress the color of blue-green pigeon feathers. Opal’s face turned to Mama’s and back to Opal’s. Then Beanie’s face. Back to Mama’s.
It was all three and not any of them at the same time, the way people can be, but only in dreams.
“Let me in,” she yelled.
I tried the door, but it was locked. Stuck. I didn’t have the key or the strength to pull it open.
“Pearl,” she screamed. “Please! It’s coming for me!”
I pulled and pulled but the door wouldn’t budge. She banged with her fists, her kicks, over and over.
“Help!” she yelled.
I sat up with a start, sweat all over me like I really had been fighting a door to get it open. I had to tell myself to be calm, to breathe deep.
My heart pounded and my head ached.
I was in my bed, I reminded myself, not in a lighthouse. The weather outside was calm, no rain in sight. And I was just eleven years old, not a full-grown woman living all by herself in a lighthouse on the edge of the ocean.
I was just a girl.
I couldn’t have saved anybody.
Not even if I’d tried.