channel on a rock not much bigger than the lighthouse itself. I bring to mind the octagonal shape, white with a red roof, dwarfed by the mountains that rise on either side of the channel. I read the rest of the paper. A nine month lease.
“For one dollar?” I ask. “What’s the catch?”
Kyle’s eyes seem to clear of everything else. I see that he has already made up his mind. “We’d take over the maintenance. It’s a win win situation. The Coast Guard doesn’t have to spend the time sending guys out there to paint and maintain the light, and we get to stay out there for basically nothing.”
Charles has swiveled his stool so that he is facing us. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Are they looking for someone to live out at the lighthouse again?” He looks at me directly. “Don’t do it. Let me tell you what the catch is,” he goes on, “you’ve got to live out in the middle of the channel all winter. You two haven’t even spent a winter in town. You just go gallivanting off down south as soon as the wind picks up. It’s dangerous out there and I don’t just mean the weather.”
Kyle turns his attention back to me. “It’s nice out there. Peaceful almost. The house is in great condition, the maintenance of the light won’t be a big deal, I’ll take care of it, and whatever the stipend is, it’s got to be a hell of a lot more than that.” He swings his arm toward the crumbled check on the bar.
“I haven’t heard of anyone living out there,” I say.
“No one has,” Kyle answers. “Not for the last twenty years.”
“You seem to know a lot about the lighthouse.” Charles has narrowed his eyes, seems to be taking careful stock of Kyle, who ignores him.
I set a beer down in front of myself and another Jack and Coke in front of Kyle. “The water’s a thousand feet deep on either side, you know,” I say, leaning toward him, both elbows on the bar.
Kyle’s eyes hold mine. I feel the momentum building in him, the first pull of a tidal wave, the first hint of motion already underway. “Come on Anna, say you’ll do it.”
The beer is cold in my hand, cold down the back of my throat. I hold his gaze, something gathering at the center of me. I think of water on all sides, of myself out there. Nowhere left to run.
2.
WHEN WE met just over a year ago, I was hitchhiking on the ALCAN, the two lane road that points toward Alaska through Canada. Kyle pulled up beside me on the road in a beat up blue truck that had seen better days. He lowered the glass of the window with one hand while he worked the knob with the other. I watched the strength in each finger. I hadn’t seen a car or truck in three days. My feet were sore in my boots and the silence of the tundra had become loud.
“You’re all alone?” he asked.
My left hand moved toward the bear spray in the outside pocket of my backpack.
“You’re heading north?” I asked. Obviously he was, there were only two directions available, and he was driving north.
“What are you doing out here all alone?” He asked with what struck me as true concern. “Get in the truck, some crazy person could pick you up. You have a name?”
“Anna.”
“Kyle. Nice to meet you.”
I stood in the road and watched him for a few minutes longer before I tossed my pack into the open bed of the truck, stepped on the back tire and climbed in. His door opened, footsteps, and then he was standing next to the bed. Nothing extra about him, then or now, only muscle and bone under a wool shirt and workpants. “You can ride up front.”
“No, thanks.” I pulled my hood up, settled deeper into the space between my pack and a stack of tires. Winter wasn’t completely over. Three hours later, we stopped for dinner. After the waitress took our order, I huddled in the bathroom, fingers under the hot water to warm them enough to hold my hamburger.
“How far are you going?” I asked when I returned to the table.
“All the way to Neely. You?”
“Neely.”
“You’ll like it. Seems like you’re the kind of person that would.”
“Is that where you live?”
“I fished out of there last year. Fished out of Juneau before that, another couple years out of Sitka. I like Neely the best.”
I stared at his olive skin, suntanned somewhere warm over the winter. I watched his hands again and the set of his shoulders. Gripping the table, I pushed back against what was pulling me toward him.
“You going to stay in the back for the rest of the eight hundred miles?”
I shrugged. “For now.”
We drove north, cradled between ocean and mountains. As Canada melted into Alaska, the previous two years chipped away from me in small irregular pieces until I was back to that morning on the ice peering into the depths of the crevasse, willing myself over the edge. After years of avoiding it, I was now heading straight toward it. I had written the ten digit phone number on a small square of paper, slid it into the inside pocket in the top of my backpack and started moving north.
As Kyle drove us closer and closer to where it had happened, the guilt started out on its well worn path, clawing its way through me. I closed my eyes as it spread through my body and began to hum. I shifted my weight against my backpack. It didn’t help. I took a deep breath and concentrated on the trees whipping past, reminding myself that this is what I need to do, that this is my last choice. That didn’t help either. It was worse than usual.
I started to feel like I should get out of the truck. I started to feel like I should turn around, start walking south. I studied the back of Kyle’s neck through the window as we sped northward. The smooth arc of skin and muscle, a solidity I had sought on rock walls, a solidity I could not find in myself. I wanted to be in the cab, I wanted to have someone at my side. I knocked on the small window between us. He pulled over and I climbed into the front seat, settling my gaze on the double yellow line stretching into the distance.
A couple hours later, steering wheel loose in one hand, body relaxed against the bench seat, Kyle looked over and asked, “What do you do?”
“I move.”
He cut his eyes across the cab, grinning at me again. “That’s what you do?”
I nodded. “Utah, Colorado, Yosemite, Arizona, New Mexico.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Something new each time.” I kept my eyes forward, felt his on me.
“Alaska’s not like any of those places.”
“Exactly,” I said and then after some time, “What’d you do before you fished?”
“I tried to go to college, but all I ever wanted to do was come up here. I hated Chicago. I got lucky and found a job on a good boat my first summer and I’ve been fishing ever since.”
“What’s that like?”
“Its good. Especially when the weather gets really bad, rain and huge waves—that’s really living, you know what I mean? Are you going up to fish? You need to be careful about who you sign on with, I mean I’m sure you could handle it, it’s just that some of those guys don’t act the way they do in town once you leave the harbor.”
“I’m not going up to fish.”
Kyle stared at me for a few seconds, looked like he was going to ask more questions, but then didn’t.
We camped that night on the side of the road in the sparse trees of the tundra. Not a single car passed. I spread my sleeping bag out and got in. Kyle spread his out ten feet away. A little close, considering all the space around us.
“Why do you move so much?”