AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Well, I know he would miss me. He does rely upon me for certain things, like tending the greenhouse and the chickens. Besides, it’s lonely here, with no one to talk to.” Lucius gives me mopey eyes, feeling excluded. “No one who can talk back, that is.”
Adam frowns thoughtfully at the mongrel before saying, “So even if he did give you permission to go, you would feel bad leaving him. Your father, I mean. Not Lucius.”
I submit to a little smile. “I would feel bad leaving Lucius, too. But I would come back. It’s not as if I would run off and be gone forever.”
“No?”
“No. I would just experience life in the Otherworld and then come back home.”
“What if you didn’t want to come back home?” Adam says. “What if you went to the mainland, and… it changed you? Changed the way you see life? What if nothing was ever the same again?”
“In a good way or a bad way?”
Adam ponders for a moment. “Both.”
My gaze lowers to the half-sewn hem. “I think I would still want to go, no matter what. I’d still want to experience something beyond… this.” I gesture at the room around us. “Do you think that’s wrong?”
“No, I don’t think it’s wrong. I just think…” His tired gaze sweeps the walls, then locks back on mine. “Experience is irreversible.”
I turn this over in my mind like an elaborate seashell, trying to comprehend it—but the true meaning of it seems too complex for my simple mind to grasp. I continue stitching the hem of the shirt while the rain falls outside.
“I’m sure Papa has all sorts of reasons for not wanting me to go to the Otherworld. When he told me of the dangers and darkness, I didn’t want to go—I was a child. I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand much of it because I’ve never seen it with my own eyes, of course… but it frightened me. Not so much the way he spoke about it—the thunderstorm people and whatnot—but the way it seemed to disturb him. Haunt him, even. And perhaps you’re right; perhaps it would change the way I see life. Perhaps it would make me see life the way Papa sees life. But would that be so very bad? Can it be? Would I not be able to help him better if I understood what he understood? Experienced the things he’s experienced? I mean, surely there is benefit in that…”
I glance up from my sewing and bite my tongue.
Adam is asleep.
The poor man is still suffering, and here I am, blabbering about myself. I purse my lips and stitch the rest of the hem, resolved to keep quiet so that he can rest.
The flickering orange light from the fireplace casts graceful, dancing shadows over him as he sleeps. Purple bruises bloom across his skin, darkening his golden, muscular arms and shadowing his face along with the swath of thick stubble growing along his jaw. The cut sliced down his face will leave a scar for a while, but somehow it becomes him—defining his rugged features in an ironically beautiful way.
He seems a more subdued version of the confident man I studied in the photo in his wallet. Or perhaps he’s always this quiet and serious. Perhaps I merely took liberties to craft my own idea of his personality based on that photograph. Perhaps true confidence is not found in sparkling charisma, but in quiet strength and steadiness, like the unwavering glow of a lighthouse on a distant shore.
When I have finished my sewing, I silently make my way up to the lantern room, taking Adam’s cell phone with me. Through the panoramic windows, I can see for miles. Storm clouds overshadow surging dark waves, ad infinitum. I sit at Papa’s desk and smooth my hands over the old maps unfurled there—tracing my fingertip over the lines of the straits, the shapes of islands. I find Whidbey and think of Jack and our first conversation the night I discovered the phone. I was so clueless; he was so desperate.
How things have changed.
I flip open Adam’s phone and decide to call him. Adam said the connection was lost earlier, but I have a hunch the signal may be stronger up here at the top of the lighthouse. After three long, droning rings, the call is answered.
“Adam?”
“No, sorry. It’s just me, Orca.”
“Oh. Hey, Orca.” Jack’s laugh is surprised, but not disappointed. “How’s Adam?”
“He’s fine. Sleeping. He wouldn’t admit that he was tired until he fell asleep while I was talking.” I bite on a smile. “I’m afraid I’m an annoying person to be stuck here with.”
Jack grunts. “Don’t take it personally; he’s always like that. He falls asleep on me all the time when we’re talking at night. Ever since I was little, that’s how it’d be. I’d be bouncing off the walls at nine o’clock, and he’d be passed out. I mean, what kind of teenager goes to bed at nine o’clock? He never went to parties, never kept a girl out past her curfew, just… strait-laced mama’s boy to the core.”
“He seems to think you and I are similar,” I say, still tracing the shape of Whidbey Island.
“Oh yeah? How so?”
“We’re both restless.”
Jack murmurs a laugh. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“But he’s not,” I observe, frowning at the gloomy sky beyond the windows. “He can’t relate to this awful feeling of being… trapped. And the fear of never being free.”
