Coastal Stranger

Telling you this, I am a much older woman now than I was. I have lost my dark chocolate hair, and the young spark in my hazel eyes, and I have lost a dream that I had once had at my fingertips. I know we all wonder whether the face of a loved one fades to nothing once they’re gone, but yours never did. Twenty years have passed and only my youth has slipped away.

When I was about seventeen, not long after the market crash, my father sent me away to live in Maine with my Aunt and Uncle. I didn’t want to go away. I wanted to stay home with my Mama and two sisters on our farm, but my Father would hear none of it. He reasoned that Maine hadn’t felt the effects of the crash yet, and it was much safer there for me than anywhere here in Nebraska.

It was safer, and he had one less mouth to feed.

Since my Aunt and Uncle had never had any children, they didn’t mind me coming to stay for—well a period of time which hadn’t been specified to me then, but later turned to be years. I never minded either of them as in their eyes I was an adult and free to do whatever piqued my curiosity so long as it stir any issues for them to deal with. Neither of them paid me much attention except for cordial conversation around the dinner table. Other than that, their cottage grounds and the near coast were a blank canvas for me to explore.

I had the same bedroom as I had when I would visit as a child. The walls were adorned in an off-white paisley wallpaper, and a rod iron bed with rusted hinges in the center of the room. The quilt folded at the foot of the bed had been handmade by my Aunt from old tattered tablecloths and bed sheets—anything she could recycle. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a wooden wardrobe in the corner for my belongings

A box of simplicity.

There was one small, round window in the room, sitting above the head of the bed. It faced away from the plains and the cattle road leading to the front of the cottage. If you looked down, you could see the shallow shore below, cut away by the assault of the waves. If you looked across, there was a lighthouse, green and red with a squat house sitting at its base. I wondered who would dream of tending to a light house. Especially one so overgrown.

For much of my time in Maine, I pointed my curiosity towards the shoreline. I sat on the dunes and drew the seagulls digging in the sand, or a rare sand dollar I might stumble upon scuttling away from me.

When I became bored of drawing, I would go and sit down by the waterline. Sometimes I would roll the cuffs of my trousers up and just let the water hit my legs, digging my toes in the sand. Other times I could go searching for seashells to add to my collection. I kept them on the windowsill in my bedroom, just behind the headboard so I could turn and watch the sun glint from their shells in the morning.

As much as I tried not to, my mind kept wondering back to the lighthouse. I had never seen one before coming to Maine.

It was quiet over there at the house, with no sign of life except maybe the overgrowing vegetation. I would watch from my bedroom window, knuckles white as snow around the rod iron poles of the headboard as I waited for a light to fill a window of the house, but I hadn’t even seen the lighthouse light lit since I had arrived.

It had been months before I decided I would go.

One day, I found myself wandering through the plains in the direction of the lighthouse. I watched the house closely, seeing no sign of a car or movement; no indication that someone was home—or even lived there for that matter. As I drew closer, the more in awe I became at the sheer size of it. I had never been a huge fan of heights, and staring up at the narrow, metal walkway which I would have to put my faith in to satiate my curiosity had my palms slick.

And that was when I saw him.

He was crouched down on the north face of the lighthouse, cutting the dead ends from some flowers that had been planted at the base. The clouds had been blocking the sun then, but drew themselves back to expose my shadow next to his.

He sprung up and spun around. He towered over me, his hands and clothing encrusted with dirt and sweat. His face was void of expression other than a furrowed brow. He simply wiped his hands on his pants and moved out of the shadows.

“Can I help you with something?” His voice was gruff, and he looked me up and down as I did him. “Are you lost?”

I swallowed. “I thought no one lived here.”

He scratched his brow and looked across at our cottage and pointed. “Well, someone did. Do you live there?”

“What do you mean they did?”

He chuckled. “You’ve got quite a lot of questions for a kid.”

“I’m seventeen,” I snapped at him.

“Beg my pardon,” he smiled and held his hands up in surrender. “A young woman you are then.”

“Do you avoid most things in your life as you avoid questions?” I asked him.

He looked at me, silent a moment as he wrung his hands on the corner of his white, button up shirt. “My father took ill a couple months ago and recently passed. I have been taking care of the grounds until I can find someone willing to take the property off my hands.”

I looked around, seeing that everything had been overgrown and the house paint was chipping. Shutters were hanging by threads and the netting of the screened in front porch had been torn in several places.

“This is a lot of work for one man,” I said and held out my hand. “Ellis Hall, your second pair of hands.”

He took a step back and his eyebrows furrowed. “You want to help me?”

“I have been stuck inside that house or watching crustaceans scuttle across the sand, and I absolutely cannot do it anymore.”

“A total stranger?”

“Call me a fool, but I’ve got a gut feeling.”

He was silent a moment, watching me. Then a smile creeped into the corners of his mouth and he took my hand, “Johnathan Greene.”

We spent many months trimming back overgrown bushes and weeding the small flowerbeds at the base of the lighthouse. There weren’t any flowers around the house, so I took to replanting some wild Lupines around its front porch to add color to the chipping white siding. We sanded the shutters and painted them green to match the plains of the coast, and each night he brought dinner out to the front porch for us to eat under the stars. He told me of his travels in Europe before coming home to his father, and I told him of my family back home in Nebraska.

The more time we spent together, the more I found myself leaning into him, hanging onto his every word. I found myself sinking into his ominous ocean eyes as he told me stories of his life, completely consumed by his charming grin and the dimples in his cheeks. I could only compare it to the feeling of quicksand. There was an electricity between us, drawing us closer and closer together as the year passed us by.

He wanted me, every inch of me, just as I wanted him—in body and mind.

One morning, as I made my way through the grasses to the lighthouse, I spotted a round of flashing lights. Red and blue and white, lighting up the shadows of Johnathan’s face as he opened the front screen door. His face was stoic, calm, as if he had known it was coming.

Sand kicked up into my tennis shoes as I sprinted towards the house, calling out his name. By the time I had stumbled over the dunes and down to the house he had been hand-cuffed and read his rights.

“Johnathan!” I called out his name, trying to shove past police officers. “Johnathan, what’s happening?”

At the sound of my voice his head whirled around. Our eyes met and he smiled. “Dig up the Lupines in the fall and save them for winter.”

Later in the newspaper I read an article about Johnathan Randal Greene, a twenty-year old man who had deserted his platoon during border patrol of Fort Popham in Bath. He had come home to his father’s lighthouse in hopes of hiding out for some time—maybe more time than he had hoped once our paths had crossed. On a trip into town for supplies to paint the shutters, locals had recognized him and reported it to the authorities.

It hadn’t been long before they linked him to the lighthouse.

One thing that bounced around in my brain from time to time was his last words to me before they shut the car door on him—dig up the Lupines in the fall.

When the sun was setting and Aunt and Uncle had wound down in front of the fireplace, I snuck out through the kitchen door and crawled across their lawn to the grasses separating the lighthouse from their cottage. I sprinted through the long blades, their rough edges like sandpaper against my smooth skin. The rays of the full moon almost seemed to make the Lupines glow along the border of the house.

My hands grew black in the night as the soil stained my skin. I worked my way around the house, digging deep under each and every Lupine. It wasn’t until I came to the one beneath his bedroom window that my fingertips struck something hard and wooden. I tore through the soil, feeling it caking beneath my nails and yanked whatever he had hidden from the Earth.

I opened the box to find a small black notebook rolled up and tied shut inside. As I loosened the ties, cash and bonds fell into my lap like a blessing reigning from the heavens. The inside had been cut away to become a hollow storage compartment.

I never knew where he got the money from, and of course I had never had the chance to ask, but I took it. I took it without a single thought. I took it home and fed my two little sisters and bought Mama a new dress. I used the money to buy my Father a new suit and tie, and a house that no one could take away from them. Then I bought myself a camera.

I went on to become a photographer. I showed people the ugly of the world, whether they wanted to see it or not, and sometimes I even brought them joy.

Every now and then, I look at that camera, and I wish I had had it during my time in Maine. His face still lingers in the back of my mind, but it’s no longer as crisp as it once was. His ocean eyes are dull and his mousey brown hair now has lost its shine I admired most in the sun. I can’t see his smile anymore, or the freckles that kissed the bridge of his nose.

Time reminds me of the waves back at the lighthouse, how their slow assault wore away at the cliffs, just as it has worn away at the edges of my memory of you.