The Light Between Oceans

“We can’t rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine, or wish for. It’s not the same thing.”

There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory. Isabel is part of him, wherever she is, just like the war and the light and the ocean. Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.

He watches the ocean surrender to night, knowing that the light will reappear.

He looks behind him, where a full moon is edging its way into the sky like a counterweight on the twin horizon, heaved up by the dying sun. Every end is the beginning of something else

His arms still feel the tiny weight of Lucy’s baby, and the sensation unlocks the bodily memory of holding Lucy herself, and before that, the son he held in his arms so briefly. How different so many lives would have been if he had lived. He breathes the thought for a long while, then sighs. No point in thinking like that. Once you start down that road, there’s no end to it. He’s lived the life he’s lived. He’s loved the woman he’s loved. No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on this earth, and that’s all right by him. He still aches for Isabel: her smile, the feel of her skin. The tears he fought off in front of Lucy now trail down his face.

As Tom walks down the path, he snaps off a yellow bud from one of the rosebushes Isabel planted when they first moved here. Its fragrance is already strong, and takes him back almost two decades to the picture of her, kneeling in the freshly dug bed, hands pressing down the earth around the young bush. “We’ve finally got our rose garden, Tom,” she had said. It was the first time he had seen her smile since she had left Partageuse, and the image stayed with him, as clear as a photograph.

My Darling Lucy,

It has been a long time. Such a long time. I promised I’d stay away from you, and I’ve stuck to my word, however hard that was for me.

I’m gone now, which is why you have this letter. And it brings me joy because it means that you came to find us. I never gave up hope that you would.

In the chest with this letter are some of the earliest things of yours: your christening gown, your yellow blanket, some of the drawings you did as a tot. And there are things I made for you over the years—linen and so forth. I kept them safe for you—things from that lost part of your life. In case you came in search of it.

You are a grown woman now. I hope life has been kind to you. I hope that you can forgive me for keeping you. And for letting you go.

Know that you have always been beloved.

With all my love.

Instead, he sits on the end of the jetty, watching the last few gulls on the lilting water.

He considers the world that has carried on without him, its stories unfolding, whether he is there to see them or not. Lucy is probably already tucked into bed. He imagines her face, left naked by sleep. He wonders what she looks like now, and whether she dreams about her time on Janus; whether she misses her light. He thinks of Isabel, too, in her little iron bed in the nursing home, weeping for her daughter, for her old life.

Time will bring her back. He promises her. He promises himself. She will mend.

The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill.

The old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it.

Humming a lullaby, skipping bars here and there, she opened the palm of the tiny hand and considered its lines: there from the moment of birth—a path already mapped, which had brought her here, to this shore