I didn’t think twice before accepting the job. Being isolated for six months as a lighthouse keeper off the coast of Portland, Maine was my lifeline. There’s a moment in every person’s life—even if it’s just for a modicum of a second—when they get an urge to pack things and leave society, even if just for a day. Maybe it’s our ancestral instinct calling us back to our roots. Maybe it’s modern life taking its toll on us.
For me, the urge had been there for a long time. I needed to get away from my life, no matter where it was. I just so happened to get lucky enough to land a job at one of the only remaining lighthouses in the world that wasn’t automated.
The job interview (if speaking to a motor oil-stained, overweight man while he’s welding a rusted piece of scrap in the back of a junkyard can be called an interview) lasted five minutes before the man exclaimed, “You start on Monday. We’ll give you a ride there.”
And so it happened.
I barely had two days to pack, and I preferred it that way. I didn’t want to have time to reconsider the offer. As daunting as it was, I needed the change. A small voice, one that always surfaced in my dark moments, told me that I was running away from myself. At that point, I didn’t really care if it made me a coward. I just wanted a reprieve from my life.
Starting Monday, I would no longer be Jeremy the unemployed good-for-nothing failure. I’d be Jeremy the lighthouse keeper.
The first week on the job was exciting, just as it always is when you take a new job. You learn the ropes and spend time exploring every nook and cranny. Although a day in the life of a lighthouse keeper can be packed with responsibilities, you inevitably become better at the things you do, which means you finish them faster, which means you have more time to get bored and think.
After three weeks, I was starting to become restless. The house next to the lighthouse that I was staying in was equipped with a DVD and a bevy of movies, but you can only watch Cast Away so many times before it becomes boring. Not a great movie choice for a lonesome lighthouse keeper, I know, but something about that flick always resonated with me..
By the end of the fourth week, the dryness in my throat refused to abate no matter how much I kept myself hydrated. I longed for something stronger: an irresistible poison that I kept coming back to despite it ruining my life.
Matt, the lighthouse keeper who I had taken over for, had shown me where they kept all the stash, confirming that it was okay to drink on the job because it wasn’t like the boss was going to drive nine miles just to check up on us. I wish he hadn’t shown me, though, because whenever nightmares roused me from my sleep, my thoughts would inadvertently flit to the kitchen cupboard.
After two months, I gave in to the temptation and downed an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The hangover and the guilt the following day reminded me why I was trying to stop drinking. I took comfort in the fact that relapses were common. Just like with losing weight, you could remain loyal to your diet for months and even years, and then one inconvenience in your life could cause you to turn to your comfort poison.
For me, that was alcohol.
But unlike a satisfactory cheat meal after weeks of dieting, the bottle of whiskey gave me no sense of fulfillment. Only a calm certainty that I’d once again faltered during my bouts of anxiety—which were becoming less and less frequent, solidifying into something even scarier; something akin to indifference and surrender.
Depression, a nagging voice in my head said.
Everything changed for me five months after I started working as a lighthouse keeper.
It was a sunny October morning. Despite the clear skies, I donned my jacket and beanie because the winds out here could be deceptive. I stepped outside and ambled across the jagged surface of the rocks toward the lighthouse.
Climbing the spiral stairs, I checked room after room. I never used these rooms, so they were exactly how I had left them. I stopped at the living quarters to grab a glass of water, since the stairs were so exhausting. Five months of climbing the 168 steps every day, and my stamina was still shit. My knees also seemed to be protesting more and more every day.
No matter how much I hated to admit it, I was no longer in my prime. In my twenties, I could get tackled during a football game by a guy who weighed over two hundred pounds and I’d get up, dust myself off, and continue playing. Now, even sleeping in the wrong position caused my back to be sore for the entire day.
I placed the glass back in the sink and turned to leave. My eyes briefly fell on a newspaper article on the counter with the headline “14 DEAD IN SCHOOL SHOOTING.” It had been there since forever. I don’t know why I never got rid of it, but I had more important things to attend to.
Climbing into the communications room, I picked up the radio off the desk and said, “Control, this is Lighthouse. Everything okay.”
A tinny, atonal voice responded moments later, “Roger that, Lighthouse.”
That had been our interaction from day one. My job was to inform the nearby control tower every six hours that everything was okay, but both the operator and I were happy to reduce that to once a day. Our communication never went past “everything okay” and “roger that.”
You’d think that two people stuck at the end of the world would be lonely enough to make small talk with each other, but that wasn’t the case. The person in the control tower probably valued their solitude as much as I did mine.
By the time I finished cleaning the windows surrounding the lantern room, I was exhausted. On my way back down, the crackling of the radio caught my attention. It wasn’t the “roger that” guy, which was what made me stop dead in my tracks.
It was a feminine voice, calling out in a sing-song tone. “Helloooo? Anybody there?”
I stood there, staring at the radio, baffled by this sudden change. It had only been an hour since the “roger that” guy responded to me, and now there was someone else on the line? I had gotten used to my comfort zone in the lighthouse, so the woman’s voice felt intrusive.
I reasoned that it was just someone who happened to hop on our frequency, so I decided to ignore it. That frayed piece of hope dispersed when she said, “Lighthouse keeper, are you there?”
My heart was working like a piston. Was I in trouble over something I’d done? Were they going to tell me that they were going to send an escort to pick me up because I was fired? My hands and feet went cold at that, dread skittering across my spine.
I hated this as much as I hated getting calls from unknown numbers. They always resonated with an urgency that made the marrow of my bone go cold. I hadn’t always been like that. I used to work in corporate, making and receiving calls from strangers all day long. But ever since that call from the police three years ago…
“If you don’t respond, I’m going to need to notify HQ,” the woman said.
That was it. I had no choice but to pick up. Part of me had hoped until then that, if I ignored her, she would disappear and I could go back to being a lighthouse keeper. A ridiculous, momentary thought that escaped my mind the moment I brought the radio to my mouth.
“I’m here. What is it?” I asked.
Silence, just long enough to set my nerves on edge.
“Finally,” the woman said. “Do you know how long I’ve been trying to reach you?” Her voice was laced with annoyance.
“Sorry. What is it?” I repeated.
“Just making sure everything’s okay on your end,” she said.
I froze. The tightness in my chest was loosening. I wanted to let out a peal of hysterical laughter at the relief that flooded me. But then, that relaxation bloomed into frustration.
“It is. I’m sorry, you are?” I asked.
“My name’s Dannie. I’m the new control tower operator. What’s your name?”
I clamped my mouth shut. I didn’t feel comfortable giving my name to this stranger.
“Hello? Are you still there?” She was unrelenting.
“Jeremy,” I said with a frown, deciding that I wanted this conversation over as soon as possible.
“Jeremy,” she repeated as if tasting the name on her tongue. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yeah. Okay, well I gotta get back to work, so…”
The sentence should have been enough to signal that the conversation was over. When Dannie didn’t respond, I placed the radio back on the desk and spun on the ball of my shoes to leave the room.
“Okay, sure,” she said. “But don’t forget to bring the radio with you.”
I whipped back around and nabbed the radio off the desk again. “Why?”
“Because I have a notice board right in front of me that says lighthouse keepers are supposed to have their radios at all times.”
“You can ignore that. There’s no need for that.”
“I’m new here, Jeremy. I’m not about to mess this up by ignoring the rules.”
I pressed the PTT button, then let it go, fuming. I resisted the urge to chuck the radio across the room.
“I’m not taking the radio with me,” I said.
“Well, okay. Then I’ll just tell HQ that you’re making my job harder.”
I ran a hand through my hair. This woman had been here less than an hour, and she was already making my stay as a lighthouse keeper a nightmare. I ran quick math in my head.
Having the radio clipped to my belt wouldn’t change anything. I would just inform her every six hours that everything was okay, and that was it.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Have it your way. I’ll take the radio with me.”
***
The waves lapped the cliffside violently by the time I got out. The wind howled and, looking back toward the horizon, a cluster of distant, dark clouds caught my attention. A storm was brewing.
I returned to the house to see the front door open. That was weird. I always made sure to close the door. Then again, it was completely possible that I simply didn’t close it firmly enough and the wind ended up opening it.
Not like I needed to worry about burglars here anyway.
I went inside and, after a short break, got back to work.
***
But Dannie wouldn’t shut up the entire time while I was working back at the house. My hands were full of tools and greasy from oil, but whenever she didn’t receive a response for more than ten seconds, she would start calling out to me in that incessant, perky voice.
I had told her that I was working and unable to talk, but that didn’t stop her. She instead continued by having a monologue about mundane stuff.
Still, as annoying as her crooning was, I found out a lot about her. She had been an EMT before quitting to take up this job. It seemed like a downgrade to me, and I knew that there was more to the story than she was telling me.
People who took up remote jobs like these didn’t do it because of the money or because they needed a break from society. They did it because they were running from something. As much as I wanted to be indifferent about Dannie, a part of me couldn’t help but wonder what had brought her where she was now.
Upon finishing fixing up things in the house, I went outside for some fresh air. The dark clouds from before loomed closer and larger now.
“HQ mentioned that there’s a storm coming,” Dannie said. “Communication might get bad. Make sure you have everything you need before you settle in for the night.”
I went back inside to make lunch. Taking out a box of mac and cheese, I filled a pot with water and let it heat up on the stove. My eyes fell on the cupboard with the forbidden bottles. I blinked, a knot tightening in my stomach. My legs suddenly felt like they were made out of pudding, my knees threatening to buckle under my weight.
I leaned on the sink, my elbows wobbling violently. My throat felt constricted, giving me barely a straw full of air.
I had learned to recognize this feeling by now. It was an oncoming panic attack. I closed my eyes and focused on breathing. As if sensing it, Dannie chose the worst possible time to start talking.
“I’m eating a burger, by the way,” she said. The sentence sounded like she had her mouth full. “How did I get a burger? Well, glad you asked. I actually bought one on the way to work. I was going to save it for dinner, but I figured, screw it, why not eat it while it’s still hot? I’ll be eating plenty of cold food for the next two months, so I might as well savor this.”
Please, just stop talking, I thought to myself while white-knuckling the sink as if it were the only thing holding me afloat in the middle of a tumultuous ocean. Unaware of my suffering, Dannie’s incessant talking continued.
“I’m not usually a burger person, but there’s this place on the way out of the city called Bentley’s BBQ. It’s a small place. A dump, really. It’s one of those places that would appear on the front pages of the news with a headline like, ‘Rat meat found in burgers.’”
A short pause ensued. I imagined Dannie taking the time to chew her bite.
“Anyway, I’ve seen Bentley’s BBQ on my way to the beach many times, but I never stopped there because, you know. Who would stop at a small burger place in the middle of nowhere when you have so many good hot dog and burger stands at the beach, right?”
Dannie continued. “But then I remembered when I was a kid and my mom used to take me to this one diner off I-295 whenever we visited Grandma. It was called Mike’s Bridge Diner. It was one of those places where you’d expect to get the kind of food you’d need to poke with your fork to make sure it was dead. But despite the artery-clogging meal, the experience still holds a special place in my heart. I treated my mom to a meal there from my first paycheck, you know?”
I nodded silently. I could relate to that. Those small, inconspicuous places were usually the ones where memories were made. To one person, it might be a dump worth a one-star review on Yelp. To someone else, it was nostalgic because of the first kiss they’d had, or the time they’d spent with their parent after baseball practice.
I let out an involuntary chortle. It could have been my imagination, but the queasiness that had seized me just moments ago was growing weaker.
“I wish we had more time together,” Dannie ended, her voice peppered with a somber tone.
“She’s no longer alive?” I found myself asking with the radio up to my mouth.
“Yeah. She died when I was sixteen. Aneurism.”
“I’m sorry, that’s rough,” I said.
For the first time that day, I saw Dannie as a human being, and not just a disembodied voice of an operator. It wasn’t until then that I realized that I was no longer slouching. The panic was all but gone, leaving me with a rumbling in my stomach the moment my nostrils smelled the mac and cheese.
***
The skies had grown dark much faster than usual. I plopped onto the couch in the living room and stared at the raindrops that pelleted the window. Soon, the first cracks of thunder tore through the air.
I watched as the beam of the lighthouse rotated. It was hypnotic, relaxing. It usually helped lull me into sleep. Coupled with the rain, the effect was even stronger. Before I knew it, my eyelids were drooping. A familiar crackle at my hip snapped me awake.
“You know, I lied to you,” Dannie said.
“What?” I asked.
“About my job as an EMT. I didn’t quit. I was fired.”
“What for?”
“Drugs. They caught me OD’d in the bathroom. It had started as a one time thing to take the edge off after my fiancé died in a car crash. But before I knew it, one had turned into ten, ten into a hundred, and so on. I became careless, and the rest is history.”
It came out of nowhere, and yet, was I surprised? No. As I said before, everyone who took up jobs like mine and Dannie’s was running away.
Dannie didn’t strike me as the kind of person that went around talking to other people about such sensitive topics from her past. But this didn’t seem to me like an attempt at small talk. It sounded more like a confession. Perhaps the distance that separated us and the lack of visual contact made it easier for her to say it.
“I’m really sorry to hear that,” I said, not knowing what else to say. “You know, I—”
But the words died in my throat when darkness engulfed the house.
***
“Uh, Dannie? Give me a moment, I need to check the fuse box. Power outage,” I said.
“I guess it’s expected on a night like this,” Dannie said.
I located the flashlight and strode to the fuse box. My eyes widened and I froze in my tracks, entrenched where I stood.
There’s a moment when we get shocked so bad that the brain needs time to process what’s going on. That was what it was like for me staring at the ax sticking out of the fuse box, sparks periodically flying out of it, illuminating the dark room. It was like seeing a disassembled puzzle, all the pieces on one pile with no clear picture.
And then it hit me.
“Dannie. Someone’s in here with me,” I said.
“What?” she asked, a slight scoff accompanying the word.
“Someone sabotaged the power. I can see a—”
A slam from the foyer caused me to jerk around. The sound of rain, wind, and thunder intensified. I was on autopilot when I strode to the source of the commotion, staring at the wide-open front door.
“Someone’s here, Dannie. I’m going to check it out,” I said. I didn’t know why I had the need to tell her that.
I draped the raincoat over myself and slid into the rubber boots. The moment I stepped toward the threshold, droplets of rain blasted me in the face. The roof awning did nothing to stop the torrent from invading the doorstep.
“I’m gonna leave you in the house, okay?” I shouted into the radio.
The radio crackled, an incoherent, cut-up sentence coming from Dannie before going mute. I placed the radio on the shoe stand and stepped outside, thinking how much I didn’t need this shit.
Thinking back now, going outside was foolish, because anyone could have been lurking just around the corner. But I was following the logic that no human should be here, not this far away from civilization, not in this weather.
I realized what a liar my logic was when I looked up at the lighthouse and saw a silhouette of a person superimposed against the lantern beam.
***
Pent up frustration and bottled-up anger arose from me in a deadly cocktail. Without thinking, I ran toward the lighthouse. I unlocked the door, ran up the 168 steps and barged into the lantern room. No one was there. Not a single person. No traces of anyone ever being there.
I stepped outside onto the metallic walkway around the lantern room, just to circle the area and make sure no one was really there. The floor was slippery, and the winds much stronger at that height. The black water was occasionally illuminated by the cracks of lightning in the distance. It was all dizzying.
I leaned on the handrail and stared down at the foaming waves that crashed against the bottom of the cliff. I choked, tears blurring my vision. An exaggerated reaction, one might think. But the stranger toying with me was the final drop in an already overflowing glass.
This was it. I had reached my breaking point for holding everything inside me for so long.
I was sick of everything. Life just continued kicking me when I was already down.
For a moment, I contemplated how easy it would have been just to jump into the turbulent water below. Just as quickly as that thought came, it left my head, making me feel foolish for ever considering it. I wiped my tears away and went down the stairs, the “14 DEAD IN SCHOOL SHOOTING” paper gawking back at me despite my attempts to ignore it.
But the universe hadn’t intended on giving me a moment of respite that night. When I returned, the first thing I noticed was the mud tracks leading into the house. The second thing I noticed was that the radio wasn’t where I had left it.
Dannie’s voice was coming from the kitchen.
“Hello? Jeremy? You’re starting to scare me.”
I peeked into the kitchen, fully aware that the intruder was still inside. The radio was in an upright standing position on the kitchen table, right next to an open bottle of whiskey. The mud tracks ended behind the kitchen table—right where the figure visibly crouched.
I got you now, you piece of shit, I thought to myself as I loped into the kitchen.
“Show yours—” I said as I stepped in front of the figure to see no one there.
Just a trick of the light. I stood there, dumbfounded, my eyes intermittently bouncing from the kitchen floor to the booze on the table.
“Jeremy!” Dannie’s voice was stern this time, but my panicked mind only heard it as a whisper.
I spent the next five minutes checking the entire house, opening the wardrobe and looking under the bed for any signs of intruders. It was clear. I went ahead and locked the front door. The entire time, Dannie kept calling out to me, her voice occasionally punctuated by static.
“I’m here. I’m okay,” I finally responded to her when I was sure that no one was in the house.
“Thank God.” She let out a deep sigh.
“But someone is in here with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure. Someone’s playing with me. I don’t know where they are now, but… I know they’re close.”
I sat on the living room couch, a kitchen knife clutched in my hand. Minutes passed, and they felt like hours. I had calmed down by then.
“You’ll be okay, Jeremy,” Dannie said, soft-spoken and motherly.
“Listen, if anything does happen to me… I want you to know something.” I regretted saying it the moment the words left my mouth, but it was already too late. “Something forced me into taking this job, just like you.”
“Okay?”
I inhaled deeply to steady my beating heart. “Three years ago, I received a call from the police that forever changed my life. There had been a shooting at the school that my son Ray went to.”
I stopped, because the words refused to come out. I swallowed against the lump in my throat.
“Oh, Jeremy…” Dannie said. That single sentence said a million things. The point was, she understood what I was trying to say.
“My son didn’t make it. I just figured you should know that in case anything happens to me.”
“Jeremy. I’m so sorry.”
We spent the next ten minutes or so in silence. I preferred it that way. Dannie probably didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to listen to her give me the same template condolences that everyone else had been giving me for the past three years.
The truth of the matter was that I died along with Raymond that day. Now, I was just waiting to be buried.
“Jeremy?” Dannie spoke up after what felt like hours of silence.
“What?” I asked.
“I… I think someone’s with me here,” she said.
I sat ramrod straight. I hadn’t noticed the panic in her voice until then. A hopeful part of me thought that she might have been messing with me.
“Where? Dannie, where are they?” I shot up to my feet.
“I don’t… someone’s moving out there. I think they’re…”
The radio turned into static then, an interrupted scream bursting from it.
“Dannie. Dannie? Fuck. Come on, not now,” I whacked the radio, as if that would do anything. “Dannie, talk to me.”
Silence.
I hated myself for what I was about to do, but I had to do it. I wasn’t about to let myself experience again something that would make me regret it.
“Dannie, if you can hear me, stay right there. I’m coming to get you,” I said.
***
The control tower was nearby, just past a thicket in the vicinity. The rain didn’t stop me. Neither did the fear or the exhaustion. My knees screamed in pain, but I ignored them. Occasionally, the radio whirred to life, a word or two uttered by Dannie between staticky noises before going mute.
I brushed past the trees, the cone of my flashlight bobbing up and down with each swing of my hand. I couldn’t hear my panting over the downpour. The only thing that mattered was reaching Dannie.
How I managed to run for so long and so fast was beyond me. The moment I broke out of the treeline, I beheld the behemoth control tower in front of me, the lights inside turned on, glowing like a miniature lighthouse of its own.
I bounded up the stairs and burst inside.
I didn’t see Dannie in front of the comms. Instead, a masculine, broad-shouldered figure stood hunched over the panels.
“Please, can anyone hear me? Just respond, please!” the man said, his voice high-pitched in panic. What a freaking faker.
“Where’s Dannie?!” I demanded, my fists poised for an attack.
He ignored me.
“Give us a status update, Lighthouse,” the comms device said.
It might have been just panic doing its thing, but I swore that the voice belonged to the “roger that” guy who I’d spoken to in the past months.
“There’s someone at the lighthouse,” the man said. “I tried to contact you but communications are down. I had to get to this abandoned control tower.”
A slight pause, and then, “Roger that, Lighthouse. We’ll send someone over right away.”
“Hey!” I shouted at the intruder. If he heard me, he gave no indication of it. “Look at me, you son of a bitch! What did you do to her?!”
Just then, the radio at my hip came to life. Dannie’s voice came through, clear as day, unobstructed by static. “Fourteen people died that day,” she said.
All I could do was stare at the radio in bafflement. I couldn’t stop the dread from rising, making me want to vomit the mac and cheese I’d eaten earlier.
“D-Dannie, what’s going on?” I asked meekly.
“You know what’s going on, Jeremy.”
“What are you… No, I…”
“Think, Jeremy. I need you to think.”
Tears welled up in my eyes once more. I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to remember.
“You have to remember, Jeremy,” Dannie insisted. “I’m going to help you, okay? Because you need to remember.”
I gulped.
This time, Dannie’s voice was mechanical, like an AI reading off the paper. “Fourteen dead in school shooting—suspect shot by police. At least twelve teenagers and two teachers were killed in the May 21st shooting at Jackson High School. The alleged gunman—identified by the authorities as 15-year-old Raymond Hefner—was killed by law enforcement at the scene.”
I was on my knees, and I had no idea when that had happened. Buzzing filled my ears. Tears dropped on the floor below me.
I had chosen to forget. After all, what parent would want to remember that their child was a monster? It’s the most conflicting emotion in the world—hating your child for the things they’d committed, and not being able to help but love them despite that.
So many times, I wished I could go back in time and change the outcome—just one little detail that would spell a different future for my son.
Involuntarily, I laughed. I looked up at the intruder that was still hunched over the comms device, looking left and right, still unaware of my presence.
“Lighthouse, what did you say is there with you?” the “roger that” man asked.
“I think… I think it’s a ghost,” the intruder said.
Pain jolted my skull. I closed my eyes firmly shut. Images were imposed on my mind. The image of me standing on the walkway outside the lantern room, looking down at the waves, thinking what a peaceful death it would be to just jump down.
And peaceful it was.
Once I let go, there was no screaming. No second thoughts. No fear. Just the eagerness for the approaching waves to embrace me.
“Dannie?” I called out.
“Yes, Jeremy?” she asked, her tone once again soft and motherly.
“Thank you,” I said.