La luce sugli oceani

On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you’re wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.
So Isabel floats further and further into her world of divine benevolence, where prayers are answered, where babies arrive by the will of God and the working of currents.

On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you’re wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.
So Isabel floats further and further into her world of divine benevolence, where prayers are answered, where babies arrive by the will of God and the working of currents.

...he wondered what other secrets lay behind her playful smile.

“Izzy,” Tom called. “Izzy, wait! Don’t do your ’nana, love. He’s not…” But she was already too far off to hear the rest of his words.
“She…” Tom considered whether to explain. “She got the wrong end of the stick about it. Sorry. She’s chucked a wobbly. Once she does that, all you can do is batten down the hatches and wait for it to pass. Means I’ll be making sandwiches for lunch, I’m afraid.”

“It’s all got to go in the log, pet. You know I’ve got to report everything straightaway,” Tom said, for his duties included noting every significant event at or near the light station, from passing ships and weather, to problems with the apparatus.

“Then the baby’s probably got a mother waiting for it somewhere onshore, tearing her hair out. How would you feel if it was yours?”
“You saw the cardigan. The mother must have fallen out of the boat and drowned.”
“Sweetheart, we don’t have any idea about the mother. Or about who the man was.”
“It’s the most likely explanation, isn’t it? Infants don’t just wander off from their parents.”
“Izzy, anything’s possible. We just don’t know.”
“When did you ever hear of a tiny baby setting off in a boat without its mother?” She held the child a fraction closer.

“I suppose, at a pinch…” he conceded, the words coming with great difficulty, “I could—leave the signal until the morning. First thing, though. As soon as the light’s out.”

“Oh, little sweetheart,” she murmured, and slowly unbuttoned her blouse. Seconds later, the child had latched on fast, sucking contentedly, though only a few drops of milk came.
They had been like that for a good while when Tom entered the kitchen. “How’s the—” He stopped in mid-sentence, arrested at the sight.
Isabel looked up at him, her face a mixture of innocence and guilt. “It was the only way I could get her to settle.”
“But… Well…” Alarmed, Tom couldn’t even frame his questions.
“She was desperate. Wouldn’t take the bottle…”
“But—but she took it earlier, I saw her…”

“We need to welcome Lucy, and say a prayer for her poor father.”
“If that’s who he was,” said Tom. “And Lucy?”
“Well she needs a name. Lucy means ‘light,’ so it’s perfect, isn’t it?”

“Izzy, Izzy! You know I’d do anything for you, darl, but—whoever that man is and whatever he’s done, he deserves to be dealt with properly. And lawfully, for that matter. What if the mother’s not dead, and he’s got a wife fretting, waiting for them both?”
“What woman would let her baby out of her sight? Face it, Tom: she must have drowned.”

“Funny how lives turn out, isn’t it? Born to more money than you can shake a stick at; went all the way to Sydney University to get a degree in something or other; married the love of her life—and you see her now sometimes, wandering about, like she’s got no home to go to.”

“Hannah had a terrible tragedy a few years ago. Family lost at sea—her husband, and a daughter who would have been about your girl’s age by now. She’s always asking that sort of thing. Seeing little ones sets her off.”
“Dreadful,” Isabel managed to mutter.

“How can you be so hard-hearted? All you care about is your rules and your ships and your bloody light.” These were accusations Tom had heard before, when, wild with grief after her miscarriages, Isabel had let loose her rage against the only person there—the man who continued to do his duty, who comforted her as best he could, but kept his own grieving to himself.

“...or I can forgive and forget...Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things...we always have a choice.”

“...or I can forgive and forget...Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things...we always have a choice.”

“It’s like a whole… a whole galaxy waiting for you to find out about. And I want to find out about yours.”

“So marry me!”

He blinked. “Izz—I hardly know you! And besides, I’ve never even—well, I’ve never even kissed you, for crying out loud.”

“At long last!” She spoke as if the solution were blindingly obvious, and she stood on tiptoes to pull his head down toward her. Before he knew what was happening he was being kissed, inexpertly but with great force. He pulled away from her.

“That’s a dangerous game to play, Isabel. You shouldn’t go running around kissing blokes out of the blue. Not unless you mean it.”
“But I do mean it!”

Tom looked at her, her eyes challenging him, her petite chin set firm. Once he crossed that line, who knew where he would end up? Oh, bugger it. To hell with good behavior. To hell with doing the right thing. Here was a beautiful girl, begging to be kissed, and the sun was gone and the weeks were up and he’d be out in the middle of bloody nowhere this time tomorrow. He took her face in his hands and bent low as he said, “Then this is how you do it,” and kissed her slowly, letting time fade away. And he couldn’t remember any other kiss that felt quite the same.

Dear Mum and Dad,

Well, God has sent us an angel to keep us company. Baby Lucy has captured our hearts! She’s a beautiful little girl—absolutely perfect. She sleeps well and feeds well. She’s never any trouble.

“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....Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.”

The town draws a veil over certain events.This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man's name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

That's how life goes on--protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame

27th April 1926
On the day of the miracle, Isabel was kneeling at the cliff’s edge, tending the small, newly made driftwood cross. A single fat cloud snailed across the late-April sky, which stretched above the island in a mirror of the ocean below. Isabel sprinkled more water and patted down the soil around the rosemary bush she had just planted. “… and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” she whispered.