After the Lighthouse

By Robert Wallace // October 13, 2023

I met Ray at a writers’ conference in Beaufort, South Carolina. This was more than ten years ago when I was an unknown writer. Back then I had long hair and a way of moving it back across my left shoulder, always the left, which exited men. I liked the response, the tantalizing tease it provoked.  

My hair is much shorter now. Still, occasionally I would fail to remember that it no longer reached the middle of my back, and I would absentmindedly brush my hand through the short coiffure and laugh at my forgetfulness.  

My parents had changed my name when I was three. They believed children grew into a name and so one day they started calling me Ginelle. I had a habit of jumping all the time and my parents joked I moved like a gazelle. They thought gazelle not a proper name for a girl, so they named me Ginelle.

I love my name.

My parents are dead now, though my mother’s death was not so long ago. I had told her about Ray. My mother, who by then was already quite frail from the chemotherapy, listened without comment until I had stopped talking.

“So what do you plan to do?” 

“I don’t know.”

“I think you should meet him.”

The answer surprised me. I had always thought of my mother as a cautious person. Perhaps coming to the end of her life changed that?

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“But what if he turns out to be a psychopath?”

My mother laughed.

“Oh, please,” she said. “He’s a writer. They only kill their characters.”

It was true; all the writers I knew were soft-spoken people. There were, of course, the bombastic ones, mostly male, with their stories of conquest and their lineage with names like Ernest and Norman, but they were a dying breed of storytellers. The new storytellers didn’t covet violence, but preferred off-kilter stories, those that were filled with odd characters, speaking obliquely, and making peculiar decisions.   

This is what I remembered: he walked with a slight limp. He told me at the first conference—the only one we both attended at the same time—that it was a childhood accident. It was a stupid affair, he had said, something about being pushed out of the hayloft by his brother when they were young. He didn’t explain in detail what happened, only that it resulted in him breaking his leg. “Back then,” he said, as if the incident occurred in the middle ages, “children were put in traction, and so I spent several days in the hospital with my leg in the air, watching baseball on the television.”  

Perhaps it was the limp that attracted me to Ray. How else to explain the dreamy feeling I felt when he was near me, as if my entire body felt his presence.  During break at the conference, we walked along the river, looking across the water at the cars slowly meandering on the bridge. It was warm, and I had taken off my thin sweater. Ray was in short sleeves. A pleasant breeze swept over the river. It was late May, the month of my birth, and he insisted on celebrating, and I let him believe the actual day was yesterday, when it had been a couple of weeks earlier.  

We came to the end of the promenade, near a tiny park where small children were playing. We sat on a swing that faced the river. The sun reflected off the water. A few boats bobbed up and down, and when Ray took my hand, I almost pulled mine away because I wasn’t expecting it. His hand was pleasantly cool and dry, and, as if each of my fingers were trying to decide what to do, one after the other they warmly covered his.  

My spam filter didn’t block the email. The subject line said, “From Ray at the conference.” I always wondered what happened to him. At that first conference, we skipped the afternoon sessions and walked along Bay Street, slipping in and out of the shops. We strolled along the river. We took his car and drove over the river onto Lady’s Island and to Huntington Island State Park. There we paid to go to the top of the lighthouse. Ray went up the steps ahead of me and he stopped at some point to catch his breath. That’s when I first noticed his limp. Near the top he was practically hopping from step to step, barely pushing off the favored leg. It was breezy and clear at the top, and we stood looking at the ocean without talking. He took my hand again, and I let him. I looked at him briefly while he stared straight ahead. He had a tear below one eye, and I thought at the time that it was from the breezy conditions, or, perhaps from the ocean’s vast emptiness. But as I sat looking at the email, deciding whether to open it or not, I realized that he had been crying. I didn’t think it was from his leg. He was in emotional pain, and I wondered why, now, after all these years, I hadn’t understood this.  

We ended up having dinner together, after leaving the lighthouse and driving back to Beaufort. I wondered if we would sleep together. I wanted to, but I sensed something different about him at the restaurant. He seemed detached in some way, as if the view from the lighthouse had given space to the silence that separates people. At the door to my room, in the conference hotel, following the meal, we had paused. He kissed my cheek; it was without doubt a chaste exchange, and as he turned and limped away from me, I wanted to call him back, but I watched, mute, as he disappeared around the hallway corner.

He was not there for breakfast the following day. At first I thought Ray had slept in. But he wasn’t in the morning workshop session either, and by lunch time I had come to understand he had left the conference.

For months I wondered what had happened to him, for I was certain something had happened. Several times I thought strongly about trying to get in touch with him, but in the end, as weeks passed, I knew I wouldn’t try to contact him. Furthermore, I believed that where he said he was from probably had been a lie. I did not Google him. I tried to forget. Still, I couldn’t help wondering if my failure to say anything to him while we stood atop the lighthouse had meant something, and that I had failed whatever test Ray had put before me.

But what had it all meant? I hadn’t a clue, for the only thing I could manage to say it added up to, was nothing. Nothing I could think of, for what had happened between us couldn’t even be described as a dalliance, let alone something more. It was a day of looking out at the wavering horizon. Nothing else.

“Dear Ginelle,” he said in the email. “This is Ray.  Yes, the Ray that you met at the writers’ conference in 2008. I see that you’re speaking at the conference this year. I am attending, and I hope you will allow me to see you. Please let me know if you would be willing. I have much I would like to say to you.”

I received the email several months ago but had never responded. There had been no follow up email from Ray. My immediate thought was to cancel the speaking engagement. But after sharing the email with my mother, I had felt inert; my mother’s encouragement causing some kind of unyielding wistfulness which, since her death, hadn’t waned. I knew my mother, even as she lay dying, was worried about me. I am after all forty-one-years old and unmarried, a notion my old-fashioned mother described as “quaint.” But I felt infected not by indifference but by indecision. And now that the conference was weeks away, I felt I couldn’t back out.  

Two weeks out from the conference I sent him an email: “Ray,” I said. “I will meet you at NeverMore Books on Friday the 13th at 4:00.”  Within minutes he emailed me back: “’Til then,” he replied jokingly.

I sat on the bench outside NeverMore Books, facing Cartaret Street. Cars passed by in a long line, backed up by traffic waiting to cross the river. I was fifteen minutes early. I was wearing sunglasses. I wanted to see Ray come limping up the sidewalk, my eyes hidden behind the dark lenses, and him perhaps not noticing me. When I did see him, he stood before me, having come up the street from behind the bookstore.

“Hi Ginelle,” he said.

For a moment I didn’t respond. I started to take off my sunglasses, but I left them on. I looked at Ray. His hair was half gray now, and he appeared much shorter than what I remembered.    

“Hello Ray,” I said.  

He smiled.  “May I sit?”  

“Let’s go inside the bookstore,” I said.

“All right.”

Jazz was playing inside NeverMore Books. The woman sitting at the desk greeted us as we entered, and we both greeted her. Ray cleared his throat. I felt my heart pumping like a character in a Poe story. We went in opposite directions but ended up side by side in the fiction section.  

“I just finished this,” Ray said. He held Washington Black in his hands, a novel by Esi Edugyan. The plastic wrap that held the novel puckered as Ray’s fingers rummaged over the book’s surface. It sounded like a pile of fallen leaves crimped together. I suddenly felt like running out of the bookstore. Ray stood close to me. There was a flock of hair cloaking one eye, and I reached out and moved it aside.  

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”  

I quickly left the bookstore, failing to completely shut the door. I rushed up the street in the direction of downtown, and when I looked back Ray was following me. I stopped and waited for him to catch up.  

“It’s okay,” he said when he reached me.  

I laughed, and Ray looked at me disarmingly. 

“Shall we walk over the bridge?” he asked.  

“You don’t plan to jump, do you?”  

“No,” he said. He smiled. “I’ve always wanted to walk over the bridge.”

We crossed the street. As we slowly made our way up the bridge, there were people coming from the other side, and we moved close to the edge and let them pass. It was a beautiful, mostly sunny day, but the breeze at the top of the bridge made it feel cooler. We stopped and leaned over the edge a bit. There was a small boat below, and the motor puttered, though it was hard to hear because of all of the vehicles moving past us.  

“My girlfriend died,” Ray said.

“What?” I asked.

“My girlfriend. She died.”

“What are you telling me?”  

“At that first conference. My girlfriend was sick. I treated you badly. I came here to apologize to you.”

“Your girlfriend was dying, and you came to the conference,” I said.

“Yes. She insisted. I didn’t want to come.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“No, I shouldn’t have. And I shouldn’t have led you on either. That’s why I left. I needed to have been home with her. Everything I did then seemed wrong.”

“And this feels right?”

“No. Perhaps not, but it’s the best I can do. At least it’s the right thing to do.”

“I think you should have not come here,” I said.

“Maybe not,” he said, “but I’m here.”

“Please go away.”

The people in the small boat waved at us. Ray waved back, but I just looked out at the river, all the way as far as I could see. I remembered the day all those years ago when we climbed the stairs to the top of the lighthouse. There had been a boat way out on the water. I had forgotten about the boat, but I remembered it now. It looked so small and brave and then it suddenly disappeared, having dropped off the edge of the horizon.  Now, while Ray continued to wave at the boaters below, as they sliced sharply under the bridge, I looked down into the foam, and I thought about pushing Ray over because he had spoilt something in me, something that I couldn’t name. The wind had picked up, and a small sailboat sluiced its way between the waves and under the bridge from the opposite side, and then the gust abruptly subsided, causing the sail to be plunged into silence. Like a heavy stone left precariously on the railing by a passerby, I lurched over the barrier and looked into the stillness of the water.    

_____________

Robert Wallace is a two-time winner of the Doris Betts fiction prize living in Durham, NC.  He has published stories in the NC Literary Review, the Bryant Literary Review, and The Petigru Literary Review, among other journals and anthologies.  His short story collection As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea was published by The Main Street Rag Publishing Company in 2021.  A Hold on Time, a novel, was published by The Paper Journey Press in 2007.