I. A Sack of Onions

At six in the morning, someone had tied a sack of onions to the tide gauge. Nora Vale knew this would be June Pepper's doing. The weather forecast had brought a run on onions, and June, who sold them by the pound from the back of her car, liked to keep a sack where the harbor camera could see it. You could tell how high the water was without getting out of bed. You could also tell that June still had onions.

The sack was dry when Nora pulled up beside the ferry office. By the time she had found the right key, it was floating. She put on the kettle and phoned June.

“Can you move your advertisement?”

“I can sell you the advertisement.”

“The water's up to the bottom of the black stripe.”

There was a pause. “I'll get it after I've moved the car.”

Nora laid out the day's work on a square of oilcloth. There were two cabin lamps with cracked housings, a door latch from the ferry's passenger toilet, and a red navigation light in a brass case. The brass light was her own. It had belonged to her father, though he would have said it belonged to the boat and he had simply died first. The ferry authority had written it off with the rest of the old launch. Nora had taken it home in a shopping bag and kept it in a cupboard for eleven years. On Thursday she had found a piece of glass that fitted.

She was holding the glass up to the light when Sam, who ran the ferry, knocked on the window with his radio.

“Road's closed at the low bend,” he said. “They're going to shut the main gate before noon. No sailings.”

“You told me Friday.”

“Friday was when we thought we'd have another foot.”

He tipped his head toward the wall, where a sheet of cream card announced the retirement of the Pelter ferry service. The new bridge, a mile upriver, had been open for a month. In ordinary weather you could drive across in forty seconds. Nora had timed it twice, hoping to find a reason to be annoyed, and all she had found was that the council had put a proper bicycle lane on it.

“The send-off's still Friday,” Sam said. “They've paid for the cake.”

“They can send the cake across on the bridge.”

“Be decent, Vale. Some of us are looking forward to it.”

She smiled after he left, when he couldn't see. Sam had ferried her to school in a high-visibility vest so large that it went down to her knees. He was entitled to some cake.

At eight a woman came in with a rolled chart under her arm and water up the legs of her jeans. Nora recognized her as a customer without being able to place what she had fixed for her.

“Edda Frost,” the woman said. “I brought you a mixer once. It only worked on high.”

“You brought it in full of cake batter.”

“It was working on high at the time.”

Edda put the chart on the oilcloth. She weighed down two corners with the broken cabin lamps. It showed Pelter as a stub of land between the river and the bay, with a narrow spur on the seaward side. Someone had painted three little red squares along the spur in ink.

“I should have brought you this years ago,” she said.

Nora leaned closer. Whoever had inked the squares had clipped the upper right corner of each one. Her father did that when he drew a light. She had once asked why and he had shown her how, without the clipped corner, he couldn't distinguish a light from the mark for a shed at the scale he worked.

“Where did you get this?”

“From your brother,” Edda said. “Before he understood what it was.”

II. Soundings

Nora had last been in Cal's kitchen when the wallpaper was coming down in strips. It was now a pale yellow. A shelf that used to tip toward the stove stood level, and the kitchen clock, which her father had insisted on setting fast, was keeping the right time. She wouldn't have noticed the clock if Cal hadn't looked up at it as she came in.

“The road here is still open,” she said.

“I didn't ask how you got here.”

“You were about to.”

“I was going to ask whether you wanted toast.”

He put two slices in before she answered. She unrolled the chart on his table and tucked the ends underneath the salt and the butter dish. Cal had inherited their father's habit of leaving the butter soft. Nora kept hers in the fridge, where it could do no damage to anybody.

“Edda gave it back,” she said.

“Then I suppose she told you I stole it.”

“She said she got it from you.”

Cal went to the cupboard for plates. There were only two clean ones. When he closed the door she saw, on a hook, the apron from his job at the bakery. He had left the harbor office three years ago. This was the first time she had seen any evidence of what he had done since.

“Dad gave it to me the week he died,” he said. “He asked me to put it through as a replacement chart. I told him he'd need fresh soundings. We argued about it. I took it home and asked Edda to look. By the time she got back to me, he was dead.”

“What did she say?”

“She said to bring him with me. I didn't answer.”

The launch had struck a submerged concrete base while carrying two passengers. The passengers made it onto a maintenance ladder. Their father went into the water while passing a child up and did not come out. The inquiry, in the polite way in which people say something intolerable about a person who cannot answer, had concluded that the skipper was probably navigating by memory.

“You let them say he was guessing,” Nora said.

Cal took the toast out. He put hers on a plate without buttering it. “I let them say he took the old passage. He did. I didn't have a way to tell them why.”

Nora sat down. She had intended to stay standing. From the table she could see the small penciled figures beside the red squares. She had thought they were depths. They ran from three to eleven and then back down to four.

“He used to tell me to put the kettle on when there were five,” she said.

“Five what?”

“I thought he meant passengers. Sometimes there weren't any. Do you remember the little alarm clock on the launch?”

Cal reached for a knife. “We used to hear it through the radio.”

They both remembered what came after the alarm, though neither spoke for a while. Their father's voice, flat and friendly, saying that he was coming in the back way. He used that voice when he was doing something that required most of his attention.

The toast had gone cold by the time Nora asked why Edda had brought the chart that morning.

“Because the flood gate's shut,” Cal said. “I got a message from the water board. There are two people on the far side of it.”

Nora pushed back her plate.

“They were checking the spur,” he said. “They were meant to be back before the road went. Somebody had the old closure time.”

“Who are they?”

“Tamsin Bell. And a trainee. I don't know his name.”

Tamsin used to buy two seats on the ferry, one for herself and one for a box of ducklings she carried to her sister. She apologized to Nora every time a duckling made a noise.

“I know him,” Nora said. “It's Ellis.”

III. Three Marks

Edda had set up a small workbench in a former ticket booth. When the wind blew against the glass the whole booth moved as one piece. Nora found her sharpening a pencil with a knife, taking off slivers no thicker than onion skin.

“Why did you want him to come with Cal?”

Edda set the knife down. “Because I didn't recognize the light positions.”

“Do you recognize them now?”

“Two of them.” She drew a straight line through the first two red squares. “This one was on a post by the cattle steps. This one hung under the footbridge. There ought to be a third in the old boatyard, to show you when to turn. He put it here, at the end of the wall. I couldn't see why. They'd already bricked up the ladder.”

Nora looked at the place where the pencil stopped. “You can get onto the wall from the yard with a stepladder.”

“You can if you're carrying one,” Edda said. “You can't if you're in a boat.”

Nora had the radio in the pocket of her coat. She could hear the water board supervisor trying to reach Ellis. A car had been found on the high part of the service road. A search crew was coming from the mainland, but the bay side was too rough for a landing and the main channel was closed by the gate. At intervals another voice gave the weather. The voices never seemed to interrupt each other. Their calmness was becoming difficult to listen to.

“What are the numbers?” Nora asked.

Edda held the chart farther from her face. “Minutes,” she said. “Or I'd bet that's what he thought they were. It's a run through the spur when the current eases. You can only use it for a little while. Too soon and the boat won't answer you at the turn. Too late and the river gets the stern.”

“But the first two lights are gone.”

“The cattle steps are still there. So's the footbridge.”

Nora took out her phone and called Cal. Behind his voice she could hear a tap running. “Do you remember the ladder we put up in the boatyard when the dog got onto the wall?”

“The dog's been dead six years.”

“I want the ladder, not the dog.”

He told her to look behind the second gate. Then, after a moment, he said he would bring it. She did not tell him she could carry it herself. She had carried it herself the first time, and it had taken twenty minutes to get it through the narrow gate without laying it down.

Edda put the point of the pencil on the third mark. “You know, I always thought he drew that light in the wrong place.”

“Maybe he did,” Nora said.

Edda nodded. “Well. That's something we can find out from the shore.”

They took the chart to Sam. He had changed into his old sweater and was eating a boiled egg over the sink. He listened, wiped his fingers, and asked Nora who was coming with her. When she said she had not asked anybody to go in the boat, he took down his coat.

“You've never brought a boat through that spur,” he said.

“Neither have you.”

“Exactly. There'll be somebody aboard who knows when we're guessing.”

IV. What the River Takes

By half past ten the service road had become a continuous sheet of water. The pump house was a low square building on an island of concrete, close enough to make out a white strip around the door. Nora and Cal stood on the landward bank and called until they heard a whistle, three short blasts, from the side of the building they couldn't see.

“That's Ellis,” Nora said.

“How do you know?”

“I gave him the whistle. He kept losing his radio in the oil tray.”

Cal lowered the ladder from his shoulder. He had brought their father's boots as well. Nora knew them from the patches on the heels. He put them on the grass beside her and didn't mention them. She found she couldn't mention them either. She put them on. The right one was still too big, exactly as it had been when she used to put her feet inside them to go to the clothesline.

The search crew arrived and spoke with the harbor supervisor on the bank. Their boat was made for open water and drew too much at the turn in the spur. Sam pointed out the old shallow workboat on its trailer. Nora had serviced the motor in the spring. They agreed to put it in below the cattle steps and hold it there while they checked the line from shore. If the landmarks didn't show them a clear way through, they would wait for a different boat. Nobody mentioned how much of the pump house would be left above water by then.

June came down in her little car with a bundle of rope and a bag containing four rolls from Cal's bakery. She handed the rolls to Nora.

“Are you catering the rescue?” Nora asked.

“I'm catering the people on the bank. Someone put a message out that the ferry was going across. I've spent half an hour explaining that it isn't.”

“Did you get your onions?”

“The river can have the onions.”

Cal went off with the ladder. Edda and a member of the search crew took two spare lights to the first marks. Nora carried the old brass lamp to the boatyard wall. The replacement glass rattled in its case. She pulled a sliver off a pencil and wedged it between the glass and the housing. There wasn't much left of the pencil when she had finished. It was Edda's, she realized. She must have taken it from the ticket booth without thinking.

From the top of the ladder she could see the low part of the wall that faced the channel. In ordinary weather you could walk to it from the yard. Today there was a tongue of water across the paving. Cal climbed onto the wall and moved along it on his hands and knees until he reached a ring set into the brickwork.

“This ring isn't for tying up,” he called.

“What's it for?”

“Look where the other one's gone.”

There was a pale patch where a bracket had been. The two marks were spaced to take a light that could be hauled down from the yard and raised again. It was the third light, on the far end of the wall, exactly where their father had drawn it.

Cal held out his hand. Nora gave him the lamp. He set it in the old ring and turned the beam down so it shone across the water. She could see the red fan touch a row of bricks beneath the surface. Beyond the bricks it disappeared. The turn was there, where the wall ended underwater, not where it appeared to end above it.

She thought of her father drawing the little clipped square. It was almost all there was of him in the chart. She would have liked it to prove that he had made no mistake. From the ladder she could see three different mistakes a person might make in that one spot, and a fourth if he had a child on board and wanted badly enough to get her home.

V. The Workboat

Sam let the workboat run in place while they waited for the two lights along the bank to come into line. At the bow a length of rope lay in a wet pile. Nora put her foot against it to keep it still. In the distance, the gate made a sound like a van crossing a metal bridge. It had settled into its tracks, the supervisor said over the radio. That was what the sound meant. Nora wondered how often a thing went wrong and made precisely the sound you were waiting to hear.

“Which one are you watching?” Sam asked.

“The one under the footbridge.”

“I mean which clock.”

Nora looked down. The watch she had strapped over her sleeve was still set two minutes slow from the last time she had taken it apart. She took it off and put it in her pocket.

“The water,” she said.

There was a bit of white wrapping caught in a thorn bush upstream. They had watched it pull straight out like a flag for most of the time they had been waiting. Now it hung from the branch in a long, loose strip. Sam said, “I see it,” before she had a chance to point.

They left the bank. For several boat lengths the river did nothing unexpected. It rose and fell around pieces of brickwork and carried thin lines of grass away on either side of them. The boat smelled of the damp rubber mat that Nora had scrubbed in March. She had forgotten how much she liked that smell when there was work to do and somebody else aboard.

“Wall's over there,” Sam said.

She could see where it was above the water. The red lamp itself was hard to make out from this angle. Then, as the boat swung into the line of its beam, the glass went dark. Nora waited for the light to come back. It didn't.

Sam brought the motor down.

“We've got time,” she said, hearing herself say it before she had looked at the water.

“How much?”

The bow was going sideways. A piece of driftwood passed it and stayed parallel for longer than she liked.

“I don't know,” she said. “Can you hold us here?”

“For a bit.”

On the radio, Cal said, “Nora?”

“I see it. Don't lean over.”

“I'm on the dry side.”

“Can you get the glass out?”

“And then what?”

She had repaired dozens of lights that failed under load. Sometimes a spring made just enough contact to work on a table and not enough to work when a boat struck a wave. Sometimes it was the glass, pushed out of place when the case twisted. She couldn't see the brass case. Cal couldn't see inside it. Her mind took an unhelpful trip around all the repairs she had meant to make on the boat before her father stopped using it.

“Leave the glass,” she said. “I need to see the last brick.”

There was no answer. Sam said, “We're going to have to back out.” He didn't sound cross, only occupied. When Nora raised the radio, a bright white streak crossed the wall.

Cal had taken the small torch from his bakery apron. On his knees, on the far side of the ring, he bent down and held it where the brass lamp had been. It lit his hand more than it lit the water. Nora could see the shadow of each finger on the brick beside it. When he moved his thumb the beam reached the last submerged course of bricks and stopped.

“There,” she said to Sam. She was pointing a little short of the place where she had wanted him to turn. “Go round the end of the light.”

They had cleared the wall when the radio spoke again. Cal asked if they could see the pump house. Nora said yes. He told her she could give him back his torch on Sunday.

“Is Sunday when I'm coming over?”

“It's when I'm making breakfast,” he said.

VI. The Window

The pump house had two doors and a window. Both doors were under water, which was why Ellis had spent twenty minutes waving a white rag from the window. By the time the workboat came round the spur, he had used the rag to bind Tamsin's arm to her chest. He waved his sock instead. Nora could see his bare toes on the sill.

“I sent somebody for the sock,” she called.

He stopped waving it. “Tamsin fell.”

“How far?”

“Down two steps. She said it was only two. Is that useful?”

“Ask her if she can stand.”

“I've asked her quite a lot of times.”

For the first time she could see what he had done inside the room. He had laid a plank across the top of the stairs and brought over a metal stool. Tamsin was sitting on it, with both feet on the plank. The stool had one leg bent inwards. On the floor beneath them, scraps of paper went around in a slow circle as the water came through the lower door.

“She can stand if she has something to hold,” Ellis said. “I can't go through first. She'll have nothing behind her.”

Nora looked at the water between the boat and the building. It had a ridge along the wall as if the building were moving forward. Sam took the radio and asked the shore crew where the other boat was. They were still trying to get it past the bridge. He asked them to bring a stretcher to the cattle steps. Then he brought the workboat a little closer.

Tamsin called from inside. “I can tell you something I can't do. I can't listen to one more person ask if I can stand.”

“All right,” Nora said. “How do you want to get out?”

The question appeared to surprise her. Nora saw Tamsin's good hand come up to the windowsill and then go down again.

“I want him to put his sock on,” she said. “He's no use to me if he slips.”

Ellis disappeared. When he came back, he was wearing two socks and holding the metal stool. He put it on the plank with the bent leg facing away from the window, where he could wedge it. Tamsin braced herself against him and stepped up. At the sill her bad arm brushed the frame. She closed her eyes, but she didn't let go.

The boat nudged away. Nora had no memory afterward of stepping onto the sill, only of a screw on the outside of the frame that had caught the heel of her boot. She put her shoulder against the frame and gave Tamsin the back of her coat to hold. Between them they got Tamsin sitting sideways in the opening. Sam steadied the boat below them. For a long moment Tamsin had one foot aboard and one foot in the room.

“I'm going to make a noise,” she said.

“You go ahead,” Sam said.

She made a noise like a cupboard being dragged across a floor. Then she was in the boat. Sam put a life jacket around her as gently as he could. Nora helped Ellis down next. He did not let go of the plank until she had a hand on his elbow, and even then she felt him shift his weight back toward the room. He had been holding it all together for so long that it seemed to him somebody ought still to be there.

“We're all out,” Nora said.

Ellis looked in at the stool. “I think I should have turned the power off.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Twice.”

“Then you can stop thinking about it for now.”

She went back for her boot, which was still caught on the screw. She could hear Tamsin asking Sam whether she might have a roll. He said that depended on whether she wanted cheese. Nora pulled the boot free. In the next room, which she had taken for a wall of shadow, a row of white mugs drifted loose from a shelf.

VII. The Cattle Steps

On their way back, Sam asked Nora whether there was any more slack left in the water. She had been waiting for him to ask. Looking at the bank, she could see the old entrance pulling at the edges of its own reflection. Looking toward the yard, she could see Cal's torch, still shining on the end of the wall. They had a way back, but they didn't have the way back they had expected.

“I can't tell,” she said.

Tamsin lifted her head. “There's a walk on top of the intake. It'll take you to the steps.”

“How much water is on it?”

“Enough to float the empty tool chest. I watched it go across from the window.”

Nora turned. Tamsin was pointing with her chin at a yellow metal lid in the grass downstream. On the chart the intake was just a rectangle. She would have passed over it with her eyes.

“What's under the walk?” Sam asked.

“Solid concrete,” Tamsin said. “You don't want to be under it. You want to be along it. We marked the far edge with posts last summer. I can show you.”

Tamsin moved over so she could see around Ellis. The boat made slow progress along the line she showed them. At the second post a length of yellow tape had come free and was streaming in the water. At the third there was a whole bicycle hanging by one pedal. Ellis looked at it for so long that Nora thought it might be his. Then he said, “Who takes a bicycle down here?” and Tamsin said, “You're asking the wrong island.”

On the cattle steps the rescue crew were ready for them. Sam got Ellis ashore first. The paramedic who took Tamsin asked her for her date of birth and Tamsin, for reasons of her own, gave him her dog's. She was still laughing when they took her up the steps. It was the kind of laugh you could hear a person begin before they knew if they had enough breath to finish.

By the time Nora got out, there were half a dozen people standing on the top step. Someone passed her a foil blanket. She gave it to Cal, who had come down from the yard and was shivering in his bakery apron. He was holding the red lamp by its handle. The pencil wedge had swelled and split the glass. The broken edges caught the daylight.

“I should have left it in the cupboard,” she said.

Cal rested the lamp on the ground. “I should have told you about the chart.”

“You could have. I wouldn't have listened that year.”

“I tried one day. You were behind the counter with the kettle on. I asked whether you remembered the two lights by the footbridge. You said to ask somebody at the harbor office.”

Nora remembered it. She had thought he had come to sell their father's radio. It was one of those scraps of a day she had kept for no reason, along with the position of the chairs and the fact that it had been warm enough to have the door open.

“Ask me again,” she said.

Cal rubbed the heels of his hands together. “Do you remember the lights?”

“Yes. One used to fill up with flies.” She picked up the lamp. “We can put all three on the chart.”

Sam came up from below with the workboat's key on his thumb. The supervisor wanted a statement. Nora saw Cal look toward the road. He was still wearing the apron. Somebody would be waiting for him to open the bakery.

“You go,” she said. “I'll tell them what we did. Come back when they ask about the chart.”

Cal took off the apron and wrapped the lamp in it, so Nora could carry the glass without getting cut. It made a soft, domestic parcel. He left it with her and went up the road.

VIII. The Time on the Clock

The ferry party went ahead on Friday. The water had gone down. You could see a mark on the side of the ferry office where the level had been, and below it the dried bodies of a great many mosquitoes. The council brought an extra cake because the first one still said GOODBYE, PELTER FERRY and nobody knew if they were allowed to eat it before the speech.

Nora took the latch off the passenger toilet and gave it to Sam in a paper bag. He thanked her gravely and put it in his pocket. After a little while he came back and asked if it was meant to be a joke.

“Only if you put it on your toilet at home,” she said.

He laughed. The speech started without him. They went in together.

The harbor supervisor had asked for Nora's chart and Cal's account of where the lights had been. Edda was arranging for someone to take new measurements. Until then the spur would stay closed. Nobody had asked Nora what she wanted the old inquiry to say, which was lucky. She had tried to write down a sentence and found herself arguing with each word as she reached it. In the end she submitted the positions of the three lights, what they had used in their place, and the name of the woman who had shown them the way home. It was more than the harbor office had had the week before.

On Sunday she went to Cal's for breakfast. He gave her tea in their father's mug. It had a brown ring at the bottom that survived any amount of washing. Nora put the brass light on the table between them. In place of the glass she had cut a disk of clear plastic from the lid of a biscuit tin.

“It'll keep the dust out,” she said. “I haven't put a bulb in.”

Cal picked it up and held it toward the window. A bit of sunlight went through the empty case and left a circle on the wall. He turned it. The circle crossed the pale yellow wallpaper, passed over the kitchen clock, and went out.

They ate with the window open. From the kitchen Nora could see part of the road and, if she leaned sideways, the place where it dropped to the ferry office. June had a new sack of onions on the tide gauge. At this distance they looked like a single dark thing tied to a stick. A bus crossed the bridge, lit up in the morning sun. Someone in the back had his feet on the seat.

“We've got ten minutes,” Cal said, looking up at the clock.

“Before what?”

“Before the second lot of bread comes out.”

Nora went to the stove and put the kettle on. Cal pulled out the other chair with his foot. There was a packet of butter on the table, already soft enough to spread, and there was time for another slice.