Page 58 of The Words We Lost

Our footsteps echo in the rectangular room until Joel reaches the door leading up the spiral staircase to the lantern room and gallery deck. There’s a large red sign chained across the opening: “Restricted Area. CLOSED for touring.”

“Henry approved this area, too?” I ask as Joel releases the chain from the doorjamb and nods.

“The lighthouse is under a phased restoration plan, so they’ve closed sections off to the public so they can work without disruption. The lantern room will remain off-limits for roughly a year until it’s completed.”

“I feel like a VIP.”

He laughs. “As long as you’re free of all sticky drinks and snack foods, then you can be whatever you want to be up here.” He waves a hand for me to go first. “After you.”

It’s a nerve-racking climb up the tower of the lighthouse, though admittedly I didn’t think twice about trespassing these steps when I was seventeen. Life felt simpler back then, and consequences felt far out of reach. But as we near the top of the tower, a sinking reality presses in. While the rules have remained the same up here, everything else is different.

There’s no Cece bounding up the stairs after us, demanding we sit opposite the rusty iron door off the lantern room. She loved to sit withher back against the steel wall, her feet touching the rail encircling the active lens used to guide thousands of sailors and fishermen safely to shore for over a hundred and twenty years. I grunt when my rear meets the cold, unforgiving steel. The gap between the lens and wall feels noticeably tighter, and by the way Joel struggles to stretch out his legs fully, I can tell he’s thinking the same.

The air is musty and a bit too overheated for comfort, but the sun is high enough in the horizon for both our faces to be shaded by the half wall that’s divided into windows on top, steel plating on bottom. And though we can only see blue sky from our vantage point down on the floor, I know the view is spectacular from the other side of the stairs. But for Cece, I want to save it for the end of our time here, the way she always did.

Seated to my right, Joel twists his head, his breath sweeping the side of my neck as he asks, “Do you want to try reading a chapter today?”

I clasp my hands on my lap and recall my failed attempt at reading Allie’s manuscript back at the cottage. “Not this time.”

“All right,” he says. “Just say the word if you change your mind.”

I nod, close my eyes, and prepare to sink back into another memory that feels as real as the lighthouse we’re inside. Only as he begins, I realize there’s something Cece left out in the timeline of our friendships. Not because she was neglectful, but because there were some things I was never brave enough to put into words. Not even for her.

Sometime after the summer I officially became a Campbell employee, saving every penny I made for whatever my college scholarships wouldn’t cover, there’d been a shift between Joel and me. Something unspoken, but certain. Something too special to be defined in casual terms. Something that had caused me to hope in a way I’d never allowed myself to hope before. Then again, before Joel and Cece, hope wasn’t a gift I understood much at all.

19

“Fall Is Hardly the Best Season of All”

Contrary to what most women in Cece’s age group fancied about “the season of pumpkin spice,” she had little affection for fall in the Pacific Northwest. She wasn’t made for the cold, wet, and the dreary. If she had her choice, she’d hibernate straight through Halloween and set her alarm for Christmas Eve. At least winter boasted a holiday she cared about. Which was why Joel’s agitated state as he paced her living room did nothing but grate on her perpetually sour mood.

“Chill out, Joel. You’re going to give yourself high blood pressure before you’re even old enough to buy a beer. She’ll be here soon,” Cece said, closing her eyes and listening to the rain beat against her mom’s roof the way it had for weeks. With weather like this, it left their trio little option in the way of weekend entertainment. They could catch a movie at the theater, but did she really want to endure another two hours of Ingrid and Joel making not-so-secret heart eyes at each other over a tub of popcorn? She might as well just change her name to Third Wheel Cece.

It was a strange thing to want nothing more than for your two best friends to finally confess their obvious-to-everybody-with-eyes feelings to each other and also to want nothing about her current relationship with either one of them to change. But change was coming; she could feel it the same way she could feel her seasonal depression creeping in every late September since she first moved to Port Townsend.

“She’s never been this late,” Joel grumbled, standing by the front door and checking his watch like a worried father. But Ingrid already had a father, one who doted and bragged on her often. She hardly needed another one.

Joel turned and pelted her with a stare. “Are you absolutely positive she said she’d meet us here, at your house, at six o’clock?”

“Yes,Dad, I’mpositive.” Cece rolled her eyes. “After our shift she said she needed to run home and grab her laundry bag so she could wash a couple loads here this week. And as per usual, she didn’t want me to tag along.” A sore point in their friendship for sure, but one Cece was doing her best to ignore. “She probably just lost track of time.” But even Cece was struggling to believe that the longer the minutes ticked on.

Ingrid had only recently purchased a cell phone, but the plan was almost as awful as the coverage. Joel had mentioned wanting to buy her a better data package for her birthday so she could text and call however much she wanted to, but seeing as it was the end of the month, the minutes were long gone and her birthday wasn’t till spring. In the meantime, they all knew each other’s work schedules, and their weekend plans were so routine at this point they were rarely disrupted—including Ingrid’s overnights at Cece’s. Her mom had already made up the sofa bed for Ingrid with fresh linens, pillows, and blankets. At first, Ingrid only stayed a night, maybe two a week. But last week she’d stayed five. The increase might have something to do with the fact that Joel’s house was only a backyard away.

With one last glance at his watch, her cousin yanked open the front door. A blast of wretchedly wet air swooped through the living room, scattering her mother’s art magazines to the floor. “Hey, close the door!”

“I’m going out to look for her.”

Cece bolted to her feet and hurried to toss the stack of magazines back on the table. “Not without me, you’re not.”

Joel gave Cece a hard look, as if calculating how he might get away without the use of duct tape to restrain her.

“Fine,” he conceded. “But I’m not waiting for you to change your clothes another five times. Grab a coat and let’s go.”

She was already snapping up her mom’s new red and white polka dot raincoat. It wasn’t her style, and it was too thin to bring any kind of real warmth, but it beat having to look through the jam-packed hall closet for a real jacket—she feared Joel would leave her behind if she attempted to open that door. “Do you think she stopped at the marina to help her dad tidy up the boat?”

Joel shook his head and marched into the horizontal rain, leaving Cece to race after him once she’d locked up the house, knowing her mom wouldn’t be home for at least another couple of hours. There was a private event at the hotel tonight; some fancy outdoor gear company from California had rented out the entire place for the weekend. They were perhaps the only guests crazy enough to buy the fishing excursion package and take a tour with Hal when the skies hadn’t stopped leaking for longer than ten minutes. At least she’d made some great tips serving them appetizers and drinks last night.

Once they were both inside Joel’s car, he said, “She’s not at the marina. Hal was off today.”

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