The Lighthouse Keeper's Granddaughter

When Aoife was sixteen, her parents sent her to spend the summer with her grandfather in Newfoundland. She had never met him. He lived alone in a white lighthouse at the end of a narrow road, on a rock surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. He had been the keeper there for forty-two years, and he was the last one. The light had been automatic since 2004, but he had refused to leave.

The first week was terrible. There was no internet, the wind never stopped, and her grandfather hardly spoke. He got up at five every morning, wrote something in a thick notebook and went outside to check the sky. Aoife stayed in bed, angry and bored. "Why does he still live here?" she wrote in a letter to her best friend. "Nobody needs him anymore."

Slowly, though, she started to follow him. He showed her how to read the clouds: long thin ones meant wind the next day, and a gray ring around the moon meant rain. He taught her the names of the birds and the boats. Every evening they climbed the one hundred and twelve steps to the top of the tower and cleaned the glass, even though a machine now did the real work.

In August, while they were having breakfast, the radio announced a storm. By the afternoon the sky had turned dark green, and the rain was falling so hard that Aoife couldn't see the sea. The wind was howling around the tower. Then, at about nine o'clock, the lights went out. The power line had come down.

Her grandfather was already putting on his coat. "The light," he said. "The backup battery has failed before." They climbed the stairs in the dark with a flashlight. At the top, the great lamp was dead. Out at sea, Aoife saw a small light moving up and down between the waves. A fishing boat was trying to get back to the harbor, and it was heading straight for the rocks.

Her grandfather opened an old wooden box that he had kept for years. Inside there was a heavy oil lamp. His hands were shaking, but he lit it and placed it in front of the mirrors, exactly as he had done when he was a young man. A weak yellow light began to turn over the water. For a long minute nothing happened. Then the small boat slowly changed direction.

The next morning the sky was clear and blue, as if nothing had happened. A fisherman knocked on their door with a bag of fresh cod. "I thought I was going to die last night," he said quietly. "Then I saw your light."

That evening Aoife opened her grandfather's notebook for the first time. It was full of weather reports, one for every day of forty-two years. On the last page, he had written something new: "Storm. Light failed. Aoife helped." She finally understood why he had stayed.