By Anjali Sachdeva
Olivia was always getting lost in the county park, though she had walked there at least three times a week for the past year. Inevitably she would meander down some poorly-mapped spur in search of a trail not clogged with dog-walkers and stroller-pushers, then be betrayed by her faulty sense of direction. Phone reception in the park was abysmal. Often, she returned to her car covered in mud and burrs, an hour or more past when she had intended to depart; even a year had not been long enough to familiarize herself with all the far-flung crannies of the woods.
But this time was too much to be believed. She stood in the middle of a field of mown grass at the bottom of a ravine, looking up at a lighthouse. Its body was white and narrowed toward the top, where a small, octagonal cabin perched. She waited for someone else to come along and explain what a lighthouse was doing here, so far from rocky coastlines or treacherous shoals or anything else that might require a warning. But no one appeared who could share her astonishment.
Olivia told people she walked in the park because it was good exercise, “trying to shed that middle-age weight,” the kind of reason people accepted without question. Among her friends, her propensity for drifting off course had become a running joke. Her sister Evie had offered to buy her a satellite phone, or even just a better map, but Olivia had declined, prompting Evie to say angrily, “Sometimes I think you like getting lost.”
In years past Olivia would have met this kind of remark with her own grumpiness, but now she considered it. She did not enjoy being disoriented. But it was reassuring to be lost in such a physical, tangible way, a way anyone could see and understand. Hikers and even mountain bikers sometimes stopped when they saw the anxious, searching look on her face and asked if she needed any help, a question people who saw her more often had stopped asking months ago.
Minutes passed as Olivia stared up at the lighthouse. The wood shake that covered its walls was thick and weathered. Tentatively, she pressed her nose to the surface and sniffed. She had expected salt, or seaweed, but instead the wood smelled like childhood Sunday mornings, cotton barely scorched by the iron as she and Evie and their parents dressed for church. She trailed her fingers against the shingles as she circumnavigated the base of the tower, coming to a compact door.
A cloud passed over the sun, and a stiff wind followed it. Olivia had set out later than she’d intended, and evening was coming on fast. She looked toward the woods she had arrived from and saw nothing but a mass of tangled plants that seemed to writhe subtly in the deepening shadows, admitted to herself that she was not at all sure of the way back to her car.
She looked up at the little cabin suspended above her, watching with dumb hope, willing it to burst into light. She had not felt hopeful in a long time, or at least, not about anything normal. Her parents had been in an automobile accident the previous summer. They were both 70, an age she had considered old, until it suddenly seemed unfairly young. A semi had run a stop sign and collided with their hatchback, slamming it into a tree at the roadside. Olivia got the call while she was at work, and then had to be the one to call Evie, who kept saying, “I don’t understand,” as if the situation were more complex than it really was: their parents were dead.
Sometimes, Olivia bought a tuna salad sandwich in the cafeteria at work and hoped she would not get food poisoning. She showered and hoped she would not slip and crack her head and die alone on the floor of a tub she didn’t scrub often enough. She hoped Evie’s cholesterol screening would come back normal, that her own exhaustion was nothing more serious. She sat at every stop sign so long, her head turning back and forth, that the restless drivers behind her lowered their windows and cursed her. Every day contained a thousand moments where she held her breath and scanned the coastline, trying to see what the water hid.
Now she turned the knob of the lighthouse door, eased inside, and began to climb the tightly spiraled staircase. When she reached the top she emerged into the cabin. Through its windowed walls, the purpled light of dusk filled the tiny room. There was a wooden chair, and a table on which sat a lamp—not the massive glass beacon she had expected, but a simple bedside lamp, scarcely different from the one that occupied her nightstand at home. She stepped out onto the balcony that ringed the cabin and looked over the surrounding landscape: the rippling expanse of grass in which the lighthouse stood, the trees tossing their heads in the gathering wind, a haze of cloud drifting in to cover the sky.
Off to her right came a burst of sound: a jumbled, flapping, chattering noise, and Olivia turned to see a flock of dark birds taking flight from…another lighthouse, perhaps a hundred feet away. She froze, as though a predator had appeared in the gloom. The second lighthouse was almost identical to the first, and she knew it had not been there when she arrived. There had been one, and now there were two.
Three. In the misty distance beyond the second lighthouse, a third one appeared even as she stood watching. One moment the horizon was empty, and the next the lighthouse was there: the white, almost conical body, the little cabin at the top. On its balcony she thought she saw a movement—a distant figure, waving, or perhaps just looking out, as she was. Beyond that, blurring into nothingness, a thin white sliver that might be another lighthouse appearing, and then another.
Somewhere below the treetops, the sun had set. In the second lighthouse, the lamp turned on. Its warm, feeble glow was not a beam that would save anyone from destruction. It was just enough to show her the murky silhouette of a person inside, someone else pacing their own, lonely room.
Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, was the winner of the he 2019 Chautauqua Prize and the 2022 Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. It was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, Refinery 29, and BookRiot, longlisted for the Story Prize, and chosen as the 2018 Fiction Book of the Year by the Reading Women podcast. The New York Times Book Review called the collection “strange and wonderful,” and Roxane Gay called it, “One of the best collections I’ve ever read. Every single story is a stand out.” Her stories have been published in McSweeney’s Quarterly, Lightspeed, Tor.com, and Vogue India, and featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. She is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and an Investing in Professional Artists grant from the Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Chatham University, and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College.
