The Secret Keepers

  “They teased you.”

  “Not everyone,” the girl said. She spoke so softly Reuben could barely hear her. “It’s okay. A couple of them are just mean.” She sniffed, then sniffed again, and Reuben realized she was crying.

  The young man dropped down from the oil drum and went over to her. He said something in a voice so low that Reuben couldn’t make it out. After a moment the girl mumbled a reply, and her brother snorted and said, “You see? That’s what I’m talking about. Smart aleck.” There was a rattle of ice, then an exaggerated slurping sound. “Ah! That’s some good lemonade. Believe I’ll just finish it off… What? No? Oh, what a look! Very nasty. Obviously, you’ve been practicing.”

  Again the girl muttered something that made the young man snicker, and the exchanges continued like this until Reuben heard the girl laugh, too.

  “That’s more like it,” her brother said. “All right, I’ll let you get back to old Penelope. What’s she gotten herself into this time, anyway?”

  “Trouble,” the girl replied, “what else?”

  “That’s good. I hope she keeps it up.”

  The door opened, and the young man’s footsteps retreated. The girl did not return to her doll play, however, but rose and went to the door. Reuben had a feeling she was watching her brother go. He willed her to go after him. He was so parched that his thirst was all he could think about.

  Fortunately, after a miserable few moments, he heard the girl give a little sigh and go out. He waited, listening, then straightened to peek over the top of the oil drum. He was alone—the distant creak of the screen door confirmed it—and the lemonade glass was still there on the bench. In his haste to get over the oil drum, Reuben nearly fell on his head. The glass was almost empty, and what little liquid remained was less lemonade than ice water, but that was fine by Reuben. He gulped it down, then crunched the last few ice cubes until his mouth ached from the cold.

  He felt sure the girl would be coming back. The dolls were gone, but she’d left the blanket and the lemonade glass. Reuben wound his watch, considering the best way to reveal himself. If he handled it wrong, the girl might run and fetch her brother, and he didn’t want to talk to any grown-ups yet. The thought filled him with dread.

  He went to stand lookout near the doorway. If anyone else came, he would disappear. He watched the keeper’s house, trying to think of what to say.

  Hi, my name’s Reuben. Do you happen to know anything about a watch that turns people invisible? And can you tell me how The Smoke knows about it? And do you know who else might know about it? See, I need to know what I’m up against so I can figure out how to sneak my mom out of the city, which happens to be swarming with these guys called the Directions, who are all looking for me. No, I can’t just tell her. She’d make me give up the watch, but then we’d still be in danger, I’m sure of it. It’s kind of complicated.…

  Reuben groaned and rubbed his head. This wasn’t going to be easy. Especially because he couldn’t tell the truth. Not all of it, anyway, or even half. He had to protect his secret. So what was he going to say?

  He was still groping for an answer when the screen door opened and the girl skipped out into the sunlight. She remembered the door just in time to fling one foot out behind her and catch it before it banged. Then she resumed her skipping—evidently, she wasn’t one to wallow in bad moods. As she drew close enough for Reuben to get a good look at her, he saw that she was not wearing a bright red hat after all, but rather had a startling, wiry mass of red hair that shot up and out from her scalp like a volcanic eruption. It bounced all around her head as she skipped. She wore sandals and a light blue summer dress and was carrying the dolls, one in each hand.

  Reuben backed away from the door. He supposed there was no way he could avoid frightening her, and sure enough, when she skipped through the doorway and saw him standing there, she gave a little shriek, dropping her dolls and leaping back, with her hands covering her mouth.

  “Sorry!” he cried, holding his palms out apologetically. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  The girl stared at him a moment, bug-eyed. Then she burst out with the brightest laugh Reuben had ever heard. She clapped her hands against her chest and doubled over. When she straightened, tears of laughter shone in her eyes. “Well, you did,” she said, comically fanning her eyes with both hands. “Whew! You scared the dickens out of me! Who are you?” Her eyes (which were green as grass) darted around the oil house, as if searching for an answer. “And how did you even get here?”

  Her eyes settled on his face again. Now that she was over her initial shock, she seemed merely baffled. She had a round face that was completely covered with freckles, as if she’d gotten a suntan through a screen, and her top two front teeth stuck out ever so slightly from her curious smile. She didn’t look at all as Reuben had expected, but now that he’d seen her, her appearance seemed to fit her voice. He couldn’t have explained why.

  “So… do you know any other words?” she asked him. “Or was that it?”

  “Sorry,” Reuben began, and the girl gave him a wry look. “I mean, yes, of course I do.” He felt the return of his shyness and had to push through it. “I’m in town visiting someone. I wondered if I could see the lighthouse.”

  “Did you look up?” the girl said, jerking her thumb over her shoulder, in the direction of the lighthouse tower. “It’s that big white thing with the green top.” She saw Reuben’s uncertain expression and quickly said, “Oh, I’m just teasing! Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude.” Scooping up her dolls with one hand, she extended her other. “I’m Penny Meyer.”

  Reuben told her his first name, and they shook hands. He noticed that she was holding her dolls behind her back and trying to seem casual about it. That was funny, he thought. She had to know that he’d seen them. Maybe she was hoping he’d forget. Or at least not be impolite enough to mention them. He wanted to tell her not to worry, that if he wasn’t too old to play secret spy games, she wasn’t too old to play with dolls. But of course he couldn’t say that, and he felt his tongue freeze up again, and said nothing.

  “Let’s start over,” said Penny, sitting down on the bench. “You didn’t tell me how you got here. The tide’s out!” Her eyes flicked to his shoes (checking them for mud, Reuben realized) and back to his face. “Are you a wizard or something?”

  “No broom. Just boots. I left them down by the dock.”

  “Aha!” Penny said, as if she understood, yet she still looked puzzled.

  “Muck boots,” Reuben explained. “I walked through the mud in them.”

  “Oh, I know, I know. I’m just wondering how it is that no one saw you coming.”

  Reuben felt his cheeks grow hot. He shrugged. “No one was outside.”

  “Maybe not,” said Penny, “but Luke is up in the watch room, and…” She frowned and shook her head. “Well, whatever! Obviously you’re here, and I’ll take your word for it that you didn’t fly. So who are you visiting? I know pretty much everyone in town. No one mentioned any Reuben coming to visit. A boy with a sandwich name? I believe I’d have remembered that. Not that it’s a bad name! I like it.” And as if to prove she meant it, she said it again: “Reuben.” She nodded with approval. “Anyway, who are you visiting?”

  Reuben took his gamble. “You.”

  “Me?” Penny said, drawing her head back as if avoiding a slap. She searched his face. “You aren’t joking?”

  Reuben swallowed and locked eyes with her. “No, I really have come to see you. Or someone here, anyway—someone at Point William Light. But it’s you I’d like to talk to about it. I found something… something very old and unusual. And I figured something out about it that led me here, to you. I know that sounds strange, and maybe it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. I’m in a really serious situation, and I need to know if you can tell me…” He trailed off, not only because he wasn’t exactly sure how to continue but also, and more significantly, because Penny’s eyes were growing wider and wider wit
h every word.

  There was a short silence, as if Reuben’s words were taking a while to reach her, and then Penny let out a squeal. She leaped to her feet, once again dropping her dolls—flinging them, rather, in opposite directions—and clasping her hands together in front of her with a look of unbridled astonishment. Her green eyes seemed huge. Her mouth hung open. Staring at Reuben, she moved her lips once or twice before finally managing to speak. And when she did, what she said astonished Reuben in turn:

  “So it’s me, then,” Penny said, in an awed tone. “I’m the one. And you. You’re the one to ask. After all these years! After more than a century, Reuben!” She grabbed him by the arms and looked wonderingly into his eyes. “After all this time—it’s us.”

  For a few seconds they stared at each other. Reuben had never dreamed of such a dramatic response. He was trying to think of what to say when Penny abruptly released him, whirling toward the door and crying, “I have to tell the others!”

  Reuben lunged forward. “No, please!” he hissed, grabbing her hand. She turned back in surprise. “Just you,” he said with an imploring look. “For now, anyway. Just you, okay?”

  And so it was that Penny remained in the oil house and agreed, after considerable pleading on Reuben’s part, to tell him what was going on. Or, rather, she started to tell him; then she changed her mind. Then she changed it again. And then again. She was so reluctant, she said (when Reuben at last looked ready to die from exasperation), because the story she had to tell him was the family’s most closely guarded secret. She and her brothers were strictly forbidden to reveal it to anyone. Indeed, she said, the story never had been revealed to anyone outside the family. Never. Not to anyone.

  And yet, although Penny was reluctant, she was not entirely reluctant. In truth she was bursting to tell him and only resisted doing so because of the family rules. Eventually she persuaded herself that Reuben wasn’t just anyone—he was, in fact, the key to everything, was actually a part of the secret himself. Besides, he was hardly a threat. He was only a boy, and a trustworthy one at that.

  “You are trustworthy, right?” Penny asked.

  Reuben, with more conviction than he actually felt, assured her that he was.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you. But you have to swear that you’ll never tell another soul without my permission.”

  Reuben swore that he would not.

  And so, at last, Penny told him the story.

  The lighthouse at Point William, according to Penny, was almost as old as the country itself. And from the very beginning, the keepers of the Point William Light had been Meyers. The protection of ships in dark and inclement weather was a critically important job, one that must never go unfilled or be entrusted to the hands of a negligent keeper. At the Point William Light such an unthinkable circumstance had never occurred, for there was always a Meyer ready to be passed the torch.

  Every generation of Meyers had proved well suited to the sacred duty of keeping the light. They had without exception been constant, reliable, unfailing in their duties. Though the governor flounder, a local saying went, and the president flail, a Meyer will always float.

  So highly regarded was the Meyer family as an institution of solid, honest folk, sound of judgment and steady of course, that when one day there came along a Meyer who was unpredictable, unconventional, reckless, and daring, no one in Point William—or indeed, anywhere—knew what to make of her.

  (Her? Reuben thought. And then, with a thrill of recognition: Penelope!)

  Was it not inevitable? Generation after generation of children bound to that island, to their family’s sacred task, watching generation after generation of ships pass in the night? Ships bearing exotic cargo from faraway countries; ships laden with unfamiliar spices so pungent and in such quantities that they prickled noses even from across the water; ships clamorous with strange animals whose cackling and growls reached the ears of the land-bound children and sent goose bumps down their backs? And above all, ships worked by sailors, and carrying passengers, who had journeyed across the ocean from places unknown and who to places unknown would return? All those children, all those years, all those ships! Why should it have been surprising that at least one child would grow up yearning to see the world?

  Such a one was Penelope Meyer. To put it plainly, as she herself would have done, Penelope was an adventuress. By the age of twelve she was teaching her beloved younger brother, Jack, all manner of surprising things, such as how to steal honey from beehives and pies from windowsills, how to build campfires in the rain, how to tie knots so complicated that no one could untie them but her. At thirteen she built her own raft. When it proved unseaworthy and sank a mile offshore, she swam back, wrung out her clothes, and announced her plan to build a better one.

  “I know what I did wrong,” she said to Jack when he begged her not to try it again (for Jack adored his sister and preferred that she not drown). “I won’t make the same mistake twice!”

  Nor did she—then or ever. Bold enough to take chances, smart enough to learn from her failures, Penelope Meyer grew into a young woman who wore trousers instead of skirts, rode horses and sailed boats (both of which, as often as not, were borrowed without their owners’ precise knowledge), and seemed every bit as likely to punch a man as to curtsy to him. Her parents loved her but could do nothing with her. Her brother could never keep her in check, though she let him bind her wounds and listen to her tales. And when at age seventeen she stowed away on a ship bound for Gibraltar (Jack found her note two days later), no one in Point William was surprised.

  In the years that followed, Jack received letters from so many different ports in so many countries, he found it difficult to keep track of them all. The map he’d hung on the wall of his room positively bristled with pushpins.

  Two years after she left for Gibraltar, Penelope returned to Point William to visit her family. She sailed into port on a clipper ship, sunburned, tall, and slim, red hair flying out from beneath a sailor’s cap. For presents she had brought her mother a beautiful silk kimono; for her father, a stuffed marsupial. Her parents received their gifts with appropriate exclamations of wonder, though no doubt what they cherished most was their daughter’s assurance that she had plenty of money and a great many friends almost as loyal as Jack, and was never in harm’s way.

  As soon as she and Jack were alone, however, she showed him where a snake had bitten her just above the knee (“Painful but not deadly,” she assured him when he paled) and for a keepsake gave him a scarred and misshapen bullet—one that clearly had been fired from a gun and later extracted from whatever (or whomever?) it had struck. Jack solemnly accepted the gift but urged her not to tell him the story behind it unless she intended to catch him when he fainted.

  Penelope, laughing, agreed that she had better not.

  The time between Penelope’s return visits to Point William grew longer with every departure. After the first one she was away for three years; after the next, it was five. She returned each time bearing more gifts, more stories, more scars. Always, when seeing his beloved sister off again, Jack would wonder whether this was the last time he would see her carefree smile and wave. From her letters, and even more from the tales she had told him in private, he knew it was rather a miracle that she had ever returned at all.

  And indeed there came a time when Penelope’s visits were cherished memories only. For some years she had continued to write to Jack—but then one year her letters turned cryptic and strange. She had partnered up, Jack knew, with a kind of scholar-adventurer whose deep learning and ambitious nature had led him to many a rare discovery and who as a consequence was growing quite rich. (“He has such books, Jack, as you wouldn’t believe, and manuscripts and scrolls older than mountains. He knows things no one else knows or ever will. I trust him not at all, for reasons I won’t trouble you with, but I can only admire his brilliance and bravado, and have hopes he will lead me into fortune. I feel sure he will, if only I keep my wits about me??
?and my hand on my holster.”)

  It was not the first letter of Penelope’s to have spoken of shadowy acquaintances or partners, but it was the last. Jack received a few more letters that year, but they no longer made reference to anything or anyone specific, and he got the unpleasant impression that Penelope was writing only to let him know that she was still alive. Later, when the letters stopped altogether, Jack wondered if she might also have been writing in order to feel closer to someone she loved and trusted, however far away he might be.

  Time passed, as time must. For many years Jack was too preoccupied with thoughts of Penelope, and later with helping his aged parents, to think much about himself. He was, moreover, rather a shy man, and it was not until he was in middle age and living alone on the island that fortune smiled on Jack Meyer. The town doctor’s daughter, a sparkling young woman beloved by every young man in town, fell in love with—of all people!—the lighthouse keeper, and insisted that he propose to her.

  Jack, who was just as bedazzled as anyone by the lovely April Jones, nonetheless argued that he was too old for her, that she might one day come to regret marrying him. But April argued right back, with far greater force, and Jack was compelled to give in and be happy.

  Point William breathed a collective sigh of relief. Everyone had been wondering what would happen when Jack Meyer grew old and died. Who would keep the light if not a Meyer? Fortune had smiled not only on Jack, therefore, but on the whole town.

  Sure enough, Jack and April soon had a baby boy, and the year following the baby’s arrival was the happiest that Jack had known since childhood. He went about his duties whistling; and from the mainland shore and the decks of passing vessels, the lighthouse keeper was often seen on the island rocking the baby in his arms or laughing and swinging him about. He also doted on April, who, true to form, made a point of out-doting him in return.

  So it was that when Jack entered his dark study late one autumn evening in search of reading glasses and found the window open, with a cold breeze billowing the curtains into the room, he was, at that moment, the most contented and carefree he had ever been—or, after that moment, ever would be again.