“Light?” She eked the word out.
“Light itself. Listen, we’re gonna be okay. Here.” He reached for her atlas, and she hated how childish she felt. Opening the book between them, he looked around. “Look at that.” He held up a hand at a sign touting Jubilee Line. “It’s meant to be. Show me where you think the Jubilee is.” He tapped the atlas. It was open to the page showing the South Pacific.
“Not there,” Lucy said, feeling her hands begin to steady as she flipped the pages, showing him her most recent theory about its location—the Strait of Gibraltar.
They passed two hours turning pages and swapping theories, until the stalled Jubilee Line felt more like a safe hideaway than a threat to her life. He leaned in close and told her of a poem he’d learned in school.
“A poem?”
“Relax. No Shakespeare, I promise. It’s called ‘The Old Astronomer.’ About a brilliant astronomer on his deathbed. Near the end it says, “‘Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.’
“See?” He gestured at their dim surroundings, the darkness. “Nothing to fear here.” Offering theories about deeper meanings, they talked on about the poem. It felt magical and heavy. She didn’t quite know what to do with it but wanted to love it, for Dash’s sake, for the way he’d seen her through the grip of fear and not made her feel ridiculous. She felt her being return from that faraway cold scene of the crash and back into the present.
When the Tube finally started moving and they emerged in Greenwich, blinking in the sun, a joy overtook her like none she’d ever felt, to be in the wide world again. This place, high on a hill and looking down on London Town, held hope. Home to the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, with the prime meridian splitting time right between them, it seemed to declare that Lucy and Dash, though on diverging paths, need not be so separate from each other after all.
But two things had changed forever down in the Underground. Though they had weathered the ordeal and she had risen to the surface triumphant in the journey, from that point, small dark spaces clawed at her, made her feel trapped and breathless, a second away from returning to the moment that had taken Mum. And that day she stopped seeing Dashel Greene as the lost boy. For he had found her in the dark, and given her a home.
five
The watchmaker changed, too. Though he phoned every night, counting down the days until he’d come home and assuring her he loved her, he never told Lucy where he’d gone. When he returned he was different, somehow. Present. Scarred and sad, but . . . he was hers again, claimed back from the dark place she had found him in.
Dash came again to the evening fires, and while it took some time for the stories to resume, her father began to instruct them on the art of riddle-making, as if it were the most natural thing in the world with which to break the silence.
“The secret to a good riddle,” he told them one night, his voice trying and not quite succeeding to reach the peaks and valleys of his old magical tone, “is to begin at the end. Know what your answer is, and slowly drop clues. Your listeners won’t know they are clues, of course—not until they lean in.”
He swallowed, managing to find a smile. He played with some gears on his small worktable, piecing cogs together until they fit just so, taking them apart, doing it again. “That’s what your mother used to say.” He put his hand on his head in thought, subconsciously rubbing it as if Penny had just plopped a clump of lichen on his hat from a tree, this time from way up in heaven. “What was it she called it? To stretch toward.”
“Ad tendere,” Lucy said, her heart quickening at being able to offer her father this gift—a lost phrase of her mother’s. How horrid to lose those details in the fog of grief. Loss upon loss. She vowed to breathe life back into her father whenever she could.
“That’s it.” He smiled in earnest this time. “Pay attention. Make a practice of digging for clues.”
Lucy glanced at Dash, who shared her concerned look. Neither of them, apparently, quite understood what Dad was getting at.
Lucy fixed her eyes on her father, eyes wide and waiting.
“So,” he said, “riddlers we shall become. Something to set our hands to. I shall give you two clues, and you shall find a story. And along the way, we will dig for light. Continue to tell the stories of this world’s wonders. I think we could all use a bit of that, don’t you? Some reminding of what the Maker of such a world can do?”
He looked so fragilely hopeful then, all Lucy could do was nod, though she still did not understand.
“Good,” he said, ruffling her hair. “I think it’s our duty to keep the stories, to pass them on. It is our duty—and our honor. In a world as dark as ours, we—that is, people—forget how to see the light. So we remind them by telling the truth, fighting the dark, paying attention . . . setting the stars alight. There are things shining brightly all along, if we will notice.”
“You make it sound as if we’re in a battle, Dad.”
He folded his fingers around her small hand. “So we are, my girl. So we are. But it is a battle that can be won by holding fast to hope . . . and light. We’ll keep telling the stories, finding the clues. Gather them up, Lucy and Dash. Taking note of the good, the true, the just, the miracles hidden at every turn is like . . . a deliberate act of defiance against the darkness. Build a . . . ” He paused, searching for a word and not finding it. “Your mother was always the one with the words. Gather the stories into a . . .”
“Compendium?” Dash offered, pushing his glasses up as if unsure whether he should speak into this moment.
“Yes!” Dad pointed at Dash. “A compendium.” He blew his cheeks out. “You kids have had more than your fair share thrown at you. Stick together. Gather the clues. Don’t give up. And remember—every good riddle has a safeguard built into it, a way for the seeker to solve the riddle, when all else fails.” He grew serious again. “If ever anything should happen to me—if my stories should stop—watch for the safeguard. It’ll come.”
six
And so began the gift. Dad giving, and giving, and giving them stories. True ones, made-up ones, and some a mysterious mingling in between. “To remember the God who is coming, and coming, and coming to find your heart,” he’d said. “Wherever you are, whatever’s happened. With every miracle around every ordinary corner.” It did not feel like he was riddling them, only continuing his nightly stories.
As she grew, it felt as if he was withholding some great story behind them all, but she began to understand that the stories were perhaps his own way of fighting the darkness. But even more, they were his way of giving her a way out of hers. They reached into her grief, spinning one step at a time into place, forming an invisible staircase out of the pit she had found herself in. And Dash was always there too, always faithful.
Until one day the thread between them was snipped. Cut quick, when Dash did not come. When she went to fetch him from his flat, the door stood propped open, revealing dark emptiness, with moonlight falling across the cold floor. Lucy felt for the first time what Dashel had felt all his life: forgotten.