The Lighthouse on Cape Breton

The road to Cape Colquhoun ran out three kilometres before the lighthouse did.

Clara Boyd stopped her rented pickup where the asphalt turned to gravel, and then, a kilometre further on, where the gravel turned to two muddy ruts through yellow grass. The wind off the Atlantic was strong enough to rock the truck on its springs. Ahead, at the very end of the headland, the lighthouse stood against a sky the colour of wet slate: a white octagonal tower, streaked with rust, with a keeper's cottage crouched beside it like a dog at its master's feet.

She had seen photographs. The photographs had not prepared her for how alone it was.

The research station of the Bedford Institute had leased the old keeper's cottage for the winter. Clara's job, for six months, was simple on paper: to maintain and collect data from a string of instruments anchored in the cold current off the northern tip of Cape Breton Island, where warm water from the south met the icy flow coming down from Labrador. Nobody else had wanted the posting. Clara, who had spent the last two years in a crowded lab in Halifax and the last six months recovering from a divorce she did not want to talk about, had volunteered almost before her supervisor finished describing it.

"There's a village about eight kilometres back," he had told her. "Petit-Étang. A general store, a church, a fish plant that's closed in winter. The lighthouse itself has been automated since 1987. A solar-powered LED on top. You won't need to touch it. The Coast Guard checks it twice a year."

The cottage key was under a flat stone by the door, exactly as promised. Inside, it smelled of salt, old wood and the faint chemical sweetness of mouse poison. There was a wood stove, a narrow bed, a kitchen table covered in a yellow plastic cloth and a window that looked straight out at the tower, thirty metres away.