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then, when they were in Gloucester and he was still writing an average of ten pages a day, he’d lie beside his sleepless wife at night, hold her hand, tell her stories. He would remember things he thought he had forgotten long ago: the interior of his grandmother’s apartment; his mother’s colorful dresses, detailed one by one; the names and faces of his childhood friends. He told her about the silent ski excursions through the woods with his father, the sadness he sometimes felt when he was little, the snow falling everywhere on his trail, white, blue, silver, gray. And he lay beside her and talked and talked and occasionally she fell asleep, but more often than not she didn’t, and he was nevertheless thankful for the warmth and nearness of her and he stroked her hand until he talked himself into his own sleep. And when Jon went quiet, sometimes dozing off mid-word, she took over. She told of dreams she’d had as a child and of dreams she had now. She told of films she had seen and books she had read, “And Jon,” she whispered, “do you read and also write in order to become someone else?” He liked lying next to her, listening to her voice, but was too tired to reply. “Do you think it’s even possible to put yourself in someone else’s place, to suffer, breathe,feel as they do?” And when he still didn’t answer she told him of when she was a little girl and of her father and how, instead of reading to her, he recounted snatches from books he loved. Siri was only six and her little brother, Syver, was four, but that didn’t stop their father, who told the children about Karenin, Anna Karenina’s husband, who was so strict that everyone was afraid of him, when in fact he was just very sad. And Siri remembered how she had understood what it must be like to be Karenin, even though she was just a little girl. And she told Jon, as she had so many times, about the time when Syver died in the forest, about her mother, who started drinking, who never staggered but simply moved fitfully around the house, suddenly popping up in a corner of the living room, suddenly on the edge of the bed, suddenly standing over pots and pans in the vast kitchen, suddenly in front of the mirror and “I tried to grab hold of her, but she slipped through my fingers and into the pots, into the mirror.” And she told of how her father ran off to Slite on the island of Gotland and married Sofia, starting up his own stonemasonry, and of the time when he paid a visit to Mailund and had forgotten to bring a birthday present, so to make up for it he cut up his gabardine coat and gave it to her, telling her that it was an invisibility cloak. It was her father—on one of the few occasions in Siri’s childhood when she had visited him in Slite—who had taken her to the lighthouse on the nearby island of Fårö. She liked Slite, liked the cement factory that seemed to loom over the whole town and the tired little streets in the center and the white dust that settled over everything and everyone, but Fårö was something else, Fårö was too beautiful, almost forbidding, with its redpoppies and pebbled beaches and shifting lights of gray, and she remembered not wanting to go back there and she really hadn’t thought much about that trip with her father until she and Jon and Alma were standing on Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester more than twenty years later and thousands of miles away, looking at the silhouettes of the two lighthouses, the twin lights, on Thacher Island.
    And Jon would turn around and say to her, “Your light shines more.” And she would make fun of him for coming up with a line like that, “You really do know your lines, Jon,” she would say, but she’d let him get away with it. That was then. These days she never let him get away with anything.
    Yet it was something he’d say to her from time to time: “Your light shines more.” More than the lighthouses on Thacher Island, more than the bright rooms they had