The Wave Photographer – Part 2: The Lighthouse Platform

The swell faded in the last week of February.

The sea dropped slowly, wave by wave, from monsters to merely enormous to ordinarily large. The crowds left the cliff. The jet-skis went home. A clear cold sunlight settled over the beach, turning the water to blue glass.

Hayley had stayed. She had filed her piece, and then another. She slept in a small room above a café and spent every day on the cliff with Inês, learning to read the horizon. Inês taught her to work a lens. Hayley taught her to write a caption. They had grown into a comfortable pair, speaking little, sharing a flask, bumping elbows at the tripod.

On the last evening, Inês took her up the old lighthouse.

They climbed the narrow spiral stair in silence, round and round, up into the cool, echoing tower. At the top, a small iron platform looked out over the whole coast. The sea lay calm and gold below, with a few long, lazy waves unrolling onto the sand. The sun was sinking into the horizon, enormous, vermilion. A flight of gulls crossed it in a ragged V.

"It is beautiful," said Hayley.

"It is the quietest it gets."

"I like it as much as the monsters."

"Do you?"

"I think I like it more." She turned. "Because I have someone to share it with."

Inês went very still. The last light turned her face to bronze. "You are leaving on Sunday."

"I could change the flight."

"Could you?"

"Yes. Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"May I kiss you, Inês? On top of a lighthouse?"

"Yes," said Inês, her voice cracking. "And if you say stop, you must shoot with me next winter."

"I'd shoot with you every winter."

Hayley kissed her, salty and warm, a hand rising to her shaved head. Inês kissed her back with a slow, deep, astonished joy, her scarred nose cold against Hayley's cheek. The sun sank, trailing gold. The last wave of the day rolled in, small and silver, and broke in a gentle hush.

When they parted, both of them were smiling.

"Green?" asked Inês.

"Green," said Hayley. "Very green."

She changed her flight, and then her address. Their book of the winter's waves has a single photograph on its last page: a small gentle wave, at sunset, taken from a lighthouse.

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