A calendar sheet lay beneath the journal. The number 14 had been circled twice: once in pencil, once by the wet bottom of a cup. The year had been torn away with the upper edge.
Elias kept such sheets in a desk drawer. Each September, another turned up. For a long time he thought they were copies. Then he noticed that the cup ring shifted each time. The date stayed where it was. The hand that set down the cup did not.
On one sheet someone had written: “The light returned.”
On another: “I returned to where the light had been.”
The sentences had lain together for a long time. Elias had read them too quickly and remembered them as one. Now he moved the sheets apart, leaving a strip of table between them.
an unsigned note
Do not place only the matching things side by side.
Leave room for what should have happened again, and did not.
He took out the remaining sheets. On one, the lighthouse had gone dark. On another, fog had hidden it. A third was blank. Until that morning, he had thrown the blank ones away.
Elias placed the empty sheet beside the written ones. The paper had yellowed in the same way; the same dark line ran along the fold. Only the account was missing. He could no longer tell whether nothing had happened or nobody had written it down.
The drawer did not hold one day lived over and over. It held different days that had been given the same square of the calendar. Resemblance had helped him find them. Now he had to keep their differences from being lost.
At the bottom of the last sheet, 2 was followed immediately by 14. Elias counted what was missing: eleven numbers. He ran a finger over the paper. Between the second and the fourteenth there was no tear, no seam; the edge of one square touched the next.
He turned the sheet over.
“Does anyone remember the missing days?”
The question was in his handwriting. There was no answer. Elias wanted to draw in the missing squares, but set down his pencil. Eleven new boxes would make the page look right. They would not tell him where the numbers had gone.
He left this sheet on top. Now he needed another record — one whose year had survived.
The clock read 06:14. He was about to copy the time onto the calendar, then stopped.
The clock told him when he was looking.
The sheet had not yet told him what he was looking at.