“What?” Olivia had not heard anyone ask that question in a very long time, and yet immediately she was transported back to the tiny, one-bedroom house she grew up in. She could hear people asking her mother, how are the twins, and her mother’s slurred reply.
Alec nodded toward her middle.
“Oh.” Olivia laughed. “Please, Alec. Twins I don’t need.” She opened the carton of rice, her fingers shaking.
“Are you okay?” Alec asked. “Or are you just hungry?”
He had graciously given her an out for her nervousness and she opted not to take it. “It feels strange having you here,” she said. “Like I’m doing something wrong.”
“Oh.” He stopped a spoonful of rice midway to his plate. “Would you like me to go?”
“No,” she said quickly. “I was just wondering how I would ever explain this to my husband if he decided to pick tonight to stop over.”
Alec shrugged and passed her the carton of rice. “We’d just tell him that we’re two lonely people who get together from time to time to ruminate over our losses. Does he come over often?”
“Hardly ever.” She spooned rice onto her own plate. “There’s something I have to tell you about him.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, first of all, you’ve met him. His name is Paul Macelli and he’s working on your lighthouse committee, although I didn’t know that the last time I saw you.”
Alec set his fork down and stared at her. “Paul? The journalist? He’s your husband? God, I didn’t picture your husband anything like Paul.”
“What do you mean?”
“I figured your husband would be someone…I don’t know, brawny. Dark-haired. In need of a shave. A Neanderthal type. A little mean-spirited and thick-skulled. Someone stupid enough to leave someone like you for a fantasy.”
Olivia laughed.
“Paul seems very…cerebral.”
“Yes, he is.”
“Very sensitive. He interviewed the old lighthouse keeper and sent me an essay of sorts on what he’d learned. It’s…I don’t know…moving. Captivating. I expected something interesting, but dry, you know, just a few paragraphs to get the facts across. He’s very talented.”
She smiled. “I know.”
“He’s quiet, though. Reserved.”
“Not always.” She could imagine, though, how reserved Paul would be around Annie’s husband. “There’s something else,” Olivia said. She would say this carefully. She did not want Alec to be able to put the pieces of this puzzle together. “Did you know he wrote that article on Annie in Seascape Magazine?”
“He did? I never even noticed the guy’s name. I know Annie had a few interviews with him…that was Paul?”
“Yes.” She tensed. Please don’t figure this out.
“It was a terrific article. I was a little worried about how it would come out, because Annie just wasn’t herself last fall. She was in one of her down moods.” Alec shuddered. “I hadn’t seen her quite that withdrawn in a long time, so I was relieved when I read the article and saw that he’d managed to capture the real Annie.” He took a swallow of tea, then looked up at her, a puzzled expression on his face. “Why didn’t he tell me he wrote it?”
“Well, it’s like you said. He’s reserved. Modest.” She ate a little of the spicy hot Hunan chicken. “He and I wrote a book together,” she said. “Do you remember that terrible train wreck in Washington back in 1981?”
“When most of the cars went into the Potomac?”
She nodded. “That was how we met. Paul worked for the Washington Post and he was covering the story in the ER at the hospital where I was a resident.”
She hadn’t even noticed Paul, but he had certainly noticed her. He’d introduced himself to her when the crisis was over, two full days after it had begun. He was in love with her, he said. She was so coolly confident, so skillful with the patients, yet compassionate with the families. He showed her the articles about the crash in the Post, the factual articles other reporters had written, and the articles he’d written himself about the amazing young female doctor in the ER. She was taken aback by his romantic idealism, but she could not deny the thrill of knowing he had observed her being herself and had fallen in love with her.
“So, a few years later we decided to write a book about it,” Olivia continued. “We followed the wreck from different perspectives—the passengers and the rescue workers and the hospital staff. It turned out pretty well. We did the talk show circuit and won a couple of awards.”
“I’d like to read it.”
She got up and walked into the living room, where she pulled her worn copy of The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit from the bookshelf. She carried it back to the deck and handed it to Alec.
“Oh, my God,” he said as he studied the cover. It was an aerial view of the wreck, taken from a great height so that at first it was difficult to see that between the two cherry blossom-covered banks of the river lay a wreck that had taken forty-two lives. He opened the book and read the jacket, then turned to the back page to read the little blurb about her and Paul.
“He’s had a book of poetry published?” Alec asked.
“Yes. It’s called Sweet Arrival.”
“Sweet Arrival.” Alec smiled. “What’s that refer to?”
“Me.” Olivia blushed. “He said his whole life fell into place when I came into it.”
Alec looked at her sympathetically. He reached across the table and softly squeezed her hand, his gold-braided wedding band catching the light from the kitchen. Then he returned his eyes to the book jacket. The small black and white picture of her and Paul was upside down from Olivia’s perspective. Their smiles looked like frowns.
Alec shook his head. “That must have been a nightmare. How do you do that kind of work without falling apart?”
“You get used to it. Hardened a little, I guess. I cry at sad movies and that sort of thing. And sometimes in restaurants over lunch, but I almost never cry at work.” She looked down at the book cover where it rested next to Alec’s plate. “I did cry a little the night Annie died, though.”
“Why?” Alec asked. “With all the horrendous things you’ve seen in emergency rooms, why would that get to you?”
“It was you,” she said, telling him only half the truth. “Your eyes. You were so devastated. I was just losing Paul, and…I don’t mean to compare what I was going through to what you went through…but I felt your sadness. For the longest time I couldn’t get your face out of my mind.”
Alec looked down at his plate. He started to lift his fork to his mouth, then rested it on the table, raising his eyes once more to Olivia’s. “Do you remember my daughter?” he asked.
Olivia smiled. “She tried to beat me up.”
“Did she? I don’t remember that.” He turned his head to look out at the sound. “She’s changing. I didn’t notice it because I’ve just tuned my kids out since Annie died. My son’s done all right. He’s working and getting ready to go to Duke in the fall. But Lacey…” He shook his head. “She’s started smoking—I guess that’s no big deal. Most kids her age try it. But she cries so easily now. The other night she came home in tears with her blouse buttoned wrong. I don’t want to read too much into…”
“How old is she?” Olivia interrupted him.
“Thir—fourteen. Just.”
Olivia set her own fork down and folded her arms across her chest. “It’s a vulnerable age for a girl,” she said. “Especially one without a mother.”
“Well, I’m trying not to be too naive. She’s always been a very good kid, very responsible, and I’m sure she’s not having sex or anything but…”
“Maybe against her will.” She spoke carefully.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she was crying. Disheveled. Maybe someone…I don’t mean she was raped out on the street, but you know how boys can be and maybe she was at a party, and someone…took advantage of her.”
Alec’s eyes had widened. “You’re certainly r
eassuring.”
“Sorry. Working in an ER gives you a warped view of the world. Why don’t you talk to her about it? Be straightforward.”
“She won’t talk to me. I tell myself it’s typical adolescent stuff, but Clay never acted this way and I’m not sure how to handle it. Annie and I just let them be. There were no rules they had to follow. We trusted them, and they were basically perfect.”
“What do you mean, no rules?”
“No curfew, no restrictions. They made their own decisions about where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do.” He pushed his plate to the center of the table. “Even when they were little, we let them decide what to wear and what to eat. Annie was big on making them take responsibility for themselves, and they did a good job of it. But now Lacey sits at the table with a radio headset on. I want to say, take that radio off and listen to me, damn it.” He struck the table with his fist. “And don’t curse at me. Talk to me. But Annie would never have made those kinds of demands on her. I can’t figure out what Annie would have done if Lacey had acted up like this when she was alive.”
Olivia sat back in her chair. “Maybe it doesn’t matter what Annie would have done,” she said. “Do what Alec wants to do. Tell her she can’t listen to the radio at the table. Tell her…”
“I can’t. I’m afraid of losing her, too. I…” He shut his eyes for a second, and then stood up. “Excuse me.” He set his napkin on the table and walked into the house.
Olivia closed up the cartons and moved them to the tray, thinking just as he had done: what would Annie do now? Annie would never have let a distraught guest leave the room without following him to make sure he was all right. She left the food on the tray and walked into the kitchen. Alec was at the window, staring out at the sound. She rested her hand on his bare arm. “Alec?”
“I’m afraid of my daughter,” he said. The sound was reflected in his eyes, turning the pale blue a milky gray. “I’m afraid to look at her because every time I do I see Annie.” He glanced down at Olivia, and she lowered her hand self-consciously to her side. “She was with Annie that night at the shelter,” he said.
“I didn’t know that.”
“She was helping in the food line. She was right next to Annie when she was shot. She saw it happen.”
“That’s how she knew there was so little blood,” Olivia said. “I always wondered about that. How horrible for her, Alec.”
“I could have lost her, too. I’m so aware now of how quickly you can lose someone. If I get too close to her or to Clay and something happened to them…I couldn’t go through it again. And if I try to figure out a way to discipline her, I’m afraid she’ll hate me. She already seems to.” He lifted his hands to the counter, and looked once more at Olivia. “I completely forgot her birthday. One hell of a dad, right?”
She felt a sudden, wrenching twist of sympathy for Lacey. Most of her childhood birthdays had been forgotten, but at least she’d had Clint to share the hurt with. “Well,” she said. “I guess she’s learning that you’re human.”
Alec turned away from the window and leaned back against the counter. “What were you like at her age?” he asked.
“Oh.” She felt herself color. “You can’t use me as a comparison. I wasn’t particularly…normal.”
He laughed. “You want to explain that?”
“Just being a twin and all.” She knew it was the “and all” that told the story, that had made her unlike other girls her age. She wanted to tell him. She had the feeling he would understand, and her heartbeat quickened at the thought of sharing her past with him. She opened her mouth to speak, but just then he sighed and stretched, shaking away the last few minutes, and Olivia quickly pulled herself back to the present.
“I’d better go,” he said. “Let me get the book.” He walked back to the deck and returned with the copy of The Eastern Spirit she’d given him. She walked him to the door, a little shaken at how close she’d come to telling him things about herself no one knew. No one except Paul.
Exactly what would Alec say to Paul at the next lighthouse committee meeting?
“Alec,” she said, “I’d rather Paul didn’t know about us being friends.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t want to complicate things.” They were complicated enough as it was. “Can we just say that you and I met to talk about what happened in the emergency room that night? Let him think that’s all there was to it?”
He frowned. “I’m a terrible liar, Olivia. It’s not like we’re having an affair.”
“I’d just rather he didn’t view you as a rival. The two of you have to work together, remember?”
He nodded. “All right.”
After he left, Olivia loaded the dishwasher and began sweeping the deck. She had to keep busy or the memories would seep in. They would stay for days once they started, and already the memory of her tenth birthday was taking shape in her mind. That was when she finally came to the realization that her mother was incapable of keeping the days straight. She couldn’t stay sober long enough to cook a meal, much less to remember a birthday.
Clint had made Olivia a card in school during the morning of their tenth birthday, and when he brought it over to her on the playground at recess, some of the kids starting taunting him, as they always did when one of the “slow-learners” stopped by. One of the boys, Tim Anderson, grabbed the card from his hand.
“Look at what the retard brought Livvie,” he said, waving it in the air. A few other boys gathered around Tim to read the card as Clint stood nearby, his face open and trusting. Olivia ached for her brother. She knew what the card would look like: the p’s in happy would be backwards; birthday would be misspelled. He’d probably drawn a picture of a cake as he’d done the year before. It would look like the drawing of a five-year-old.
She tried to grab the card from Tim’s hand.
“Love,” Tim mocked. “He signed it love Clint. Is he your boyfriend, Livvie? He’s a retard.” With that the boys jumped on Clint, four of them, pinning him to the ground and pounding on him with their fists while Clint struggled helplessly to get free. Olivia watched the ineffectual flailing of his hands around the heads of his assailants. She beat at their backs with her fists, screaming for them to leave him alone. She kicked at their legs, their sides, until Mrs. Jasper came out of the building. She walked toward them briskly, clapping her hands, crying “Children! Stop it this instant!” Upon hearing her voice, Tim and his cohorts immediately scattered and Olivia dropped to the ground next to her brother. His nose was bleeding and his face was red and streaked with tears.
Mrs. Jasper smoothed her skirt over her legs and knelt down on the other side of Clint. She pulled a lacy handkerchief from her skirt pocket and pressed it to his nose. “There, dear,” Mrs. Jasper said. “Are you all right?”
“Yeth,” Clint answered, with his little lisp.
Olivia spotted the card he’d made for her a few yards away and ran over to pick it up. It was crushed almost beyond recognition, but she could still make out the birthday cake with its ten candles. Clint had colored it green.
“They’re such bullies,” Mrs. Jasper was saying to Clint, as Olivia knelt beside them again.
“Avery’ll beat ’em up.” Clint sat up, still holding the bloody handkerchief to his nose.
Olivia looked toward the corner of the playground where the older kids were playing dodgeball. Her brother Avery had the ball, and she watched as he threw it hard at one of the girls who jumped out of the way just in time. Yes, Avery would take great pleasure in beating up Tim Anderson. He would use any excuse at all for a fight.
Mrs. Jasper looked at Olivia. “Maybe Clint should go home for the rest of the day. Shall I call your mother?”
Olivia shook her head, aware that Mrs. Jasper knew the futility of calling Mrs. Simon. “I’ll walk him.” Olivia held out her hand to her brother and he locked his blue-stained fingers with hers. Blueberry season was long over, and the few dollars the Simon chi
ldren had earned picking the berries had already been spent. Still, it would be weeks before the stain left their fingers.
She walked Clint home, hoping their mother had passed out on the sofa by now, because Olivia knew what she would say when she heard Clint had gotten beaten up again. She’d shake her head, her thin, uncombed hair sticking up in dark tufts from her head. “God must’ve screwed up the day he made you two, Livvie,” she’d say, as though Clint couldn’t understand how she was insulting him. “Gave you Clint’s brains on top of your own, so it’s up to you to take care of him.”
Their mother was on the sofa, her doughy face pressed into the soft cushions. The bottle lay on its side on the floor next to her. Olivia tucked Clint into his bed, one of three in the cramped bedroom she shared with her brothers. Clint was worn out from his ordeal and fell asleep quickly, the blood scabbed and scratchy-looking around his nose. Back in the living room, Olivia picked up the bottle from the floor next to the sofa and put it as high as she could reach in the kitchen cupboard so her mother would have to hunt for it when she woke up. Then she left the house, thinking she would have to make Clint a card, too, when she got back to school. She knew it was all either of them would get.
Olivia stopped sweeping the deck to listen. Someone was in the house. She peered through the sliding glass doors into the living room, but it was too dark to see. Had she forgotten to lock the front door after Alec left?
“Olivia?”
Paul. She let out her breath as he stepped onto the deck. She was annoyed he thought he could simply walk into this house at any time, but she was too relieved to see him to say anything that might put him on the defensive. “You startled me,” she said. If he had come over twenty minutes earlier he would have gotten quite a surprise himself. She thought of the peacock feather in the kitchen. She would have to keep him from seeing it.
“Sorry. I knocked, but you probably couldn’t hear me out here.” He sat down at the table and looked up at her. “I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “If you’re willing.”
“Of course I’m willing.” She rested the broom against the house and sat down across from him.