Keeper of the Light

  “Annie…”

  “My father said you’re trying to pull yourself up in the world through me, but that you’ll only succeed in dragging me down with you.”

  He wanted to throw something against the wall. “Do you believe that crap?”

  “Of course not, but I feel like I’m killing him, Paul.”

  “He’s trying to kill you. He’s trying to make you a little clone of his goddamned fucked self.”

  She pressed her hands to her ears and he sat down next to her, pulling her close to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, when you see your father, you get under his spell or something. It’ll pass in a little while and you’ll feel okay about yourself again. And about me. We’ll be in New Hope again this summer and…”

  She shook her head. “I’m not going to New Hope this summer.”

  He froze. “What do you mean?”

  “I need to be by myself for a while. I need to think everything through.”

  “Will you stay with your parents?” He could not bear the thought of her spending two months with them. She would be entirely brainwashed by the end of the summer.

  “No,” she said. “I thought I’d travel down the coast. From here to Florida.”

  “What do you mean, from here to Florida? Who would you go with?”

  “Myself.”

  “You can’t do that. What if your car breaks down?”

  “I’m going to hitchhike.”

  Paul stood up. “You have this all planned out, don’t you? You’ve been thinking about this for a long time and haven’t said a word to me about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Annie, I can’t be apart from you for the entire summer.”

  “Maybe it won’t be that long. Maybe the first week it’ll all come clear to me, and I’ll write to you every single day.”

  He went to New Hope alone. He took a part in summer stock but was reviewed poorly, his first truly bad review ever. At first Annie sent him postcards daily from coastal towns in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. She’d write volumes in the little space on the cards, her handwriting squeezed together almost unintelligibly, telling him about the beaches, the water, the arcades. She was meeting lots of interesting people, she wrote, which disturbed him. How many of those people were men? She’d sign the cards, I love you, though, and he tried to relax, to tell himself she would come back refreshed and free of her father’s shadow. Little boxes wrapped in brown paper arrived for him several times a week and inside he’d find shells, a starfish, a seahorse. Annie and her gifts.

  Suddenly, though, the gifts stopped, along with the postcards. He was sick with worry. After five days without a word from her, he called her parents.

  “She decided to stay in North Carolina awhile,” her mother told him.

  “Well, I…I was hearing from her just about every day and then the cards stopped…and I just thought.” He grimaced. He could imagine Annie’s mother smiling with delight on the other end of the telephone. “Where in North Carolina is she?” he asked.

  “The beach somewhere. I think they call it the Outer Banks down there.”

  Two more weeks followed without a word from Annie. He was in pain. His body literally ached when he got out of bed in the morning. He couldn’t imagine she would leave him hanging this way, that she would cut herself off from him so completely. He read her last postcard over and over again, and the “I love you” at the end seemed just as sincere as it did in the first one. Maybe her mother was lying. Maybe Annie was in Boston. Maybe she wrote to him daily and her mother intercepted the letters.

  Then the note came from Kitty Hawk.

  Dear Paul,

  I’ve written this letter in my mind a thousand times and it never comes out right, but I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve met someone down here. His name is Alec and I’ve fallen in love with him. I didn’t plan for this to happen, Paul, please believe me. I left B.C. with thoughts only of you, but also with the knowledge that things between us were not what they once were. I still love you—I think I always will. You’re the one who taught me that receiving could be just as much an act of love as giving. Oh God, Paul, you’re the last person in the world I would ever want to hurt. I doubt I’ll return to B.C. in the fall. It’s just as well we don’t ever see each other again. Please, please forgive me.

  Annie

  He considered going to North Carolina to find her, claim her, but he didn’t want her on those terms. He became obsessed with thoughts of harming himself. He could no longer drive at night without being tempted to slip his car across the white line into oncoming traffic, and he’d sometimes sit for hours in his kitchen, staring at the blade of a steak knife, imagining how it would feel to draw it through the vein in his arm.

  He quit the play and moved home for the rest of the summer, where his sisters clucked over him and his parents tried to force him to eat. They treated him like the sick, withdrawing addict that he was. Still, he could not stand it when his sisters called Annie a two-faced bitch.

  He returned to Boston College a walking dead man. He tried out for the junior play, but Harry Saunders said he was “lifeless,” and cast someone else in the part Paul knew Harry had intended for him. He lost interest in acting altogether and switched his major to journalism. In November, one of Annie’s friends told him that Annie had married Alec O’Neill in North Carolina. O’Neill. He supposed an Irishman was preferable to an Italian in her parents’ eyes.

  And in hers as well.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Alec was calling Olivia in the evenings. The first time he had an excuse. He remembered her saying that she’d appeared on talk shows after the publication of The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit. He could picture her on TV, poised and attractive and persuasive. Only in his fantasy, it was the lighthouse she was talking about.

  “Would you ever consider taking on one of the speaking engagements?” he asked her that first night he called. The kids were out and he was sitting alone in the living room, watching the sun melt into the sound. “We get a lot of requests, and after the brochure is put together we’ll be inundated. There are too many for me to handle alone right now.”

  “But I don’t know a thing about the lighthouse,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

  She hesitated, and he wondered if he was asking too much of her. “Why is the lighthouse so important to you, Alec?”

  Alec looked across the room at the ten small, oval-shaped stained glass windows built into the side wall of the house. Their designs were barely visible in the dusky evening light. “That’s where I met Annie,” he said. “I worked there the summer after I graduated from college. Annie was traveling down the coast and we just happened to be at the lighthouse at the same time one evening. It became sort of symbolic to me, I guess.”

  “Well, I’ll do it, Alec. As long as the time doesn’t conflict with my hours in the ER.”

  “That’s great.” He ran his hand over the arm of the chair. “By the way, I bumped into Paul in the grocery store yesterday.”

  “You did?” She sounded alarmed. “What did you tell him?”

  “Oh, I just asked him a few questions about his fantasy life.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “I hope you’re kidding.”

  “Of course I’m kidding.” He frowned. “This really isn’t a joking matter with you, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We just talked about the lighthouse.”

  He didn’t bother with an excuse when he called Olivia the following night. Or the night after that. On the fourth night, he got home late after driving Clay to Duke for a five-day orientation. It was ten-thirty, too late to call her, and he felt as though something was missing from his day when he got into bed. The emptiness of the bed overwhelmed him in a way it had not for several weeks, and he picked up the phone and dialed Olivia’s number. He knew it by heart.

  She sounded sleepy when she answered
.

  “I woke you,” he said.

  “No. Well, yes, but that’s okay.”

  There was a silence, and an odd feeling passed through him that he was talking to her from his bed, and she from hers. He could picture her there. Silky-straight hair. Fair skin. Green eyes.

  “I took Clay to Duke for an orientation today,” he said. “It seems strange not having him around the house.”

  “Maybe this is a good time for you and Lacey to do something together.”

  “Ha. Fat chance.” He felt a sense of dread about the next four days without Clay’s presence to ease the tension between Lacey and himself.

  It took Olivia three nights of phone calls to persuade him. He stopped by Lacey’s room before breakfast that Wednesday morning. She was dressed for school in yellow shorts that were too short and a T-shirt from the sporting goods store where Clay worked. She was hunting on the floor of her closet for her other sandal.

  He sat down on the corner of her bed. “Let’s do something tonight, Lacey,” he said. “Just you and me.”

  She looked up at him. “Why?”

  “Like we used to. Remember? We used to spend a lot of time together.”

  “I’m going out with Jessica tonight.”

  “You see Jessica every night. Come on. Give your old Dad some of your time.”

  She leaned back against the wall next to her closet, the sandal in her hand. “What would we do?”

  He shrugged. “Anything you want. You used to like to bowl.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “We could see a movie.”

  “I’ve seen every movie that’s playing around here. They never change.”

  “Night fishing?” he offered. “You used to like that.”

  “Yeah. When I was about eight.”

  He sighed. “Help me out, Lacey. What can we do tonight?”

  “I know.” She suddenly looked excited, and he leaned forward. “I could, like, go out with Jessica and you could stay home with your lighthouse pictures.”

  He stared at her, hurt, and she sighed and set her sandal on the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said, defeat in her voice. “We can do whatever you want.”

  He stood up. “Fishing then. I’ll make the reservations.”

  She wore her radio headset in the car on the drive to the inlet. She slouched in the front seat of the Bronco, her feet against the dashboard tapping time to music he couldn’t hear.

  They arrived at the inlet and Lacey got out of the car, fastening the radio to the waistband of her shorts. She walked ahead of him, and his fantasy of spending a quiet evening in the company of his daughter fell apart.

  “Lacey?”

  She continued walking. Whether she was ignoring him or truly couldn’t hear him with the headset on, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She was cutting him out one way or the other.

  He caught up to her, stopping her with his hand on her arm. “Please don’t take the radio on the boat,” he said. “Leave it in the car, Lace. Please.”

  She muttered something under her breath, but returned to the car with him and left the radio on the front seat.

  She was the only female on the boat. There were a dozen men from their early twenties on up, and they stared openly at Lacey when she boarded, forcing Alec to look at her with a more objective eye. Her clothes looked suddenly provocative. Her shorts were insanely short, her legs long and slender and remarkably tanned, given her delicate skin. She’d changed out of her T-shirt into some sort of tank top—a flimsy piece of white cloth with a scooped neck and a hacked-off length so that it didn’t quite reach the waistband of her shorts. The nipples of her small breasts were visible beneath the thin white fabric. She was carrying a blue windbreaker that he wanted to wrap around her.

  One of the younger men smacked his lips and grinned at her as she hopped from the pier to the boat.

  “I’m her father,” Alec said to the gawking young man. “Watch it.”

  “Dad,” Lacey said. “See why I don’t want to go out with you? You’re so embarrassing.”

  He found a spot for them at the side of the boat, near the cabin and away from the other fishermen, who occasionally turned from their posts for a beer or fresh bait and stared in Lacey’s direction. Was this what happened every time she went out on the street? If these guys were as blatant about it here, when she was with her father, what would they be like if he were not around?

  Lacey baited her hook with a chunk of mackerel, effortlessly, as if she did it every day of her life.

  “You were always better than Clay at this,” Alec said. “He could never bring himself to touch the bait.”

  “Clay’s a wimp sometimes.” She sat down and leaned against the back of her chair.

  Alec sat next to her and breathed in the scent of salt and seaweed as the coastline faded into the distance.

  “Remember the one that got away, Lace?”

  “Huh?”

  “The blue you caught that jumped off the deck.”

  She nearly smiled, turning her face away from him so he wouldn’t see. “A long time ago,” she said.

  “It was huge. I helped you reel it in and you were so excited, but once we got the damn thing off the hook, back it went.”

  “No one believed me,” she said quietly, but with a certain indignation. “And you said you’d gotten a picture of it and…”

  “And the film got wet and didn’t turn out.”

  She laughed, but caught herself quickly. “Well, I don’t think Mom ever believed it.”

  “Yes, she did. She just liked teasing you about it.”

  They were quiet for a few minutes. “I hate bluefish,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I hate fish.”

  It grew dark quickly, and with the darkness came a sudden blustery wind. The sea began to kick up a little, the boat bouncing and rocking more than Alec would have liked. He and Lacey put on their windbreakers.

  Lacey suddenly stood up. “I’ve got something, Dad.” Her pole was bending, the reel clicking rapidly as the fish carried the bait out to sea.

  “Just hold on, Lace. Let it run. That’s it.”

  She hung on to the pole, the tip of her tongue caught between her lips in concentration. “It stopped!” she said.

  “Okay, reel in the line. Get the slack out of it. Do you want some help?”

  “Uh uh.”

  One of the young men came over and stood by her side. “Atta girl,” he said as she cranked the reel. “It’s probably gonna take off on you another time or two. Just…”

  She yelped as the fish began stripping line from her reel once more, but it quickly tired of the battle this time, and she started reeling it in again, laughing.

  Another of the men had come over to watch. “It’s a blue,” he said, as the fish thrashed wildly just below the surface of the water. “And a real beauty. Almost as pretty as the fisherman.”

  Lacey managed to grin at him as she struggled with her pole.

  “Fisherwoman,” the first young man corrected him.

  “Right,” said his friend. “No doubt about that.”

  Lacey blushed. Alec thought she looked like a trembling mass of erogenous zones.

  The first fisherman reached over the railing with the net as Lacey pulled the bluefish from the water. “Eight pounds, I’d say.” He scooped the fish up easily and lifted it onto the deck.

  “Don’t let it jump back in!” Lacey screamed, and she lowered herself next to Alec, holding on to the fish with a rag while he extracted the hook from its mouth. One of the young men lifted the lid of the cooler, and Alec dropped the fish inside. Then, with one last look at Lacey, the fishermen returned to their own poles at the stern.

  Alec and Lacey baited their hooks again and took their seats. Lacey was smiling.

  “That was good work, Lacey,” he said.

  “We don’t have to eat it, though, do we?” she asked.

  “No. We can give it to Nola. She loves bluefish.”

  “Noler,” sh
e corrected him and he laughed. Annie, with her Boston accent, could never master those open “a”s. “I’d like you to meet my friend Noler and her daughter Jessiker,” Lacey said, mimicking her mother’s husky voice.

  “She wasn’t quite that bad,” Alec said.

  “I’m just glad she didn’t name me Melissa or something.”

  He smiled at a memory. “She wanted to name you Emma, but I refused. I told her I’d only go along with it if she could say the name for a week straight without turning it into Emmer. But of course, she couldn’t do it.”

  “Emma. God, Dad, thanks, you saved me.”

  The young man who’d called her a real beauty walked by, and Lacey turned to smile at him.

  “I should tell them you’re barely fourteen,” Alec said.

  Lacey shrugged. “Well, Mom was only fifteen the first time she…you know.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me.”

  “She did?” Thanks, Annie.

  “I mean, she said it wasn’t good to do it that young, but she turned out all right.”

  “She was lucky she didn’t get pregnant. And there are diseases around now that she didn’t have to worry about back then.”

  “I know all that, Dad.”

  He couldn’t see Lacey’s face, but he could practically hear her rolling her eyes, and he waited a moment or two before he spoke again. “So, does that mean you’re planning to have sex next year when you’re fifteen?”

  “God, Dad, that really isn’t any of your business.”

  He stopped himself from telling her it most certainly was his business. This was too good. She was actually talking to him. He probably should say something about birth control. If he brought it up, though, wasn’t that tantamount to giving her the go-ahead?

  “Jessica’s done it,” Lacey said suddenly, her eyes glued to the water.

  “What?”

  “God, I shouldn’t have said that. You won’t tell Nola, Dad, will you?” she pleaded. “Please don’t. Jessica would kill me.”