Keeper of the Light

  She had to stay in the hospital the night before the surgery and Alec took a room in the hotel across the street. He watched television the entire night. If he fell asleep he might miss the alarm, and Annie would be taken into the OR before he’d have a chance to see her.

  He walked over to the hospital before dawn and went into her room as soon as they would let him. She looked beautiful, her hair falling around her shoulders, a smile of contentment on her face.

  “Oh, Alec.” She reached for his hand. “You didn’t sleep.”

  “Yes, I did,” he lied.

  She shook her head. “You have circles under your eyes. You look awful.”

  He tried to smile. “Thanks.”

  The nurse came in, telling them it was time for Annie to be wheeled to the operating room. Alec leaned over to kiss her, leaving his lips on hers for a long time. When he pulled away she whispered, “Don’t be scared.” They wheeled her out of the room and he struggled to keep his tears and his terror in check as he watched her disappear down the hall.

  The surgery went smoothly, and Annie was practically euphoric by the time he saw her back in her room.

  “My first thought when I came out of the anesthetic was, ‘I’m alive!’” she told him with a tired smile. “I was sick as a dog. It was wonderful.”

  Sitting on the plane was not easy for her. She fidgeted, adjusting her seat belt in an effort to get comfortable, but she didn’t utter a word of complaint.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, when they were somewhere over Virginia. “There are some changes I want to make about us.”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “We need more time together.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “I propose that we meet for lunch one day a week.”

  “Okay.”

  “A two-hour lunch,” she said. “In a motel.”

  He laughed. “I see.”

  “I really need this, Alec.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “We never get time away together, without the kids around. It’s so important. It’s more important than you know, than I can possibly explain to you.”

  They met on Fridays, from twelve to two, in any motel that would take them. In the winter it was easy to find a room, but during the summer, they paid an exorbitant price for the privilege of two hours in a prime-season motel. By that time, though, Alec knew those couple of hours were worth any amount of money. The intimacy they shared in the motel rooms spilled over to the other days of the week, and he saw a change in Annie. Her occasional moodiness, her periods of withdrawal, completely disappeared. Amazing that two hours a week could change so much.

  “I’ve never been happier in my entire life than I’ve been this past year,” she told him. They’d been meeting for well over a year by then, and her contentment was so complete that when the depression took hold of her late in the fall, it was impossible to miss. She grew nervous. Jumpy. She was tearful when they made love on those afternoons in the motel room, quiet as they ate the lunch she’d brought. She avoided his eyes when she spoke to him. Sometimes she’d cry for no reason at all. He’d find her weeping in the bathroom as she soaked in the tub, or he’d wake up in the middle of the night to hear her crying softly into her pillow. It seemed far worse than the other times, or maybe it was just that it had been so long since he’d seen that misery in her.

  “Let me in, Annie,” he’d say to her. “Let me help.” But she seemed no more aware of the reason for her distress than he was, and so he settled for holding her close to him, for trying to still her trembling with his arms.

  Then suddenly, she was gone. In the hospital that Christmas night, he’d remembered his promise to her and it had seemed ludicrous to him that she’d asked him to grieve for only one year. He couldn’t imagine ever being interested in another woman. A year seemed no longer than one rotation of the lighthouse beacon.

  Until he met Olivia, a woman as unlike Annie as a woman could be. She’s a friend, he told himself now as he coasted gently on the glider. She’s married to another man and carrying that man’s child.

  Maybe he should call her earlier in the evening, before he got into bed, the bed that still seemed filled with Annie’s presence. Maybe he shouldn’t call her at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Tom Nestor helped Olivia load the bags of magazines and paperbacks into the trunk of her car after her lesson that Saturday. The Manteo Retirement Home wasn’t far from the Battered Women’s Shelter, and since she was volunteering there tonight, she thought it was about time she made good on her promise to get the magazines out of the studio.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Tom said.

  “I meant to take them long before now,” Olivia said as she got in behind the steering wheel.

  “Hey, Olivia,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze through the window. “The panel’s a real peach.”

  She smiled at him and then glanced down at the panel she’d finally completed that morning, a geometric blend of colored and clear glass that was pretty enough to hang in one of her windows—one of the windows Paul would be unlikely to see if he stopped by the house.

  She drove into Manteo and parked across the street from the retirement home, directly in front of a small antique shop. Her eyes were drawn to the sidewalk in front of the little shop, where three antique dolls dressed in satin and lace sat on three splintery old wicker chairs. This must be where Annie had bought her daughter’s birthday gifts. She would have to tell Alec.

  She got out of the car and shaded her eyes to look at the retirement home. It was a lovely old house, painted sky-blue with sparkling white trim. A broad porch ran its entire width. From the street, Olivia could see that several of the front windows were filled with stained glass panels, no doubt made and donated by Saint Anne.

  She lugged the bags out of the trunk of the Volvo and walked across the street and up the sidewalk to the house. Although she’d been out of her air-conditioned car for only seconds, she was already perspiring. It was the hottest day of the summer so far and there was no breeze at all.

  About a dozen sturdy-looking white rocking chairs lined the porch, but only a couple of them were occupied—one by a shriveled old woman who looked too frail to be sitting out side in the heat, the other by a white-haired woman wearing sneakers and holding a newspaper on her lap.

  “Hello, there, young lady,” the woman in sneakers said as Olivia started up the steps. “You’re bringing us some magazines?”

  Olivia set the bags down on the top step and shaded her eyes again. The woman sat clear-eyed and stick-straight in the rocker, but this close up, Olivia could see she was quite old, her face lined and leathery. Someone had carefully trimmed and shaped her short white hair.

  “Yes,” Olivia said. “Is there someone inside I should leave them with?”

  “Sandy’s in there.”

  “Eh?” The second woman leaned forward, and the woman in sneakers spoke loudly into her ear.

  “She’s brought us magazines, Jane, you know, like Annie used to do?”

  Jane gave a slight nod before leaning back in her chair again and closing her eyes.

  “You knew Annie?” Olivia stepped under the porch roof, out of the sun.

  “Indeed I did.” The woman held out one long-boned hand to Olivia. “I’m Mary Poor, keeper of the Kiss River Lighthouse.”

  Olivia smiled and shook her hand, struck by the strength in the woman’s slender fingers. “I’m delighted to meet you, Mrs. Poor. My name’s Olivia Simon.”

  “Olivia. Pretty name. Kind of old-fashioned.”

  “I think you know my husband, Paul Macelli,” Olivia continued. “He interviewed you about the lighthouse.”

  Mary Poor narrowed her eyes at Olivia. “He’s got you running around, doing Annie’s old chores?”

  Olivia was speechless for a moment, trying to figure out which of them was confused. “No,” she said finally. “I’m taking stained glass lessons from the man Annie used to share her studio w
ith and…”

  “Tom, am I right? Tom what’s-his-name. Wears his hair like a girl.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Tom Nestor. Do you know him?”

  “Oh.” Mary smiled, displaying lovely straight teeth for a woman her age. “I met him once or twice,” she said. “So it’s Tom who’s got you doing Annie’s work.”

  Jane started to snore softly from the chair at Mary’s side.

  “Well, no,” Olivia said. “I saw the pile of magazines, and Tom told me that Annie used to bring them over here, so since I’m volunteering at the women’s shelter, I figured I could…”

  “You’re working at that hell hole?”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Oh, no, child, you shouldn’t be there.” Mary patted the arm of the empty rocker next to her. “Sit down,” she said.

  Olivia looked at her watch. She was running late, but she was curious about this old woman. She sat down in the rocker.

  “You’re a pretty girl,” Mary said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You remind me of my daughter, Elizabeth. She had your color hair—dark and silky—and eyes like yours, with a little sad look to them.”

  Olivia leaned away from her. She did not want sad-looking eyes.

  “You don’t look a thing like Annie, though.”

  “I know,” Olivia said. “I’ve seen pictures of her.”

  “I bet you’re not like her in any way at all.”

  Olivia felt insulted, and Mary did not miss her look of dismay. She hurried on.

  “And that’s just fine, child,” she continued. “You be you, let Annie be Annie. Would you have done what she did? Jumped in front of a woman about to get her head shot off by her husband?”

  Olivia had wondered about that herself. “Well, I like to think I…”

  “The hell you would. Instinct takes over and you fight for yourself, for your own hide. And that’s the way it should be.” Mary licked her lips and looked out toward the street, toward the little shop where the dolls sat baking in the sun. “Annie was a really fine girl,” she said, “but she could be a fool sometimes.”

  Olivia did not know what to say. She stared at the newspaper in Mary Poor’s lap, folded to the crossword puzzle, which had nearly been completed.

  “That husband of yours,” Mary said.

  “Paul?”

  “Paul. He’s a very high-strung sort, isn’t he? You need to feed him kale with sea salt and lemon.”

  Olivia laughed.

  “Kale with sea salt for those nerves of his. And you tell him it’s about time he came back. I have plenty more I can tell him and Lord knows how much longer I can keep it straight in this old noggin.” She touched her fingertips to her temple.

  “You seem very lucid to me, Mrs. Poor.” Olivia stood up. She bent down to pick up the bags, nearly straining her back with the weight of them.

  “You make this the last time you bring magazines by here, all right?” Mary said.

  Olivia frowned. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought…”

  “You can come visiting anytime, child, but not doing Annie’s chores for her.”

  Mary leaned back in the rocking chair after the girl had gone and closed her eyes. She had done enough of the crossword puzzle for now, and she knew that Jane would be asleep until suppertime. She should take a little rest herself, but her mind kept returning to the girl’s face. Had she really looked like Elizabeth? Probably not. To be honest, she could barely remember Elizabeth’s face at all. It was frozen in her memory at the ages she’d been in the few pictures she had of her. Three, eight, fifteen. That last picture had been taken the day before she ran away. She remembered well how she’d looked the very last time she’d seen her, though, two years ago, when she’d been lying in a casket. Mary never would have recognized her. Elizabeth had been fifty-eight years old, gray-haired and waxy-pale.

  A friend of Elizabeth’s in Ohio had sent Mary the letter, telling her that Elizabeth had collapsed at work and never regained consciousness. Mary wanted to go to the funeral, she told Annie. She needed to pay her last respects.

  Annie drove her, and it took them a very long time to get there. Days, perhaps. Mary wasn’t sure. She slept most of the way, while Annie sang along with the radio. Mary would catch bits and pieces of her songs, amused by the energy she put into them, as though she were on stage. It made Mary chuckle to herself. Then she’d feel a little guilty at the comfort she took in being with Annie, while her own daughter had died a stranger to her.

  Annie took care of her on that trip, and for once Mary needed Annie’s care more than Annie needed hers. Away from Kiss River for the first time in many years, Mary suddenly felt every bit her age—eighty-seven and one half years old. Almost as devastating as seeing the unfamiliar, lifeless body of her daughter was the sudden awareness of her frailty. She was confused, uncertain of the hour or the day. Sometimes uncertain of the year. In the restaurants, she stared at the silverware, trying to remember how to hold a fork, how to cut her meat. During the night in the hotel, she woke Annie half a dozen times to ask her why there were no bursts of light coming through the window.

  The strangers she met at the funeral treated her like a very old woman, sometimes talking past her as if she were not there. Annie became her eyes and her ears and her memory. Mary would catch her dear young friend looking at her with a worry in her face she had never noticed before. Annie wept at Elizabeth’s funeral, and Mary knew it was not Elizabeth she cried for, but her. She wanted to assure Annie that she was all right, that Annie did not have to fret about her. But the truth was, away from Kiss River she was a very old woman.

  She was relieved to be back at Kiss River after that long and taxing journey. She stepped stiffly out of Annie’s car and felt immediately rejuvenated by the cool, salt-filled air. She wanted to climb to the top of the lighthouse, but Annie dissuaded her. Annie made dinner for her before going home to her own family, fussing over her as if she were a helpless child.

  Mary had only been back at Kiss River a day and a half when she fell. Looking back later, she wished she could say there’d been an obstacle in her path that night, but the truth was she was simply walking across the kitchen floor when she lost her balance and went down. Pain shot through her hip and arm, and her cheek smacked hard against the tile. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t lift herself a fraction of an inch from the floor.

  For two days and two nights she did without food or drink. She messed herself. The floor grew as cold as the ground outside, while the fire in the living room turned to ashes and a cold front swept across Kiss River. Mary slipped in and out of consciousness, struggling to keep her mind working by remembering the names of the dozens of men who had worked at the lifesaving station over the years.

  On the third night, Annie arrived. Mary heard her key in the front door. She heard her step into the living room, and she tried to call out to her, but her throat was too dry. Annie called her name as she moved from room to room, and Mary heard her gasp when she finally entered the kitchen.

  “Oh, my God,” Annie said, dropping next to her, the soft fabric of her skirt brushing over Mary’s face. Did she have someone with her that night? Yes, of course. Mary remembered Annie speaking to the stranger who hung back in the shadows of the cold living room, telling him to call an ambulance. Then she lifted Mary’s head into her lap and rocked her, as she must have rocked her children when they were younger.

  “Oh, Mary,” she whispered, her hair like a red veil in front of Mary’s eyes. “You’ve gone and done it this time, precious. They’ll move you out now for sure.”

  Mary hoped she would die right then. She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to force her soul from her body, but her effort only resulted in a deep and painless sleep. And when she woke up to the smell of antiseptic and sterile air, she knew she had left Kiss River forever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Paul knew he should have backed out of tonight’s meeting. He’d been sitting in
his car on the tree-lined street in front of Alec’s house for several minutes now, his windows rolled up and the air conditioner blowing in his face as he summoned up the courage to go inside. The first few meetings at the Sea Tern had been uncomfortable enough. He didn’t know why Alec had suddenly suggested the committee meet here.

  On the outside, the house was utterly Annie—yellow, with white trim, and surrounded by trees hung heavy with Spanish moss. It was a decade old—he knew that she and Alec had it built when Alec’s practice was finally solvent. A couple of brightly colored sailboards were propped against the side wall, and he could see a fish-shaped windsock flying from the pier around back. The house was on the sound, on a little cul-de-sac of water, just as Annie had described it to him. The sunsets, Paul. The colors. They would make you want to write. They’d make you want to cry.

  Paul started at a sudden rapping on his car window, and he turned to see Nola Dillard standing inches away from his face. He rolled the window down.

  “Coming in, hon?” she asked. She was on foot. She must live close by.

  He opened his door and joined her in the street, where her perfume masked the scent of the sound, and the setting sun played on the false gold of her hair. “I wasn’t sure I had the right house,” he lied.

  “This is it, all right. You can tell by the sailboards if nothing else.”

  They were greeted at the door by a German shepherd on three legs.

  “This is Tripod,” Nola said.

  Paul patted the dog’s head. A dog and two cats, Annie had told him. Not much for a vet.

  The personality the house exuded on the outside spilled over into the living room. Annie’s touch was everywhere. The furniture was not the usual sturdy beach variety of the Outer Banks, but rather an overstuffed and eclectic collection of chairs and sofas upholstered in bold floral prints. The floor was nearly covered by patterned rugs, haphazardly layered on top of one another to form a comforting patchwork. Paul felt as if he’d walked into Annie’s arms.