Keeper of the Light

  Paul glanced across the road and reluctantly dropped to his knees. He was defenseless now. If the horses decided to stampede, the three of them were doomed.

  He trained the light on the ugly wound. It was deep, and easily eight inches long. Alec washed it with a solution he took from his tool box.

  “Do you have to stitch it?” Paul asked.

  Alec nodded. “If it were winter, I’d let it go, but with this heat the flies are sure to get to it if I don’t.”

  Paul wasn’t certain he could watch this. He hadn’t known what he was agreeing to when he’d told Alec he wasn’t squeamish.

  Alec rooted around in the tool chest for another minute. Then he took the flashlight from Paul and handed it to Julie. “You’ll need to hold the edges of the wound together for me, Paul, okay?”

  “Uh. You’ll have to show me how.”

  Alec demonstrated, and Paul followed his example, wincing as Alec began to stitch.

  “How’s your baby doing, Jule?” Alec asked, keeping his eyes on his work.

  “She’s not a baby anymore,” Julie said, “which goes to show how long you’ve been out of circulation. She’s a hellion. Into everything.”

  Julie talked about the little restaurant she managed, and Alec talked about Clay going off to college in another month. Paul listened to their easy conversation, their comfort with one another. Alec’s voice was so calm, so assured, despite the work he was doing on the colt, that Paul nearly forgot about the horses across the road.

  “I wasn’t sure I should call you,” Julie said, after a brief silence. “I know you haven’t been working lately.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Alec said.

  “Well, I thought twice about it, I can tell you that. But there just isn’t anyone else I’d trust with one of these guys.” Alec glanced up at her with a smile. “This one’s going to make it, Jule.”

  There was a silence as Alec continued his stitching. Paul moved his fingers along the edges of the wound to keep pace with him. The tension had left his body. The horses across the road seemed harmless as long as Alec was close by. For the first time he thought he understood. There was nothing mysterious about Annie leaving him for Alec. There had been no ulterior motive on her part, no hidden agenda, no succumbing to the demands of her parents. He could imagine her with Alec—Annie with her need to feel loved and cherished, safe and secure. Alec would have met those needs without even trying.

  The pulsing light of the beacon seemed to slow, lingering on Alec’s hand for several seconds before melting back into the darkness. Then his hands stilled, suddenly, the needle poised above the wound, and Paul looked up to find Alec staring at him.

  “Are you all right?” Alec asked, as the soft white light swept over them again.

  “Yes,” Paul said, lowering his eyes to the horse. He wondered what Alec had seen in his face.

  Okay, he thought, you won. She was yours, not mine. She loved you, not me. You won, Alec. Fair and square.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  It was nearly eleven by the time Alec said good-night to Paul and walked alone into his house. Lacey and Clay were still out, and the emptiness was oppressive. Even Tripod did not bother to come downstairs to greet him.

  He poured iced tea into one of the green, hand-blown tumblers Julie had given Annie for her birthday a few years earlier, and carried it into the living room, where he sat down on the couch and stared at the phone. It was after eleven. Too late to call Olivia, and that was just as well. He’d become a little too dependent on those phone calls. He’d see her in the morning, anyway. She had agreed to go windsurfing with him at Rio Beach.

  He lay down, stretching out along the length of the sofa, a throw pillow beneath his head. It had been a long, long time since he’d worked on an animal. It had felt good—powerful—to be able to make a difference, to set something right for a change. He had expected to find a dead horse up there. Or worse, a dying horse. He supposed that’s why he’d asked Paul to come along—to keep his mind off his jangling nerves.

  Paul had to be the softest man he’d ever met. He’d gotten misty-eyed over the colt. Alec could imagine him with Olivia. An image—thoroughly prurient—slipped into his mind of Olivia and Paul together, and he rested his arm over his eyes to try to block it out. The first erotic thought he’d had in months and he wasn’t even a part of it.

  God, he missed Annie. Sleeping with her, waking up with her. He missed those clandestine Friday “lunches” in motel rooms. She had been a different woman during those two hours each week. She’d never been a reluctant lover, but he knew it was usually the closeness she was after. The holding. The loving words. He’d learned long ago that he had a need for sex itself—for the purely physical pleasure it offered—that she didn’t share. He’d adjusted. They had acknowledged their differences and worked it out. But during those weekly rendezvous, Annie had been impassioned, eager. Her body had given off steam when he touched her.

  Alec finished the iced tea, wishing he’d poured himself something stronger, something numbing. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, letting the hum of the air conditioner lull him to sleep.

  When he woke up, he could not at first get his bearings. The dim light from the kitchen washed over the wall in front of him and he saw the ten oval windows. He was lying on the living room sofa. He had a throbbing erection, and its inspiration—Annie—no longer existed. God damn it.

  He got off the couch in a rage, hurling the throw pillow to the floor. Fuck the Battered Women’s Shelter. Fuck Zachary Pointer. He lifted the tumbler from the coffee table and heaved it toward the wall. Fuck you, Annie.

  The tumbler sailed across the room, and he caught his breath as it connected with one of the ten small oval windows, splintering the detailed stained glass image of a dark-haired woman carrying a parasol.

  Alec stared at the empty, oval-shaped hole in the wall. He closed his eyes and groaned, raking his hands through his hair.

  The side yard was illuminated by lights under the eaves, and Alec could see some of the small, painstakingly cut pieces of glass as he walked barefoot through the sand. He sat on the ground beneath the windows and began picking up the pieces, collecting them in his palm.

  A car stopped on the street in front of the house and he heard laughter, followed by the slamming of a door. In a moment Clay was walking toward him.

  “Dad? What are you doing out here?” Clay looked down at the colored glass in his father’s hand. “Who broke the window?”

  “It was an accident.” Alec followed Clay’s eyes to where the green tumbler rested in the sand, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

  “Did Lacey…?”

  “No. It wasn’t Lacey.”

  Clay stuffed his hands in the pockets of his shorts. “Well, look, Dad,” he said. “It’s late. You can worry about the window tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want to leave the glass out here.” Alec ran his fingers through the sand and found a small white triangle of the parasol.

  “It’ll be all right.” Clay glanced around him as if he were worried someone in the neighborhood might be watching this scene. “Come on, Dad. You’re freaking me out. I’ll help you find the pieces in the morning.”

  Alec looked up at his son. A handsome young man. Black hair. Dark skin. Seventeen years old. In all likelihood he had made love to Terri Hazleton tonight. In another month, he’d leave home for good. He’d start his new life. His own life. Alec stared into his pale blue eyes. “I miss your mother,” he said.

  Clay lowered himself to the sand, and leaned back against the house. “I know, Dad,” he said quietly. “I do, too.” He sifted his fingers through the sand and found a small red piece of glass, which he handed to Alec.

  Alec closed his fingers around the fragments of glass in his palm. He rested his arms on his knees and looked out at the black water of the sound. “They’re going to move the lighthouse, Clay,” he said. “They’re going to pull the damn thing out of the ground, and Kiss River wil
l never be the same again.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Alec could have asked Olivia to come to his house. He had the sailboards there; they could have set out right from the little cove that formed his back yard. As he drove toward Rio Beach, though, he realized that he hadn’t wanted Olivia at his house in case Clay or Lacey were there. So what did that mean? Nola was over all the time, and he never gave it a second thought. But if they found Olivia there, he would have to offer an explanation for her presence. They might remember her from that night in the ER, or they might not. That wasn’t it. He just didn’t want them to see him with a woman other than their mother, no matter how platonic the relationship might be.

  Olivia was leaning against her car in the little parking area adjacent to Rio Beach. She wore a white cover-up over her bathing suit and her legs were nearly the color of the jacket. This was a woman who worked entirely too much.

  He parked next to her, and she shaded her eyes as he got out of the Bronco and began unstrapping the sailboard from the roof.

  “I’m warning you, Alec,” she said. “I can’t swim a stroke.”

  He threw her a life vest from the back seat of the Bronco. “You don’t need to know how to swim,” he said. “You do need some sunscreen, though.”

  “I put some thirty on. This is the first time I’ve been out in the sun this summer.”

  “It looks like the first time in your life.”

  She made a face at him and took the end of the board to help him carry it through the tangled weeds leading out to the sound.

  “How come there’s just one board?”

  “Because the wind is perfect for you today, but a little nonexistent for my taste. It’s pretty shallow here. I can stay next to you and tell you what to do.”

  Rio Beach was nothing more than a scrap of sand at the water’s edge, barely wide enough for the blanket Alec spread across it. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking out at the sound. The sun shimmered on the water, and he could see other windsurfers in the distance, but he knew none of them had put in here. Rio Beach was his little secret.

  “Great day for this,” he said, turning to Olivia. She was gnawing on her lower lip. “Are you ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.” She took off her jacket and laid it on the blanket. Her bathing suit was black and violet, conservatively cut at the thigh, but dipping gently over her breasts, and he remembered his erotic fantasy of her and Paul from the night before.

  “What are you smiling about?” she asked.

  He laughed as he took off his T-shirt. “Just glad to be out here,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  She wore a long gold chain that fell softly between her breasts. The bone-whiteness of her skin made her look terribly fragile, but he would never have guessed she was pregnant. The slight rise of her belly would not give her away.

  “So, did you call your doctor about windsurfing?” he asked. She had told him she was concerned about the advisability of windsurfing when pregnant.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Yes. Turns out she’s a windsurfer herself. She said the only risk she could see was that I might actually have fun for once and not know how to cope with the experience.”

  Alec laughed. “Your doctor’s got you pegged.”

  He gave her a little demonstration, showing off a bit with a beach start, a couple of duck-jibes, before settling down to the tamer moves she would need to learn. The twelve-foot board felt sluggish, cumbersome beneath his feet. He was used to the small board he liked to take out in the ocean.

  She shivered when she stepped into the water. Alec held the sailboard steady for her, and she climbed onto it, her face the picture of concentration. “Put your feet on either side of the mast,” he said.

  “Is this the mast?”

  “Right.” He held her hand to steady her as she rose to her feet. “Now hold on to the rope. You’re going to uphaul to get the sail out of the water. Bend your legs. That’s it. Keep your back straight and use your legs to pull the sail up.”

  She pulled in the rope, hand over hand, and the sail began to rise out of the water, taking wind, causing the board to turn suddenly beneath her feet. She screamed, falling backward into the water with a splash. He walked around the board to help her, but she surfaced laughing.

  “I should have warned you about that,” he said. “When the clew comes out of the…”

  “What’s the clew?” she asked, tossing the water out of her hair.

  “This part of the sail right here,” he said, and he got onto the board once more to show her how it was done.

  She spent more of her time in the water than on the board, but she was nothing if not a good sport. She laughed a couple of times to the point of tears. It was a side to her he had not seen, a side he imagined she rarely saw herself.

  She was climbing gamely onto the board for what seemed like the hundredth time, when her bathing suit slipped from her shoulder and he saw the sharp white line it left on her skin.

  “You’re burning,” he said. “We’d better get you out of here.”

  Olivia sat down on the blanket, her teeth chattering. Alec wrapped her towel around her, rubbing her arms through it, briefly, letting go as he realized the intimacy of the touch. The gold chain clung softly to the pink swell of her breasts, and he looked away.

  He got the green and white striped umbrella from the back of the Bronco and set it up over Olivia’s half of the blanket. Then he lay down next to her, relishing the warmth of the sun on his skin. “So, how come you never learned to swim?” he asked. He had spent most of his childhood canoeing and water skiing on the Potomac.

  “I never lived near any water.” The umbrella caught her words and floated them down to him.

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “In the central part of New Jersey. Have you heard of the Pine Barrens?”

  “Isn’t that where everyone intermarries and produces, uh—” he was not sure how to word it “—less than brilliant offspring?”

  She made a sound of mock disgust. “Well, you’re thinking of the right place, but your view of it is a little colored by its press. Intermarriage is far more the exception than the rule.”

  “That’s where you grew up?”

  “Yes, and I know what you’re thinking. Just because I can’t master windsurfing does not make me less than brilliant.”

  He smiled to himself, staring up at the clear sky, a dazzling blue he had seen nowhere outside the Outer Banks. “Paul was at the lighthouse meeting at my house last night,” he said.

  She sat up, abruptly. The gold chain swung free for a moment and then clung once more to the slope of her breast. “You didn’t say anything, did you?”

  “No.” He looked up at her worried face. “I told you I wouldn’t. He said something you might find interesting, though.”

  “What? Tell me everything he said. Every word, okay?”

  Alec smiled. “He’s a nice guy, Olivia, but he’s not God. I’m sorry, but I neglected to take notes. I didn’t realize I’d be tested on the material.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Are you angry with me?”

  “No.” He shaded his eyes to see her more clearly. The bridge of her nose was burned. “Do I sound mad?” Did he? Was he? “He said that whatever was wrong between the two of you was his fault, and that he thought he might have made a mistake when he left you.”

  Olivia pressed her fist to her mouth. “He said that?”

  “Yes. He seems depressed to me. There’s a…heaviness about him.”

  She looked out at the sound. “I can’t believe he said he might have made a mistake. Was that his exact word?”

  Alec sighed. “I think so. I’ll tape him next time, Olivia, I promise.”

  She lay down again. “It’s just that I was about to give up.”

  He told her about the horse. “He got sort of choked up while he was helping me.”

  “It sounds as if you spent half the night with him. I’m very jealous.” She
suddenly gasped. “Don’t ever tell Paul I’m taking stained glass lessons, Alec. You haven’t mentioned it to him, have you?”

  He frowned at her. “What are you so afraid of?”

  “It’s too hard to explain,” she said, looking away from him. “Just please don’t tell him.”

  They were both quiet for a few minutes, and when she spoke again her voice was subdued. “I’m having an amniocentesis done Thursday,” she said.

  He looked over at her. “Are you nervous about it?”

  “No. Well.” She shrugged. “I guess you always have to face the possibility that something could be wrong. I just hate having to go through it—not the procedure so much as the waiting for results—without Paul.”

  “You know, Olivia, I think one of us should tell him we’re friends. It might open his eyes a little to the fact that you’re not going to just sit around waiting for him forever.”

  “Except that I would. Wait around forever, I mean.” She let out a weary-sounding sigh. “What about you, Alec?” she asked. “Do you go out at all?”

  “No.” He shut his eyes against the brilliant yellow sunlight. “It’s not time yet, and there really isn’t anyone. There’s one woman who has designs on me, but I’m not interested.”

  “Who is she?”

  “A neighbor. Nola.” He ran a hand through his hair. It was almost dry. “She’s been a family friend for many years. Annie always said she had her eye on me, which I didn’t believe at the time. I do now, though. She brings us food. She calls to check up on me.”

  “And you’re not interested?”

  “Not in the least.” He stretched, ready for a change of subject. “Well, listen. I’ve been asked to speak on both a radio show and at a meeting of lighthouse enthusiasts in Norfolk this coming Saturday and I’d love to talk you into taking on one of those jobs. Any chance of that?” He looked over at her. “Do you have Saturday off?”