Keeper of the Light

  Annie.

  An infatuation.

  One-sided.

  Paul sat down on the cold sand and buried his head in his arms, finally allowing himself to cry, for what he’d lost, for what he’d never had.

  CHAPTER THREE

  June 1991

  Alec O’Neill’s favorite memory of Annie was also his first. He had been standing right where he stood now, on this same beach, and it was as moonless a night then as it was now, the night air black and sticky like tar. The lighthouse high above him flashed one long glare every four and a half seconds. The wait between those light flashes seemed an eternity in the darkness, and in one of those blasts of light he saw a young woman walking toward him. At first he thought she was a figment of his imagination. It did something to your head, standing out here alone, waiting for the beacon to swing around again and ignite the sand. But it was a woman. In the next flash of light, he saw her long, wild red hair, a yellow knapsack slung over her right shoulder. She was probably a year or two younger than him, twenty or so. She started speaking as she drew near him, while he stood mesmerized. Her name was Annie Chase, she said, her husky voice a surprise. She was hitchhiking down the coast, from Massachusetts to Florida, staying close to the water all the way. She wanted to touch the ocean in every state. She wanted to feel the water grow warmer as she moved south. He was intrigued. Speechless. In the beacon of light he watched her pull a Mexican serape from her knapsack and spread it on the ground.

  “I haven’t made love in days,” she said, taking his hand in the darkness. He let her pull him down to the blanket and fought a sudden prudishness as she reached for the snap on his jeans. It was, after all, 1971, and he was twenty-two and five years beyond his first time. Still, she was a complete stranger.

  He could barely concentrate on the sensations in his own body, he was so enchanted by hers. The beacon teased him with glimpses of it, delivered in four-and-one-half second intervals. In the tarry blackness between light flashes, he would never have known she was there except for the feel of her beneath his hands. It threw off their rhythm, those lambent pulses of light, made them giggle at first, then groan with the effort of matching his pace to hers, hers to his.

  He took her back to the cottage he shared with three friends from Virginia Tech. They had just graduated and were spending the summer working for a construction company on the Outer Banks before going on to graduate school. For the past couple of weeks, they’d been painting the Kiss River Lighthouse and doing some repair work on the old keeper’s house. Usually they spent the evenings drinking too much and looking for women, but tonight the four of them and Annie sat together in the small, sandy living room, eating the pomegranates she had produced from her knapsack and playing games she seemed to have invented on the spot.

  “Sentence completion,” she announced in her alien-sounding Boston accent, and she immediately had their attention. “I treasure…” She looked encouragingly at Roger Tucker.

  “My surfboard,” Roger said, honestly.

  “My Harley,” said Roger’s brother, Jim.

  “My cock,” said Bill Larkin, with a laugh.

  Annie rolled her eyes in mock disgust and turned to Alec. “I treasure…”

  “Tonight,” he said.

  “Tonight,” she agreed, smiling.

  He watched her as she plucked another red kernel from her pomegranate and slipped it into her mouth. She set the next kernel in her outstretched palm, and she continued to eat that way as they played—one kernel in her mouth, the next in her palm—until her hand had filled with the juicy red fruit. Once the shell of her pomegranate lay empty on her plate, she held her handful of kernels up to the light, admiring them as if they were a pile of rubies.

  He was amazed that his friends were sitting here, stone cold sober, playing her games, but he understood. They were under her spell. She had instantly become the red-hot core of the cottage. Of the universe.

  “I need…” Annie said.

  “A woman.” Roger groaned.

  “A beer,” said Jim.

  “To get laid,” said Bill, predictably.

  “You,” Alec said, surprising himself.

  Annie took a bloodred ruby from the pile in her hand and leaned forward to slip it into Alec’s mouth. “I need to be held,” she said, and there was a question in her eyes. Are you up to it? her eyes asked him. Because it’s not a need to be taken lightly.

  In his bed later that night he understood what she meant. She could not seem to get close enough to him. “I could love a man who had no legs, or no brain, or no heart,” she said. “But I could never love a man who had no arms.”

  She moved in with him, abandoning her idea of hitchhiking down the coast. It was as though she had found him and fully expected to be with him forever, no discussion needed. She loved that he was studying to be a veterinarian and she would bring him injured animals to heal. Seagulls with broken wings, underfed cats with abscessed paws or torn ears. In the course of a week, Annie came across as many hurt animals as the average person encountered in a lifetime. She did not actively seek them out, yet they found her. He understood later that they were drawn to her because she was one of them. Her injuries were not physical. No, physically she was perfect. Her pain was hidden, and over the course of that summer he realized she had given him the task of making her whole.

  He stood now in the thick black air, a prickly tension in him as he waited out the seconds between the light. Twenty years had passed since that first night. Twenty excellent years, until this last one. Until Christmas night, a little more than five months ago. He still came out here three, maybe four nights a week because more than any other place, it reminded him of Annie. Was it peace he felt here? Not exactly. Just close to her. As close as he could…

  There was a rustling sound behind him. Alec turned his head, listening. Maybe it was one of the wild mustangs that roamed Kiss River? No. He could hear the steady footsteps of someone coming through the field of sea oats, up from the road. He stared in their direction, waiting for the light.

  “Dad?”

  The beacon caught his son’s black hair, red T-shirt. Clay must have followed him. He walked through the sand to stand at his father’s side. He was seventeen, and this past year had grown to Alec’s height. Alec still had not adjusted to standing eye-to-eye with his son.

  “What are you doing out here?” Clay asked.

  “Just watching the light.”

  Clay didn’t respond, and the beacon swung around once, then twice, before he spoke again. “Is this where you come at night?” he asked, his voice hushed. Both he and Lacey had taken on this careful tone when they spoke to him.

  “Reminds me of your mother out here,” Alec said.

  Clay was quiet for another minute. “Why don’t you come home? We can rent a movie or something.”

  It was Saturday night and Clay was two weeks away from his high school graduation. Surely he had things he’d rather do than spend the night watching movies with his father. In the next flash of light Alec thought he saw fear in Clay’s blue eyes. He rested his hand on his son’s shoulder.

  “I’m all right, Clay. Go on now. You must have plans for tonight.”

  Clay hesitated. “Well, I’ll be over at Terri’s.”

  “Fine.”

  Alec listened to the sound of Clay’s footsteps retreat across the field. He listened until he could hear nothing other than the waves breaking against the shore. Then he sat down on the beach, his elbows resting on bent knees, and stared out at a small yellow light on the black horizon.

  “Remember, Annie, the night we saw the boat on fire?” He spoke out loud, but his voice was a whisper. So long ago—a decade, maybe more. They’d been sitting right where he sat now and probably they had made love, or were about to, when they spotted the ball of gold light on the horizon, shooting yellow tendrils into the sky and spreading shimmery waves of liquid gold into the water. The keeper’s house was locked tight and dark, Mary Poor asleep for the nigh
t, so Alec had driven out to the road to call the Coast Guard from a pay phone. They were already on the scene, he was told. Everyone was off the boat and safe. But by the time he’d returned to Annie she was weeping, having created her own scenario. There were children on board, she told him, old people too feeble to save themselves. He comforted her with the truth, but it was many minutes before she could let go of her own catastrophic vision. They watched the fire burn itself out, until the black smudge of smoke against the night sky was all that remained.

  They’d made love on this beach as recently as last summer. The park was closed at dusk, but over the years they had never felt the chain across the road was meant for them. No one had ever disturbed them, not once, although until two years ago they’d known that Mary was sleeping close by.

  They’d swim at night, too, when the water was calm enough. Alec was always first back to the beach because he liked to watch her lift up from the black water, a glittering specter in the stark white bursts of light. Her hair was darkened and tamed by the water, sleek and shiny over her shoulders and breasts. Once last year she’d stood in the water, wringing it from her hair and looking up at the beacon. She said something about the lighthouse, about its being as much a comfort to those on land as on sea. “It’s a touchstone,” she said. “It keeps you safe the same time it helps you chart your course.” He’d felt a lump in his throat, as though he knew what lay ahead, what he was going to lose. He’d thought it would be the lighthouse. He hadn’t known it would be Annie.

  The lighthouse had been the only real source of friction between them. It stood close to the water, unlike its neighboring lighthouses at Currituck Beach to the north and Bodie Island to the south, which sat, secure, farther inland. Each year the ocean crept closer to the foundation of the Kiss River Light, and Alec joined the desperate battle for its preservation, while Annie distanced herself from that work.

  “If it’s time for the sea to take it, we should just let it go.” Every time she’d say those words Alec would picture the graceful white brick lighthouse crumbling into the ocean and feel nearly overwhelmed with sadness.

  He closed his eyes now as he sat on the beach, waiting for the next blast of light to shine red through his eyelids. If you stayed with the lighthouse long enough, your heartbeat slowed almost to the rhythm of the light, until it barely seemed to beat at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Olivia was obsessed with Annie Chase O’Neill. It was getting worse instead of better, and now as she sat in her living room watching Paul and the tanned young boy he’d hired carry boxes and furniture out to the rented U-Haul, she felt the obsession crystallize inside her.

  She hadn’t wanted to be here when Paul moved his things out. She hadn’t expected him to do it this soon, this abruptly, but he’d called early this morning to say he had the truck, did she mind? She said no, because she wanted to see him. She would take any opportunity to see him, even though every meeting left her bruised. A little more than five months had passed since he walked out, yet she still ached at the sight of him. Even now that he’d met with a lawyer and signed a long-term lease on a cottage in South Nags Head, she still clung to the hope that he would take a good look at her and realize his mistake.

  He stopped now in the arched doorway between the living room and dining room, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his khaki shorts to wipe his forehead.

  “Are you sure about the dining room set?” he asked.

  He’d taken his shirt off sometime in the last hour and his skin glistened. His dark blond hair was damp and pushed back from his forehead, and his glasses caught the light from the windows behind her head. She felt a futile wave of desire, and looked past him into the dining room.

  “It’s yours,” she said, holding a finger to mark her place in the journal on her lap. “It’s been in your family for years.”

  “But I know you love it.”

  He was not without guilt, she thought.

  “It should stay in your family.”

  He looked at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry, Liv.”

  She’d heard those words from him so often these past few months they no longer had any meaning. She watched him lift the two chairs from one side of the table and head toward the door.

  She sat glued to the sofa, afraid to see the rest of the house and the gaps he had left her. Once he and the boy were gone she would brace herself and walk through. Slowly. It would be good for her. Maybe reality would sink in. Maybe she would stop hoping.

  Paul walked back into the house, into the dining room. Olivia rose and stood in the arched doorway as he and the boy turned the table upside down and unbolted the legs. When the last screw was removed, Paul stood up to look at her. He adjusted his gold wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and gave her a quick grin that meant nothing. A nervous gesture. He still had that slightly gawky, appealingly academic look that had attracted her ten years earlier, when he worked at the Washington Post and she was a resident at Washington General. She thought now of how quickly she could change this scene. With just a few words she could have him back. She let the fantasy unfold in her mind. “I’m pregnant,” she would say, and he’d drop the table leg and stare at her. “My God, Liv, why didn’t you tell me?” Maybe the news would snap him out of the crazy stupor he’d been mired in all these months. But she would say nothing. She didn’t want the baby to be his reason for coming home. If he came back to her it would have to be because he still loved her. She could accept nothing less.

  She poured herself a glass of ginger ale and took her seat again in the living room while they carried the table out to the truck. She listened to Paul’s voice rising up from the driveway and through the open front door as he told the boy to get himself some lunch. “I’ll meet you at the new house at two,” Paul said. Then he came back into the house, walking slowly through the kitchen, the study, the bedrooms, to see if there was anything else he could take from her. When he was finished, he sat down in the rattan chair on the opposite side of the living room from Olivia. He was holding Sweet Arrival, the slim volume of poetry he’d published a few years earlier, and one of the copies of the book they’d written together, The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit, and he rested them in his lap.

  “So,” he said. “How have you been?”

  She sipped her ginger ale. “Busy.”

  “What else is new?” His voice bit her with its sarcasm, but then he softened. “That’s good, though, I guess. Good to keep yourself occupied.”

  “I’ve started doing some volunteer work at the Battered Women’s Shelter.” She watched his face closely. The change in his features was abrupt. The color left his cheeks and his eyes widened behind his glasses. He leaned forward.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “To fill the time. I work there a couple of evenings a week. They really need the help. Infections pass like wildfire through a place like that.” It had been hard at first, working there. Everyone spoke of Annie in the same reverent tone Paul had used. Her photographs adorned the walls, and her stained glass seemed to fill every window, bathing the broken women and restless children with color.

  “It’s a rough place, Liv.”

  She laughed. “I used to work in D.C., remember?”

  “You can’t predict what’ll happen in a place like that.”

  “It’s fine.”

  He sat back, letting out a sigh. Olivia knew he had spent the last few weeks covering Zachary Pointer’s trial. She had not read the articles he’d written. She didn’t want to know how he would allude to Annie, didn’t want to read of his delight in seeing Pointer locked up for life.

  “Look,” Paul said to her now. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Don’t get mad, okay? I mean, whatever your answer is, I won’t hold it against you. I know you’re human.” That quick, nervous grin again. He fanned absently through the pages of Sweet Arrival, while she waited for him to speak again. “When you realized it was Annie in the emergency room that night?
??did that affect how you treated her?” he asked. “I mean, did you try as hard to save her as you would have if she were just some…” He must have seen the look on her face, because the words froze on his lips.

  Olivia tightened her fingers around the glass of ginger ale. She stood up. “You bastard.”

  He set the books on the end table and walked toward her, rested his hand on her elbow. “I’m sorry, Liv. That was out of line. It’s just that…I’ve always wondered. I mean, if it had been me in your position, I don’t know if I could have…”

  She jerked her arm away from him. “You’d better go, Paul.”

  He walked back to the end table, not looking at her, not speaking to her, and she watched as he gathered his things together and left the house. When he was gone, she sat down again, her legs too weak to carry her through the house. How far they were from a reconciliation if he could think that of her. Hadn’t she wondered about it herself, though? In her bleakest moments, hadn’t she asked herself the same question? She knew the answer. She had tried—with every ounce of strength in her—to save Annie O’Neill’s life. That night had been the hardest she’d ever endured in an emergency room and she was certain she had done her best, although the irony of the situation had not been lost on her for a moment. She had, quite literally, held the life of the woman her husband loved in her hands.

  Paul had not hidden his infatuation with Annie from her, and at first that had made Olivia feel safe. If Annie had been a threat, she thought, he would never have been so open about his feelings. It started with the spread he did on her in Seascape. He spoke admiringly of her, but the admiration quickly turned to adulation. It was like a sickness in him. It was one-sided, he assured her—Annie barely knew he was alive. Yet he could speak of nothing else. Olivia heard lengthy descriptions of Annie’s physical beauty, limitless generosity, charming quirkiness, boundless energy and extraordinary artistic talent. She listened, feigned interest. It was a phase, she told herself. It would pass. When it didn’t, she carefully, tactfully suggested he was going a little overboard. No, he said. She didn’t understand.