Keeper of the Light

  “Sit down,” he said, and she lowered herself to the bed. He laid her back on the blanket and then knelt by the side of the bed, drawing her legs over his shoulders and letting his mouth finish the work of his hands. She understood immediately what he had meant about it being over too quickly. It had been so long since she’d been touched this way, this intimately. Her orgasm was sudden, and almost unbearably intense, bringing with it a fresh rash of tears she didn’t understand.

  He lifted her more fully onto the bed and was quickly inside her, pinning her beneath him in a way that gave her one brief, irrational moment of panic, that made her wonder if he was still angry. No. The thrusting of his body was careful and controlled, and it felt good. Very good. He moved in a way that was new to her, with a depth and pressure that took her straight back to a climax and renewed her weeping as she wrapped her legs around him to spur him on to his own release.

  The stillness of the room was nearly overwhelming after the frenzied activity of the last few minutes. She tried to keep the sound of her tears out of her breathing. She did not want him to know. He had touched her everywhere. He had explored her body in intimate ways, yet he had carefully avoided her stomach, carefully avoided the evidence of her husband.

  She turned her head to kiss his jaw. He was so still, so quiet.

  He lifted himself from her before she was ready to lose him, briefly touching his lips to her forehead as he slipped out of her and rolled onto his back. His semen seeped from her body to the blanket, and the cool air of the house hit the dampness of her skin and made her shiver.

  “Alec?” she said softly.

  He found her hand in the darkness and held it on his stomach. “I didn’t leave a note for Lacey,” he said. “I should probably get going.”

  He sounded empty. She closed her eyes. “What was this all about?” she asked quietly, forcing the words past the tightness in her throat. “Why did you come here tonight? Was it vengeance? Were you using me because you thought I used you?”

  He raised himself up on his elbow to look at her. The reflected moonlight filled his eyes, made them look like translucent glass, blue marbles. “Did you feel used?” he asked. “Is that how it felt to you?”

  She shook her head. “But you seem very distant. You seem…let down, as though it was Annie you wanted and Olivia you got, and I just don’t measure up in bed any more than I did in her studio.”

  “Olivia,” he said, his voice a quiet reprimand. He smoothed her hair back from her face.

  She drew the edge of the blanket over her breasts. “When Paul and I made love back in April, he told me he had to imagine I was Annie before he could…feel anything. I thought maybe that’s what you were doing, and then…”

  Alec interrupted her. “Oh, Olivia,” he said, smiling. He shifted a little on the bed so there was more blanket for her, and he tucked it beneath her shoulders. “Do you ever have it wrong. Want to hear how wrong you have it?”

  She nodded.

  He lifted her hand to his lips, and the moonlight shimmered in the gold braid of his wedding ring. “For the past month or so, when I try to think about Annie, you always get in the way. I’d try to remember making love to her, and the only image I get in my mind is of that night in your living room.”

  “Then why are you suddenly so distant? Why do you want to leave?”

  He didn’t answer right away.

  “Is it the baby?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Partly, yes.” He sighed and rolled onto his back again, looking up at the ceiling. “Everything’s wrong about this, Olivia. Everything. Here we are, making love in your husband’s bed. He could come over here any second. What would I do then? Hide in the closet? Climb out the window?”

  “Paul and I are separated, Alec.”

  “It makes me feel…sleazy.”

  Olivia winced. She did not feel sleazy. She felt no guilt at all.

  “Paul still loves you. You can see that, can’t you? If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been so angry when he saw you in the studio,” Alec said. “He wouldn’t care that much. It’s Paul who should be here in this bed with you, not me. This is just plain wrong.” He let go of her hand. “But that’s still not all of it.”

  He stood up and began to dress. Olivia pulled herself up to sit against the headboard of the bed. When he’d zipped his jeans he sat back on the bed and looked over at her. “Annie’s been gone such a short time,” he said. “Just eight months. After nearly twenty years, eight months is nothing. I’m still too much…Annie’s husband, and I feel as though I’m betraying her somehow.” He chuckled, but the clear blue of his eyes had clouded over. “This sounds a little…I don’t know, melodramatic, I guess, but a few years ago Annie had to have surgery and she thought she might die. She asked me to promise that if she died, I wouldn’t get involved with anyone for at least a year. She needed to know she was so well-loved that I couldn’t even consider seeing someone else.” He smiled at the memory. “Well, of course I never thought she’d die. Even if she did, I couldn’t imagine being able to care enough about another woman to get involved again for a very long time. When I came over here tonight, I put memories of Annie out of my mind, but when we finished making love, it just hit me. Wham.” He looked out at the sound. “I can see her face. I can remember her asking me…” He shook his head quickly, then looked over at her. “See what I mean?” He smiled. “It’s just too soon for me, Olivia.” He stood up again, picking up his rugby shirt from her dresser, and Olivia wiped the tears from her face while his back was turned.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as he straightened the collar of his shirt. “I didn’t mean to use you any more than you meant to use me.” He sat on the edge of the bed again to put on his tennis shoes. “I’m going to call Paul tomorrow, just to clear the air. He and I are into this lighthouse thing too deeply for either of us to just walk away from it. And I want you to tell him about the baby. Please, Olivia. For my sake, all right?” He finished tying his shoes and looked over at her. “Because once he knows, it will straighten him out. He’ll want you back. We both know that, and once you’re back with him, I’ll be able to get on with my life without thinking about you every damn minute of the day. Will you tell him?”

  Her voice was thick when she answered. “As soon as he’s calmed down enough to hear it,” she said, knowing she would not want to tell him even then, because Alec was right. Once Paul knew, he would want her back, but she was not at all certain that she wanted him.

  “Make that very soon, okay?” Alec stood up and walked to the door, where he stopped and looked back at her. He had stepped out of the moonlight and he was no more than a shadow in the doorway.

  “I’ve been thinking lately that maybe Annie was wrong about some things,” he said softly. “She was such a powerful person—such a charismatic person—that I went along with her whether I agreed with her or not. It was just…easier. I always found her endearing—her wackiness, her disorganization, the way she could never get anywhere on time. You are entirely her opposite, Olivia. There’s no way you could ever be like her, don’t you see that? I’ve appreciated all those things in you that are unlike her. Sex with you was different. I knew it would be. You actually like it.” She could not see him, but she heard the smile in his voice. “I feel guilty that I appreciate that in you, because then I have to admit that maybe things weren’t as good with Annie as I tried to make myself believe they were.” He paused. She heard the air conditioner come on, felt the cool shaft of air on her throat.

  “I’m rambling,” Alec said. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think I at least owe her the year I promised her. And you owe it to Paul to tell him he’s going to be a father.” He paused again, and she hugged her knees to her chest. “You’re very quiet,” he said.

  “I love you, Alec.”

  She followed his dark shadow as he walked toward her, as he slipped back into the light, real again. He leaned down to kiss her, his lips light and warm against her own. Then he turned a
nd left the room.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Lacey was asleep when he got home. She had been sticking to her curfew. Friday night she didn’t even go out. Olivia had been right. Although Lacey offered verbal protests, she seemed to welcome the restrictions on her freedom. He’d hear her on the phone, complaining to her friends. “My dad won’t let me stay out that late,” she’d tell them, a sort of perverse pride in her voice.

  It was nearly one. Really too late to talk to Paul, but he would not be able to sleep until he did. He needed to have this discussion behind him. He went to the den for his address book and sat down at the desk to dial Paul’s number.

  “Hello?” Paul sounded wide awake. Alec heard music in the background. Something instrumental. Classical.

  “It’s Alec, Paul, and it’s one o’clock in the morning, so let me start by apologizing if I woke you up.”

  “I’m awake,” he said. “Is something wrong?”

  Alec laughed. “That’s an understatement.” He flipped idly through the pages of his address book while he spoke. “Look,” he said, “you need to know that I was at the studio when you came in this morning. I heard everything you said.”

  There was silence on Paul’s end of the phone, and Alec continued.

  “I wish you’d been honest with me,” he said. “You had a thing for Annie. I would have understood. She was very easy to have a thing for.”

  “Did…had Olivia already told you that?”

  “No. She’d told me you left her because you were in love with someone you couldn’t have. She never told me who it was.”

  “Did she… What did she tell you? I mean, did she explain to you that it was just…”

  “Relax.” He felt sorry for Paul. “She told me it was platonic, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Paul was quiet for a minute. “You were lucky to be married to her,” he said. “I’m jealous of you for that.”

  “You have nothing to be jealous about. Olivia’s a wonderful person. She’s pulled my family back together.” He remembered Paul asking Olivia if she had slept with him. He hoped the question did not come up now.

  “I don’t understand what got into her, with the stained glass and all,” Paul said. “That’s so unlike her. She really went off the deep end.”

  “If you think she’s behaved strangely, maybe you need to take a look at yourself. You left her because you had a crush on a dead woman, for Christ’s sake.” He looked at the picture of Annie on the wall above his desk. She was sitting on a split rail fence, winking at him, grinning. “Have a little compassion, okay?” he continued. “Olivia was so upset when you walked out that she would have tried anything to get you back.”

  Paul sighed. “I haven’t been able to get Annie out of my mind.”

  “Annie’s dead, Paul, and I’m the widower. You have a wife who’s alive and beautiful and who still cares about you. You’re throwing away something that’s real for something that doesn’t exist.”

  “I know that,” he said quietly.

  He’d come to the S’s in his address book, and he let his fingers pause there, on Olivia’s name. “There’s something Olivia needs to tell you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Just talk to her. Tomorrow.” He yawned, suddenly tired. “And by the way, don’t forget that Mary Poor’s giving you and Nola and me a tour of the keeper’s house Tuesday morning.”

  “You still want me on the committee?”

  “Of course.”

  Paul hesitated. “Someone else could write up the part about the keeper’s house.”

  “No one on the committee writes the way you do. I’ll see you about nine then?”

  “All right.”

  Alec was exhausted when he got off the phone. He fell into bed, but could not sleep. Olivia’s scent was still on him, and for some reason every time he closed his eyes he saw her in the emergency room, telling the man with the lacerated arm that the ER was not a McDonald’s. The memory made him laugh out loud.

  He should never have gone to her house tonight. He knew what would happen—he’d intended it to happen. He hoped Olivia could have her soul-baring talk with Paul without throwing in that minor detail. It was one thing to covet a man’s wife; it was quite another to sleep with her.

  He woke up tired in the morning, his sleep interrupted by nightmares about the lighthouse and fantasies of Olivia. He got out of bed and frowned into the bathroom mirror. It had been a while since he’d seen those dark circles around his eyes. He looked like someone out of a horror movie, someone haunted.

  Downstairs, he took Annie’s tool case from the closet in the den and carried it into the kitchen, setting it by the back door. Then he poured himself a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee.

  He had to see the lighthouse today. He needed more pictures of it before they moved it, because once it was moved it wouldn’t be the same. The view would be different. The air around the gallery wouldn’t smell the same. It wouldn’t feel the same.

  He opened the drawer next to the refrigerator and took out the stack of lighthouse pictures. It had been many weeks since he’d looked through them. He propped them up against his juice glass and sat down to eat.

  “Dad?”

  He looked up to see Lacey in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “Hi, Lace,” he said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You look…I don’t know.” She sat down at the table and hugged her arms across her chest. Her eyes fell to the photographs on the table. “Why do you have them out?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, lifting the top picture, one he had taken from inside the lens itself. The landscape was upside down in the curved glass. “I was looking through them to see if I’ve missed anything. I want to make sure I’ve got every angle of it before they move it.”

  Lacey scrunched up her face. “You have every possible angle anybody could ever have, Dad.”

  Alec smiled. “Maybe.”

  Lacey took an orange from the fruit bowl in the middle of the table and began rolling it back and forth between her hands. “Do you want to do something today?” she asked.

  He looked across the table at her, surprised. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. You can choose.”

  “Do you want to go to the lighthouse with me?”

  “Dad.” She looked bruised, and he thought she was going to cry. “Please don’t start going there all the time again. Please.”

  “I haven’t been in a long time, Lacey.”

  “I know. So why do you have to go today?” She did start crying now. She raised her feet to the chair and hugged her legs to her chest. The orange rolled off the table and she didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I get up this morning and all of a sudden everything’s, like, gone back the way it was.”

  “What do you mean, back the way it was?”

  Her eyes had found Annie’s tool case by the door. “Why is that there?” she asked, pointing.

  “I’m going to drop it by the emergency room for Olivia.”

  “She can come here to use it.”

  He shook his head. “She can’t come over here anymore, Lace. She needs to spend her time with her own family, not with us.”

  “She doesn’t have a family.”

  “She has Paul.”

  Lacey made a disdainful noise. “He’s an asshole.”

  Alec shrugged. “Regardless of what you think of him, he’s still her husband.”

  “I thought you liked her.”

  “I do like her, Lacey, but she’s a married woman. Besides, Mom hasn’t been gone all that long.”

  “Mom’s dead.” Lacey glared at him. “She’s burned up into fifty million little ashes that the sharks probably ate for dinner the night after her funeral. She’s nothing but shark shit, now, Dad.”

  If he’d been sitting closer to her, he would have slapped her. So it was just as well the tab
le was between them. Her cheeks reddened quickly. She had frightened herself.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was small and she kept her eyes glued to the table. “I’m really sorry I said that, Daddy.”

  “She was a very special person, Lace,” he said, gently. “She can’t be replaced.”

  Lacey was quiet for a moment. She drew invisible lines on the table with her fingertips. “Can I still call Olivia?”

  “Sweetheart.” He set down the picture. “You have a reasonable curfew now, so I really don’t see much point to you disturbing her every night, do you?”

  “But…when would I get to talk to her?”

  She looked waiflike, with her funny hair and red nose, and her big, sad blue eyes. “I’m sorry, Lace,” he said. “I let things get out of hand and you got caught in the middle. Why don’t you call her…not today, though, she has some things to work out today…but in a few days, and then you and she can arrange how and when you can talk. You’re welcome to talk with her if she’s willing, but I’m not going to be seeing her anymore.”

  Olivia was taking a quick lunch break in her office when Kathy brought in the tool case and set it on her desk.

  “Alec O’Neill left this for you,” she said.

  Olivia nodded. “Thanks, Kathy.”

  “And there’s a compound fracture on its way in.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

  She set down her peach as Kathy left the room, and opened the case, spreading it flat. The tools were neatly arranged, as she had left them the last time she was at Alec’s. Tucked into one of the pockets was a white envelope with her name on it, and inside she found a note in Alec’s handwriting.

  Tools are for you, for as long as you want them. Put them to good use. I spoke to Paul last night—he knows you need to talk to him. Lacey’s upset to learn you aren’t coming over anymore. I told her she could call you in a few days. Hope that’s okay with you. I wish you the best, Olivia.