Keeper of the Light

by Diane Chamberlain

  Mary climbed down the stairs and walked out to the beach.

  “Hello, there!” she called as she neared the girl, and Annie turned, shading her eyes with her hand and smiling broadly.

  “Hi!” she said, her voice surprising Mary with its huskiness. So deep for such a young girl. Then she asked, as though Mary were the interloper here, “Who are you?”

  “The keeper,” Mary replied. “I live here.”

  “The keeper,” Annie exclaimed. “Well, you must be the luckiest woman in the world.”

  Mary had smiled herself then, because that was exactly how she felt.

  “I wanted to come out here by the lighthouse.” Annie looked down at the sand beneath her bare feet. “I met the man I married right here on this spot.”

  “Here?” Mary asked, incredulous. “There’s never anyone around here.”

  “He was painting and doing some repair work on the house.”

  Ah, yes. Mary remembered. A few summers ago the place had swarmed with young men, half-naked and bronzed and beautiful, scarves tied around their foreheads to keep the sweat from their eyes. She must mean one of them.

  “It was nighttime when I met Alec, though. It was very dark, but every time the lighthouse flashed I could see him. He was standing right here, just enjoying the evening. The closer I got, the better he looked.” She smiled, blushing, and turned her face back to the water. Her hair blew in long tufts up and around her head, and she lifted her hands to draw it back to her shoulders.

  “Well.” Mary was startled to know this had gone on within a short distance of her home. “So this spot’s special for you.”

  “Uh-huh. Now we’ve got a little boy. We’ve been living in Atlanta while Alec finished his training—he’s a veterinarian—but all the while we knew this was where we wanted to settle down. So, now we’re finally here.” She looked puzzled and glanced up at the lighthouse. “You’re the keeper?” she asked. “I didn’t think they still had keepers. Aren’t all the lighthouses run by electricity now?”

  Mary nodded. “Yes, and this one’s had electricity since 1939. Most of them are maintained by the Coast Guard these days. My husband was the last keeper on the North Carolina coast, and when he died, I took over.” She studied Annie, who was shading her eyes to stare up at the tower. “Would you like to go up?” she asked, surprising herself with the question. She never invited anyone up with her. The tower had been closed to the public for many years.

  Annie clapped her hands together. “Oh, I’d love to.”

  They walked toward the door in the lighthouse, Mary stopping for the bucket of wild blackberries she’d picked earlier that morning.

  She could still climb to the top of the tower with only one or two stops along the way to catch her breath and rest her legs. Annie had to stop too, or maybe she just pretended she needed to so Mary didn’t feel too old. Mary led her right up to the lantern room, where the enormous honeycomb lens took up so much space there was barely room to walk around it.

  “Oh, my God,” Annie said, awestruck. “I’ve never seen so much glass in one place in my entire life.” She looked at Mary. “I love glass,” she said. “This is fantastic.”

  Mary let her slip inside the lens, through the opening made when one segment of glass had to be removed a few years earlier after being damaged in a storm. Annie turned slowly in a circle, taking in all of the landscape, which Mary knew would appear upside down to her through the curved glass of the lens.

  It took her a while to lure Annie away from the lens and down to the next level, where they stepped out onto the gallery. They sat on the warm iron floor, and Mary pointed out landmarks in the distance. Annie was quiet at first, overwhelmed, it seemed, and Mary watched her eyes fill with tears at the beauty spread out below them. She learned right then that nearly everything made this girl cry.

  They spent a good two hours up there, eating berries and talking, the windows Mary had been cleaning in the lantern room forgotten.

  Mary told her a little about Caleb, how she used to love to sit up here with him, how after decades of living at Kiss River they had never tired of the view. Caleb had been dead ten long years then, and having Annie to talk with, having someone listen to her so attentively, made her depressingly aware of how few friends she’d been able to make over the years, how hungry she was for companionship. For some reason, she told Annie about Elizabeth. “She hated living in such an isolated place, and she resented her father and me for making her live here. She just took off when she was fifteen years old. Quit school and married a man from Charlotte who was ten years older than her. She moved there and never sent us her address. I went there once to try to find her but without any luck.” Mary looked out at the blue horizon. “That child broke our hearts.” Why was she telling all this to a stranger? She no longer discussed these things even with herself. “She’d be forty-five now, Elizabeth.” Mary shook her head. “It’s hard for me to believe I’ve got a daughter who’s forty-five years old.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late to make things right with her,” Annie said. “Do you know where she is now?”

  She nodded. “I have an address I got from a friend of hers. I heard her husband died a few years back, so she must be living alone now. I write her letters a couple times a year, but I’ve never once heard back from her.”

  Annie frowned. “She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a mother who cares about her. Who loves her,” she said. “She doesn’t know what she’s thrown away.”

  Mary felt a little choked up. She took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her brown work pants, pulled one out and lit it in her cupped hand, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. It had been a long, long time since she’d let herself think about Elizabeth, and she could not bear how much it hurt, so she changed the topic to the young woman sharing her balcony. Annie’s hands and lips were stained with the juice of the berries, the color clashing wildly with the red of her hair.

  “Where are you from?” Mary asked. “Where did you pick up that accent?”

  “Boston.” Annie smiled.

  “Ah, yes,” Mary said. She sounded like one of the Kennedys, the way she strangled most of her words.

  “My family has a lot of money.” Annie rolled a berry between her thumb and forefinger. “My father is a heart surgeon. People come from all over the world to see him.”

  There was pride in her voice. And something else. A wistfulness, perhaps.

  “I haven’t seen him or my mother for a while, though.”

  “Why is that?”

  Annie shrugged. “Well, they’re incredibly busy. My father with his practice, my mother with her volunteer stuff and garden club and things. They never had much time for a kid. I was the only one, but even so, I think I was an afterthought. They just threw money my way from time to time. They had so much money they didn’t know what to do with it. I could have anything I wanted. Anything material, at any rate.” She looked out at the horizon. “I’m not going to raise my son that way. Not on your life.”

  Annie visited Mary often after that first meeting, sometimes bringing her adorable baby son along with her, sometimes not. Mary looked forward to her visits, and she found herself listening for the sound of Annie’s little red Volkswagen out on the dirt road, or searching for it when she was high up in the tower. Annie brought her things—bread or cookies she’d baked, or sometimes full meals that she’d make for Mary while cooking for her own family. Mary chided her. “You shouldn’t spend your money on me, child,” she’d say, but Annie said it wasn’t polite to turn down a gift or mention what it might have cost the giver. Although Annie had come from money, she didn’t seem to have it now. Her husband had to work long hours, she said, often at night, driving out to the mainland farms to doctor cows and horses and goats. There was little work to keep him gainfully employed on the Outer Banks themselves.

  It was only a few weeks after Mary first met Annie that the Park Service started talking about taking over the operation of the Kiss
River Lighthouse. Rumors flew around Kiss River. They would pave the little sand road, people said. They would turn the keeper’s house into a tourist attraction.

  For the first time in her life, Mary had trouble sleeping. She knew what was coming, and she wasn’t surprised when someone from the Park Service came to tell her that her services would no longer be needed. As a matter of fact, the man said, Mary would have to leave. They would help her relocate, he continued, but by that time Mary had shut the door in his face.

  Annie got wind of it and was off and running before Mary knew she was involved. She had petitions signed, and dragged the newspapers into the fracas. She even showed up on Mary’s doorstep one day with a television crew. She left no stone unturned, no politician unharassed in her rigorous, though often disorganized, crusade. By the time it was all over and Mary was granted permission to stay in one half of the keeper’s house, everyone in the Outer Banks knew Annie’s name as well as hers.

  “Come on, now, Mary. Into your chair. Time for dinner.”

  Mary felt someone tugging at her arm. She opened her eyes to see Gale, one of the young girls on the retirement home staff, holding her cane in front of her. She looked out at the street.

  “Is the young man still here?” she asked. Then she remembered watching him get into his car and drive away.

  “No, Mary. Your visitor left an hour ago.”

  “He’ll be back,” Mary said, rising to her feet, wincing as her left foot hit the floor and sent the pain up into her hip. “He’ll be back, all right.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Alec could have taken his film into the studio anytime that week, but he waited until Saturday. It wasn’t until he’d pulled into the parking lot that he admitted to himself the reason for his delay: he wanted to see Olivia Simon again. He’d found himself talking to her in his head all week, telling her things about Annie other people were no longer interested in hearing. He could always talk to Tom Nestor, but Tom’s grief was still as real as his own, and that bothered Alec. He had never particularly liked sharing Annie with Tom.

  Olivia was at the work table where he was accustomed to seeing Annie. Her head was bent low, and she was wearing Annie’s old green safety glasses. It had given him something of a jolt, seeing her in those glasses for the first time last week, but he could think of no good reason why she shouldn’t use them.

  She was holding the soldering iron and a coil of solder. Tom leaned close to her, guiding her fingers, giving her encouragement. Cigarette smoke snaked into the air above Tom’s head. He had never smoked in here when Annie was alive.

  Tom looked up as Alec closed the front door.

  “Howdy, Alec,” he said.

  Olivia lifted her head from her work and smiled.

  “Hi.” Alec walked over to the table and peered down at the pieces of glass. “What are you working on?” he asked Olivia.

  She handed him a sheet of graph paper, and he studied the design drawn in felt tip pen—a rectangle with a crazy quilt of shapes inside it, each labeled a different color. He smiled at its simplicity, and at the pleasure in her face.

  “She’s a natural,” Tom said, nodding toward her, as Alec placed the paper on the table again.

  “I’m a novice,” Olivia corrected him, and neither Tom nor Alec was about to argue the point.

  Alec tapped her lightly on the shoulder and she looked up at him, the green of the oversized glasses a near match for her eyes. “Let me buy you lunch,” he said. “A real one. No indigestion this time.”

  She seemed to weigh the invitation for a moment, then nodded. “All right.”

  Alec went into the darkroom and began developing the black and white film he’d used the Sunday before. He thought of the little stained glass panel Olivia was working on. Annie’s first panel had been large and elaborate—two sheep standing in a meadow composed of five different greens. She had always refused to waste her time on anything just for the practice. If her first effort didn’t produce something she could display with pride, there would be no second attempt.

  He met Olivia in the parking lot at noon. “Are you in a hurry?” he asked as she got into his Bronco. “We can drive up to Duck and eat on the sound if you have the time.”

  “That’s fine.” She buckled her seat belt across the lap of her white cotton pants, and for a few seconds he was mesmerized by the delicacy of her hands, the whiteness of her fingers, and the smooth, rounded tips of her short nails. He remembered what she’d told him about holding Annie’s heart in her hand, and he could barely tear his eyes away as he started the Bronco and pulled it out onto the road.

  “I haven’t been up this far,” she said when he took the right fork in the road, heading toward Duck.

  “Really?” That seemed ridiculous. “It’s just a few miles from where you live, and you’ve been down here…how long?”

  “Nearly a year,” she admitted. “I started working the day after we moved here. We had a new house to fix up, and there simply hasn’t been any time for us to explore the area.”

  She spoke as though she and her husband were still together. Maybe in the week since he’d seen her things had changed. Maybe he’d moved back in.

  They got a table on the deck outside the tiny restaurant. They were directly over the water, and a few fat geese looked up at them expectantly as he and Olivia took their seats.

  They both ordered crab salad. Alec was relaxed, a different person than he’d been a week earlier. He remembered ordering their sandwiches in the deli, his body coiled and tense, ready to bolt. He’d been afraid to hear Olivia talk about the night Annie died, but it had helped him immeasurably to listen to her describe what happened, to hear her talk about feeling the same desperate need to keep Annie alive that he had felt.

  He ordered wine, but Olivia did not, patting her stomach by way of explanation, and he remembered the baby.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. She looked healthy, except for the nearly translucent whiteness of her skin, which he assumed was natural for her.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “A little tired. I worry about how the baby’s being affected by the stress I’m under.”

  “You husband’s still gone?”

  “Yes.” She looked down at her hands in her lap, probably playing with her ring as she had the week before. “I never imagined going through a pregnancy alone, much less raising a child by myself.” She smiled up at him. “I have nightmares that it might be twins. That’s all I’d need.”

  “Are there twins in your family?”

  “I’m one.”

  “Really? Identical?” He tried to picture two of her.

  “No. He was a boy.”

  “Was?”

  “He died a few years ago.” Olivia brushed her hand through the air, obviously whisking that topic away. “Anyway, I’d get this feeling every once in a while that there were two of them in here and it made me panicky. But I heard the heartbeat at my doctor’s appointment this week, and there was just one.”

  They were quiet while their food was set in front of them. A ray of sunlight shimmered in Olivia’s dark, arrow-straight hair.

  “How are things with your husband?” he asked when the waitress had left their table.

  Olivia lifted her fork. “Not good,” she said. “He seems completely disinterested in me. I called to tell him I love him—as you suggested—and he said I shouldn’t bother, that he’s not worth it.” She tried to smile, but didn’t quite succeed.

  “Maybe he feels guilty about the affair.”

  He saw her start. “He didn’t have an affair. I told you it was more of a fantasy.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She took a bite of her crab salad, chewing and swallowing before she spoke again. “He worked with her, and then he became obsessed with her, talking about her all the time. He’d compare me to her, and I didn’t compare too well.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “She was married and not the least bit interested
in him.

  He admitted that it was completely one-sided.” She spoke forcefully, as if she were trying to convince herself as much as she was him. Maybe more. “Nevertheless,” she continued, “I didn’t measure up to his image of this woman, so when she…so even though he couldn’t have her, he still left me.”

  Alec frowned. Her husband sounded like a jerk.

  “She was all he’d talk about, and I put up with it. I thought I shouldn’t overreact, I should let him talk and get it out of his system, but he never did.”

  “Did he leave so he could get closer to her? I mean, forgive me, Olivia, but maybe he wanted to have an affair with her and didn’t feel right about it while he was still with you. So he…”

  Olivia shook her head. “She moved away before he moved out.”

  “Where did she go? Could he still be in touch with her?”

  She suddenly laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand. “No, I’m sure he isn’t.” She picked at the crab salad with her fork. “She’s in California.”

  “California’s not on another planet. What makes you so sure he’s not still communicating with her?”

  “He would have told me. He never hid his feelings from me, although at times I wished he had.” She looked across the table at him. “She was a better person than me in some ways,” she said. “Ways that were important to my husband.”

  Alec sat back in his chair. “Hey, listen,” he said, “the man’s obsessed. Irrational. Don’t get sucked into thinking he’s right. He never really knew her. If he’d ever had the chance he probably would have figured out she was a shrew.”

  She lowered her head, and he saw a small, glistening tear-drop on her lower lashes, watched as it fell to her lavender blouse, where it made a dark round spot above her breast.

  He leaned toward her. “Olivia?”

  She raised her napkin to her eyes, glancing at the other diners. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, “I’m sure you didn’t invite me to lunch so that I could embarrass you.”