Keeper of the Light

by Diane Chamberlain

  He pulled his chair closer to the table. “I didn’t invite you to lunch to upset you, either.” His knees touched hers beneath the table, and she pulled back slightly.

  She began slowly shredding her napkin into long, ragged strips. “I just don’t understand it,” she said. “He was so wonderful before he met her. Our marriage was really good, excellent, and then suddenly it fell apart. I keep waiting for the old Paul to come back, but it’s as if he died.”

  Alec shook his head. “Probably just hibernating. Stay in his life until he wakes up, Olivia. Remind him how good things used to be.”

  She had stopped crying, but her nose was still red and it made her look helpless. Nothing like the woman he’d met the week before, the woman who had meticulously described her attempt to save Annie’s life.

  “I’ve been trying to be a little more like her,” she said. “Like the other woman.”

  Alec frowned again. “It’s Olivia he fell in love with, right? It’s Olivia he had the healthy relationship with, not this—” he wanted to say bitch, but he did not quite feel comfortable using that word in front of her “—this woman who brings out the craziness in him.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, her hands balled into tight, white fists. “I was infertile,” she said. “I think that’s when it changed. When his feelings changed. I had surgery, but it was too late to snap him out of it.”

  “Maybe if you told him about the baby?”

  “Then I’d never be sure if it was me or the baby he wanted.”

  There was a sudden bleating sound from her purse, and she reached in to turn off her beeper. “Is there a phone here?” she asked.

  “I’m sure they’ll let you use the one inside.”

  She stood up, straightening her spine and giving a slight toss to her shimmery dark hair as she walked into the restaurant, once again the competent doctor.

  He picked apart his uneaten slice of bread and was feeding chunks of it to the geese by the time Olivia returned to the table and took her seat again.

  “Do you have to go?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “They can handle it without me.” She looked down at her shredded napkin, frowning, as though she had no idea how it had gotten there. She scooped the shreds and deposited them on her plate, giving him a rueful smile. “I’m sorry, Alec,” she said. “Next time I start babbling about my problems, shove a cork in my mouth, okay?”

  “I don’t mind listening,” he said, dropping the last piece of bread into the water. The geese fought over it, noisily. “Your circumstances are very different from mine, but the bottom line is that we’re both alone. I know how that feels.”

  She played with the straw in her iced tea, now that her napkin was no longer available. “When I start missing Paul, I think about you without Annie—without the possibility of Annie—and I…” She hesitated, shook her head. “I miss touching. I don’t mean sex, exactly, but just…holding hands, just that intimacy with another person. You don’t know how good you’ve got it till it’s gone.”

  He nodded, and she leaned back in her chair and dropped her hands to her lap again.

  “I’ve started getting massages just so I can feel someone touching me,” she said.

  He smiled at her candor, and he understood what she meant. He wondered if she went to a man or a woman, or if it would matter, or if he should get a massage himself. How would it feel, paying someone to ease the pain of a body suffering from neglect?

  They stopped for the light at the corner of Croatan and Ash on the way back to the studio, and Alec pointed down Ash toward the sound. “See the third cottage on the right?” he asked. “That was where Annie and I first lived when we moved here.” The small cottage stood on stilts above the sand. It was blackened with age; it had been black even when he and Annie lived there. “We didn’t have much money, as you can tell.”

  Olivia was quiet as the Bronco began moving again, slowly, through the heavy summer traffic. “I started working at the shelter after the night Annie died,” she said finally.

  He glanced over at her. “Why?” He hated that place.

  She shrugged. “Well that was the first I’d become aware of its existence. My husband was gone and I had the time.” She looked over at him. “The staff still talk about Annie.”

  He smiled. “Do they?”

  “They adored her. They talk about how she was always full of ideas and how everyone depended on her creativity. The place is falling apart without her. At least that’s what they say.”

  “Like my house,” he said, almost to himself.

  He pulled into the studio parking lot. Olivia unbuckled her belt, but turned in her seat to face him. “What was she really like, Alec? When they talk about her at the shelter she sounds like she should be canonized.”

  He laughed. “I doubt they canonize atheists.” He turned the air conditioner up another notch. “She had very strong values and she put her money where her mouth was, literally. She donated practically all the money she made to various causes. Animal rights, AIDS, the homeless, the right-to lifers.”

  “The right-to-lifers?”

  “Oh, yeah. She was a rabid antiabortionist. I made donations to Planned Parenthood to try to nullify her effort.” He smiled at the memory. “Made her mad as hell.”

  “I’m surprised she’d be antiabortion. She sounds so liberal.”

  “She was about most things, but she was also very pro-family.” He looked up at the studio windows. “People talk about her like she was perfect, but she wasn’t. She was human. She’d get moody sometimes.” He felt a little guilty, tarnishing Annie’s image in Olivia’s mind, but those strange periods of melancholy were as much a part of Annie as her altruism. It was a moodiness that came and went in waves. He never understood it, and she never seemed able to explain it to him. She would withdraw from him, from everyone. It’s my dark side, she’d tell him, and he could almost see the black shroud settling over her shoulders, over her head. He learned quickly there was nothing he could do to turn the tide of those moods. All he could do was wait for them to pass on their own. It bothered him enormously that she had died in the midst of one, that she had died troubled.

  “I’ve come to admire her.” Olivia sounded almost shy. “Now that I know how challenging it is to work in stained glass, I look at her things and I’m in awe.”

  He was touched. He looked up at the studio and could just make out one of Annie’s few remaining stained glass panels, a design of beveled glass. “She was an extremely talented artist,” he said. “I think she could have gone a lot further if I hadn’t dragged her out of school to get married.”

  “Where was she going?”

  “Boston College.”

  “Really?” Olivia looked slightly stunned. “That’s where my husband went. He graduated in seventy-three.”

  “That would have been Annie’s class,” Alec said. “Next time you speak to him, ask him if he knew her. Her maiden name was Chase.”

  Olivia was quiet for a moment. “Well,” she said finally, reaching for the handle of the door. “Thank you for lunch.”

  He stopped her with his hand on her arm. “Do you have many friends here?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Just at work.”

  He pulled out his wallet and removed a business card. He turned it over and wrote down his home phone number. “Keep me posted on how things go with your husband,” he said, handing it to her.

  “Thanks.” She started to step out of the car.

  “Olivia?”

  She turned to look at him.

  “I want you to know how glad I am that you were the doctor in the emergency room that night.”

  She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She got out of the car and closed the door softly behind her. He watched her step around the front of the Bronco, brushing a strand of her sleek, dark hair from her face.

  Her husband was a fool.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was the fourth time Olivia had stop
ped in to look at the crib. She’d intended to go directly home after Alec dropped her off, but the little shop was right across the parking lot from the studio and it had a lure on her she could feel from a mile away.

  The crib was a white Jenny Lind, and she could picture it in the small third bedroom of the house. It would look wonderful, that clean white against the sunny yellow wallpaper she had already picked out. She wished she could buy the crib now, today, but there was still the chance that Paul might stop by the house for something. She didn’t want him to learn he was going to be a father from the sudden appearance of a crib rather than from her.

  She was still clutching Alec’s business card when she returned to her car. It was soft as felt from months of being carried in his wallet. She slipped it into the back of her own wallet, gnawing on her lip. She had lied to him. Omitted things. She hadn’t told him that Paul was the author of that article on Annie in Seascape. What choice did she have? She couldn’t take the chance of telling him, of having him realize it had been Annie that Paul worshiped.

  When she got home, she made a batch of cookies—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d baked—and changed into a blue flowered blouse Paul had always loved on her. She studied her map at the kitchen table, checking it against the address he’d given her, while the house filled with the smell of oats and brown sugar. She carried the cookies out to the car and drove the ten miles to South Nag’s Head.

  It was close to six when she pulled up in front of his house, a small gray cottage one block from the ocean, in the midst of the tourists and their summer rentals. It was new. She could smell the cedar siding as she stepped onto the front deck and knocked at the door. She had to knock a second time before Paul opened it.

  “Olivia,” he said, not bothering to mask his surprise.

  She smiled. “I wanted to see your new house.” Her tone was that of an intimate friend. Curious. Caring. “And I made some cookies for you.”

  He stepped aside to let her in. “You baked? I didn’t think you knew how to operate an oven.”

  His house felt like a shrine to Annie. Each of the four large windows in the living room was adorned with a stained glass panel—two of the silk-clad women, and two underwater scenes filled with tropical fish and fluid strips of blue and green in that distinctive Annie O’Neill style. Tom Nestor had explained that technique to her at length—twice—and she still could not begin to understand how it was done.

  “Your house is very nice, Paul,” she said.

  There were four skylights in the cathedral ceiling above them and they let in a welcome pool of clear white sunlight.

  “Thanks.” He walked over to the dining area and began straightening the already neat piles of paper on the dining room table, the table she had long considered her own. He seemed flustered at having her there, and she felt as though she’d walked in on him with another woman. In a way, she had.

  “I’m interrupting your work,” she said. His portable computer was also on the table, and it was apparent he’d been in the throes of something when she arrived.

  “No, that’s all right. I’m ready for a break. Have a seat.”

  She lowered herself into one of the familiar dining room chairs.

  “I’ve got some iced tea. Or would you rather have wine?”

  “Tea would be great,” she said. She watched him disappear into the kitchen, knowing she was keeping things from him as well. She could hardly tell him she’d had lunch with Alec, and she certainly wouldn’t ask him if he’d known Annie went to Boston College. She could imagine his reaction if that was something he hadn’t known. He’d torment himself over what might have been. She didn’t want to feed his fantasy of Annie any further.

  He returned to the dining room and set her iced tea on the table, but he didn’t sit down, and he had brought nothing to drink for himself. He stood near the computer, hands in his pockets.

  “Have a cookie.” Olivia gestured toward the plate.

  Paul lifted the foil and raised a cookie to his mouth. “No arsenic in them I hope.” He smiled, and for a moment she was struck by his hazel eyes, by the warmth his smile gave them. Seeing that charm in his face made her realize how long it had been since she’d felt any affection at all from him. She wished she knew how to seduce. She had never learned—had steadfastly avoided learning—those skills.

  She forced her eyes back to the table. “What are you working on?”

  Paul glanced at one of the stacks of paper. “I joined the Save the Kiss River Lighthouse Committee. We’re putting together an educational brochure to generate interest in saving the lighthouse.”

  He had always had a weird fascination with that lighthouse. The day they arrived in the Outer Banks, before they had even gotten all the boxes in the house, he went to see it. Olivia stayed home and unpacked, a little annoyed at being left to do the work by herself and disconcerted by the fact that he hadn’t invited her to come along. That day had been the beginning of the end.

  “It was bizarre, Olivia,” he said now. “I walked into this meeting and who should be the chairman of the committee but Annie’s husband.” He looked at her and she knew he was checking to see if this was a safe topic. She could not be sure of her own expression. Alec was chairman of the lighthouse committee? Paul was working shoulder to shoulder with him? She thought quickly. Should she tell Paul that she knew Alec? Then she’d have to tell him about the stained glass lessons, the two lunch dates. She felt herself getting wrapped more tightly in the web of lies.

  “I wanted to get up and leave,” he continued, waving the cookie in the air, “but I was trapped. I’d practically begged to be allowed to join, but the last thing I expected was to find Alec O’…” He stopped and grimaced. “I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear any more of my Annie crap.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You can talk about her. I know you need to. I know there isn’t anyone else you can talk to about her.” He probably felt the way she had earlier that afternoon when she’d bent Alec’s ear about him. She finally understood Paul’s need to spill it all out.

  He sat down across the table from her, staring at her, and his eyes had reddened. “Why would you do that?” he asked. “Why would you sit here and let me ramble on about someone who destroyed your marriage?”

  “Because I still love and care about you.”

  He turned his face away from her. “I can’t talk about her to you anymore. It was never fair of me to do that.”

  Olivia stood up and walked over to his chair. She knelt next to him, resting her hand on top of his, but he stiffened and drew his hand away.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  She sat back on the carpet. “Do you remember when we used to take those long walks together early in the morning?”

  He frowned at her. “Why are you bringing that up?”

  “It’s one of my favorite memories, walking with you through Rock Creek Park, holding hands. Buying bagels with cream cheese and scallions at Joe’s little deli and…”

  “And your beeper going off half the time.”

  She leaned back against the wall, defeated. “Did it seem like that often?”

  “At least.”

  “I’m sorry. If I’d known what it would cost me, I would have done something about it.” She had thought he’d admired her for her diligence. A workaholic, he used to call her, although he had always made it sound like a term of endearment rather than a complaint. Certainly he understood the forces that had made her that way. He understood them better than anyone. Even in high school and college, she’d intentionally lost herself in work, leaving herself no time for a social life. Work had kept her safe from the flirting she had never been able to master, the casual sex that was entirely out of the question. By the time she met Paul and discovered she felt safe with him, her work pattern was firmly in place and there seemed to be no reason to change it. Now she could see her mistake. She’d taken him for granted. She had given Paul so little of herself that he needed
to turn to a fantasy to feel whole, and he’d found the fantasy superior to his marriage.

  “It’s my fault.” She rested her head on her arms. “It’s my fault everything fell apart. I miss you so much, Paul. I would do anything if you’d come back. I’d quit my job. I’d work as a waitress. I’d shell shrimp. Shuck oysters. Just weekdays. No evenings or weekends.”

  She heard him laugh and when she looked up he had taken off his glasses. His eyes were still rimmed with red, but there was a smile on his face.

  “Liv,” he said, a tenderness in his voice she had not heard in many months. “I’m the one who’s screwed up here, not you.”

  “Nine years,” she said. “You seemed happy. You seemed content.”

  He nodded. “I was very content. It was good. It was nearly perfect. I’ve changed, Liv, and I’m sorry.”

  She thought of the crib, of the heartbeat that had filled the examining room in her doctor’s office. “We could see a counselor,” she said. “There must be a way we can work it out.”

  He shook his head and stood up, holding out his hand to help her up from the floor. He let go as soon as she’d reached her feet, and he started walking in the direction of the door, obviously telling her she had stayed long enough.

  “Thank you for the cookies,” he said, opening the door.

  She felt a wave of desperation as she stepped out onto the deck. She turned back to look at him. “I meant what I said, Paul. About changing. About quitting my job if that’s what it takes. Maybe I…”

  He stopped her with another shake of his head. “You should have your own lawyer, Olivia,” he said, and then he closed the door softly between them.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  July 1991

  “Where did you get that?” Clay looked across the breakfast table at his sister. Alec glanced up from the newspaper to see what he was talking about. Lacey wore a headset attached to a small red transistor radio which rested next to her plate. It was the first time he’d seen it.