Keeper of the Light

by Diane Chamberlain

  Clay looked down at his cantaloupe. “I think you need me here,” he said. “I think Lacey needs me.”

  Alec laughed. “You and Lacey get along like oil and water.”

  “That doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to her. I’m afraid if I go away I’ll come back and she’ll be pregnant and using coke or something.”

  Alec reached across the table to lay his hand lightly on his son’s arm. “Clay, what is it? Are you afraid to leave home?”

  Clay drew his arm away. “Yeah, I’m afraid, but not for myself.”

  “You’re going to college. I can certainly take care of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  Clay looked up at him, and Alec was surprised at the tears in his eyes. He had seen Clay cry only once since he was small, and that was the night Annie died. “You used to be the greatest father in the world,” he said, “but now I’m not so sure you can take care of a fourteen-year-old girl. I’m not so sure you can even take care of yourself.” He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Dad, listen to me, all right?” he said. “I was at a party last night and some guys I know came in and told me they’d just come from a party where they saw Lacey. She was ripped, Dad. Wasted. They said she went into one of the bedrooms with some guy and then later with another. And that’s just while they were there.”

  The coffee started to burn a hole in Alec’s stomach. He stared wordlessly at his son.

  “They didn’t know who the guys were or I would have found them and beat the shit out of them.”

  “Okay,” Alec said. “Thank you for telling me. Let this be my problem, though, all right? I’ll handle it. I’m her father, not you.” He reached for the toast, thinking of Annie. She would never have forced Clay to go to school if he didn’t want to. “The choice is yours about college, Clay, but don’t stay here because of Lacey.”

  He turned on his answering machine to take the calls from friends and acquaintances incensed over the way Olivia had managed Annie’s case in the ER, angered by something they knew nothing about. Then he showered and shaved in an at tempt to pull himself together, struggling unsuccessfully to keep his mind off the image of Lacey in a strange bedroom, being pawed at. Used.

  He woke her at noon. Her face was puffy and pale, and she groaned when she opened her eyes. He’d left the overhead light off and the shades pulled, but still the faint light made her wince. She sat up slowly, leaning against the headboard, the china doll lying face down at her side.

  “You wanted to talk to me last night,” he said. He would be careful not to call her Annie.

  “I don’t remember,” she said in the sullen voice he had come to equate with her lately. There was a string of hickeys, red and round, on her neck, disappearing under the neckline of her T-shirt.

  “I think we do need to talk.”

  “Not now. I don’t feel well.”

  “You’re hungover, and that’s one of the things we need to talk about. You’re way too young to be drinking.” He cursed himself as she frowned. Wasn’t he going to start this conversation by telling her he loved her?

  “I only had one beer,” she said, and tempted though he was to accuse her of lying, he bit his tongue.

  He picked up the doll and rested it on his lap. Its brown eyes were painted on; they stared blankly at the ceiling. Alec looked back at his daughter. “I was thinking last night that it’s been a while since I told you I loved you,” he said.

  She dropped her eyes to the blanket covering her knees and picked at a thread coming loose from the binding. She’d made a tactical error in cutting her hair—it was no longer long enough to cover her eyes.

  “I do, Lace. Very much. And I’m worried about you. Clay told me that some of his friends saw you…go into a bedroom with a couple of different guys last night.”

  Her face shot up. There was alarm in her eyes, but she attempted a laugh. “They must have me mixed up with someone else.”

  “You’re a smart kid, Lace, but I think drinking throws your judgment off and you end up doing things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. Guys will take advantage of you. You’re too young to…”

  “I’m not doing anything, and even if I was, so what? Mom turned out okay.”

  “She did start young, that’s true, but it was because she was searching for love. You know what her parents were like—she never felt loved by them. You know you’re loved, don’t you Lace? You don’t have to have sex to get guys to like you.”

  “I’m not.”

  Alec’s eyes were drawn to the wall above Lacey’s head where a long-haired musician, his leather pants stitched into a genital-hugging cup at the crotch, smirked at him. He looked back at his daughter. “I guess we should talk about birth control,” he said.

  Lacey flushed, her cheeks the color of the welts on her neck. “Please shut up.”

  “If you need birth control, you can get it. Do you want me to make a doctor’s appointment for you?”

  “No.”

  He looked down at the doll, touching the delicate little white teeth with the tip of his finger. “Well, maybe it’s not negotiable. If you’re getting involved with…boys, you probably should see a doctor whether you want birth control or not.”

  She stared at him incredulously. “Mom would never have made me go.”

  He felt his patience slipping. “Look, Lacey, if you want to act like an adult, then you’re going to have to face the responsibilities that come along…”

  “Mom would never have gotten on my case like this, either,” she interrupted him. “She would have believed anything I said. She would have trusted me.”

  He threw the doll down hard on the bed and stood up. “Well, I’m not Mom,” he said, unable to keep the anger out of his voice. “And she’s not here. You’re stuck with me because she thought a bunch of goddamned battered women needed her more than we did.”

  Lacey flung her blanket aside and jumped to the floor, turning to glare at him across the bed. “Sometimes I think you wish Zachary Pointer had killed me instead of her,” she said. “I bet you lie awake at night and think, why couldn’t it have been Lacey? Why did it have to be Annie?”

  He was too astonished to speak. He stared after her as she ran out of the room, her footsteps quick and sharp in the hallway, and the bathroom door slammed shut so loudly he winced.

  He stood there for a few minutes more before beginning to make her bed. He folded the edge of the sheet neatly over the blanket, tucked the spread under her pillow, and sat the doll up against the headboard. Then he walked downstairs to the den, where he could spend the rest of the day lost in his work on the lighthouse.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  They gave her the tourists in the emergency room over the next couple of days, because the locals—at least those coherent enough to be choosy—refused to see the doctor who had taken Annie O’Neill from them.

  On the Tuesday after Jonathan’s vitriolic story appeared in the Gazette, Mike Shelley asked to see her. He was on the phone when she walked into his office, and he gestured for her to sit down. She watched the lines deepen in his forehead as he listened to his caller. Whatever he had to say to her wasn’t going to be good.

  She had felt very much alone these past couple of days, despite a reserved sympathy from most of the ER staff. “We’re behind you,” Kathy Brash said to her. “We know what you went through that night,” Lynn Wilkes added, but their voices were whispers, as though they were afraid of being too public with their support. Jonathan had his allies as well—people who watched her every move, who waited for her to make another error in judgment.

  She had heard nothing from Paul since he’d left for Washington, and nothing from Alec since the night she’d stood naked and willing in his arms. She cringed to remember that night. He’d been serious when he said they should avoid each other. For the past couple of nights she lay in bed, waiting for ten-thirty to come, hoping that the phone would ring. She’d finally drop off to sleep, waking up in the morning to the realization that he hadn’t c
alled. Perhaps by now he blamed her too.

  Mike hung up the phone and gave her a tired smile. “I need to show you something I received this morning,” he said. He pulled a sheaf of paper from a large envelope and pushed it across the desk to her. “A petition. Three hundred names, all asking for your resignation. Or, I guess, asking me to force you to resign.”

  She looked down at the yellow lined paper. Across the top of the first sheet someone had typed: In light of her inadequate handling of the medical emergency which resulted in the death of valued community member Annie Chase O’Neill, the following people call for the immediate resignation of Olivia Simon, M.D.”

  She let her eyes brush over the names, lifting the second sheet, the third, trying to determine if Alec’s signature was among the many, but she could not read that quickly, and the names began to blur in front of her. She looked up at Mike.

  “I have no intention of asking you to leave, Olivia, but I thought you should know what we’re up against. I’m sorry this has gotten so out of hand.”

  Mike had made his own statements to the press, and although he vehemently denied any cover-up, he was reserved and cautious in the words he used. Olivia understood. His position was political as well as medical, and he couldn’t afford to alienate the community. It didn’t matter what he said, anyway. People were hearing only what they wanted to hear. Even after all these months, they wanted a scapegoat, someone to blame for the loss of their beloved Saint Anne.

  “Have you heard anything from her husband?” she asked. “Do you know where he stands?”

  “Well, I don’t thinks he’s behind this petition. I just hope he’s not talking to a lawyer.”

  “Mike, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. What you did may have been unwise from the standpoint of liability, but it took courage. I’m not at all certain I would have had the guts to do something for her here.”

  She stood up, and he followed her to the door.

  “Keep your chin up,” he said. He gestured toward the petition on his desk. “I’ll figure out what to do about this. You just concentrate on your work.”

  She stopped by the studio that evening to show Tom her design for a new stained glass panel—multicolored hot-air balloons above a green meadow. A little more of a challenge. She could already picture it in the window of the nursery.

  Tom looked up from the work table when she walked into the studio.

  “Hi.” She pulled the roll of graph paper from her tote bag and set the bag itself on the empty chair by the table. “How are you doing?”

  “I’m not sure.” Tom’s voice sounded tight, and when she looked down at him, he crossed his arms across his chest.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought, Olivia,” he said, “and I’m just not sure I can teach you any longer.”

  She stared at him, wondering if his signature was on the petition. “Because of the things Jonathan Cramer’s been saying about me?”

  “Because I don’t know what to believe. Because I think you took a risk with the life of a very good friend of mine. A very precious friend.” There were actual tears in his eyes, ready to spill onto his pale eyelashes.

  Olivia put her hands on her hips. “I did everything I could for her, Tom. I didn’t kill her. I feel like people are blaming me because Zachary Pointer’s too far away and too invisible—blaming him doesn’t give them much satisfaction. So I’ve become the scapegoat, but I swear to you, Tom, I did the best I could.”

  “Maybe you did, Olivia. I can’t judge. All I know is, I can’t sit here with you week after week, letting you use Annie’s glass and Annie’s tools and Annie’s…”

  “All right.” She reached for her tote bag. “You’ve made your point.”

  “I could give you the names of a few other people who could teach you, but I have to warn you that the art community here’s pretty tight, and I really doubt any of them would be willing to take you on right now.”

  She slipped the graph paper back into her bag, and without another word, left the studio. She let the door slam behind her, and a few people in the parking lot turned to stare at her. Did they know who she was? Did everybody know? She got into her car, and just in case someone was watching, waited until she was out in the street before she let herself cry.

  Her shift in the emergency room was nearly over the following night when they got a call about a head-on collision out on the main road. One driver had walked away with scratches, but the driver of the other car, a woman in her early twenties, was seriously injured and was being brought in by ambulance.

  “We’ll need a second physician,” Olivia said to Kathy as she readied the treatment room.

  “I know,” Kathy said, her voice hesitant, “but it’s Jonathan who’s on call.”

  Olivia was at the scrub sink. “Well,” she said, “you’d better get him over here.”

  The injured driver and Jonathan arrived at the same time. Jonathan plowed into the treatment room, barking orders, looking as though he were already director of the ER. The patient—a twenty-one-year-old woman—was brought in taped to a backboard and wearing a cervical collar. There was a dark bruise already spreading across her abdomen. She was conscious, though not too coherent, and she moaned with pain.

  “Wasn’t wearing a seatbelt,” said the paramedic. “She was lucky she got caught on the steering wheel or she would have gone through the window.”

  “Get a C-spine,” Olivia said to Kathy, “and a CBC and type and cross. And do a blood alcohol level, while you’re at it.” She thought she smelled alcohol on the young woman’s breath.

  Jonathan started an IV in the woman’s arm. “Is the helicopter on its way?” he asked Lynn Wilkes, who nodded. “We’ll stabilize her and send her up,” he said. Then he looked across the patient at Olivia, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Or do you want to play doctor on her?”

  Olivia did not respond. She felt uncertain of their next move with this patient. Her blood pressure was ninety-five over sixty. She was a slender woman who appeared to be in good physical condition. Was that pressure normal for her or an indication of something more ominous? “Pulse is one-ten,” Kathy said, glancing at Olivia.

  Olivia carefully palpated the woman’s abdomen. “Abdomen’s firm,” she said, moving her fingers to the woman’s left side. Suddenly the woman groaned, trying to roll away from Olivia’s touch. Was she simply recoiling from pressure on the bruise, or could her spleen be ruptured?

  “Let’s tap her abdomen,” Olivia said.

  Jonathan scowled at her. “We don’t have time. You want another dead lady on your hands?”

  Olivia said nothing more. She followed Jonathan’s lead, helping him prepare the woman for transport, and she felt dizzy as she watched the emergency technicians transfer her to the waiting helicopter. By the time she returned to her office, her legs were weak and rubbery. She sat down at her desk, leaning back in the chair and closing her eyes. She’d been a coward. Why was she letting Jonathan intimidate her?

  She should have fought him, but she was terrified now—not of Jonathan, not of losing her job—but of her own judgment. If anyone were to ask her just at that moment, as she sat nauseated and trembling at her desk, if she was certain she’d made the right decision in Annie’s case, she could not have said.

  She called Emerson Memorial that night and learned that the woman had indeed suffered a ruptured spleen. Jonathan had been right—the extra minutes it would have taken to tap her abdomen could have cost the young woman her life. Olivia wept, partly from relief that the patient was all right, and partly from the realization that she’d been wrong, that right now she could not trust her own ability to make sound decisions in the ER.

  She went to bed, overwhelmed by her solitude. At twelve-thirty, she lifted her phone from the night table to her bed and dialed Alec’s number. His voice was thick with sleep when he answered, and she hung up without saying a word.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


  August 1991

  Paul walked across Connecticut Avenue, struggling to pull the District of Columbia’s thick, sodden night air into his lungs. You needed gills for this sort of weather. The pink neon sign for Donovan’s Books sprouted from the side of a building half a block in front of him, and he quickened his pace.

  Once inside the store he stood by the door for a moment, mopping his forehead with his handkerchief and drinking in the unmitigated splendor of his favorite bookstore in all the world. Olivia’s favorite as well. He missed living here, and he was beginning to miss Olivia.

  Nine-thirty at night and the store was packed. Joy. What was open in the Outer Banks at nine-thirty except, perhaps, the bait shops?

  He walked slowly through the store, touching books with his fingertips. He’d had poetry readings here on a fairly regular basis. Sunday afternoons, Tuesday evenings. The crowd was always eclectic, always appreciative. Always on his side.

  He reached for the stairs in the rear of the store and climbed up to the loft, where he ordered mineral water and a slice of cheesecake from the man at the service counter. Then, carrying his tray, he searched among the small, crowded tables for an empty seat. Two men were just vacating a table near the railing. They offered it to Paul, and he sat down, realizing as he surveyed the store below him that this was the table where he and Olivia had always tried to sit. For the first two years of their marriage, they had lived in an apartment directly across the street. Even after they’d bought the house in Kensington, they’d meet a few times a week at this table, spending hours over mineral water and avocado sandwiches as they worked together on The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit. God, how he had loved writing that book with her.

  He’d been at Washington General to cover the illness of a senator when he got word of the train plunging into the Potomac. He was the first reporter to reach the emergency room, and in the chaos of that moment, and during the hours that followed, no one seemed to notice him or monitor his actions.