“I considered it,” she said, “but I didn’t want to hurt you.”
He took a step toward her and cupped her head in his palms, kissing her softly on her forehead. “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t think I could have handled hearing it from you just then.” He rested his hands on her waist and sighed. “Now I have to figure out when and how to tell my little girl that Tom is her father.”
“Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose it’s something she needs to know. Medical history and all of that.”
He nodded. “I have to wait, though, until I can accept it myself before I can expect her to. I want to tell her in a way that won’t make her think less of Annie—that will make her feel compassion for her. I don’t think I can do that quite yet.”
“You’re a good father, Alec.”
“I thought you had some doubts about that.”
She shook her head. “About some of your methods, perhaps. But I never doubted your intentions or your love for Lacey.” She touched his cheek. “Are you glad you know the truth?”
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. He raised his hands until his thumbs grazed the sides of her breasts. “It’s eased my guilt about loving you.”
“You took off your ring,” she said.
“So did you.”
She smiled, pressing her forehead to his chin. “Alec…?”
“Hmm?”
“Could we go to bed?”
He laughed, his breath warm against her cheek. “Yes,” he said.
They made love at a more leisurely pace than the last time. The sun outside her window poured warm, thick, honey-like air into her room and slowed them down, made them take their time. She was straddling Alec as he came, and she watched his body strain and arch in the golden light, as he must have watched hers only seconds earlier.
When his breathing had settled down, he opened his eyes and looked at her. “You look beautiful up there,” he said. He stroked his fingers along the gold chain resting against her breasts. “I love you, Olivia.”
She was aware of her nakedness, something that had not concerned her at all only a few minutes ago. But now she felt as though she was all stomach, the rest of her body small and inconsequential.
“It scares me to love you,” she said.
“Why?”
“I just finished loving a man who wished I was Annie. I’m afraid that loving you might end up being the same thing.”
He shook his head against the pillow. “I want you, Olivia,” he said, his hands tightening on her thighs. “I want you just the way you are, with your organized mind, and your craving for structure, and your driving ambition, and your ability to put yourself first.” He touched her lightly where her body was joined to his, and she shivered. “And with your genuine, and thoroughly unsubtle, carnal needs.”
“And with my pregnancy?”
He slid his hands to the firm golden orb of her belly. “I’ve already raised and loved another man’s child,” he said. “I can do it again.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
September 1991
The electricity went out in the Manteo Retirement Home at about eight-thirty in the evening, and the portable radio grew scratchy and unintelligible. The residents, along with some of the staff, huddled together in the candlelit living room, taking turns playing with the knobs on the radio, fighting the dying batteries.
Mary sat off in a corner, the folded newspaper with its finished crossword puzzle resting on her knee. She didn’t need the radio to know what was happening outside. She could feel the devastation in her bones.
She’d opened the window in her room a few hours earlier and let the air blow over her skin. She’d sniffed it, tasted it, and she knew the storm was very close. It’s time, she thought. For days she’d had a feeling about this one. Even before the residents of the Outer Banks were told to evacuate, she knew this storm would be like no other. It would hit head-on, with a sudden punch at the defenseless coastline, the mere preamble to a beating that would last hours.
Trudy tried to talk her into joining a game of canasta.
“If anyone should be used to storms, it’d be you, Mary,” she said when Mary declined. “Look at you, sitting there like a scared little girl.”
She wasn’t scared, but she didn’t bother to defend herself to Trudy. She wasn’t afraid at all.
She went to bed far later than usual, but still she could not sleep. The wind was ferocious. It howled eerily through the big house, and every once in a while she could hear the crackling sound of a tree snapping in two. One of the windows in Jane’s room blew out during the night, and her screams brought everyone out into the hall. Jane spent the rest of the night on the pull-out sofa in the living room.
Mary finally slept a little toward morning. When she woke up, the sky was overcast and foggy, and the little circle of stained glass hanging in her window cast weak, muted colors on the walls of her room.
She joined the others downstairs in the dining room, but she couldn’t eat. After breakfast, when everyone else went out on the porch to look at the downed trees and the broken windows in the neighboring houses, Mary walked into the kitchen, where Gale and Sandy, the only two members of staff who had made it in this morning, were loading the dishwasher. They looked up at her when she walked into the room.
“What is it, Mary?” Gale asked.
“I need one of you to take me to Kiss River,” she said.
Sandy laughed. “You’re nuts, Mary. The Outer Banks flooded last night and they said on the radio a lot of the roads are still under water. We probably couldn’t get there if we wanted to.”
“Please,” she said. She hated this. She hated having to beg, having to depend on these young girls for everything. “I’ll pay you.”
Gale laughed. “With what, honey? Do you have some money tucked away we don’t know about?”
Mary leaned heavily on her cane. Her hip was throbbing this morning. “If you don’t take me, I’ll find another way to get there.”
Sandy and Gale looked at each other, finally taking her seriously. A few weeks ago, someone had gotten to Mary’s puzzle before she did, and when they refused to drive her to the store for another paper, she’d walked the mile there and back herself.
Sandy slipped a plate into the dishwasher and wiped her hands on a paper towel. “All right, Mary,” she said. “I’ll take you. But don’t expect us to get very far.”
Mary rode in the front seat of the van, while Sandy drove. Sandy tried to get her to talk, but finally gave up. Mary had little to say today. She tapped her finger on the top of her cane, straining her eyes through the milky fog, trying to make out where they were.
The main road up the island was clear of water, but the storm had taken its toll on the buildings. Each time the fog thinned, just for a second or two, Mary could see glassless windows in the houses, boards and brush littering the sand. The street was peppered with shingles blown off the roofs.
They turned onto the road that ran through Southern Shores and she wondered how Annie’s family had fared. Had they evacuated? Had Olivia gone with them or stayed here to doctor anyone hurt in the storm? She was head of that emergency room now. Most likely she had to stay.
Alec had invited Mary to dinner last week, and she had been surprised by the invitation, surprised that Alec held no grudge against her for her role in Annie’s betrayal. Olivia had been there—obviously pregnant, a complication Mary had not even guessed at—and she and Lacey and Alec cooked while Mary sat at the kitchen table, observing the outcome of her revelations in the keeper’s house. They were happy people, those three. Survivors of her last, and most likely final, rescue.
Paul Macelli had moved back to Washington, they told her, where he was working once again for the Post and writing poetry, reading it on the weekends to his faithful covey of followers.
“Here we go,” Sandy said, as the van approached a long stretch of road that was under water. Gamely, she put the van into four-wheel drive and plunged
in, and in a few minutes they were on dry road again. Sandy patted the steering wheel.
“Good girl,” she said.
Mary looked out toward the sea, but the fog hugged the beach, and there was little she could make out. They hit a few more patches of flooded road before finally reaching Kiss River.
Sandy pulled onto the narrow road that led down to the lighthouse. “Wow,” she said. “Lot of trees down.”
Mary didn’t care about the trees. She barely took note of them. Sandy stopped the car at the edge of the parking lot, and Mary managed to pull the van door open before her young driver had a chance to get out.
“Stay here,” Mary said.
“No way. I’m coming out there with you.”
“I don’t want you with me.” Mary got out of the van and slammed the door shut, surprised at her own strength.
Something in her voice must have convinced Sandy. “If you’re not back in fifteen minutes, I’m coming to find you,” she called out the window as Mary began walking away from the van.
Mary stepped from the paved lot to the wet sand, testing her legs, and began walking in the direction of the lighthouse. A dagger of pain cut into her left hip with each step, and her cane sank into the sand as she walked, but after a minute or two, the pain lessened and she thought no more about it.
She was nearly on top of the bayberry bushes before she saw them. The fog clung to the ground, to Kiss River, as it had many times in the past, and she had to rely on some inner sense of direction to keep herself on course. She found the path through the bushes, and once on the other side of them, could make out a couple of bulldozers and a truck laden with long, steel beams. They rested idly next to the keeper’s house. She walked a bit closer to the house, squinting, looking for damage. There was a bald spot on the roof where it had lost a few shingles, but the house itself was still standing, still in one piece, as far as she could see. A few windows were blown out, though. And right next to the cistern, a backhoe was tipped precariously onto its side.
The sea must have been all the way up here, she thought. And if it had been high enough to reach the house, it had been plenty high enough to…
She turned around and squinted up into the sky for the white tower, the black iron gallery. Maybe it was just too foggy to make it out. She walked in the direction of the lighthouse, barely using her cane now at all. She kept her eyes skyward. Had she gotten confused? Was she walking in the wrong direction? In her heart, though, she knew that wasn’t the answer. She’d known since last night, when she’d listened to the rain spiking against the roof of the retirement home and the wind snapping trees in half as though they were kindling. She’d known then what she would find out here today.
She took a few more steps. Quite suddenly, a gust of wind swept the fog out into the ocean, and she could see the scene in front of her as clearly as if she were looking at a painting in a museum. The sea hissed and swirled around the jagged remains of the Kiss River Lighthouse. The tower was one-third as tall as it had been, the cylinder of white bricks chewed off at an angle, and a few dozen feet of the circular stairs jutting into the thinning fog. The ground was littered with huge chunks of brick, the scene so startlingly clear that she wondered how she had missed it a few minutes earlier. The lens itself was nowhere to be seen, and she pictured it lying on the floor of the ocean, an enormous, prism-studded shell.
She glanced over at the bulldozers again, and the truck, waiting and ready to build a track that would not be needed. She shook her head, remembering the time she and Annie had sat up on the gallery and she’d told the younger woman, “If it’s time for the sea to take the lighthouse, we should just let it go.”
Mary could not resist a bittersweet smile at the memory. She began walking slowly back to the parking lot, the pain in her hip kicking to life once again as she shuffled through the wet sand. When she had nearly reached the row of bayberry bushes, she turned around for one last look at her lighthouse. “The time has come, Annie,” she said. “It’s finally come.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m indebted to Cher Johnson, Mary Kirk, Arlene Lieberman, Suzanne Schmidt, Laura and Pete Schmitz and Joann Scanlon for reading various drafts of Keeper with enthusiasm and insight.
Veterinarian Holly Gill, emergency room physician Martha Gramlich, Outer Banks nurse Betsy McCarthy, Outer Banks artist Chris Haltigan, stained glass artist Jimmy Powers, lighthouse enthusiasts David Fischetti, Hugh Morton and John Wilson and National Park Ranger Warren Wrenn all shared their expertise with me and graciously endured my endless questions. Also, The Keeper’s Log, issued by the United States Lighthouse Society, proved to be an invaluable source of inspiration.
I’m grateful to Peter Porosky for altering my vision and to my former editor, Karen Solem, for her faith, patience and wisdom.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-0422-5
KEEPER OF THE LIGHT
Copyright © 2002 by Diane Chamberlain
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