The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  “It’s good you miss him. If you miss him, it’s because you know he’s not here.”

  “He’s not here. He’s not even born yet. I find that very comforting.”

  “And you’ll be happy here with me?”

  “I could die here a happy woman. I don’t know if I could be any happier than I am now. I feel like I got everything back that I’d lost in my old life. Husband, baby on the way, a friend...”

  “You’re still missing something.”

  “I am? What?”

  “Stay there,” he said as he stood up and headed out the door.

  “Thanks to you I can’t walk,” she called out after him. “Where would I go?”

  “Just stay.”

  She stayed.

  Carrick was gone only a minute before he walked into the room holding a leather case the size of a large book in his hands.

  “You said the other day you wanted one of these.”

  Faye unfastened the leather straps on the case and pulled out something she’d never seen before but recognized instantly.

  She looked up at him in shock and joy.

  “You got me a camera?”

  “You said you missed having a camera.”

  “When... How?”

  “Bought it from one of the keepers at Hunting. He wasn’t using it. They say Kodak is pretty good. Hope so.”

  “Yes, Kodak is a good camera. A very good camera.” She ran her fingers over the camera, turning knobs and adjusting the straps. She lifted the camera’s viewfinder to her eye, aimed it in the direction of the lighthouse, and as soon as she saw it, she knew...

  “You’re smiling,” Carrick said.

  “I know what I’m here to do,” she said, looking up at him, breathless with happiness and excitement. “I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing with my life here. I should have known... I mean, it’s what I was supposed to doing in 2015.”

  “And what is that?”

  “What I was hired to do. Take pictures of the islands.”

  25

  Faye spent half the night with Carrick up in the lighthouse before coming back down to her bedroom. She woke up right after sunrise to find him in her bed, where he belonged, sound asleep. She kissed his forehead, and he didn’t stir. She’d let him sleep. With Dolly gone they had all day to play honeymooners and half the night. And the rest of their lives. As quietly as she could, she slipped from the bed and went downstairs. The mantel clock revealed the time as half past seven. She’d slept late today. How decadent. When she was married to Hagen with no reason to get out of bed, she’d wake up around ten, and maybe by noon she’d be showered and dressed. But that was her old life, and she didn’t miss any of it. Not even her ice maker.

  Faye peeked out the front door at the ocean and saw an old friend of hers standing on the end of the pier. Wearing nothing but her slip, she walked out into the morning haze. The bit of grass between the porch and the seawall was cold and slick with dew. Her toes tingled, waking up the rest of her body.

  “Hello, you,” Faye said to the white wood stork perched on the very end of the pier.

  The wood stork eyed her and said nothing.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t take your picture. Not yet anyway. I have to get some film first.”

  The stork tilted its head sideways. Up close Faye was astonished by the sheer size of the bird. It must have been more than three feet tall. Perched as it was on top of the pier’s post, they met eye to eye.

  The stork didn’t answer, but Faye hadn’t truly expected it to talk.

  “Was this your doing?” she asked. “Who do you work for?”

  The stork dipped its head and dropped something onto the pier at Faye’s feet.

  It was golden and shining in the new morning light. Faye picked it up.

  Will’s championship ring.

  Faye gasped, tears instantly springing to her eyes.

  “Will...” she breathed.

  I told you I’d love you and take care of you for as long as you lived.

  “Yes, you did, babe,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  Faye slipped the ring onto her thumb and smiled at the sunrise, smiled at the ocean, smiled at the stork and the ocean and the waves, the blessed waves that had brought her here.

  She smiled until a wave came from nowhere and slammed into the end of the dock, knocking her into the water and sweeping her out to sea.

  26

  He looked like an elderly Gregory Pack again. His hands trembled with the palsy that plagued him as he passed Faye a glass of red wine.

  “I saw the stork I’d seen at the lighthouse standing on the pier. I walked out and the bird gave me the ring.” Faye held up her hand to show off Will’s ring on her thumb. “A wave came out of nowhere and hit me. When I woke up, I was on the beach and it was 2015 again.”

  Faye took a long sip of her wine. Pat said he’d had to drink at least two glasses a night or he couldn’t fall asleep, his hands would shake so hard. Faye was drinking for other reasons tonight. She missed her husband. She missed her island. She missed her home. She missed the peace she’d had there, however brief.

  “You didn’t do anything at all?” Pat asked as he took a seat on the chair next to his sofa. “You didn’t go in the water, touch the water, drop anything in the water?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I was doing nothing but standing there, and the wave came for me. I didn’t see it coming, didn’t hear it coming. It just came.”

  “You want to go back, I assume?”

  “Of course I want to go back. My husband’s there.”

  “I thought he was right here.”

  Faye laughed, but it wasn’t a real laugh. There was no joy in it. In 2015 she wasn’t pregnant, and she felt the loss of it as keenly as she missed Carrick and Dolly. She had to go back, no matter what.

  “Pat, why am I here? I knew. I knew exactly what I was doing in 1921.” She leaned back on the couch and stared at the ceiling. “I knew my purpose. I knew the plan. Everything I lost in this time I got back in the past. There’s no reason for me to be here again. None.”

  “And yet here you are. Must be a reason. If there’s a reason you went there, there must be a reason you came back.”

  “The hole,” she said. “I think it’s that hole.”

  “What?”

  “The hole in the fishing net. Remember?” She lifted her head and looked at him. “You said you thought of time as a fishing net. God—or whoever—knits the net and sometimes that net gets a hole in it and God, or whoever, has to mend the net. I’m the patch in the hole in the net. I have to be. I’m back here to mend the hole.”

  “One more stitch in time?” Pat asked.

  “Maybe. But I don’t know what to do to make that last stitch.” She couldn’t keep going back and forth, one foot in the present and her heart in the past. She had to find a way to stay back and stay for good.

  “There has to be something, Faye. Something that keeps dragging you back here. If you were a ghost I’d say unfinished business.”

  She shrugged, tears in her eyes.

  “There’s nothing,” she said. “My father’s dead. My mother might as well be. She’s in good hands with her sister. I loved them. They were good parents but...it’s not them. I have no brothers or sisters. I have no kids. I’m widowed. I’m divorced. I’m...”

  Faye stopped. She looked into the deep red cave of her wineglass.

  “I’m divorced,” she said.

  “Hagen?” Pat asked.

  Faye nodded. “Hagen.”

  “Does Hagen still love you?”

  Faye reached into her purse and pulled out her phone. She hit a few buttons and showed it to Pat.

  “Ten missed calls while I was gone,” Faye said. “And according to the clock and the calendar, I was gone twelve hours.”

  “Nobody calls a woman ten times in twelve hours if he doesn’t care when she goes missing.”

  “You really think I was brought back here to 2015
just to talk to my ex-husband on the phone?”

  Pat took a long, deep drink of his wine and then set the glass on his knee. It didn’t shake.

  “I told you. Ex-husbands are people, too.”

  “He played golf with his buddies the day after I had my second miscarriage.”

  “Well... I never said they were good people.”

  “I don’t know,” Faye said. “Compared to Marshall, Hagen’s a saint. Low bar, right? But he did just what Carrick did—married a woman who was pregnant with someone else’s baby.”

  “What do you think would have happened to you if you hadn’t married Hagen?”

  “Honestly?” Faye said. “I think I might have killed myself. Maybe I should tell him that.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt.”

  Faye kissed Pat on the cheek—they’d said all their goodbyes to each other in 1921—and left her half-finished glass of red wine on his coffee table. She got into her Prius and cranked up the air-conditioning as she drove out to Bride Island. She knew she wouldn’t find Carrick there. Or Dolly. Or her house or her porch or her garden. But she needed to be near the lighthouse if she was going to have this conversation. She felt naked in this time, stripped of herself, like she’d left most of Faye in 1921 and all that was here now was just fragments and pieces. If Hagen was the reason she kept coming back, there was nothing for it. She would have to call him.

  But she didn’t have to like it.

  Faye made the call.

  “Faye? Jesus Christ, I’ve called you a million times.”

  “I noticed,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you okay?” He sounded frantic.

  “Of course I am.”

  “Of course? You had an MRI a couple of days ago, and you say ‘of course,’ like of course you’re okay. I was afraid you’d passed out on the side of the road or something, gotten into a car wreck, I don’t know.”

  “I didn’t. I was just staying with some friends and didn’t have my phone on me.”

  “Keep it on you, okay?” The anger in his voice was a mask for his relief. He should have taken the mask off more often.

  “I will. I promise,” she said, hoping that after today she’d never see her phone again.

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  Faye waited. Hagen would either give up and tell her goodbye or he’d start the third degree with her.

  “Who are the friends you were with?” he finally asked. Third degree it was.

  “Hagen.”

  “Sorry. Sorry. I know. None of my business anymore.” Silence again. A long pause. Faye waited him out. “I hope you don’t mind, I put something in the mail for you.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Your wedding album. Yours and Will’s. I found it when I cleaned out the guest room closet. I know you hid it from yourself after we moved into the new house.”

  “I didn’t hide it from myself—I hid it from you.”

  “From me? Why?”

  “You hated when I talked about Will. I thought you’d...”

  “You really thought I’d make you get rid of your wedding album? Seriously? You thought that of me?”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Hagen said. “I swear to God I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “I know that now. I just didn’t know it then. Sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right. I know I always shut you down when you tried to talk about him. I shouldn’t have done that. We should have talked about him.”

  “I think that would have helped us both,” she said.

  “Looking at your wedding album brought everything back. You know in college, we joked that Will would make all his baseball money and I would take care of it for him so he wouldn’t go bankrupt like a lot of professional athletes do. It was just a joke, but when you two got married, he asked me to promise to take care of you if anything happened to him. I’d forgotten about that until I looked at your pictures. There’s a really good one of all three of us. I hope you don’t mind, but I...I made a copy of that one to keep.”

  Faye lifted her hand to her forehead.

  “No, I don’t mind,” she said. “Thank you for sending me the album.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She hadn’t expected that Hagen would do that for her. She hadn’t expected the apology, either.

  “He looks so young in the pictures. And he’s smiling like an idiot in every single one of them,” Hagen said. “It was really tough to look at them, but I couldn’t stop once I started.”

  “I keep forgetting...” she said, and swallowed. “I keep forgetting he was your best friend. Grief can make people selfish. It made me very selfish.”

  “Better selfish than bitter. That’s what it did to me,” Hagen said. “Bitter and stupid.”

  “You are not stupid.”

  “I was.” Hagen laughed. “I mean, I asked you to marry me.”

  “Rude.”

  He laughed again. “You know what I mean. I asked you to marry me a month after Will was killed. That was pretty dumb, and we’ve both paid for that mistake.” Hagen paused, and she knew he was wiping tears off his face. She knew that because she was doing the same thing. “The more I think about it, the more I wish I could go back and do everything different.”

  “Like when you went to play golf the day after my second miscarriage?” she teased.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did, you jerk. You told me you did.”

  “I told you I did, but I didn’t.”

  “Then where the hell did you go?”

  “I went to Mom’s and told her I was about ninety percent sure I’d ruined your life and I was about ninety-five percent sure I’d ruined mine, too. She talked me off the ledge and sent me home to you. Told me to take care of my wife. But you didn’t want to be taken care of.”

  “I should have let you,” she said. “I should have done a lot of things I didn’t do. I should have seen a therapist. I should have grieved for Will like I needed to. I should have kept working even when you told me not to.”

  “We should never have gotten married,” he said. “I could have helped you without marrying you. I guess I just thought it’s what Will would have done. It wasn’t meant to be, though. You and I.”

  “No, it wasn’t meant to be. And I believe some things are meant to be.”

  “Can you forgive me?” he asked.

  “For marrying me? I don’t know. That’s a pretty big sin.”