Keeper of the Light (11 page)

She did not know what to say. She had no idea what words she could use to save the little scraps of whatever they had left together. And so she watched in silence as he finished dressing, as he bent low to kiss the top of her head, as he left the room. She listened to him hunting in the study for whatever it was he needed. Then she heard him leave the house, closing the door quietly behind him, but closing it all the same. She listened to him pull the car out of the driveway, and she could still hear it as he turned the corner onto Mallard Run. It was another hour before she shut her eyes, and an hour after that before she slept. And it was just a few short weeks before she knew that the seed Paul had imagined himself planting in Annie had started a new life in her.

Alec wasn’t surprised to find Randi still waiting for him in his office. He had avoided seeing her these past six months. He’d bumped into her a couple of times, once in the grocery store, once at the Sea Tern, but he’d kept those meetings brief, shifting away from her when he saw impatience replace the sympathy in her eyes. Now, though, he was cornered.

“Sit down, Alec.” She was sitting in the chair Olivia had vacated, and he sat down once again behind his desk.

“It was so great to walk in here and see you in that chair,” she said.

“Look, Randi, I was here because we were talking about something too heavy for a restaurant. This was the best place to meet. Don’t read so much into it.”

“When are you coming back, Alec?”

He hated being asked that question so directly. It made it impossible to dodge. “I don’t know,” he said.

She sighed, exasperated, and leaned forward in the chair. “What the hell are you living on? How are you keeping your kids fed? How do you plan to get Clay through four years at Duke?”

“It’s not a problem.”

“Isn’t your brain disintegrating?”

“I
like
the time off, Randi. It gives me loads of time to work on the lighthouse committee.”

She sat back, scowling. “Alec, you’re pissing me off.”

He smiled.

“Don’t give me that condescending smile,” she said, but she was smiling herself. “Oh, Alec, the bottom line is I
miss
you, and I
worry
about you. But you just dumped everything on me. You said it would be one month, and here I am nearly a year later doing it all.”

“It hasn’t even been six months, and you’re not alone. Isn’t Steve Matthews working out?”

She waved her hand impatiently through the air. “That’s not the point.”

He stood up and walked around to the front of his desk, leaning back against it, working his way toward the door. “Randi, if it’s really too much for you, tell me and we’ll get someone else in to help out. I don’t want you to be overextended.”

She sighed and seemed to deflate in the chair. “I’m all right. I just thought playing on your guilt might work.” She stood up too, and he was pleased to see she was surrendering. She walked over to him for a hug, which he provided, stunned for a moment by the way her breasts felt against his chest, by the way her hair lay warm and fragrant next to his cheek.

He pulled away from her, gently. “Wow, do you feel good. It’s been a while since I hugged a woman.”

There was a sudden glint in Randi’s eyes. “I’ve been dying to fix you up with this friend of mine,” she said.

He shook his head.

“You’d love her, Alec, and it’s time you went out. There’s a world full of single women out there, and you’re a free man.”

He was irritated by the word
free.
“It’s way too soon,” he said.

“What about that doctor? She’s pretty and…”

“And married and pregnant.”

“Don’t you miss sex?” she asked bluntly.

“I miss
everything,
” he snapped, suddenly angry, and Randi took a step backward. “This is not some high school game, here, Randi. I’ve lost my wife. My right arm, you know? Annie wasn’t replaceable.”

“I know that,” Randi said in a small voice. There were tears in her eyes.

“Let me do things at my own pace, okay?” He picked up his keys from the desk and started for the door.

“Alec,” she said. “Please don’t be angry.”

“I’m not.” He opened the door and looked back at her. “I shouldn’t expect you to understand, Randi. Don’t worry about it.”

He was sweating by the time he reached the Bronco. He sat for a moment with the door open, letting the air conditioner blow the heat from the car. Then he pulled onto the road, heading north, his car practically operating on autopilot. In a short time, he had reached Kiss River. There might be tourists at the lighthouse this time of day, but he knew how to escape them.

He turned onto the winding, wooded road that led out to the lighthouse. He had to stop for a minute as one of the wild mustangs—the black stallion he had treated for an infection last fall—leisurely crossed the road in front of him. He drove on until he reached the small parking lot, surrounded on all sides by thick, scrubby bayberry bushes. He got out of the Bronco and took the footpath that led to the lighthouse.

The ocean was rough today. It broke wildly over the jetty, and he felt the spray against his face as he neared the lighthouse. It rose above him, the white brick sun-drenched and blinding. There were a couple of kids on the crescent of sand that made up the small, ever-shrinking Kiss River beach, and a few tourists milling around, some of them reading the plaques, others shading their eyes as they looked skyward toward the black iron gallery high above them.

Alec tried to make himself invisible as he approached the door in the white brick foundation. He glanced over at the old keeper’s house. It looked as though no one from the Park Service was around today. Good. He slipped a key from his pocket and into the lock, jiggling it a little before the door opened. Mary Poor had given the key to Annie years ago, and she had cherished it. Controlled it jealously.

He disappeared inside, locking the door behind him. It was cool, almost chilly. There were birds somewhere in the tower. He couldn’t see them, but he heard the echoing flap of their wings, the occasional chirp that ricocheted off the rounded brick walls. The brick was white in here as well, although the paint was crumbling, flaking onto the floor in a coarse white powder.

Alec began the long climb to the top up the steel circular staircase, not bothering to stop at the six rectangular windows that marked the landings along the way, and by the time he reached the claustrophobic room below the lantern, he was winded. He was not getting enough exercise these days.

He opened the door and stepped into the sunlight on the gallery. He sat down, close to the tower so he could not be seen from below, and breathed in the damp, salty air.

Glassy blue water stretched out in front of him for as far as he could see. He had a clear view of the jetty, and it made him remember the funeral and the welcome numbness that had befriended him back then. From the moment Olivia Simon told him Annie was dead, he’d felt nothing. He didn’t cry, didn’t even feel close to crying. Nola helped him make the arrangements, weeping most of the time and talking about how Annie usually did that sort of thing, how good she was at rallying people together at a time of crisis, and he’d muttered some form of agreement from inside the comforting protective capsule that had formed around him.

The funeral was held in the largest church in the northern Outer Banks, but even it was not big enough to hold everyone who wanted to come. Someone told him later that people stood in the vestibule and spilled out onto the front steps and into the parking lot.

Alec sat between Clay and Nola. Lacey had refused to come and he didn’t press the issue with her, although person after person wanted to know where she was. He was too dazed to realize that his response “—she didn’t want to come—” was not enough.

Even Annie’s mother was there, and Alec let her sit in the back of the church, although Nola begged him to try to make peace with the woman.

“Annie would never have let her sit back there, Alec.” She spoke quietly in his ear.

“I don’t want her near me,” he said, and he wished he could stop Clay from turning around to get a glimpse of the grandmother he had never known.

Alec listened as people recounted how Annie had touched their lives. They walked up to the podium in the front of the church, one after another, ending finally with the county commissioner, who spoke of how Annie had been “woman of the year” for four years in a row, how she’d donated stained glass panels to the library and the community center, how she’d fought for the rights of people who could not fight for themselves. “She was our Saint Anne,” he said. “You always knew you could turn to her for help. The word ‘no’ was simply not in her vocabulary.”

Alec listened to it all from behind the wall he’d built around himself. He did not like it, this recitation of her generosity. It was her generosity that killed her.

Nearly everyone met on the cold beach at Kiss River afterward to watch Alec and Clay walk out on the windy jetty with Annie’s ashes. It wasn’t until Alec let them fly, until he watched in horror as the wind caught them and carried them away from him with cruel speed, that the numbness gave way to a searing pain. The ashes had been all that was left of her and he’d cast them away. He stared after them, stunned, until Clay tugged at his arm.

“Let’s go back, Dad,” he said. By the time they reached the beach once again, Alec was weeping freely and leaning on his son. Arms reached for him, and he was quickly pulled into a loving circle. Clay, Nola, Tom, Randi. Everyone. They moved closer to him until they formed one black mass with Alec at its core, completely surrounded, completely alone.

Alec leaned forward and looked directly down from the gallery. The ocean was closer to the lighthouse than the last time he was up here, or perhaps that was his imagination. Whatever the Park Service decided to do to save it, he wished they would hurry up.

He patted his pocket for the illicit key.
Mary!
Alec had a sudden brainstorm. He would call that journalist, Paul Macelli, as soon as he got home and tell him to get in touch with Mary Poor. He hoped the old woman was still alive, still thinking clearly. She would be loaded with anecdotes. Paul might not even need the historical collection if Mary was lucid enough to help him out.

Alec stood up and drew in a long breath of salty air. He felt better, although he could still hear Randi’s voice, telling him about the joys of being “free.” He shook his head. Randi couldn’t possibly understand, he told himself. He shouldn’t hold it against her.

He thought of the doctor. Olivia. The woman whose husband had left her for an illusion.
She
knew how he felt. He could tell by the way she spoke to him, by the empathy in her eyes. She had understood completely.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Paul lay on his bed, staring at the colors in his ceiling. It was six in the evening, his favorite time in this room. The slant of the sun was just right to lift the tropical fish from the stained glass panel at his window and transpose them onto his ceiling, a bit distorted perhaps, but shimmering with blue and green and gold. He could easily lie here watching them until darkness fell. He had spent many evenings in this house watching his room grow dark, and this evening in particular he was anxious for darkness, for sleep. He wanted to sleep away the call from Alec O’Neill. He wanted to pretend he had not picked up the phone in the kitchen an hour earlier to hear the enthusiasm in Alec’s voice. How could he sound so content, so pleased with life? He had an idea, Alec told him. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it sooner. Paul could interview the old lighthouse keeper, Mary Poor, for the brochure on the lighthouse.

Paul had said nothing, stunned.
Oh sure,
he thought.
Why don’t I just lie down on a bed of nails?

“She’s living at the Manteo Retirement Home,” Alec continued. “My wife used to visit her there, and as of the last time she saw her—about six months ago—Mary was very lucid.”

Paul could see no way out of it. He’d set his own trap the morning he’d called Nola Dillard and begged to be on the committee. But maybe Mary Poor would not remember him. Regardless of how lucid she was, she was a very old woman and she had not seen him in many years. He thought of telling Alec that something had come up and he would not be able to serve on the committee after all, but the pull of the lighthouse was too strong. He would be happy to meet with the old keeper, he said. He’d get on it as soon as he could.

Then he’d hung up the phone, walked into his bedroom, and lay down to let the colors soothe him.

The phone rang again, and Paul reached over to his night table to pick it up.

“Am I interrupting something?” Olivia asked.

“No.” He lay back again, phone to his ear. The colors were beginning to blend, melting onto the far wall.

“I just called to see how you’re doing.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “You?”

“Okay. I’m working at the shelter tonight.”

“Still doing that, huh?” He hated her working there. Annie had worked at the shelter out of a genuine desire to help others, but he did not understand Olivia’s motivation. Occasionally he’d pictured something happening to her there, something horrible. Another crazed husband, perhaps. The thought of her being hurt terrified him in a way he hadn’t expected.

“Yes. Just one night a week.” She hesitated. “But the real reason I’m calling is to let you know I still love you.”

He closed his eyes. “Don’t, Olivia,” he said. “I’m not worth it.”

“I haven’t forgotten the way things used to be between us.”

He felt villainous. This was so hard for her. She’d counted on him, been
dependent
on him. She could be tough and self-assured in the ER, but once she took off her stethoscope, she was far frailer, far softer than anyone would guess.

“Paul?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I just needed to let you know that.”