Keeper of the Light (15 page)

They were quiet while their food was set in front of them. A ray of sunlight shimmered in Olivia’s dark, arrow-straight hair.

“How are things with your husband?” he asked when the waitress had left their table.

Olivia lifted her fork. “Not good,” she said. “He seems completely disinterested in me. I called to tell him I love him—as you suggested—and he said I shouldn’t bother, that he’s not worth it.” She tried to smile, but didn’t quite succeed.

“Maybe he feels guilty about the affair.”

He saw her start. “He didn’t have an affair. I
told
you it was more of a fantasy.”

“Sorry,” he said.

She took a bite of her crab salad, chewing and swallowing before she spoke again. “He worked with her, and then he became obsessed with her, talking about her all the time. He’d compare me to her, and I didn’t compare too well.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“She was married and not the least bit interested in him.

He admitted that it was completely one-sided.” She spoke forcefully, as if she were trying to convince herself as much as she was him. Maybe more. “Nevertheless,” she continued, “I didn’t measure up to his image of this woman, so when she…so even though he couldn’t have her, he still left me.”

Alec frowned. Her husband sounded like a jerk.

“She was all he’d talk about, and I put up with it. I thought I shouldn’t overreact, I should let him talk and get it out of his system, but he never did.”

“Did he leave so he could get closer to her? I mean, forgive me, Olivia, but maybe he
wanted
to have an affair with her and didn’t feel right about it while he was still with you. So he…”

Olivia shook her head. “She moved away before he moved out.”

“Where did she go? Could he still be in touch with her?”

She suddenly laughed, then covered her mouth with her hand. “No, I’m sure he isn’t.” She picked at the crab salad with her fork. “She’s in California.”

“California’s not on another planet. What makes you so sure he’s not still communicating with her?”

“He would have told me. He never hid his feelings from me, although at times I wished he had.” She looked across the table at him. “She was a better person than me in some ways,” she said. “Ways that were important to my husband.”

Alec sat back in his chair. “Hey, listen,” he said, “the man’s obsessed. Irrational. Don’t get sucked into thinking he’s right. He never really knew her. If he’d ever had the chance he probably would have figured out she was a shrew.”

She lowered her head, and he saw a small, glistening tear-drop on her lower lashes, watched as it fell to her lavender blouse, where it made a dark round spot above her breast.

He leaned toward her. “Olivia?”

She raised her napkin to her eyes, glancing at the other diners. “I’m sorry,” she said softly, “I’m sure you didn’t invite me to lunch so that I could embarrass you.”

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.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

It was the fourth time Olivia had stopped 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.”