Keeper of the Light (38 page)

Mary rested her head against the back of the rocker. All this talking was wearing on her.

“Would you like to stop for today?” Paul asked.

Mary shook her head. “I’m not finished just yet,” she said. There was one last story she needed to tell—and a story it was, more fiction than fact. She’d told it this way for so long now, she could hardly remember the truth anymore. “You see, in the end it was my courage—or maybe my foolhardiness—that cost me my husband. In July of 1964, I was up in the tower when I spotted a man swimming off Kiss River and it looked like he was in trouble. I ran down to the beach and went in after him. He was unconscious when I got to him and he was just too heavy for me and I started getting crampy and going under. Caleb somehow caught sight of us and he came out to the beach and jumped in after the both of us. He managed to get us out, too, but it was all too much for him. He was sixty-four years old. His heart stopped right there and he fell out on the sand.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “That’s a tragic way to lose someone.”

Mary stared into space for a moment. “Yes, it was,” she said finally. She raised her hands and dropped them on her thighs. “Well, that’s all for today, I think.”

“Of course.” Paul turned off his recorder and stood up. “Thanks again for your help,” he said.

Mary watched him walk down the sidewalk to his car. The stories had tired her, made her remember things about herself she did not like to remember. And they made her remember a night long ago when she’d told those same stories to Annie.

She’d known Annie for only a few months then, but already she’d felt a comfort with her young friend she’d never known with another soul, woman or man. She had never had the luxury of a close woman friend, and despite the difference in their ages, she knew she could confide in Annie. She could tell Annie the truth.

It was on a cold evening in January, one of many evenings Annie had spent with her back then. Alec was struggling to make a go of a veterinary practice, but the Outer Banks were so sparsely populated that he spent most of his time treating farm animals on the mainland. He was gone often in the evenings, pulling calves, or tending to colicky horses, leaving Annie with entirely too much time on her hands.

She had Clay with her, as she often did, on that night in January. Clay would totter around the keeper’s house, talking gibberish and getting into things. Finally, Annie would lay him down in the small upstairs bedroom, setting pillows at the edge of the bed so he couldn’t roll out. She’d sing to him in that soft, dusky voice that made Mary’s heart ache as she listened to her from the chair by the fire. She could picture the room—the room that had been Caleb’s as a child—filling with light every few seconds. Annie might pull the shades and draw the curtains, but the light would still find cracks to pass through, and Clay would slip under its hypnotic spell. He would be asleep quickly, more quickly than he ever fell asleep at home.

After a bit, Annie would come downstairs, where Mary had the fire raging and the brandy poured. For the first time in a decade, she had a bond with another human being.

Most nights were filled with Annie’s chatter, and Mary loved listening to her, to the way she mangled words with her accent. She spoke about Alec, whom she adored, or about Clay, or the stained glass. Sometimes she spoke of her parents, whom she had not seen since meeting her husband. Her phone calls to them were not returned, she said; the letters she wrote them were sent back unopened. Once, she and the baby flew to Boston, thinking her parents surely wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to see their only grandchild. But she was turned away at their front door by a maid who told her she was no longer welcome in her parents’ home.

She worried about Alec, driving so much in foul weather, working outdoors with huge animals. His hands were chapped and raw most of the time, she said, and once his arm had been broken by the ferocious contractions of a cow in labor. She’d gone with him a few times, but he’d said it was no place for her—and certainly no place for Clay—out in the middle of nowhere with the wind tearing at their clothes and stinging their eyes. So she ended up with Mary at the keeper’s house more often than not.

As Mary felt the brandy warm her on this particular night in January, it was her voice, not Annie’s, that echoed softly in the living room of the house. The fire crackled and spit, and the ocean roared not far from where they sat, but Mary’s voice was calm and steady. She could not have said why she poured it all out to Annie that night, that secret side of her self she had never bared to a soul, except that with Annie’s silence, her loving gaze, she spurred her on.

Mary told her the same tales she’d told Paul Macelli—how she had come to be known as the Angel of the Light through her acts of kindness and caring.

“You remind me of myself in that way, Annie,” she said. “You have such a good heart. You go out of your way for folks, with never a thought for yourself.” She sipped her brandy, feeding herself courage. “But that’s where the comparison ends. You’re really a far better person than I ever was. A far better woman.”

Annie looked over at Mary, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the fire. “Why do you say that?”

Mary shrugged as though what she had to say next was easy for her. Insignificant. “I had another side of me,” she said, “a side I never let anyone see.” She looked hard into Annie’s eyes. “You see, my husband was the best husband a woman could ask for. Patient and kind and strong. But it never felt like enough for me. Maybe it was the isolation. I don’t know. But I wanted to…” She pursed her lips, staring into the orange flames in the fireplace. “I wanted to have other men,” she finished.

“Oh,” said Annie. “And so…did you?”

“Only in my imagination.” Mary shut her eyes. “It was the strongest feeling. The strongest yearning. I’m ashamed to talk about it.”

“You don’t need to be ashamed. Lots of women think about…”

Mary brushed away whatever Annie was about to say with a wave of her hand. “Not the way I did. I’d lie awake at night, imagining being with other men I knew. I’d be with Caleb…
lying
with Caleb…and I’d imagine he was someone else. Sometimes I couldn’t do my work. I’d go up in the tower to polish the lens, and instead I’d sit on the gallery and daydream. I’d wave to the sailors and imagine them returning at night, coming up on the beach to look for me. I used to think about hanging a red cloth from the gallery to let them know when Caleb was gone, when I would be…available. Once I went so far as to buy the cloth.”

Mary felt the color in her cheeks. How foolish she must seem, a seventy-three-year-old woman talking this way.

“But you never hung the cloth?” Annie prodded.

“No.”

“It must have hurt,” Annie said, “wanting to do something so badly, but thinking that you couldn’t.”

Mary smiled. Annie
did
understand. “That was the
real
reason I wanted to work with the Life Saving crew,” she said, “so I could be around the men, so I could feel the excitement of what might happen. But I’d come to my senses every time I came close to going through with it. What right did I have to be so dissatisfied, I’d ask myself? To want more than I had?”

Mary tapped her fingertips against the glass. She would have liked a cigarette, but she knew it distressed Annie when she smoked.

“Sometimes I’d force myself to stop thinking about other men, but it felt like I was cutting off a leg or an arm, it was so much a part of me. We’d go to church and even
there
I couldn’t stop myself from imagining. People would say that Caleb wasn’t good enough for me. Some of them would ask me what I saw in him, me being such a fine woman—so they thought—and Caleb just a plain man, solid and steady.” She shook her head. “He was a thousand times better than I was.”

Annie leaned forward in her chair, the fire throwing gold light into her long red hair. “You are far too hard on your self, Mary.”

Mary took a full swallow of the brandy, thick as honey as it warmed her throat. She looked up at Annie. “It was my nonsense that killed Caleb,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

Mary shook her head. “Even at sixty-three, my head was still full of that schoolgirl silliness. No one knows this—the truth of how Caleb died, I mean. Can you keep it here in this room?”

Annie nodded.

“Well, there was a fisherman who’d taken a shine to me when I was in my thirties, and we talked off and on over the years, teasing each other about how one day we’d do more than just talk. Finally he persuaded me. He told me I wasn’t getting any younger, and I thought to myself. He’s right. It’s got to be now or never. We planned to meet one evening when Caleb was away for the night. Only Caleb didn’t go. So when I went out to the beach, it was to tell Chester it was off for that night. He didn’t believe me, I guess. Thought I was weaseling out of it. So he started kissing me right there on the beach, and I was fighting him, afraid Caleb might be up in the tower. And that’s just where he was. He saw it all and thought Chester was attacking me. He flew down those stairs and out to the beach and started sparring with Chester. Two gray-haired old men.” She shook her head. “They ran into the water, pounding each other in the waves. Caleb was just too old for that. They
both
were really, two old coots going at it like a couple of wild Indians. By the time Caleb drug himself out of the water, he couldn’t get his breath and he just fell dead at my feet.” Mary winced, recalling her initial disbelief that Caleb was dead, and, later, her self-loathing.

“A few weeks after Caleb was buried, Chester had the nerve to ask me to marry him. Needless to say, I turned him down. I’d finally found the cure for my wicked imagination, but it came with a big price tag.”

Mary talked a while longer and felt a change in Annie, a silent drawing in. Annie had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and now she pulled it tighter, staring at the flames as Mary spoke. After a while, they heard a faint cry from upstairs.

“He’s awake,” Annie said softly.

Mary nodded. “You’d better get home.”

Annie rose, letting the shawl drop from her shoulders to the chair. Her footsteps were heavy and slow on the stairs. Mary listened to her reassuring Clay with her cooing and clucking.

When Annie returned downstairs, she handed the baby to Mary, resting him on the older woman’s lap. “Let me stoke the fire for you before I go,” she said, as she always did. She stirred the wood for many minutes, and Mary watched the flames leaping around her head. When Annie finally stood up and lifted Clay into her arms, her face was flushed, and heat poured from her hands and her clothes. She didn’t meet Mary’s eyes, and for a moment Mary wished she had not spoken so freely. She had risked too much in telling her. She had risked this special friendship.

Mary stood up and walked Annie out onto the porch. Annie turned to face her, hugging her baby close to her against the wind.

“Mary,” she said. “Your longings…your fantasies…they didn’t make you a bad person.”

Mary breathed in a quick, silent sigh of relief. “No,” she said.

She watched as Annie walked through the darkness toward her car. Halfway there, she turned back to Mary, and in a voice so soft she could barely be heard over the sound of the sea, said, “Mary. We are more alike than you know.”

For just a moment she was illuminated by the beacon of the lighthouse and Mary saw the shine of her cheeks, the stubby hand of her child coming up to touch her chin, and then the world was dark again.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-
S
IX

Paul’s car was in her driveway when she got home from the emergency room that Thursday evening. Olivia felt a disconcerting mix of joy and anger. Should he be allowed to come and go as he pleased? What if he’d walked into the room that was to become the nursery and discovered the crib?

Inside, the house smelled of garlic and olive oil and wine, familiar smells of Paul’s cooking. She walked into the kitchen, and he smiled at her from the stove where he stood over the skillet, a fork in his hand like a conductor’s baton and his old red smock apron tied around his waist.

“Hi,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise you. Scampi.” She had told him once, long ago, that his scampi was an aphrodisiac.

She set her purse on the table. “Could you let me know before you come over in the future?” she asked. “I don’t think it’s fair for you to…just walk into this house.”

He looked surprised that her first words were critical, that she did not appear overjoyed to see him. “I’m still paying my share of the mortgage,” he said.

“It isn’t a matter of money,” Olivia said. “You left me. I’m entitled to at least some privacy.” She wanted to look down at her stomach to see if there was any telltale bulge.

He rested the fork on the counter and turned to face her. “You’re right. I didn’t think. I just wanted to surprise you. I wanted to do something nice for you, Liv. Do you want me to leave?”

She shook her head. “No.” There was a surly edge to her voice that surprised her as much as it did him. “I want you here,” she said, gently now. “Let me change my clothes.”

Once in her bedroom, she put on the one pair of jeans she could still fit into and a long, baggy T-shirt. Soon, she was going to have to give in and buy maternity clothes. People would know then.
Paul
would know.

She returned to the kitchen. “Can I help?” she asked.

“It’s ready,” he said. “Just sit down.” He gestured toward the kitchen table. She still had not replaced the table in the dining room.

She sat down, and Paul set a plate covered with fat garlicky shrimp and wild rice in front of her. He was a natural cook, one of those people who could turn out stunning meals without ever consulting a cookbook. He had always been far more domestically inclined than she. Their plan had been for him to stay home with their children while she went off to work.

He tilted the bottle of wine above her glass but she held her hand over the rim. “No thanks,” she said, and he looked down at her in surprise. “I’ve stopped for a while.”