Keeper of the Light

by Diane Chamberlain

  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 di
dn’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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  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.”

  “Why?”

  It would have been easier just to let him pour the wine. She didn’t have to drink it.

  “Cleaning up my act a little,” she said.

  He sat down. “I was hoping to get you drunk tonight so I could seduce you.”

  She felt her cheeks redden and looked down at her plate.

  Paul leaned across the table to rest his hand on her arm. “You’re really furious with me,” he said.

  “You’ve done some things that are hard for me to simply overlook.”

  He nodded and leaned back again, pouring wine into his own glass. “I guess I can’t blame you,” he said, “but I did something today you’ll approve of.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I donated two of Annie’s stained glass panels to the library.”

  She was truly surprised. “You did?”

  He sipped his wine. “I can’t just quit cold turkey, Liv, but I’m working on it. The two underwater scenes in my living room. Plus the little oval in my car. The librarian was thrilled. Those panels are probably worth a lot more now that she’s…been gone awhile.” He pursed his lips for a second, as though acknowledging that Annie was dead still hurt him. “I’ll get rid of the rest of them in a week or two, as soon as I find the right place to donate them.”

  “That’s good, Paul.” She tried to smile at him. “Whether we get back together or not, you really need to put her behind you.”

  He flushed. “What’s your game, Olivia? Are you playing hard to get or what?”

  “I’m not playing any game at all.” She looked at him, at the warm hazel eyes behind his glasses. “This is hard for me, trying to figure out how to behave with you. I’m terrified of trusting you, of letting my guard down around you. I’m afraid to commit myself to you when I’m not certain you can make a commitment yourself.”

  “It worked before,” he said. “We just need to get away from here.”

  She ate in silence for a moment before looking up at him again. “I’ve received a job offer,” she said. “At Emerson Memorial.” She described the call from Clark Chapman, as a smile spread across Paul’s face.

  He set down his fork and leaned across the table again, reaching for her hand this time. “It’s a sign, don’t you think? A good omen. We move to Norfolk and start over. Start fresh. Tell him yes, Liv. Call him tonight and tell him.”

  She shook her head, but left her hand in his. “I need to think about it,” she said. “I can’t jump into it that quickly.”

  After dinner, he served her strawberry mousse in the living room, she on one end of the sofa, he on the other. She wondered how she could get him out of the house before he tried to touch her. He seemed to have no intention of leaving. He took off his shoes and raised his legs to the couch. “I reread The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit last night,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to feel good. To feel close to you. It made me remember how I felt during those days when I was watching you in the ER and falling in love with you. Remember how wonderful it was?”

  She laughed, bitterly. “It was wonderful all right. Forty-two people died. It was fantastic.” She regretted her nastiness as soon as she spoke. Paul stood up, a hurt expression on his face.

  “You’ve changed,” he said. “You’ve become…callous.”

  “I’m just afraid to feel close to you.”

  “What do I have to do, Liv?”

  “To start with, you could get rid of the rest of the stained glass.”

  He nodded. “All right. Tomorrow.”

  An arrow of fear passed through her, as she realized that even if he got rid of every tangible trace of Annie O’Neill, she still might not want the man who was left. “You made love to her,” she said softly. “That’s what hurts most. You can’t throw that away, and I’m always going to feel like that memory is still with you. If we ever make love again, I’ll think you’re comparing me to her. Or imagining I’m her.”

  He looked stricken. “Oh, no.” He sat down, pulling her into a hug. “I love you, Liv,” he said. “I just lost my mind for a while, that’s all.” He tipped her head back to kiss her and she allowed the kiss, hoping she would feel something tender for him, but she wanted to bite his lips, to draw blood. She pulled her head away, awkwardly crossing her arms low on her stomach to keep him from touching her.

  He leaned away from her. “I guess you don’t want me to stay over tonight.”

  She shook her head.

  “I miss you.”

  She looked up at him. “I miss you too, Paul,” she said. “I’ve missed you very, very much, but I need to be sure of you. Call me again when you’re over Annie, when you’re one hundred percent finished with her.”

  She stayed seated on the sofa while he put on his shoes. Then he leaned over to squeeze her knee, not speaking to her, not looking at her, and she knew he was close to crying, that once outside, he would
probably let the tears come.

  She unzipped her jeans when he left, sighing with relief as she drew in a long, deep breath. She rested her hand on her gently rounded stomach and her eyes went to the phone. It was ten-thirty-five and it hadn’t rung.

  Alec.

  She had to admit the truth to herself: She was four months pregnant by a man she was no longer certain she loved, and she loved a man still in love with his dead wife.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The baby moved.

  Olivia lay very still. Outside her bedroom window, the first pink light of dawn tinged the sky above the sound.

  Again. The flutter of bird wings.

  It stopped. She closed her eyes, resting her hands flat on her stomach. Had she dreamt it? No. Too real. Paul’s child.

  When she opened her eyes again, the sun was full in the sky, and her room glowed with a clear yellow light. She lay still for a moment, struggling to feel…something. Maybe it had been a dream. Maybe her imagination.

  She had the day off, and so she was still in her robe a half hour later when she picked up the Beach Gazette from her front deck and carried it into the kitchen. She’d been tense reading the paper lately, but this morning there should be some mention about Jonathan leaving the ER.

  Indeed, there was an article on the front page. Jonathan Cramer had resigned suddenly, the article stated, offering little else except a recap of the mud-slinging situation, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions about his sudden retreat. This would not be enough, she thought, disappointed.