Keeper of the Light

by Diane Chamberlain

  “It’s phenomenal,” he said.

  “I know. Come on.” She took his hand and they walked up the brick path to the house. Lights were on in a few of the downstairs windows, but he couldn’t get a good look inside.

  Annie knocked briskly on the door and after a moment it was opened by a tall, elderly woman dressed in a long dark skirt and white blouse.

  “Come in, Annie,” she said, stepping aside.

  “This is Paul Macelli, Mary. Paul, this is Mary Poor, the keeper of the incredible Kiss River Lighthouse.”

  Paul nodded solemnly at Mary. What the hell was going on? Were they going to spend the evening talking with an old woman?

  Annie kissed Mary’s cheek. “Do you need anything, sweetie?”

  “No, no.” Mary waved her hand. “You go on up.”

  Annie grabbed Paul’s hand and led him up the stairs to a small bedroom with a quilt-covered double bed. She closed the door and swung around to kiss him. “Oh, God, Paul you were so beautiful on that stage. I’d forgotten.” She started unbuttoning his shirt, but he caught her hands.

  “Annie, I don’t understand…”

  “Shh.” She pulled her own blouse, still buttoned, over her head and took off her bra. “Hold me,” she demanded, and he held her, the sun-filled scent of her hair achingly familiar, and the bare skin of her back warm against his hands. Every few seconds the white light of the beacon flooded the room, catching the red of her hair, the creamy whiteness of her skin, but otherwise it was too dark to see.

  “Touch me,” she whispered. “Everywhere.”

  He stripped off his own clothes and laid her down on the bed to carry out her order. Her body was more alive than he’d ever known it, and he did not like to think that he owed her new fervor to her husband. She wrapped her legs around him. “I need you close to me, Paul,” she said. “As close as you can get.”

  He slipped inside her, briefly aware of the bed creaking, of the old woman downstairs, but surely Mary Poor knew what was going on up here. He put the sounds out of his mind and focused on Annie. He was with her, inside her, after all this time. She rocked with him, but when he slipped his hand between their bodies to touch her, she shook her head.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

  He was insistent. Persistent. And finally she came, the spasms of her body propelling him over the edge.

  He started to roll off her after a few minutes, but she held him fast. “No,” she said. “Stay close.”

  “I love you, Annie.”

  “Hold me.”

  “I am. I’m right here.” He concentrated on holding her tightly enough to still the trembling in her body. Then he did roll off her, halfway, so that when the light filled the room he could see her face. “I don’t understand this arrangement, Annie,” he said. “The old woman…”

  “Mary. She knows I need to see you. I visit her a lot when Alec works. I’ve told her all about you.”

  “Can we meet again?”

  “We have to. Afternoons might be better. Can you make it in the afternoon?”

  “Of course. But let’s meet at my apartment.”

  “No,” she said. “It has to be here. People might see me with you. A lot of people know me, Paul. I’m too familiar a face. Way out here, we’re safe.”

  And so it continued. It was Paul’s most blissful summer, with the possible exception of the summer he had spent with her in New Hope. She would let him know in the mornings, by hanging a red scarf from the corner of the little front deck of her studio, whether she could meet him that day. She asked him never to come into the studio—she didn’t want to have to explain his presence to Tom Nestor.

  A few times during the summer, he would see her from a distance with Alec. He spotted them together in the grocery store, and once throwing a frisbee on the beach. She laughed a lot with Alec, the dimples deep in her cheeks, and Paul would not be able to get the image out of his mind until he was with her again.

  The scarf hung from the deck more often than not. Annie and Paul met at Mary’s house and spent the afternoons in the upstairs bedroom. They spoke often of the past, but never of the future. He was careful of his demands on her, but by the middle of the summer he could no longer tolerate the clandestine nature of their relationship. He wanted more.

  “I think it’s time you left Alec,” he said one afternoon, after they had made love.

  Annie’s head shot up from his shoulder. She looked stunned by his request. “I’ll never leave him, Paul. Never.”

  “Why not? I could support you better. And Clay. I’d adopt Clay. I could…”

  “Don’t talk that way!” She sat up. “You said you’d take whatever I was willing to give. This is it.”

  “But I love you.”

  “And I love Alec.”

  For the first time, he was furious with her. He pushed her aside and got out of the bed, but she quickly grabbed his arm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.”

  “You hardly ever see him. He’s gone all the time, leaving you with a baby and…”

  “Because he worries about money. It’s the only kind of work he can get right now. If we wanted to live in a city, he wouldn’t have to work so hard, but we want to live here. So that’s the price we have to pay.”

  He looked down at her. “You’re using me.”

  “No.”

  “You are. I’m just filling a need when Alec’s not around, right? Good old Paul.”

  “Don’t say that.” She began to cry, reaching for him, wrapping her arms around his waist, and he put the argument aside.

  She held his hand when she walked him out to his car that night. “I’ll never leave Alec, Paul. If you want me on those terms, you can have me. Otherwise, don’t come here again.”

  Of course he continued to come, enduring the knowing nod from Mary Poor, the telltale creaking of the bed. He never lost the hope that Annie would reconsider. The Lost Colony play closed on Labor Day and he got a job as a waiter in Manteo. It was hardly what he’d been trained to do, but he could not leave. Then things suddenly, abruptly changed.

  For several days in a row, the red scarf did not appear. He worried she was ill, or angry with him, and he had made up his mind to call her when he spotted the scarf hanging once again from the corner of the deck. He drove to Kiss River that afternoon, greatly relieved.

  “She’s upstairs,” Mary Poor said when she met Paul at the door. Paul could never look this woman squarely in the eye. He felt disliked by her, his presence merely tolerated. “She’s not feeling well.”

  Annie looked terrible. Her hair was tied back and the skin around her eyes was puffy. There were lines in her face he had never noticed before, at the corners of her mouth and across her forehead.

  “What’s wrong?” He touched her forehead for fever, but it was cool. “Poor Annie. You look awful.” He tried to draw her into his arms, but she pulled back.

  “We can’t make love,” she said, sitting down on the bed.

  “Of course not. Not with you feeling so bad.”

  “No, that’s not it.” She was agitated. Hot-wired. “We need to talk.”

  Alec must have found out. This would be it, then. Things were finally coming to a head and in the next few minutes, Paul would learn either that he had won or lost.

  Annie kneaded her hands together in her lap. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said.

  “What’s happened? Does Alec know?”

  “No. I’m just…disgusted with myself.” With that she jumped up from the bed and ran down the hall to the tiny upstairs bathroom. He heard her getting sick. He thought then of how she wouldn’t let him use rubbers because they could interfere with his pleasure. She’d assured him, though, that he didn’t need to worry, that she had replaced the strange bevy of birth control devices she’d used in college with a diaphragm. Exactly how foolproof was a diaphragm?

  Her skin was damp and gray when she returned to the room. He forced her into hi
s arms, and she clung to him, weeping.

  “You’re pregnant.” He spoke quietly into her hair.

  “No!” She pulled away, wild-eyed. “Please Paul, just leave the Outer Banks and don’t come back.”

  “I won’t go. Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”

  “Please.” She started sobbing, far too loudly. She pleaded with him to leave, all the while clutching his arm. He heard Mary Poor’s slow footsteps on the stairs, and he grabbed Annie’s hands to try to calm her as the door swung open.

  Mary walked into the room, and suddenly she did not seem the old woman Paul had thought her to be. She stood very tall, a light burning in her blue eyes. “Get out now and stop upsetting her,” she said. She sat down on the bed and pulled Annie’s head against her shoulder, and Annie clung to her. “Hush, Annie. You’ll make yourself sick again.” Mary looked up at Paul. “Get out,” she said, her voice soft now, not unkind, and Paul felt his own tears starting.

  “Don’t I have a right to know why?”

  “Leave now,” Mary said.

  Annie clung more tightly to Mary, drawing her knees up, trying to fit all of herself into the protection of the old woman’s arms, and Paul had no choice but to leave. He returned to his apartment, where he packed up his belongings. He left the Outer Banks that same night, after taping his family’s address and phone number in Philadelphia to the door of Annie’s studio.

  Twelve going on twenty. Of course she’d been pregnant. What other reason could there have been for her secretive behavior and his sudden dismissal? If she had told him during the interviews that Lacey was thirteen, he would have done the math. He would have figured it out.

  Oh, Jesus. He opened the drawer of his night table and pulled out the stack of photographs the Gazette photographer had taken of Annie at her home. There was one of Lacey and Clay that had not been used in the article, and Paul stared hard at the young girl. She looked like Annie. He needed to see her again. He needed to search her face for traces of himself and his sisters. He needed to know for certain, and there was only one person alive who could tell him.

  He inserted another tape into the recorder and pressed the play button, leaning back against his headboard, eyes closed, to lose himself in Annie’s voice.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Olivia was moved by the poem. It reminded her of the poems he’d written about her in Sweet Arrival. She could imagine Paul reading it to her in the voice he saved for his poetry, the voice that could still other voices in a crowded room and draw all eyes to him. She remembered the pride she’d felt listening to him at readings, and the wrenching sort of love his carefully crafted verses elicited in her. No wonder he missed Washington. There were many people there who appreciated his gift.

  The doctor’s office had called her earlier that afternoon to tell her that the results of the amniocentesis were completely normal—and that she was carrying a boy. Only when she felt the wild surge of relief wash over her did she realize how frightened she’d been that something might be wrong. Now she could think of little except the baby.

  She read the poem over several times, even though the first reading had convinced her that the old Paul, the Paul she had married, had returned. It was time to tell him about the baby. Time to accept him back, to do her best to forgive him and begin moving toward the future again.

  She dialed his number, but reached only his answering machine. Alec had mentioned a lighthouse meeting tonight. Most likely he was there.

  “I love you, too, Paul,” she said, after she heard the tone on his machine. She rested her hand on her stomach. “Please call me when you get in. I have something important to tell you.”

  She worked on the stained glass panel at the kitchen table, waiting for the call, which never came. The phone didn’t ring at all until after she had gone to bed, and she knew before she picked it up that it would be Alec, not Paul, on the line.

  “Was Paul at the meeting tonight?” she asked him, after a few minutes of small talk.

  “Yes. He was first to leave, though. Seemed like he was in a hurry.”

  “He wrote a poem about me and left it in my mailbox. I think he might truly be ready to come home and start over.”

  There was a short silence on Alec’s end. “I think you’re right. He said something about needing to make up to you for the hell he’s put you through.”

  “He said that?”

  “Something like it.”

  She smiled. “I’ve decided to tell him about the baby.”

  “It’s about time.”

  “It’s a boy, Alec. I got the amnio results and everything’s fine.”

  “That’s wonderful.” He sounded a little flat.

  “Paul’s always talked about having a son. He grew up surrounded by females.” She sighed. “I’m nervous about telling him, though. Once I do, there’s no turning back. I left a message on his machine to call me.”

  “Oh,” Alec said. “Then I’d better let you go.”

  “No. Please don’t get off.” She bit her lip as another few seconds of silence filled the line.

  “I spoke to Tom,” Alec said finally. “He said to tell you he’s sorry for his behavior, and he’d like to teach you again.”

  “Really? That’s great. Thank you.”

  “Do you have all the tools you need now?”

  “I could use a soldering iron. Did Annie have one?”

  “A couple of them.”

  She closed her eyes. “Oh, God. Paul will have a fit when he finds out I’m doing stained glass.”

  “Why?”

  She clutched the phone. She had slipped, forgetting that Alec did not know the whole story. “I’m not a very artistic person. He’ll think I’m wasting my time.”

  “It’s not a waste of time if it’s something you enjoy.”

  There was one more brief, loaded silence before Alec spoke again. “If you don’t see Paul tomorrow night, you’re welcome to come over here and use the soldering iron or whatever.”

  “All right,” she said, but she knew she would see Paul. She had to. Suddenly she wished she could split herself in two. “Oh, Alec,” she said, “you’ve been the very best of friends.”

  “You sound as though we’ll never see each other again.”

  “No, I don’t want that to happen.” She knew it would have to be that way, though, that she would have to cut herself off from Alec. It was too dangerous. She might confide in him when she should be confiding in Paul. She might compare Paul to him, and there was enormous risk in doing that, in the possibility she would find Paul lacking. At some point she would have to break away from Alec completely. But not right now. Not yet.

  “Alec?” she asked. “Are you in bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  He laughed. “I’d better get off the phone and let your husband take care of you.”

  With that he was gone. Olivia lay awake a while longer, waiting for the phone to ring a second time, but it never did.

  Paul didn’t call the following day either. She wondered if he might have lost her number at the ER, but even if he had, it wouldn’t be that difficult to track her down. By late afternoon she was certain his machine had somehow eaten her message and she left another. Then she tried his office.

  “He’s not in today,” the receptionist said. “He took it as a personal day.”

  When seven o’clock came with still no word from Paul, she drove over to Alec’s.

  “Maybe he had to go out of town?” Alec suggested. He was sitting at his desk, sorting slides of the lighthouse for a presentation he needed to make the following week, while Olivia studied the directions for the soldering iron resting on the work table.

  “That must be it,” she said.

  “Hi, Olivia.”

  Olivia turned to see Lacey in the doorway. She wore short denim shorts and a tank top that hugged her small breasts and exposed her midriff.

  “Hi, Lacey. How did you do on your biology homework?
”

  “I got an A. Or I guess you got an A.”

  “Not true,” Olivia said. “You did the work yourself. I just got you pointed in the right direction.”

  “I’m going out.” Lacey looked at her father.

  Alec glanced up from his slides. “Have fun,” he said.

  Lacey turned to leave the room, the denim snug across her small, rounded bottom.

  “What time does she need to be in?” Olivia asked, when she heard Lacey close the front door behind her.

  Alec shrugged. “When she stops having fun.”

  Olivia stared at him. “What if that’s five in the morning?”

  Alec turned around at the challenge in her tone. “It won’t be. She rarely pushes her limits.”

  “But how do you know she’s okay? I mean, how do you know when to start worrying?”

  “Haven’t we had this discussion before?” he asked. “Lacey’s learning to make her own choices and take responsibility for her own actions.”

  “Is that Alec talking or Annie?” Olivia knew by his stunned expression that she’d taken the debate one step too far. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Alec. It’s really none of my business.”

  He stood up and pulled a book from the shelf by the window, and he touched Olivia’s shoulder lightly before sitting down again. “It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t understand. I think it’s impossible for anyone who didn’t know Annie to understand.”

  It was slow in the ER the next day and Olivia spent much of the morning obsessively checking her answering machine at home, but there were no calls from Paul. She tried his work number again, and this time the receptionist told her he’d called in sick. She called his home, beginning to worry. There was no answer, but there was little she could do about it until she got out of work.

  She had just finished stitching the eyebrow of a hang gliding novice when Kathy told her there was a girl in the waiting room who was asking to see her. Olivia walked into the reception area to see Lacey leaning against the waiting room wall, thumbing through a magazine.