The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  his thumb he clicked through the beads, turning them over rapidly like a bicycle chain whirling in gear.

  “What’s wrong?” Faye went to stand next to him by the window. She tried to see what it was he saw, but apart from a cloudless sky she saw nothing.

  Carrick slipped his rosary beads into the pocket of his pants.

  “It’s quiet out. Hear it?”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly. Listen again. Tell me what you don’t hear.”

  Faye listened. She heard the water lapping the shore. She heard a rustle of wind in the trees. She smelled something like copper in the air. Nothing else. No sounds. No smells.

  “Where are the birds?” she asked.

  “Gone.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “Hurricane?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But bad weather is coming. Big, bad weather.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad enough to scare the birds away. The barometer’s falling fast. It’s going to be an ugly day. I want you and Dolly in the lighthouse with me.”

  “Won’t her father be coming for her?”

  “He knows better than to come out here in a storm. Pack up some blankets and food. We’ll camp in the watch room tonight.”

  Faye’s heartbeat hastened. She’d never been this close to the ocean during a tropical storm before. Hartwell and his dirty money could wait.

  “I’ll go get Dolly,” Faye said.

  “You do that—what on earth are you wearing?” Carrick had finally noticed her clothes. “Are those trousers?”

  “I had Dolly sew them for me.”

  “They look like long underwear.”

  “Don’t be mad. I told Dolly you wouldn’t care if I wore them around the house when I was working.”

  “But pants?” He screwed up his face in a mixture of confusion and suspicion.

  “Would you want to do your work in a long skirt?”

  “Well...no.”

  “See? I promise I’ll change into my very best dress the second someone comes to visit. While I’m scrubbing floors and weeding the garden, I want pants.”

  He took a step back and looked her up and down. With his index finger he made a little circle in the air, and Faye turned around with a heavy, put-upon sigh.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “They’re different.”

  “Women will be wearing pants all the time everywhere eventually,” she said. In a decade or two or three, but definitely eventually. “I’m sure of it.”

  “They’re very...” Carrick paused. “Revealing.”

  “Revealing? These pants that cover me from waist to foot are revealing? You do remember the night you got me out of my wet clothes? All my wet clothes?”

  “That’s different. That was a rescue. This is... I can see your shape in them. Your hips, and that sort of thing.”

  “You already know what shape I am.”

  “True, but it’s different seeing you like this. I think...”

  “What?” she demanded sharply.

  “I think I like them.”

  Faye laughed, and Carrick kissed her. A quick kiss from a scared man who knew a big, bad storm was coming, and if they didn’t kiss now they might not ever get to kiss again. Faye returned the kiss with ardor, with hunger, forgetting, as she was wont to do, that she wasn’t supposed to kiss this man any more than he was supposed to kiss her.

  Faye heard a sound. A loud gasp followed by a tiny, stricken cry. She turned her head and saw Dolly in the doorway staring at her and Carrick in horror.

  “Shit,” Faye said.

  “Faith!” Carrick said, aghast.

  Dolly turned on her heel and ran out, horrified by what she’d thought she’d seen.

  “I’ll go get her,” Faye said.

  “What are you going to tell her?” Carrick grabbed a shirt out of his closet and pulled it on. He buttoned it up quickly and followed her out the door.

  “I don’t know. But let me handle it.”

  “Go. But hurry. This storm is kicking up fast.”

  “We’ll be right back, I promise.” She kissed him one more time because she just had to, then ran out the front door. Carrick hadn’t been kidding. The sky darkened as she ran down the beach, and the wind blew hard enough to turn the water white. Thankfully Dolly had run down the beach instead of into the forest. Faye saw her ahead running pell-mell into the wind. Good thing Faye had her pants on. No way could she catch up with those long teenage legs otherwise. Faye reached out and grabbed Dolly’s arm. Dolly gasped and spun around, struggling against her.

  “Please,” Faye mouthed, hoping Dolly could read that word on her lips. “Please...”

  Dolly stopped trying to run away. She put her hands over her face and shook her head. A sound came from the back of her throat, a guttural moan of sorrow. Poor girl. What she must think of them...

  Faye dropped to her knees, and Dolly looked at her, stunned. In the sand Faye wrote a single word with her finger.

  Watch.

  Dolly waved her hand, a dismissive “go ahead, see if I care” gesture.

  Faye cut right to the chase. “Chief isn’t my father or my stepfather.”

  Dolly’s eyes widened as she read the words.

  “I ran away from home,” Faye wrote. She hoped that was close enough to the truth.

  Dolly dropped down onto her knees in the sand.

  “Why?”

  “I’m hiding here.”

  “He’s not your pa?”

  “No.”

  “You his wife?”

  “Another man’s wife,” Faye wrote. “An evil man.”

  Dolly shook her head, tears streaming from her eyes. “It’s not right.”

  “I know.” Faye scribbled as quickly as she could. The wind picked up, blowing her words away. “I’m sorry.”

  Dolly stuck her finger into the sand and wrote a question Faye didn’t think she could answer yet.

  “You love Chief?”

  Faye stared at the question. Before she could answer it, a wave hit the beach so hard it slammed into them both washing all their words away.

  Lightning cracked the sky wide-open. Thunder exploded like an atom bomb in the air. Even Dolly felt it and jumped. Grabbing Dolly by the arm, Faye pulled her toward the house. The ocean was roiling now, bubbling as wildly as a pan of water on high boil. Again and again waves slammed the shore, climbing higher every second. Running on hard wet sand was faster and easier than trying to wade through loose dry sand, so they skirted the waves as they raced back toward the house. Easier wasn’t safer, however, and when the wind struck them again, Dolly was blown facedown into the sand. She came up howling and weeping, sand in her eyes, blood trickling out of her nose. In pain and unable to see or hear, she stumbled toward the water. Faye raced after her, pulling the terrified girl close and guiding her down the beach again. Sandy tears streamed out of Dolly’s eyes. Faye looked up and saw Carrick running toward them. Before he could reach them, another wave struck, and the ocean dragged Dolly into the water with greedy arms.

  “Dolly!” Faye screamed, forgetting the girl couldn’t hear her. She ran into the water and tugged Dolly free from the grip of the current. Carrick arrived just in time to lift Dolly, sodden heavy skirts and all, out of the water. He set her down gently higher up on the dune before running back for Faye. He reached for her, and Faye reached for him. As their hands met, a current caught her by the legs and ripped her out of his grip, shoving her under the surface. She struggled against the waves, which tossed her like a chew toy in a dog’s mouth. Even under the water, she heard Carrick calling for her, screaming for her, and she wanted him. She wanted him so much, but she just couldn’t make her way to the surface.

  No. She wouldn’t give in. She’d just found Carrick, and she wasn’t about to lose him. With all her strength, Faye clawed at the water, tore through it, digging an escape tunnel where none existed. Her hea
rt felt like a drum in her chest, huge and pounding, ready to break out of her body. She surfaced with a roar of pain as air filled her scalding lungs. Broken and exhausted she limped out of the water, crawled on the beach and collapsed.

  She heard the sound of birds calling.

  Birds? Carrick said the storm had scared away all the birds.

  And she heard music, too.

  Music?

  Faye forced her eyes open, lifted her head, and looked out onto the water. The calm, lazy water. She saw a boat. A yacht. On it a dozen twentysomethings lounged around in board shorts and bikinis, drank beers from cans and lay out on the roof in the sun. Faye looked down at her body. She had on jeans. Jeans and a black tank top.

  Instinctively she looked to the lighthouse for comfort and it was there. Thank God it was there. But the house was gone. Her house. The seawall. The vegetable garden. The oil shed and the root cellar and the outbuildings and the beach. So much of the beach was gone.

  And Carrick was gone. And Dolly was gone. And it was 2015 again, which meant Will was gone.

  And she was here.

  Goodbye, Oz.

  Hello, Kansas.

  17

  Numb from shock, Faye dragged herself to her feet and wandered unsteadily down the beach toward the lighthouse. Her mouth was dry and tasted of salt water. Sand and sweat stiffened her clothes, chafing her skin as she walked. The lighthouse door hung open on its rusty hinges. The black-and-white tile on the floor was gone, replaced by bare cement.

  “Hello?” she called up, and only a dusty echo answered.

  She walked around the lighthouse, disoriented by her sudden reentry into this time. Her head swam and her eyes watered. A brown pelican swooped overhead, and Faye flinched, mistaking it at first for a vulture. In a daze, she wandered to her car. A fine layer of dust and sand covered the windshield, but the keys were still in the ignition, the doors unlocked.

  The car started on the first try. “Thank you, Hagen,” she muttered, grateful he’d given her the new car when she’d left. She’d been gone a week, and to have the car start up without any trouble was a relief. Wait. Six days? Was that how long she’d been gone? Her phone was dead and she’d left her charger in her luggage. She drove back to Beaufort slowly and fearfully, remembering how to drive as she drove. When she was off the island with the lighthouse miles behind her, she picked up speed as muscle memory kicked in. The more distance she put between herself and Bride Island, the more she remembered who she was and where she was and when.

  “My name is Victoria Faye Barlow. I’ve always gone by Faye because Vicky is my mom. I was born June 5, 1985 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire...” she recited as she drove across the Sea Island Parkway bridge and merged onto Carteret Street. She pulled into the parking lot of the Church Street house and had a sudden panicked thought that her room had been given to someone else while Faye had been gone. Surely Miss Lizzie would have called the cops or something. And if not that, she would have chucked Faye’s luggage out and given the room to someone who hadn’t skipped out on her tab.

  Feeling like a criminal, Faye slipped in the front door and peeked into the living room and TV room. No one there. She went back to the kitchen and saw Ty at the counter constructing a sandwich roughly the size of a human head.

  “You,” she said to him.

  “Me?” He smiled and pointed at himself. “What about me?”

  “I know you.”

  “Biblically,” he said.

  “What day is it?” she asked.

  Laughing, Ty looked her up and down, whistled and shook his head.

  “If you don’t know, I’m not telling. Are you hungover?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You look like shit, baby. No offense.”

  Faye rested her head on his shoulder a moment, before straightening up and crossing her arms over her chest, shivering.

  “It’s freezing in here,” she said.

  “You know how Miss Liz loves her AC.”

  “Where is she? Did she say anything about me being gone?”

  He shrugged. “Not to me. Why?”

  “You know how I asked you what day it is?”

  “Yeah...?”

  “Can you tell me what year it is, too? I know what year it is. I just want you to tell me.”

  “It’s 2015. And you need this more than I do,” he said, handing her his sandwich. “Go upstairs. Eat. Sleep. Take a shower. A long one, ’cause you smell like a sailor on shore leave.”

  “Thank you,” she said meekly, obediently taking the plate from him and walking upstairs. When she reached the door to her room, she put the key in the lock and eased it open, worried someone else had moved in while she’d been gone.

  But no, there was her luggage, her clothes, her camera equipment and laptop. Nothing had been moved, nothing touched. It was like she’d been gone a night and no longer.

  “What the hell...” Nothing had changed. It was like no time had passed at all.

  Dizzy and sunburned and exhausted to the bone, Faye sank into her desk chair and placed the sandwich in front of her. It was so tall she didn’t know how to eat it. She extracted the top layer, which consisted of lettuce, bacon, tomato, onion, mayo, more lettuce, maybe Thousand Island dressing, all between two pieces of toasted wheat bread. She took a bite. Then another. Maybe Ty was onto something. She’d feel more like herself once she’d eaten, had a shower and slept. The shower was top priority, right after the sandwich. Faye leaned back in her chair and started to put her feet up on the desk. When she saw the Singer sewing emblem under the tabletop, she sat up again.

  Hadn’t Miss Lizzie said most of the furniture in her room came from the lighthouse?

  “Dolly...” Faye ran her hand across the wooden surface, worn smooth by time and faded by wear. Dolly’s sewing table. Tears burned Faye’s eyes, and she could barely swallow. Dolly had been real, hadn’t she? She couldn’t have been a dream. Why would Faye’s subconscious have invented a teenage Martha Stewart to be her friend and teach her how to make peach pie? No, surely Dolly was real. She needed Dolly to be real. Dolly had sewn her a pair of linen pants. No figment of her imagination had ever sewn her pants before.

  Faye wept as she ate, and she didn’t know why, other than she was homesick, so homesick, but she was already home and it was the wrong home.

  When Faye finished eating, she took a shower. She stayed under the water for so long that when she emerged her feet and fingers were wrinkled as raisins. She dried her hair with the blow-dryer, and it felt like a luxury. Everything did. Air-conditioning and hot water in the shower that didn’t have to be rationed because it wasn’t rainwater stored in a cistern. The sandwich from the fridge. The blow-dryer. Face moisturizer. Towels fluffy and soft and smelling of Downy fabric softener.

  Back in her room, she pulled the heather-gray Sox T-shirt out of her suitcase, the only one of Will’s shirts she’d kept. She put it on and crawled into bed and waited for sleep. She knew then that whatever she’d been through, whatever had happened, it hadn’t been a nightmare. Maybe a dream, but never a nightmare. How could it be a nightmare if she wanted to have it again?

  Faye slept but did not dream. In the murky light of almost morning, during those last gray minutes between dark and dawn, Faye remembered the turtle. Two nights and ninety-four years ago, she’d been woken near dawn by a soft knock on her bedroom door.

  “Carrick?”