The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  backyard’s live oak trees. If she closed her eyes and listened, she could pretend she was back at the cottage again. Evening meant cooking dinner and waiting for Dolly’s father to come fetch her. He’d pull up to the dock in his metal fishing boat that spewed diesel fumes they could smell all the way up at the house. Carrick would catch his rope and tie it to a pillar. Her father, a fisherman named Wallace, always brought them something from his catch—grouper or snapper or flounder—and Faye would give him something from their garden, corn or squash or onions. And without fail, every day he’d doff his hat and say, “Thanks to you and the chief for taking good care of our girl.” And without fail, every evening Faye would reply, “We don’t know what we’d do without her.” Every evening, that was the ritual. It was so deeply embedded in her mind that when she’d passed a display of saltwater fish for sale at the grocery store, her nose had conjured the scent of diesel.

  When the pie finished baking, Faye took it out of the oven and set it on the trivet to cool. It looked like Dolly’s peach pie and smelled like Dolly’s peach pie, but she wouldn’t know for certain she’d made it correctly until she tasted it.

  “Something sure smells good in here.”

  Faye looked over her shoulder and saw Miss Lizzie come into the kitchen, her broom and dustpan in hand. She cleaned the house almost as obsessively as Dolly had cleaned theirs.

  “Peach pie,” Faye said. “I hope you don’t mind. I used one of your mixing bowls and your pie pan.”

  “I don’t mind a bit as long as you wash them and give me a piece of your pie.”

  “Soon as it cools, it’s all yours.”

  Miss Lizzie walked over to the oven and gave the pie on the trivet an appraising look.

  “Looks good. You make it with the cracker crust? That’s the way to do it.”

  “I think so, too. You’ve had it like that before?” Faye asked as she washed her hands.

  “Many, many times,” she said wistfully as she walked over to the broom closet and opened the door. “My grandmother always made it like that. Still my favorite.”

  Faye froze with her hands under the faucet. She picked up a towel, turned around and saw a faded blue-and-white-gingham apron hanging inside the broom closet on the back of the door.

  “Didn’t you tell me the furniture in my room was from the Bride Island lighthouse?” Faye asked.

  “The desk is and the side table. Few other pieces around the house.”

  “How did you come to have them?”

  “Passed down. They were my mother’s first and she gave them to me.”

  “And your grandmother’s before that?”

  “They were. She worked out at the lighthouse, and they gave her some of the furniture when they automated the light. Same grandmother who taught me to bake pie, as a matter of fact.”

  “Dolly,” Faye said, her blood chilling, her heart leaping.

  “Dorothy,” Miss Lizzie said. “Although I do think she was called Dolly as a girl.” Miss Lizzie narrowed her eyes at Faye. “How do you know my grandmother’s name?”

  Faye walked over to her, shaking a little. There it was—Dolly’s pretty nose right on the center of Miss Lizzie’s face. Same eyes, too, wide with a little upturn at the corners—Diana Ross eyes.

  “I’ll tell you how I know in a second. But can I do something first?” Faye asked.

  “Whatever you please,” the older woman said.

  “Can I hug you?”

  18

  Faye hugged Miss Lizzie like she’d hug Dolly right now if she could. Miss Lizzie suffered the hug gladly, patting Faye on the back the whole time.

  “You’re an odd one, Miss Faye, but you make pie like my grandma made it, so you must be a good one.”

  Tears sprung to Faye’s eyes.

  “Now, don’t cry, girl,” Miss Lizzie said.

  “I miss... I miss my grandmother is all,” Faye said, when what she wanted to say was I miss your grandmother.

  “I miss mine, too. I miss her every day.”

  By the time Faye had finished crying and pulled herself together, the pie had cooled enough to eat. She and Miss Lizzie sat across from each other at the kitchen table, a piece of pie in front of each of them.

  Faye lifted her fork and paused before she took the bite. If she’d screwed up the pie, then maybe it had all been a dream. Maybe she’d read about Carrick and Dolly while studying the lighthouse and it had all come together in some sort of brain stew in her sun-bleached brain while she’d lain passed out on the beach.

  Faye took the bite, and it tasted like pie, like Dolly’s pie, like a pie that could save your soul if it needed saving. And it tasted real and true, as real as the peaches on her tongue, as true as her time in 1921. Dolly and Carrick and the house—it hadn’t been a dream. Faye had been there.

  “I don’t know how to make pie,” Faye said to Miss Lizzie.

  The older woman took a bite and nodded her head.

  “Tastes like pie to me,” she said. “Just like my grandmother’s pie.”

  “Maybe I found her recipe when I was researching the lighthouse.”

  “You said you found some papers about her?” Miss Lizzie asked.

  “I found a few mentions of her,” Faye said. She hated to lie, but she didn’t want to burden this woman with the truth. “Dolly Rivers—she worked as a housekeeper at the cottage there. Kept the whole place running like clockwork.”

  “Those papers said that about her?”

  Faye nodded.

  “I believe it,” Miss Lizzie said. “She was always a good housekeeper but you know, that just never was enough for her. In her forties after her kids were old enough, she got a job at a furniture store. It wasn’t her dream job, of course. Until the day she died, she talked about how all she wanted was to go to New York and try her hand at being a real interior designer. It wasn’t meant to be back in those days. She made the best of it, though. One lady who came into the furniture store all the time hired her to decorate her house. My grandmother did such a good job that before it was over, she’d done half the houses in town. Every lady within fifty miles of here wanted my grandmother’s help. You know what my grandmother said to me about it?”

  “No, what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘They let me in through the back door, but when I’m done I go out the front.’ She made a lot of money doing those houses up, though she would have made more with her own business.”

  Faye grinned. Not even bigoted old white ladies could deny Dolly’s talent. It would be like denying the wind while standing in a hurricane.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Faye said. “The papers I read said she was the best cook around, and she decorated the whole place, made it a home. The keeper and his...his daughter loved her. They loved her very much.”

  “Oh, she loved them, too. Now, the first family she worked for in town, she didn’t like them much. They treated her like she was stupid just because she couldn’t hear. But the light keeper and his girl, she was close to them.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone treating her like she was stupid. I mean, the stuff I read said she was smart and talented, very artistic.”

  “You sound like you know her,” Miss Lizzie said.

  “I feel like I do. Tell me more about her. She got married, I guess. And kids and grandkids...”

  “Four children, ten grandchildren. And all thanks to her ears. About age twenty or thereabouts, her brother took her to Atlanta. They had a hospital there just for black folks. All black doctors and nurses, too. Now, they couldn’t do anything for my grandmother’s ears there, but one doctor decided he’d rather have her as his wife than as his patient. He didn’t mind my grandmother couldn’t hear. His nurses said he was the sort of man only a hard-of-hearing woman could love anyway.” Miss Lizzie’s face broke into a broad grin. “But that was Dr. Gerald Holt, my grandfather.”

  “A doctor. Good for Dolly.” Faye wanted to find Dolly right this second and give her a high five.

 
; “She was the talk of the town because of him. She wouldn’t marry him unless he agreed to take her to New York on their honeymoon, and you better believe he took her there.”

  “Very smart man,” Faye said. “I bet the wedding was incredible. I’m sure she made her own dress.”

  “She made a beautiful dress, but a month before the wedding her daddy died. But Chief Morgan, he stepped in and gave her away.”

  “Carrick gave her away? I mean, Chief Morgan did?”

  “Oh, yes. They were like family, she said, she and the Chief were—that’s what she always called him—Chief. And he’d lost a daughter and my grandmother lost her daddy...and they were close. Not in any way that wasn’t right,” Miss Lizzie said quickly. “They were the only two people there when his girl drowned in the storm. My grandmother watched it happen.”

  “A storm,” Faye repeated. “His daughter drowned in a storm?” Is that what had happened? They’d watched her drown? Originally Faith had been killed a week earlier when she’d fallen off the pier into the water. Faye had changed the past, but only in the smallest of ways. The present, it seemed, was otherwise unchanged. Thank God for small favors.

  “It wasn’t quite a hurricane, but it was bad,” Miss Lizzie said. “My grandmother never talked about what happened until the night before the Chief’s funeral. Then she told us the whole story, about how it was her who’d almost died that day. She fell in the water and the keeper’s girl dived in after her and fished her out. But before the keeper’s girl could get out of the water, a wave hit, and she went under. Never came up. My poor grandmother had to drag the Chief out of the water before he drowned himself looking for her. They spent the night in the lighthouse. My grandmother said it was the worst night of her life. Every few minutes she had to stop him from running out and throwing himself in the ocean. She said she slept stretched out in front of the hatch to stop him. She said...she said she’d never seen anyone grieve like he grieved for that girl of his.”

  Faye leaned back in her chair, all appetite gone. Carrick... He’d mourned for her like she’d mourned for Will. He thought she was dead, and here she was, alive and well and eating pie. His grief was for nothing. She hadn’t died, but how could she tell him that?

  “I can’t imagine watching someone drown, someone I loved,” Faye said. “I don’t want to imagine.”

  “My grandmother and the Chief carried that night with them all their lives. I recall my mother telling her she didn’t want to go to Chief Morgan’s funeral. He was a Catholic man, you see, and none of us had ever once stepped foot in a Catholic Church before, and this was a white church, very white. But my grandmother said, ‘We are all going.’ So we went.”

  Faye could scarcely breathe thinking of Dolly at Carrick’s funeral, of her grief and Carrick’s and all of it that could have been avoided somehow...should have been...

  “I was fifteen or so then and liked my grandmother a whole lot more than I liked my mother. You know how girls are at that age. So I sat by her side through the funeral,” Miss Lizzie continued. “You know, I had never seen my grandmother cry before. And she...she wept.” Miss Lizzie said those two words with finality. “She wept so hard the priest tried to cheer her up afterward by asking her if she was Chief Morgan’s girlfriend. I laughed at that—teenage girls find everything like that funny—but my grandmother did not. She never talked much outside the family. But that day she spoke, clear as a bell. She held that priest’s hand and said, ‘Father Cahill, the Chief was my friend.’ And that was that.”

  “Father Cahill? Pat Cahill?”

  “You know him? He lives around here now.”

  “I know him. And I think I need to go have a little talk with him.”

  Faye stood up and reached for her plate of half-eaten pie. Miss Lizzie put one finger on the edge of the plate.

  “You can leave that right there,” she said with a meaningful smile.

  Faye grabbed her purse and her car keys and was heading out the door when her bag buzzed at her. When she pulled out her phone, she saw a text message from Hagen flashing on the screen.

  Four simple words: I’m calling. Please answer.

  Faye sighed. Sure enough, the phone buzzed in her hand. She sat on the bottom step in the foyer. Something told her she’d want to sit down for this call.

  “Okay, I’m answering,” she said to him.

  “Thank you,” Hagen replied. “I swear this won’t be a fight unless you want it to be.”

  He sounded sincere. Sincere and panicked.

  “I don’t want it to be,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “I got an email confirmation about an MRI for you from our insurance company? What the hell, Faye? Are you all right?”

  Damn it. The insurance was still in Hagen’s name, his email address, his phone number. She’d forgotten to tell them to change it.

  “I’m fine. I don’t have anything wrong with me. They were just checking.”

  “Doctors don’t do emergency MRIs for fun. Were you in an accident? Are you hurt?”

  “Not hurt. I may have accidentally mixed up my Ambien with Tylenol. I blacked out. Nothing else.” Ty’s theory had been reasonable, a very male “stupid girl” theory that Hagen was likely to believe as it put the blame squarely on her.

  “Jesus, Faye, you could have killed yourself. Are you keeping all your pills in one bottle? Were you drunk?”

  “You know, our whole ‘let’s not fight’ plan is not going to fly if you start accusing me of getting drunk and mixing booze and pills. Does that sound like something I’d do?”

  “I’m not accusing. I’m scared. I’ve pried pill bottles out of your hand before.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “Now you’re overdosing and blacking out,” Hagen continued. The man could go on like this for hours if she didn’t stop him. “I’m allowed to worry about the woman I was married to for almost four years. Even if that woman does hate me.”

  “I don’t hate you. I never hated you.”

  “You hated being married to me.”

  “Not all the time.”

  The last thing she expected was to hear Hagen laugh, but he did. A real laugh, not ironic, not sarcastic. Just amused.

  “Hagen?”

  “We did suck at being married to each other, didn’t we?” he asked.

  Faye smiled. “We absolutely did. We sucked hard,” she said, amazed Hagen had admitted it. Finally.

  Hagen sighed so hard the phone rattled in her ear.

  “Maybe you should come back for a few days,” Hagen finally said. “Just until you’re sure you won’t have another blackout. You know the house is big enough you wouldn’t have to see me if you didn’t want to.”

  “You know that’s not a good idea.”

  “Fine, go stay with your mom and aunt, then. Stay with somebody who will keep an eye on you.”

  “Aunt Kate can barely keep an eye on Mom. And I have friends here. One took me to the ER today and waited until I was done to drive me home. He’ll take me there again if I have to go back.”

  “He? Are you dating somebody again already?”

  “My personal life isn’t your concern.”

  “So you are?”

  “I’m hanging up now...” She sang the words, trilling them to him, something he always hated.

  “Faye, please. Keep in touch with me, okay? I worry about you.”

  “You don’t have to worry. I’m okay. Really.”

  “Because of this new guy?”

  “He’s part of it, yes.” Faye didn’t want to hurt Hagen needlessly but the sooner he moved on, the better for everybody involved, especially him.

  “Who is this guy?”

  “He’s a lighthouse keeper.”

  “A what? I didn’t think they existed anymore.”

  “They don’t.”

  Faye told Hagen goodbye before he could get in another word. She hung up, got in her car and threw the phone in the glove compartment. She drove straight to Pat’s hous
e. When he didn’t answer her knock on the door, she followed a hunch and drove over to the Marshlands. Faye spotted his white hair and his Gregory Peck profile parked in his usual painting spot in front of the house by the stone bench.