The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  Carrick started up again, and Faye stayed one step behind him. His shirt was drenched through with sweat. He must have done this in the other timeline when Faith had drowned and died in the storm, and Dolly had had to drag him to the lighthouse. He would’ve had to carry Dolly up the steps—a double weight, for he’d borne the weight of the living girl in his arms and the weight of the drowned girl on his heart.

  One painfully slow step at a time, Carrick ascended the stairs. He had to stop for breath after each step, and soon he wasn’t breathing but wheezing. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, they reached the watch room. Carrick set Dolly on her feet inside the door, and Faye pulled her in and dragged her to the opposite wall. She grabbed a blanket out of Carrick’s supply trunk, laid it on the floor and drew Dolly down to it. Dolly pulled herself into the fetal position, facing the wall, hiding from doors and windows. Carrick let out a groan and bent double, still standing but resting his full weight back against the wall.

  “Carrick?”

  His face was red, and he was gasping like he’d just run a marathon or ten.

  “I’m...” He gulped a breath and collapsed onto the floor.

  “Carrick!” Faye ran to Carrick and dropped to his side. His heart beat so hard she could see it punching against the inner wall of his chest like a fist. He was breathing in short, shallow breaths that scared her. She could see the outline of the jagged scar on his rib cage through his shirt, which had gone transparent with sweat.

  “Don’t die,” she begged, hating how white he’d turned, how cold. “Don’t you dare die after all I gave up to be here with you. Central air and the internet and Oreos and antibiotics and vaccines and Netflix. Don’t you dare...” Tears choked her throat. Did she do this by coming back? Maybe in the original timeline Carrick and Dolly had made it to the lighthouse after the wind had died down, and so the door hadn’t blown off its hinges, and they waited the storm out at the foot of the steps. Had she traded her life for his by coming back? She’d never forgive herself. Better to have never come back at all.

  “Sweet girl.” Carrick breathed the words through chalky lips.

  “Oh, God, are you all right?”

  “I need—”

  “Anything. Tell me.” She would run to the house for food. She’d run to the cistern for water. She’d run a billion stairs into the heavens and grab God by the throat if Carrick asked her to do it.

  He rolled over, stuck his head out of the door hatch, and she heard the unmistakable thick liquid sound of heavy vomiting.

  Faye winced. Poor Carrick.

  “Need me to hold your hair?” she asked, although she knew he couldn’t hear her over the sound of his own retching.

  She looked around, found his water canteen on his desk and brought it to the door.

  He crawled back into the watch room, closed the hatch, and sat back against the curved stone wall.

  “Feel better?” she asked.

  He slowly nodded. “I think I vomited on Ozzie down there.”

  “Ozzie threw up a hairball in my wicker flower basket. Turnabout is fair play.”

  “How’s our girl?” Carrick asked, still breathing too hard for her liking.

  “Curled up in a ball and keening. So about as well as you.”

  She unscrewed the cap from the canteen and brought it to his lips. He drank deeply but carefully. When he nodded again, she put the cap back on. Carrick grinned.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “I would marry you if you weren’t already married,” Carrick said. “Do you want to marry me?”

  “You nearly killed yourself carrying a teenage girl up one hundred and ten stairs. That was still the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen. If you weren’t half-dead and if Dolly weren’t up here with us, I’d do things to you to make a sailor blush.”

  “If I knew that’s what put you in the mood, I’d carry a different girl up those stairs every day of my life. No, I wouldn’t. That was the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever had to do.”

  “Watch your language.”

  “It’s not true anyway. Standing there in the water waiting for you to come up again—that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Carrick, I’m sorry. I didn’t—”

  “I stood there watching the water like my whole life was there in front of me, and if you came up, I’d live, and if you didn’t, I wouldn’t.”

  “You would have lived.”

  “Aye, but I wouldn’t have wanted to, and that’s worse than death, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Faye said. “That is worse than death. I’ve been there.”

  “When you went under, it killed me to think you might die never knowing that I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you, since the moment you flew off that swing and into my arms, since the moment you said—”

  “My hero.”

  “God’ll just have to forgive me for declaring my love to a married woman. I won’t act on it. I won’t. But I had to tell you. And if the day ever comes when that husband of yours takes a long walk off a short pier, I’ll marry you by sundown.”

  Faye bowed her head and sighed, Pat’s words ringing in her ears.

  If you don’t tell him the truth, it’s not you he loves.

  “What if we don’t have to wait, Carrick?”

  “Wait for what?”

  “For Marshall to take a long walk off a short pier. What if I wasn’t married?”

  “I know you are. I was there.”

  “What if I said that wasn’t me?”

  Carrick looked at her long and hard. Then he sighed, pulled her to him. “I know it wasn’t you,” he said.

  “You know?” She leaned away and looked at him.

  “I know it was your mother making you marry him. But that doesn’t change that in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of God you are married. I’d risk my soul for a night with you, but I won’t let you risk yours. I’m not worth it.”

  She’d tried telling him and just couldn’t do it. Not with the way he was looking at her, looking at her like a man in love. A man in love with a dead woman. Faye knew that look all too well.

  “You’re worth it.”

  Faye took his face in her hands and kissed him lightly on the lips. Right now he looked like Carrick, just Carrick, and not like Will at all. But she loved his face nonetheless.

  She settled against him, clung to him. Faye’s love for Will wasn’t gone, but in Carrick’s arms the ache of it dissipated like the waves on a pond after someone threw a stone into the water. The stone had sunk to the bottom and would remain there always, yet once more the water was calm, at peace. And so was Faye.

  Faye saw Dolly raise her head. She saw Faye and Carrick clinging to each other and rolled her eyes. When Faye waved her over, Dolly came up on her hands and knees and crawled across the floor to join them in their pile of arms and legs and wet clothes and relief. Carrick held Faye. Faye held Dolly. Soon enough Ozzie bounded up the stairs and Dolly held him, too, as he purred loud enough to give the wind outside a run for its money.

  The whole family was alive and well. Let the wind blow the world away tonight. This lighthouse was her ark and she had all she needed in here. Tomorrow they’d find dry land. Tonight they’d be one another’s sanctuary.

  Faye let Dolly sleep and Carrick rest while she took care of the beacon. She cranked the clockwork to keep the lens rotating all night, and even went up to the lantern room to make sure the windows were clear of debris. Faye monitored the anemometer readings and recorded them in Carrick’s station log like he had taught her. When the winds died down to ten miles per hour, Carrick sent her and Dolly back downstairs to the house so they could get some real sleep in real beds. He would stay until the sun came up to clean the windows and the lens. It would certainly need it after this storm. Faye worried Dolly would have to be carried downstairs again, but no, Dolly devised her own solution for getting down the steps. She sat on them, and while clinging to the banister, she bump-bump-bumped on her bottom
all the way down, Ozzie following Dolly and Faye following Ozzie.

  When they emerged from the lighthouse, it was to an island that looked like it had survived a drinking binge. By the first gray and pale pink rays of dawn light, Faye spied tree branches littering the beach like broken glass on a bar floor. Sand had been swept all the way up to the back steps like spilled liquor. One green shutter hung sideways, giving the window the look of a bruised and swollen eye. Kelp hung off the corner of the roof like a discarded bra tossed aside in a drunken fling.

  Yet for all the damage the storm bender had done, it was a lovely morning to be alive. The rain was nothing but the gentlest drizzle now, and the air smelled so fresh Faye felt clean just by standing in it and breathing it in. June 21 was less than a week away according to the kitchen calendar. Almost officially summer. Oh, it would get hot here this summer. Hotter. But cooler again in autumn. Would it snow on the beach in winter? She couldn’t wait to find out. And she would find out, because she would be here. Because that house with the shutter askew and the seaweed hanging off the roof was her home. A little bruised, a little battered, but home.

  Dolly headed straight to her bedroom, collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep in seconds. Faye stood in the doorway smiling at the sleeping girl. It was there that Carrick found her, and she leaned against his chest.

  “How is she?”

  “Exhausted,” Faye said. “But alive and well, thanks to you.”

  Carrick put his arm around her and rubbed her back.

  “I want a daughter,” Faye said. “Just like her.”

  “Well, you can’t have her. She belongs to someone already.”

  “I’ll fight them for her,” Faye said. Now that she’d returned, she knew she’d come back as much for Dolly as she had for Carrick, as much for Carrick as she’d come back for herself.

  “She’s a little wild for me. Look what she did.” Carrick turned and showed her the back of his neck and the bloody fingernail scratches deep in his skin.

  “Oh, no, you poor thing.” Faye tried to sound sympathetic but ended up laughing at him instead. “Let’s go in the bathroom. I’ll clean those cuts up.”

  She put a chair by the bathroom sink and tried not to stare as Carrick shucked out of his shirt and undershirt. In her abject terror, Dolly had left sixteen scratches in Carrick’s neck, shoulders and back. Faye counted them all. She also counted the tattoos on his back. Seven of them—all birds.

  “This isn’t fair,” Faye said as she ran cool water onto a clean strip of linen cloth and pressed it against the dried blood on Carrick’s shoulder. She washed off the blood, put iodine on the cuts. “I’m the one who should be leaving fingernail scratches on your back.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he groaned, rubbing his forehead. “You’ll be the death of me, woman, if you say things like that.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Ignore me. Tell me about the tattoos. What are the birds?”

  “Swallows,” he said. He had an entire flight of swallows on his skin, fluttering from shoulder to shoulder and shoulder to hip. Seven of them total. They made a C-shaped curve from his upper back to his lower back, red and black and yellow birds.

  “They must have hurt,” she said. She couldn’t imagine how much getting tattooed with a World War I–era tattoo gun hurt. A whole damn lot, probably. Standing in front of him, she gently pushed his head down so she could put iodine on the cut along his hairline.

  “Nobody but a fool joins the navy hoping to avoid pain.” Carrick rested his forehead against her stomach. Will would do that, too, when she rubbed his shoulders after a long road trip. But the thought came and went, fluttering away like a swallow returning home. She didn’t miss Will right now. She didn’t miss missing him, either. She remembered him, but without the pain of loss. The wound had healed and left a scar, but the scar didn’t hurt.

  “I wouldn’t think so. Does it mean anything you have seven of them?”

  “You get one for every five thousand miles you sail. I was in the navy a good long time.” Carrick pushed up the edge of her shirt to bare a couple inches of her stomach. He pressed a soft kiss against her side.

  “That’s my rib you’re kissing, Chief Morgan,” she told him as she dotted the iodine on the cut.

  “No, ma’am, that’s Adam’s rib. He said I could kiss it.”

  “I loved that movie,” Faye said.

  “A what?” Carrick asked, confused.

  Oops. Adam’s Rib wouldn’t be out for another almost thirty years.

  “Nothing. Tell me more about your swallows. You traveled thirty-five thousand nautical miles?”

  “Thereabouts.” He lifted her shirt a little higher, kissed her again. Faye shivered with pleasure.

  “That’s the entire world, Carrick.”

  He shook his head. As he did, he blew warm air across her bare stomach.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, shivering with pleasure.

  “I was thinking about taking you to bed before I remembered I’m not supposed to do that. What are you doing?”

  “I think I was arguing with you about how big the earth is while cleaning up your cuts.”

  “The earth is about twenty-two thousand nautical miles,” he said. “I was nearing my second circuit when the war ended. Not that I minded not getting that eighth swallow. Three years on the Kentucky was long enough for me. Are you done yet?” He held her by the hips while Faye screwed the lid back onto the iodine bottle and pretended not to notice his roving hands. Now this felt like a marriage. How many times had she been attempting to do boring and important tasks like putting away dishes or paying bills while Will would kiss her neck or rub her ass or whatever it took to get her to give up her work and go to bed with him? Which was what she wanted to do all along but it was always much more fun making him wait for it.

  “What’s the Kentucky? Your ship?”

  Carrick raised his head slowly and looked at her through narrowed eyes.

  “Of course it was my ship. It was Marsh’s ship, too. You know that, lass.”

  Faye went silent and her blood stilled. There was silence in the room, the same silence she’d heard before the storm.

  She’d done it. She’d committed an error so egregious there would be no way to explain except with the truth.

  “Carrick,” Faye said, putting her hands over his on her hips. “I have to tell you something.”

  “You did hurt yourself that night, didn’t you? When you fell off the pier? You’ve been different. I knew something was wrong. I should have hauled you to the doctor whether you wanted to go or not.”

  “That’s not it, I swear.”

  “Was it Marsh? I told you my dad hit my mom so hard sometimes she forgot—”

  “Carrick, stop. Listen to me, please.”

  “Talk,” he said.

  Faye was shaking. She had no idea how to explain it to him, how to make him believe her. “You promise you won’t think I’m crazy?” she asked.

  “I would never think that of you. The only crazy thing you’ve ever done is come to me when you could have gone anywhere.”

  “That’s the least crazy part of all this. Carrick...”

  She looked down into his eyes. There was no way to say it but to say it.

  “I’m not Faith Morgan.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m not Millie Scarborough, either, or Millie Carlyle.”

  Carrick looked at her but didn’t seem to see her. Or perhaps he was seeing her, the real her, for the first time. Faye couldn’t say, but he’d never looked at her quite like this before—with suspicious, searching eyes and his usually warm hands cold in her grasp. He looked afraid. Though she’d seen him scared before, she’d never seen him scared of her.

  “Who are you, then?” he asked.

  “Someone who loves you,” she said. “And someone who came a long way to be with you.”

  Outside the house she heard the unmistakable whine of a motor boat com
ing into dock.

  “Ignore him,” Carrick said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I can’t ignore him. I have his money. Dolly and I found it right before the storm.”

  “Money? What money?”

  “Ten thousand dollars, all in cash. It was in a book under the dresser. That’s why Hartwell broke in. I’m going to give it to him, and hopefully we’ll never see him again.”