The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  Pat looked at her, and she understood. He’d been Carrick’s confessor—he knew the secrets Carrick hadn’t even told her yet and perhaps never would. If anyone could make Carrick believe the truth of this story, it was Pat. But that didn’t mean Carrick would like what he heard.

  “He thinks I’m a twenty-year-old girl who was a virgin until I married Marshall, not a woman of thirty who’s been married twice, widowed and divorced. God, I’m divorced, Pat. Carrick will never forgive me.”

  “He’ll forgive you,” Pat said. “Carrick’s more open-minded than you’re giving him credit for. Have faith, Faith.”

  Faye set off running down the beach to meet Carrick. He grabbed her as soon as she was within grabbing distance.

  “Oh, God,” Carrick said, holding her so tightly it hurt. “I thought you were a goner. I thought Marshall did you in for good. I’ll kill him. Where is he—”

  “Dead,” she said, looking up at Carrick’s face. “He drowned when the boat turned over.”

  “Jesus...” Carrick pulled her even tighter to him. Faye rested her head on his chest and tried to make an impression of this moment deep in her mind in case this was the last time he held her. He was a wall to her, a warm wall of masculine strength and love. And that wall had a door and that was why she never got hurt running into the wall, because he always opened the door for her when she ran to him. “You’re safe, sweet girl. That’s all that matters.”

  But it wasn’t all that mattered, no matter how much she wanted to believe that.

  “Carrick, let me go.”

  “Never.”

  She laughed through her tears.

  “I need you to meet someone,” she said. “He saved me when I jumped out of the boat.”

  She pulled away from his rough embrace as Pat walked toward them.

  “Chief Morgan,” Pat said, extending his hand. “Pat.”

  Carrick shook it heartily. “I’m grateful to you, sir,” he said. “Grateful beyond words. Pat, you said?”

  The priest nodded. “Patrick Cahill.”

  Carrick’s brow furrowed. He looked at Faye. “Patrick Cahill,” he said to her. “Your...fiancé? I thought that was just a story.”

  “My...” Her voice trailed off. Of course. The fake fiancé she’d invented to keep Hartwell from sniffing around her.

  “Carrick,” Pat said, cutting in. “Forgive me for calling you by your first name, but we’ve actually met before.”

  “We have?” Carrick looked more confused than ever. “When? The war?”

  “No, I’m not a sailor or a military man,” Pat said. “I’m a priest. Your priest, actually.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. A priest as young as you, I’d remember.”

  “I’m not your priest yet,” Pat said. “I will be. We’ll meet in 1965. So take a good look at me. This is exactly what I’ll look like when we meet someday.”

  Carrick said nothing. He looked at Pat and then at her.

  “What on earth are you saying to me?” Carrick said.

  “Please listen to him,” Faye said. “He has something to tell you. About me.”

  “I’m listening.” Carrick raised his chin, his expression closed and carved out of granite.

  Pat took a breath, glanced at the ocean, stared at it as if waiting for it to tell him a secret. He smiled like he remembered something, then looked back at Carrick.

  “Do you believe in miracles, Carrick?”

  Carrick narrowed his eyes at Pat, but nodded.

  “Good,” Pat said. “Because one just happened. And I can prove it.”

  23

  It was the longest day of Faye’s life. Pat and Carrick sequestered themselves in the watch room of the lighthouse to talk while Faye distracted herself by clearing storm debris from the yard. When her extreme exhaustion caught up with her, she finally slept. Even her sleep exhausted her as her dreams were plagued by images of Marshall and his gun, Marshall and his boat capsizing, Marshall and what could have been had Pat not come to save her.

  And Faye? Would Pat save her now? Would Pat be able to convince Carrick of the truth about her identity? Would Carrick shrink from her in horror? Or accept her and love her for who she really was? Even then, he would have to grapple with the knowledge that Faith had drowned herself. Had Carrick loved Faith, or had he simply been offering her safe harbor from her abusive husband? Either way, Carrick would grieve her loss. Faye would respect that and keep her distance if need be. No one honored mourning more than a woman who’d lost her husband while she was still in love with him.

  Faye’s nap left her feeling more tired than before she let herself sleep. She hadn’t been this tired in a long time. The last time she’d felt this sort of bone-deep exhaustion, she’d been pregnant with Will’s baby.

  And now she was pregnant with Marshall’s.

  She should have known that was what it was—the dizziness and the nausea and the tiredness, not to mention the weight gain Dolly had noticed when she’d measured Faye for trousers two weeks after measuring Faith for skirts. But how could Faye have known? Who wouldn’t be dizzy and nauseous after being yanked decades years back in time? And who wouldn’t be tired doing manual labor every day? And who wouldn’t gain weight eating food cooked in lard? Even now Faye wished she could convince herself that it wasn’t true, that it wasn’t happening, but for one thing.

  The pregnancy didn’t matter.

  How could it? Carrick would find out she wasn’t the woman he’d known, and reject her. Then Faye would go back to her own time, where she wasn’t pregnant. She should have known she couldn’t simply slip on someone’s life like borrowing someone’s coat on a cold day. This journey had seemed like a gift, the rarest and most precious of gifts, but it was no gift. If Faye was to stay here in 1921, it would be at a great price. A price too high, since it would be Carrick paying it.

  Despite her tiredness, she rose and dressed in her best black skirt, her prettiest white blouse—Faith’s best skirt, Faith’s prettiest blouse. Whatever happened with Carrick, at least Faye wouldn’t feel like a fraud anymore, like a thief. Faye pinned up her hair as well as she could and washed her face, ready to meet her fate if her fate was ready to meet her.

  A peaceful quiet pervaded the cottage, the calm after the storm. Faye’s footsteps echoed hollowly on the steps and the floor as she walked down to the kitchen. Dolly sat at the table reading a book. When she saw Faye, she pushed a piece of paper her way with a note already written on it.

  “I have to stay the night again,” it read. “Big boat came by and told the Chief it’s too choppy still for little boats.”

  The big boat was likely a coast guard ship patrolling after the storm. She wondered if they’d found Hartwell’s body yet or Marshall’s.

  “Stay as long as you need to,” Faye wrote, grateful for her company.

  “Hungry?” Dolly wrote.

  Faye shook her head no. Nervousness tied her stomach in such knots no food could fit in it. She felt like a defendant in a court trial awaiting the jury’s decision on her fate. Who could eat at a time like that?

  “Who’s that man?” Dolly asked, scribbling the question in her loopy, girlish handwriting.

  “Friend of mine from home,” Faye wrote. “Patrick Cahill.”

  Dolly tapped her pencil on the page before writing something with a grin on her face.

  “He’s handsome.” Dolly’s cheeks darkened in a blush.

  Faye smiled. The knot of her stomach loosened slightly.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Faye wrote. “He’s going to be a Catholic priest.”

  Dolly’s eyes widened with shock. Then she sighed. Twice.

  “Don’t worry,” she wrote to Dolly. “You’ll find true love someday and get married. If you want to get married, you will.”

  “I want to,” Dolly wrote. Then she paused before writing something else. “Do you think a man will want me with my ears?”

  Faye wrote, “Yes. Men like girls with ears.”

>   Dolly pursed her lips at her. She clearly did not find Faye’s joke amusing.

  “YES,” Faye wrote in all caps. “You’re beautiful and smart and have lots of talents. A man will want you even if you can’t hear. I promise. He’ll be lucky to have you.”

  Dolly took the pencil from Faye’s hand.

  “You getting married to the Chief?”

  “Should I?”

  “Your bad husband is dead, right?” Dolly wrote. “Why not?”

  Faye stared at the words. How did she know about Will? She didn’t, of course. Dolly meant Marshall. Marshall was dead. Carrick must have told her what happened.

  “Oh, my God,” Faye said out loud. “I’m a widow again.” And not just a widow again.

  A pregnant widow again.

  She groaned tiredly, drunkenly, and Dolly looked at her like she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.

  “Marry Chief,” Dolly wrote. She underlined marry and Chief twice.

  “I don’t think that can happen,” Faye wrote. Dolly looked at her with a question in her eyes. It wasn’t enough of an answer for the girl. Faye sighed. “I may have to leave.”

  “Why?” Dolly wrote.

  “Hard to explain.”

  “Because of the baby?” Dolly wrote.

  Faye looked at her in shock. Dolly smiled and wrote something else.

  “Only your belly is getting fat. I know what that means.”

  Well, Dolly did have five younger siblings. She knew what pregnancy looked like.

  “Yes,” Faye wrote. “The baby is my late husband’s.”

  “Chief will marry you anyway,” Dolly wrote.

  “You sure about that?” Faye replied.

  Dolly must have been very sure about it, because she wrote, “When you get married, I get to make your dress.”

  “You’re not helping much here,” Faye said but didn’t write it. Dolly ignored her as she sketched the outline of a simple empire-waist wedding dress.

  Faye left Dolly to her dress designing as she brewed a pot of tea. She took comfort in the routine of the act—in boiling water, in straining the leaves, in deciding between one lump of sugar or two. Her sweet tooth won. She carried her cup onto the front porch. A light wind kept the water awake and dancing in the fading sunlight. The cool breeze and Faye’s hot tea did more to restore her than her nap had. The sun quickly dropped out of sight, and soon only pink light remained on the horizon. Pink turned to orange. Orange turned to red. Right as the last of the sunlight faded, the lighthouse came to life, and Faye took comfort in that, too.

  Frogs and crickets started up a chorus of minor key singing as Faye sipped her tea. Her eyes followed the beam of light until it disappeared beyond human sight. The ocean was so vast it was a miracle anyone ever survived the crossing from one shore to the next. She wondered how her baby loggerhead turtles were doing out there in the deep blue ocean. She wondered what Carrick and Pat were talking about in the lighthouse. She wondered what she would have to do to get back to her time if Carrick sent her away. She wondered...

  “Will, what’s happening here? Why me? Do you know?”

  “Do I know what?” Carrick said.

  Faye turned around. Carrick stood in the open front doorway to the house. He looked tired, beat even. She wanted to run into his arms again, but she held back. It wasn’t time for that. Maybe it would never be time for that again.

  “Nothing,” Faye said. “I’m talking to myself. I do that sometimes.”

  Carrick shut the door behind him and came to stand near her, not close but not far.

  “I didn’t know you talked to yourself.”

  “I’m lying to you,” Faye said, shrugging. “I talk to Will sometimes. It helps to talk out loud. Makes it less like he’s gone for good. Sometimes I can hear his voice in my mind.”

  “Will? He was the man you loved, the one I remind you of?”

  She nodded. “You’re learning a lot about me today,” Faye said.

  Carrick said nothing for a very long time, long enough for Faye’s tea mug to cool in her hands.

  “I don’t talk about the war if I can help it,” Carrick finally said. Faye looked at him wide-eyed. Of all the things she’d expected him to say, that hadn’t even been in the top one hundred.

  Carrick went on. “It’s hard on a man, although we’re not supposed to take it hard. They say words to us like courage and valor and patriotism and they’re supposed to mean something. And they do, until that moment comes when words don’t mean anything and it’s all guts, smoke and terror like you can’t believe... I hope you never know terror like I’ve known.” He glanced up at the new night as if seeing something in the stars he wished he didn’t see. “But maybe you do,” he said.

  “I saw your medals in the box in your closet.”

  “We were under attack, started taking on water. I pulled some men out of a room that was flooding, sealed that room off the best I could, got the old tub running again, and we managed to sink them before they sank us. That was what all those medals were for.”

  “Which I assume is Carrick-speak for ‘I single-handedly saved the lives of every man on my ship.’ Yes?”

  Carrick only shrugged, but he didn’t argue.

  “Call it penance,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For what had happened a month before that. It was during a skirmish with a U-boat. We got the better of it, but it was a rough night. You learn to live with the fear, but it takes time. There were new kids aboard. And kids they were. Seventeen, eighteen. Boys so young you’d look at them and couldn’t believe you were ever that young. One of them, Francis Walter... Why this kid joined the navy, I’ll never know. From Iowa. I don’t even know if they have rivers in Iowa, much less thirty thousand miles of ocean. I don’t know if he had a screw loose or if being on the water for weeks on end loosened one of his screws, but he lost his mind one night and came at me with a knife.”

  “You? Why?”

  “He wanted a 4-F discharge. Any kind of discharge. He’d rather wait out the war in a military prison than on the boat, he was that scared. Came at me from behind and sliced my whole side open.”

  The scar on Carrick’s side. So that was where it had come from.

  “I didn’t think,” he said. “I just reacted. I threw him into the wall, punched him so hard I killed him. Marshall found us in the engine room. He was my commanding officer. When I told him what happened, he said we should throw him over. No military court in the world would have convicted me, but it would still be a hell of a lot of paperwork, a trial, and during the war, no one wanted that. Marshall said the ship needed me. I was in too much shock to even argue with him. He tossed the boy in the water and I let him, praying for that kid’s soul the whole time. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I let him. Everyone assumed he committed suicide. Nobody questioned it. That kid was a wreck from day one anyway. Marshall and I swore each other to secrecy, and we got on with the business of fighting the war.”

  “It was a war,” Faye said, trying not to betray her horror at Marshall’s act, what he’d made Carrick do, what he’d taken from that poor boy’s family. “Terrible things happen in wars.”

  “After the war they started handing out medals. I felt like a fraud with every medal they gave me. No matter how much good I’d managed to do, that kid’s blood is on me like a red shadow.” Carrick shook his head, took a shuddering breath. “Seventeen years old. He should never have been on that boat.”

  “No, he shouldn’t have. But he shouldn’t have attacked you, either. I saw that scar. He could have killed you.”

  “His family had no body to bury because of us.”

  “I’m not saying what you did was right. I am saying it’s forgivable.”

  “Pat says it’s forgivable. He says he absolved me of the sin in 1965.” Carrick turned and looked her in the eyes for the first time since coming out onto the porch. “I told Marshall I’d keep that secret until my deathbed. Turns out I did. But Pat remembers my confessi
on. There’s no way he could know the things he knows unless I told him myself. And I’ve never told anyone.”

  Carrick leaned back against the porch post and closed his eyes. With his arms crossed over his chest, he seemed like an impenetrable wall to her. No door opened to let her in.