Maidenstone Lighthouse

by Sally Smith O'rourke

  Just as I’d always remembered, a flickering azure glow suffused the circular room, magically transforming the swirling white textures of the domed plaster ceiling into a twilight sky alive with soft, cottony clouds that might have been painted by the hand of Maxfield Parrish.

  Pleased with myself for having remembered to bring along the treasured lamp, I yawned happily and traded my wrinkled jeans and sweatshirt for a thick terry robe. Then I slipped downstairs to try out the pièce de résistance of Damon’s remodeling job.

  Undoubtedly the biggest drawback to Aunt Ellen’s house had always been the second-floor bathroom, a big, clammy, linoleum-floored chamber containing all of the necessities and none of the comforts of modern plumbing. The awful room’s worst feature had been without question the great clawed iron bathtub that had dominated one corner like a medieval torture device.

  Adding to its grim demeanor, patches of cold black metal showed through the ancient tub’s yellowing porcelain finish. And the greenish copper taps had clanked and hissed menacingly before spewing out uncontrollable volumes of rust-tinged water whose only temperature variations were scalding and freezing.

  When Damon, who values his creature comforts mightily, first saw the house he’d taken one look at the scabrous old bathroom and shuddered theatrically. “Positively barbaric,” he’d drawled, scowling at the ancient tub, the cracked wooden toilet seat and the stained medicine cabinet mirror. “Sue, darling, no civilized person will even consider staying in this mausoleum once they’ve visited the loo,” he’d announced, sweeping away my feeble protests about the unthinkable expense of remodeling the bathroom.

  “If, as you’ve said,” he reminded me, “the only way you can afford to keep this house is by renting it out to well-heeled summer tourists, then you can’t afford not to fix the bathroom.”

  So once again he’d had his way, covering the glossy white walls in soft green fabric and wood and replacing the cracked linoleum with thickly luxurious carpeting a much darker shade of forest green. All of the hideous fixtures had been replaced with attractive new ones. And he’d added a bidet for good measure, a move that I’m sure would have sent poor Aunt Ellen into a swoon.

  But finally, and best of all, Damon had junked the massive cast-iron bathtub, replacing it with a gorgeous sea green replica of the elegant claw-foot tub Queen Victoria herself had installed in Windsor Castle. Unlike Victoria’s tub, however, the updated version came complete with a set of Jacuzzi jets and an infinitely controllable temperature dial.

  Turning the gleaming taps full-on I sprinkled lavender salts into the rushing water. Then I slowly undressed and slipped into the blessed warmth of the fabulous new tub. As the glorious tingle of rushing bubbles massaged my aching spine, I reflected that Damon had been absolutely right, as usual.

  I closed my eyes and blessed my business partner for his spot-on wisdom. Then I sank back into the soothing veils of steam. And as the scented water swirled around me I thanked Aunt Ellen for leaving me this lovely old house.

  Once again I saw the scowl of disapproval as Bobby and I left that afternoon three years earlier. The sight of her tiny form on the porch as we drove away was a painful memory.

  I pushed the guilt-ridden thought aside and instead went back to the very first visit I remembered.

  At six I was something of a tomboy and my mother had long since given up trying to keep me in dresses playing with dolls. Aunt Ellen was horrified by my unlady-like antics and had made efforts to rein me in; but after several heated arguments with my mother she stoically refrained from further comment.

  I chuckled to myself, remembering how much all my cousins feared her, but even at six I somehow saw through the gruff exterior and wouldn’t let her dismiss me the way she did the others. I became her favorite. A fact she would have denied vehemently.

  It was that summer the turret bedroom became mine.

  In her best no-nonsense voice she told me that I was being consigned to the room farthest away from the living spaces because she wasn’t used to having children in the house and wanted to retain as much peace as was possible with a rambunctious little girl around.

  I smiled, remembering seeing the room for the first time, the curved walls and domed ceiling, the mullioned windows looking out on the raging sea. I’d become a princess in the highest tower in the castle. I was thrilled and threw my tiny arms around her legs. She’d gently disengaged me, saying I was wrinkling her dress, but I could see in her eyes that she was pleased.

  Aunt Ellen. She didn’t give hugs and kisses but I always knew she loved me. I hoped she knew how much I loved her.

  I stretched and sank lower in the tub so the soothing jets could do their magic on my neck, stiff from the long drive.

  When another drive swam into my thoughts. I still have nightmares where the truck crosses the center line and smashes into the side of the car. I cringed.

  Even at ten Mother insisted I sit in the backseat buckled into the middle. She’d read somewhere that air bags were dangerous to children. So I was safe, not a scratch on me, but because the truck hit the side of the car Mother’s air bag didn’t save her.

  My father and I were alone.

  It was Aunt Ellen who was there for us, for me. I never saw her cry but her strength helped my father and me through that first horrid year and after that I spent every summer here.

  Starting to prune, I got out of the tub and went upstairs to bed.

  Chapter 6

  That night I dreamt of Bobby.

  But my dream, for a change, was not one of the foolish longing fantasies with which I had been torturing myself ever since his disappearance.

  Instead, that night, snug in my sturdy old sea captain’s bed, with the October wind rattling the windows of my secure cocoon and the soothing glow of the fairy lamp fending off the freezing darkness outside, I dreamt of the day I had first met Bobby, and of the life we had shared together.

  It was early on a bright autumn morning. Dressed in baggy sweats and bedraggled from an intense aerobic workout at my women’s health club, I was coming out of a Seventh Avenue bakery, a bag of croissants in one hand, my open wallet carelessly clutched in the other.

  Intoxicated by the delicious yeasty smell of the warm bread and squinting happily down the sun-splashed street, which looked fresh-scrubbed from a brief spring shower that had ended just seconds before, I could have been the poster girl for Mugging Victims Anonymous.

  Suddenly, I heard the rapid slap of sneakers on the concrete behind me, and something hard and brutal—a fist, as it later turned out—landed squarely in the center of my back. I briefly glimpsed a pair of large, dirty running shoes as I fell face-forward onto the wet pavement and felt the wallet being ripped from my fingers.

  Then the running footsteps were receding into the distance and someone was shouting in a deep, enraged voice.

  I sat up groggily, clutching my bleeding nose and still only dimly aware of what had just happened to me. Slowly I realized that the angry shouting had not stopped. Looking down the glistening street, I saw that the noise was coming from a tall, blond-haired man in a worn leather jacket and jeans. He stood twenty yards from me, leaning over something in the rain-filled gutter.

  Attracted by the shouts and my first startled scream, people were coming out of the bakery. I felt gentle hands helping me up. Concerned voices were asking if I was okay and debating with one another about whether or not to call the cops.

  When I looked down the street again the blond giant was just stepping away from another man who was squatting by the curb, holding his ribs. The blond shouted a final threat and the other man staggered to his feet and weaved away, arms still wrapped tightly around his chest, his cruel, stubbled face pale as ashes.

  Then, without warning my leather-jacketed hero was standing in front of me like some gorgeous avenging angel straight out of a Hollywood action film.

  He held out my wallet and stooped slightly to peer closely at my damaged nose.

  I tried sm
iling but it hurt too much. So I gave him sort of a lopsided grin and tilted my head like a wounded parakeet, trying to think of something appropriately grateful to say.

  Meanwhile, content that I had been taken in hand, the small crowd of Manhattan sidewalk gawkers was drifting away.

  “I think maybe you need to see a doctor,” my handsome savior said in a pleasingly basso voice that was edged with a crisp Midwestern twang.

  I shook my pounding head vigorously. “I’m fine,” I mumbled past my aching jaw. “Jus wanna go home now.”

  He must have seen me starting to sway, for I was suddenly overcome by a wave of dizziness. Before I had a chance to topple I felt his strong hand under my elbow. “Home it is, then,” he said, effortlessly holding me upright with one hand while retrieving my miraculously undamaged bag of croissants with the other. “Is it close enough to walk, or should I call a cab?”

  At my insistence, we had walked. Rather, he walked while I stumbled along, leaning heavily on him.

  Ten minutes later I was seated at the chrome 50s dinette in my little apartment while he tenderly applied an ice-filled towel to my battered nose. I submitted to the soothing treatment like a broken marionette, gazing stupidly into the most devastating pair of ice-blue eyes I had ever seen, and marveling silently at the way the sunlight pouring in through the window at his back shone like gold on his wheat-colored hair.

  The whole scene was so steeped in melodrama that I halfway expected violins to start playing an accompaniment to the ringing in my ears.

  Of course, I was miserable to a degree far exceeding the superficial bumps and scrapes that had been dished out by my mugger. For I could only imagine what I must have looked like to my hero, all mud-stained and bloody, and with a jagged rip in one knee of my sweats.

  And if my bedraggled appearance alone was not enough to send my kind new friend running for the hills, I had clearly demonstrated to him by my carelessness in having openly flashed my wallet on a busy Manhattan street that I was a complete moron, to boot.

  So I kept waiting for the golden idol to finish up his obligatory first aid, make some hurried excuse and beat a hasty retreat.

  Instead, he lavishly tended my mashed nose and scraped knee, then made hot tea for me. In the process, I learned that his name was Robert Jonathan Hayward—“but you can call me Bobby”—and that he was a commercial pilot. He said he was originally from Colorado. And when I asked about the Midwestern accent he confided to me that the laconic twang was something all professional pilots affect in the cockpit when talking on the radio, so that nobody on the ground will suspect how shit-scared they are most of the time, he added with a grin.

  I had laughed then, which brought tears to my eyes, because my poor battered jaw really did hurt like hell.

  Saturday morning slipped effortlessly into afternoon as I learned more about Bobby Hayward. He was an ex-navy fighter pilot, had lost both parents in a car crash when he was twelve, had no other family and did not generally make a habit of cracking the ribs of New York muggers, unless they ran head-on into him while making their escape, as mine apparently had.

  Just before dark he finally left my apartment, explaining that he had to run out to LaGuardia to check on some repairs to a plane he was scheduled to fly to Greenland on Monday morning.

  Coming from anyone else, such an outrageous macho claim would have sounded like pure Manhattan singles bar bullshit. At that point, however, I think that Bobby Hayward could have told me that he was blasting off to Mars for the weekend and I would have swallowed it whole.

  So I had merely nodded meekly as he promised to return—just to be sure I was okay, he said—and threatened to take me somewhere for X-rays if the swelling in my jaw had not gone down appreciably in the interim.

  The moment the door closed behind him I jumped into the shower, then found some clean clothes and tried to pull myself together. Afterward, I sat in the living room, staring at my scarred front door like a lovesick teenager and absolutely positive that I’d never lay eyes on him again.

  Nevertheless, after a couple of hours, Bobby returned, bringing with him a huge container of steaming chicken and matzo ball soup—in honor of my injured jaw, he explained—and pastrami sandwiches from the corner deli. He also brought a bottle of delicious Chilean red wine and a bouquet of dewy spring flowers, which I ceremoniously enshrined in a priceless Steuben Crystal bowl that I was minding for an antique-dealer friend.

  Later, we sat cross-legged on my authentic but sagging Duncan Phyfe sofa, eating the deli take-out and listening to classic country-western CDs while Bobby quizzed me about my life, my work and my dreams.

  Sunday morning was just dawning as we slipped into the bedroom and made shy, gentle love for the first time.

  Except for one brief foray to a neighborhood market for supplies, we remained together in the apartment all day Sunday, cooking, laughing and making love to the soothing sound of the gentle spring rain.

  Early Monday morning, Bobby left on his trip, promising to call me when he arrived in Greenland.

  I stayed home from work that day, nursing my jaw, which had gone from being grotesquely swollen to merely turning a hideous shade of purple. Too agitated to concentrate on a book or the stack of appraisals I had brought home to write up on my laptop over the weekend, I alternately dozed and watched a mindless parade of game shows, soaps and other trash TV as I attempted to assess what had happened to me.

  Handsome and gentle, wild and adventurous, Bobby Hayward had swept into my life out of nowhere. Like the lead character in an idyllic, never-never land romance novel he had cared for me with the utmost concern and tenderness, talked with me for hours about books, music, life and philosophy. And, finally, perhaps more as the result of my desire than his own, for I certainly was no competition for Cindy Crawford and he was clearly fearful of further aggravating my injuries, he had made sweet, exquisitely thrilling love to me…

  Then he had flown off to a faraway place that I hadn’t previously imagined even had such normal, everyday things as people and airports and houses.

  Expecting my romantic bubble to burst at any moment, I hovered by the phone at the appointed hour when he’d said he was scheduled to arrive in Greenland.

  Miraculously, the phone rang and, sounding like he was across town and not in some distant, frozen land where the nights were six months long, Bobby confessed that he’d thought of me all the way across the North Atlantic. And I haltingly admitted that he had been on my mind as well. Then, suddenly, we were both talking and laughing like we’d known each other all our lives, and I had insisted on going out to the airport on Thursday to meet him.

  God, it was all just so perfectly beautiful and exciting that it defies description. I never, ever wanted it to stop. And, except for the all-too-frequent times when Bobby was away on extended long-distance flying assignments, it didn’t. Not really. For though we’d had problems—mostly having to do with his erratic, often dangerous work and the amount of time he was gone—the time we did have together was fantastic.

  Bobby moved in with me the week after he returned from Greenland. Eighteen months later, we bought the loft on lower Broadway, which we were slowly remodeling. And we had been talking very seriously of late about getting married and having a baby…two or three babies, in fact.

  Then, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had all begun, my life with Bobby had ended.

  He’d been gone for over a week, flying three top executives of the oil company halfway around the world to conclude a merger with an Indonesian producer. And he was supposed to be coming home the next day, a Friday.

  I’d happily planned a long, lazy New York summer weekend for us, a concert on Saturday, picnicking in the park on Sunday afternoon, with lots of lovemaking in between. I had been hanging around the office, waiting for his call—Bobby always called from his last stop, to tell me when he’d be “wheels down” at LaGuardia, where the company’s planes were based.

  But that last phone call never came
.

  Instead, late on Thursday afternoon, a somber-looking young company executive in an equally somber gray summer-weight suit had appeared at my office, where I was impatiently coaxing the final details of a large estate appraisal out of Damon.

  I felt my whole life draining away as the nervous oil company emissary haltingly informed me that Bobby’s plane was overdue and “presumed down somewhere in the Indian Ocean.” The plane had only one passenger onboard, having dropped off the other two company executives for a short meeting before the long return flight to the United States.

  The man had kept on talking, relating a bewildering array of technical details about bad weather in the area, the massive air-sea search that had already begun by several cooperating nations and the U.S. Navy destroyer that had been dispatched from the American base on the remote island of Diego Garcia. But I had absorbed little or none of it.

  All I knew was that Bobby was gone…

  I awoke with a start, bitter tears of anguish and regret streaming down my cheeks. The wonderful dream of Bobby had turned suddenly into a horrible nightmare.

  And then I realized that I was not alone in the turret bedroom.

  Chapter 7

  Dressed all in white and shimmering with a faint fluorescent glow, she stood motionless beside the casement window farthest from my bed. Her back was turned to me and she was holding aside one of the sheer lace curtains, gazing intently through the rain-streaked glass into the black and forbidding night beyond.

  At first I thought I was imagining her, the way children sometimes imagine they can see the figures of animals in the puffy white clouds of a summer’s day.

  Limned by the faint blue light of the fairy lamp and half-hidden by the shadow of Damon’s wardrobe, she looked like a creature of pure imagination. The simple, flowing lines of her diaphanous gown merged seamlessly into the folds of the sheer floor-length curtain in her hand. And she stood as still and as silent as a sculpture of palest Carrera marble.