Keeper of the Light (44 page)

“Do you and Clay get along?”

“I mostly ignore him. He’s been a complete prick this summer because now I, like, go to some of the same parties as him and he hates having his little sister around.”

Olivia frowned at her. “You
are
a little young to be hanging around with graduating seniors.”

Lacey smirked at her. “Graduating seniors,” she said, mimicking Olivia’s voice. “God, Olivia, sometimes you sound like an old lady.”

“Well, that’s what Clay is, right? A graduating senior? When do those parties get over?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…I understand you don’t have a curfew. So what time do you usually get home?”

“One or two.”

“
Lacey.
That’s outrageous. You’re fourteen years old.”

Lacey gave her an almost patronizing smile. “It’s
summer,
Olivia, and summer school’s over. It’s not like I have to get up early in the morning or something.”

“Did you stay out that late when your mother was alive?”

Lacey poked her fork in the lasagna. “I…no,” she said, pursing her lips. “I didn’t need to, but she wouldn’t have gotten on my case if I did.”

“What do you mean, you didn’t need to?”

Lacey looked up at her. “I
liked
being home then. My parents were
fun.
My friends practically lived at my house, they liked being around my parents so much.” She tightened her lips again. “You should have known my father then. He was really funny, and he always had ideas for what we should do. Once he got us all up in the middle of the night and drove us to Jockey’s Ridge and we climbed out on the dunes in the
dark
and then laid down in the sand to watch the stars. He was always doing things like that. He used to take me and my friends up to Norfolk for concerts. Nobody else’s father would ever do that. He was so cool.” She looked out the window at the darkening parking lot. “He’s changed so much. That’s part of why I stay out late. I don’t like being around him, ’cause he reminds me of how fucked up everything is.” She looked over at Olivia. “Excuse me for saying that. Fucked up, I mean.”

Olivia sat back from the table. “I want to buy you something,” she said. “What?”

“A watch.”

“You’re
kidding.
” Lacey smiled uncertainly. “Why?”

“Someone your age should have one.”

“My mother…” Lacey stopped herself. “Could I pick it out?”

“Yes, but it comes with a contingency.”

“What’s a contingency?”

“Something you’ll have to do in order to get the watch.”

Lacey looked intrigued. “What?”

“You’ll have to call me every night at midnight, no matter where you are, to let me know you’re okay.”

“What?”
Lacey laughed.

“That’s the contingency.” She knew she was undermining Alec, but perhaps Alec needed to be undermined.

“I’ll wake you up,” Lacey said.

“Yes, you probably will, but I’ll fall back to sleep knowing you’re safe.”

Lacey stared at her solemnly. “Why do you care whether I’m safe or not?”

Olivia studied her own plate for a moment. Her manicotti had hardly been touched. She looked up at Lacey again. “Maybe you remind me a little of myself at your age,” she said.

“Well,” Lacey set down her fork and looked coyly at Olivia. “There’s a contingency about me calling you.”

Olivia smiled. “What’s that?”

“I’ll call you if you’ll stop working at the Battered Women’s Shelter.”

Olivia was touched by the unmistakable concern behind Lacey’s request. She shook her head. “I like working there, Lacey. You don’t need to worry about me. I’m not very much like your mother. I don’t think I would ever have the courage to risk my own life to save someone else’s.”

They stopped in the drug store on the way back to Olivia’s to look for a watch. Lacey tried on six or seven, carefully avoiding those in the higher price range, before finally selecting one with a glittery silver face and a black band adorned with silver stars.

They picked up a carton of ice cream and, once back at Olivia’s, built themselves huge banana splits. They carried the sundaes into the living room, where they sat cross-legged on the floor to eat them. Sylvie curled up, purring, in Lacey’s lap as they dug into the ice cream. Every minute or so, Lacey raised her left hand to study her watch.

“I can’t believe that you’re fourteen years old and that’s the first watch you’ve ever owned,” Olivia said.

“If my mother was buried, she’d be rolling over in her grave right now.”

Olivia cut off a chunk of banana with her spoon. “Was she cremated?” she asked.

“Yes. Well, of course, first every little speck of her that could be used by someone else got donated. Then what was left was, you know…” Lacey waved her hand through the air. “Clay and my father threw her ashes into the ocean at Kiss River.”

Olivia shuddered, the imagery almost too much to bear.

“I didn’t go to the funeral,” Lacey said.

“How come, Lacey?”

“I wanted to remember her like she was alive.” Lacey’s face suddenly darkened. She looked down at Sylvie. “I don’t get why some bad people can live to be a hundred years old and someone as good as my mother dies so young. She hated—what do you call it when you go to the electric chair?”

“Capital punishment?”

“Yeah. She hated that, but if I could see the man who killed her and I had a knife, I’d slice him up.” Her hands were balled into fists as she spoke, and Sylvie opened one eye to observe the unprotected bowl of ice cream on the floor in front of her. “I could do it,” Lacey said. “I could kill him and I wouldn’t ever feel bad about it.”

Olivia nodded, certain Lacey meant what she said.

“I keep imagining what it must have felt like to have that bullet shoot into her chest.”

“Your father told me you were with her when it happened. That must have been terrible for you.”

Lacey poked at her ice cream. “I was standing right next to her,” she said. “I was in charge of the green beans, and she was in charge of the salad. This man rushed in and started yelling at this lady in the food line. Mom could never stay out of
anything.
She stepped right in front of the lady and said, ‘Please put the gun away, sir. It’s Christmas.’ And he shot her.
Bam.
” Lacey winced, and a visible shiver ran through her arms. “I keep seeing her face. Sometimes when I’m in bed at night, that’s all I can see. Her eyes got real wide, and she made a little noise like she was surprised, and where the bullet went through her shirt, there was a little speck of blood.” She looked up at Olivia. “I blamed you for a long time, because I was so sure she’d be all right. I couldn’t imagine her dying. Then it seemed like once you got to her you made things worse. My father says you didn’t, though. He said you tried really hard to save her.”

“He’s right, Lacey. I did.”

Lacey ate a few more mouthfuls of her sundae before looking at Olivia from under a shock of two-toned hair. “Do you like my father?” she asked.

“Very much.”

Lacey lowered her eyes again. “He’s been a little better since he started…being friends with you,” she said. “He used to walk around like he was sleepwalking or something. He hardly ate anything and he didn’t care what he wore and all his clothes got too big for him. He looked like a scarecrow, and all he’d do was carry around his stupid old pictures of the lighthouse and stare at them every chance he got. He used to sleep with my mother’s old
sweatshirt.
”

Olivia ached for Alec. She was embarrassed by this glimpse into his dark and private world.

Lacey took the last bite of her banana, now swimming in a chocolate soup. She swirled her spoon around in the bowl with her stubby fingers and their chewed-off nails. “I met your husband at the lighthouse meeting the other night,” she said, glancing up at Olivia. “I thought he looked kind of nerdy. No offense.”

Nerdy? Olivia supposed that a forty-year-old man with wire-rimmed glasses and cerebral good looks would probably strike a fourteen-year-old as nerdy. “No offense taken,” she said.

“Do you think my father’s handsome?”

Olivia shrugged noncommittally, aware she was treading on dangerous ground. “I suppose so.”

“My mother used to say he was
hot.
They were, like, completely and totally in love.” Lacey moved her wrist back and forth, her watch sparkling in the light from the table lamp. “Nola would love to get into my father’s pants,” she said, her eyes glued to the watch.

“That’s sort of a crude way to say she’s interested, don’t you think?”

Lacey grinned at her. “I think you’re kind of
prissy.
I mean, if you think my father’s handsome, don’t you sometimes wonder what it would be like to go to bed with him?”

Olivia struggled to keep the shock from her face. She leaned forward and spoke slowly. “What I think, or what your father thinks, or what Nola thinks about that sort of thing is very personal, Lacey. It’s not your place to speculate about it.”

Lacey’s eyes filled in a half-second’s time. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, crimson patches forming on her throat and cheeks. Her lower lip trembled in a way Olivia could not bear to watch. She set her own bowl of melting ice cream on the floor and moved forward to take Lacey in her arms. Lacey held her tightly, her delicate shoulders shaking with her sobs.

“It’s okay.” Olivia kissed the top of her head. She remembered being held this way a lifetime ago by Ellen Davison, who never pressed her to tell her why her body ached and bled, who never once suggested she go home again. She remembered the surprising strength in Ellen’s slender arms, strength that let her know she could finally turn her burden over to a grown-up who would keep her safe.

“My father hates me,” Lacey wept.

“Oh, no, honey. He loves you very much.”

“There was just that drop of blood on her shirt, so I told him she’d be all right. He was so scared. I wasn’t used to that—I’d never seen him look scared of anything before—and I kept telling him not to worry. He
believed
me that she’d be okay. He blames me for getting his hopes up.”

Olivia felt Lacey’s fingers on her back, clutching her blouse.

“It could have been me,” Lacey said. “I was thinking the same thing my mother was, that I should just jump in front of that lady. Maybe he wouldn’t have shot a kid, and then nobody would’ve gotten hurt. I think my father wishes I’d been the one to get shot. For the longest time after she died, he wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t even
look
at me and he kept calling me Annie.” Lacey stiffened beneath Olivia’s arms. “I
hate
him. He forgot my birthday. He thinks Clay’s so wonderful because he’s smart and got a scholarship to Duke and everything and I ended up having to go to summer school. He just wishes I’d go away. He wouldn’t care if I stayed out all night long. He wouldn’t care if I never came home.”

Olivia’s own tears fell onto Lacey’s hair. It was
Alec
Lacey should be talking to, Alec who needed to listen to his daughter’s fears. It was Alec who needed to tell her he would do everything in his power to make her world right again.

But Alec wasn’t here, and perhaps he wasn’t capable of listening to Lacey yet, or of coping with fears that were so much like his own, and so Olivia pulled Lacey more tightly into her arms. She would hold her for as long as it took to make her feel safe.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-
T
WO

Every time Alec glanced in the rearview mirror, he saw the lines across his forehead and the deepening crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. Maybe he’d spent too much time in the sun over the last few years. Or maybe he was just getting old.

He’d left Clay at Duke a few hours earlier and he had not expected the crush of emotion that came over him as he said good-bye to his son. There had been other students in the lounge of Clay’s dorm, and so he’d hugged him loosely when what he really wanted to do was hold him close. It had been a one-sided hug, anyway. He could see the light in Clay’s eyes, the excitement he felt at this new chapter in his life about to begin. Only one of them was truly going to miss the other.

He turned off the highway into Manteo as a light rain started. He drove past the Manteo Retirement Home in its blue splendor, thinking that he should call Mary Poor soon to arrange the tour of the keeper’s house. On a whim, he turned the car around and stopped in front of the Home. Might as well do it now.

As he got out of the car, he noticed the small antique shop across the street, where a few antique dolls sat in front of the window on ancient-looking chairs. A gray-haired woman was moving some of the dolls inside, out of the rain. Olivia was right. This must be the store where Annie had found Lacey’s dolls.

There was no one sitting on the broad front porch of the Retirement Home. He rang the bell and a young, blond-haired woman answered.

“I’m looking for Mary Poor,” he said.

“Come in.” The woman stood back to let him pass. “She’s in the living room working on a crossword puzzle, as usual.”

She led him into a room where several elderly women were watching television. Mary Poor sat apart from them in a wing chair in the corner, holding a folded newspaper under the beam of light from a floor lamp. “Mary?” the blond woman said. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”

The old woman rested the paper in the lap of her blue skirt as she looked up into Alec’s face, a surprising sharpness in her blue eyes. She was wearing tennis shoes.

“Mrs. Poor?” Alec held out his hand. “I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Alec O’Neill. Annie’s husband.”

The woman squinted up at him for a moment before shaking his hand. “So you are,” she said. “So you are.”

Alec sat down in a second wing chair, noticing with some admiration that Mary was working the puzzle in pen.

“I stopped by to ask if you’d be able to give some of us on the lighthouse committee a little tour of the keeper’s house. I guess you know we’re putting together a booklet on the lighthouse. Paul Macelli’s been talking to you, and it’s really coming together, but I think he should get a firsthand look at the house so he can describe the rooms, and I’ll take some pictures.” He looked at the thin skin covering Mary’s blue-veined, fine-boned hands. “Would it be possible? I mean, are you able to get around?”