Keeper of the Light (5 page)

It wasn’t until Paul mentioned Annie’s two children that Olivia began to feel truly threatened. Paul was one of six children in a closely knit family. He was hungry for a family of his own, and all the medical tests had pointed the finger at Olivia as the reason they had none. She’d finally had surgery this past fall to improve her chance of conceiving, but by then it was too late. Even at the hospital, while holding Olivia’s hand after the operation, Paul spoke of Annie. She had once donated her bone marrow, Paul said. “Can you imagine that? Undergoing surgery to save the life of a total stranger?”

“Yes, Paul, you’ve convinced me.” Olivia spoke in anger for the first time. “She’s a saint.”

After that, he stopped talking to her about Annie, which worried Olivia even more because she knew by his brooding silence that Annie was still much on his mind. He was restless in his sleep. Losing weight. At the breakfast table he pushed his food from one side of the plate to the other. He lost track of their conversations, misplaced his car keys, his wallet. When they made love—their futile attempts at conception—his fingertips felt as dry as ash on her skin, and no matter how close their bodies were she felt the gulf between them that she couldn’t narrow with her words or her touch.

She had asked him outright if he and Annie were lovers, and he hadn’t bothered to mask his disappointment when he told her they were not. “She’s completely in love with her husband and committed to her marriage,” he’d said gloomily, in a way that let Olivia know he no longer felt any such commitment himself. Obviously, the platonic nature of his relationship with Annie had been dictated by Annie herself and not by Paul.

After walking out on her the night Annie died, Paul had taken an apartment close to his office. He’d written her a long letter, filled with his apology and confusion. He knew he couldn’t possibly have Annie now, he wrote, but knowing her made him realize what he was missing with Olivia. Olivia’s self-esteem, which had taken a lifetime to construct from the scrappiest raw materials, disintegrated in the few minutes it took her to read his words.

She saw him from time to time over the next few months when he needed things from the house. Clothes. Tools. The computer. She watched his hands as he folded, lifted, packed. She missed his touch—she’d started getting massages once a week just to feel another human being’s hands on her skin. Paul was no longer cool when he spoke to her, and there was occasionally a smile in his eyes when he saw her. She clung to the hope that the smile meant there was something left between them, something she could build on, but he never gave her the chance. He never stayed in the house longer than he had to, except for that one night in April when she’d shamelessly begged him to stay and he relented, only to kill her with the regret she saw later in his eyes.

What had become of the man she’d married, the man who had written an entire volume of poetry about her, who had helped her put her past aside and made her feel safe for the first time in her life? Who made love to her as though she were the only woman he could ever imagine loving? The man who had not yet met Annie O’Neill.

She wanted him back. She
needed
him back.

Olivia stood now at her living room window, the room behind her taunting her with new empty spaces to fill, as she watched the U-Haul disappear behind a dune. Out of the hundreds of times they’d made love, why had the forces of nature picked that particular night to leave her pregnant?

She felt a sudden determination replace her dejection. Like the room behind her, she had empty places to fill, and she would fill them with the qualities that had drawn her husband to Annie. But first she would need to learn what they were, and as her impulsive decision to work at the shelter had shown her, she would do whatever it took to find out. She had to admit the truth to herself: Paul’s obsession with Annie had become her own.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Alec woke up with Annie’s old green sweatshirt beneath his cheek. He’d taken to sleeping with it, a practice which seemed absurd to him during daylight hours but to which he surrendered at night. The sweatshirt was little more than a rag Annie used to throw on for her early morning runs. When he’d come home from the emergency room that Christmas night, he’d found it lying on her side of the four-poster bed, a crumpled patch of green on the old, faded double wedding ring quilt. He’d slept with it that night, except that, of course, he hadn’t slept at all.

He’d given all her other clothes away after offering them to Lacey, who’d cringed at the thought of wearing them. The sweatshirt, though, he couldn’t part with. He hadn’t washed it and surely after all these months it had taken on more his scent than hers, but it comforted him all the same.

He had a Save the Lighthouse Committee meeting this morning, and he shaved for the occasion, quickly, avoiding a long look in the bathroom mirror. He did not like to see the toll these last few months had taken on his face.

Clay and Lacey were already at the breakfast table when he came downstairs. They were arguing, which was typical of them lately, but they fell silent when he walked into the room.

“Morning,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Morning, Dad,” Clay said, while Lacey mumbled something under her breath.

Tripod walked over to Alec with his jaunty, three-legged gait, and Alec bent low to scratch the German shepherd’s head. “Anybody feed the animals?” he asked.

“Mmm,” Lacey said, and he took her reply to mean yes.

Alec poured himself a bowl of raisin bran, picked up a stack of photographs from the counter, and took his seat at the table. He looked through the pictures while he ate, holding them in one of the few patches of clear light that flowed through the kitchen windows. Annie’s stained glass colored nearly all the light in the room, splashing greens and blues and reds against the white cupboards and countertops.

Alec studied the photograph he’d taken from the base of the lighthouse, looking up at the black iron gallery. “Your pictures are getting stranger and stranger, Alec,” Tom Nestor had told him when Alec stopped by Annie’s old studio to use the darkroom. Alec propped the picture up against his coffee cup as he dipped his spoon into the raisin bran. It
was
a weird picture. He liked it.

“Dad?” Lacey asked.

“Hmm?” He turned the photograph on its side to see how it looked from that angle.

“Miss Green is going to call you this morning.”

“Who’s Miss Green?” He raised his head to look at his daughter and she quickly dropped her gaze to her cereal bowl. Why did she do that? “Lace? Look at me.”

She raised her eyes, dark blue and wide like her mother’s, and he had to struggle not to look away himself.

“Who’s Miss Green?” he repeated his question.

“My counselor at school.”

He frowned. “Are you having problems?”

Lacey shrugged and looked down at her bowl again. She played with her spoon, her fingertips stubby and sore-looking. She’d always bitten her nails, but this raw look, this biting them down to the quick, was new. “She’s on my case about my grades.”

Clay laughed. “What do you expect, O’Neill? You haven’t opened a book all semester.”

Alec set a quieting hand on Clay’s arm. “I thought you were getting all A’s, Lace.”

“Not this year.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner so I could have helped you?”

She shrugged again, a little spasm of her slender shoulders. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“
Bother
me.” He felt his face cloud over. “You’re my
daughter,
Lacey.”

The phone rang on the wall behind him.

“That’s probably her,” Lacey said. Her face had gone white beneath her freckles.

“You’re in deep shit now, O’Neill,” Clay said as Alec stood up to answer the phone.

“Dr. O’Neill?” the woman said, her tone formal, removed.

“Yes.”

“This is Janet Green, Lacey’s counselor.”

He had an immediate image of her: dark hair sprayed into place, too-pink lipstick, a smile wide and false. Someone too cold, too rigid to be working with teenagers.

“Lacey mentioned you’d be calling.” Lacey had certainly waited until the last minute. He watched his daughter pick at her raisin bran, her head bowed, her long red hair falling like curtains on either side of the bowl.

“I live near you,” Janet Green continued. “I’d like to stop by this afternoon and talk with you about Lacey. Save you a trip in.”

Alec looked around him. Last night’s dishes, streaked red with tomato sauce, cluttered the counter next to the sink. The spaghetti pot was still on the stove, one long strand of spaghetti stuck to its side in the shape of a question mark. Pieces of mail and old newspapers littered the countertops, and his pictures of the lighthouse were strewn everywhere.

“Let’s just talk on the phone,” he said.

“Well, did she tell you why I want to see you?”

“She said her grades aren’t very good.”

“No, they’re not. She’s really plummeted, I’m afraid. She has nothing above a C and she’s failing biology and algebra.”

“Failing?”
He shot Lacey a look. She leaped from her chair as though he’d touched her with a live wire, swung her book bag from the counter to her shoulder, and flew out the door. He lowered the receiver to his chest. “Lace!” he called after her, but he saw the red blur of her hair as she ran past the kitchen window and out to the street. Alec lifted the phone back to his ear. “She took off,” he said.

“Well, I know she’s upset. She’ll have to take biology and algebra in summer school if she wants to pass the year.”

Alec shook his head. “I don’t get it. She’s always been a straight-A student. Shouldn’t I have known about this sooner? What about her last report card? I would have noticed if she was slipping.”

“Straight C’s.”

He frowned into the phone. “She must not have shown it to me. That’s so unlike her.” He’d never seen a C out of either of his children. For that matter, he’d never seen a
B.

“Your son’s kept up with things quite well despite losing his mother, hasn’t he? I hear he’s going to be class valedictorian.”

“Yes.” Alec sat down again at the table, suddenly exhausted. If it were not for the lighthouse meeting, he would go back to bed.

“And he’s going to Duke next year?”

“Yes.” He watched his son get up from the table. Clay took a peach from the fruit bowl and waved as he walked out the door.

“I think Lacey’s a little concerned about what that’ll be like, having her brother gone, just the two of you in the house.”

Alec frowned again. “Did she say that?”

“It’s just a feeling I got. She seems to have had a very difficult time adjusting to her mother’s death.”

“I—well, I guess if her grades are down…” She was
failing.
He’d had no idea. “I haven’t picked up on anything unusual.” He hadn’t
looked
for anything. He’d let his children fend for themselves these past few months.

“You’re a veterinarian, right, Dr. O’Neill?”

“Yes.”

“Lacey said you’re not working right now.”

He wanted to tell her it was none of her business, but he held his tongue for Lacey’s sake. “I’ve taken some time off.” He’d thought he’d take a few weeks off after Annie died. The weeks turned into months, the months accumulated at breakneck speed, and he still had no intention of returning to work.

“I see,” Janet Green said, her voice dropping a degree or two to the level of pure condescension. “By the way, are you aware Lacey’s had two detentions in the last few months for smoking on school grounds?”

He started to tell her that Lacey didn’t smoke, but obviously this woman knew his daughter better than he did. “No, I didn’t know that,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”

He got off the phone and sat down at the table again, drained. This weariness was new for him. He was known for his energy, for his inability to sit idly for more than a minute or two. Now he was too tired to wash the spaghetti pot.

They ate spaghetti a few times a week. It was easy. Boil water, open a jar of sauce. Every once in a while one of the kids would cook, but they were not much more inventive than he was.

Annie used to make everything from scratch. Even bread. Two loaves of honey whole wheat every Saturday. The house would fill with the smell. This kitchen had been alive back then. She’d leave certain items on the countertops—a row of fruit along the backsplash, or colorful packages of exotic teas on the windowsills—so she could admire them while she worked.

Back in those days, Annie would usually get home ahead of him and create something wonderful in the kitchen, and often—in his memory, it was every other day or so—he’d come home and invite her into the bedroom and she would hand the spoon over to one of the kids, who would groan and resign themselves to another late dinner. Annie, the flush of longing already burning in her cheeks, would tell them, “Remember, loves, it’s
elegant
to dine late.”

That was the way this house operated back then. Annie had been a firm believer in spontaneity. “This is a house without rules,” she’d say. “We have to trust ourselves and our bodies to tell us when to sleep, to eat, to get up in the morning. To make love.”

It had only been in the last couple of years that the kids realized there were plenty of rules in this house—they were just not the same rules their friends lived by, but rather the peculiar rules of Annie’s creation. She allowed no clocks in the house, although Alec always wore a watch. Lacey and Clay were free to make their own decisions in the matter, both of them following their mother’s example until last year, when Clay began wearing a watch identical to Alec’s. Before that, Clay and Lacey were often late for the school bus, or on a few bizarre occasions, extremely early. They had never had a curfew, which made them the envy of their friends. Even when they were small, they were allowed to go to bed anytime they pleased. They regulated themselves quite well, actually, which probably had something to do with the fact that the O’Neills did not own a TV.