Keeper of the Light (53 page)

He set Sylvie on the floor and stood up. “Well.” He looked unsure of his next move. “Is it all right if I use your bathroom before I go?”

“Of course.”

He left the room, and it was a full minute before she realized he had to pass the nursery to reach the bathroom. She went rigid on the couch, listening, trying to remember if she had left the nursery door open or closed. She stood up slowly and walked into the hall, where she could clearly see that the door was wide open. She steeled herself and walked into the room.

Paul stood next to the crib, his hands on the rail. He looked over at her when she stepped into the room, and dropped his eyes to her stomach.

“Are you…?”

“Yes.”

“Is it mine?”

“Of course,” she said. “That night you stopped by in April. That night you pretended I was Annie.”

“Oh, my God.” He turned away from her, leaning heavily on the crib.

She didn’t want to watch him wallow in his guilt. She walked through the house and out to the back deck, intentionally sitting in one of the chairs rather than on the settee so he would not be able to sit next to her if he came out. She watched a windsurfer gliding across the sound. He was blond. Tan. She could not guess his age from this distance, but he was good. Maybe as good as Alec.

It was a while before Paul joined her on the deck. He turned one of the chairs around so he was facing her, and very close.

“You’re nearly five months?”

“Twenty-one weeks, yes.”

“How are you feeling? Is everything going all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m healthy. I had an amniocentesis done, and it’s a boy.”

“A boy.” He smiled, and she wished she’d kept that fact from him. She was irritated by the pleasure on his face.

“You should have told me,” he chided. “It would have made a difference. It would have brought me back to reality.”

“I wanted you to want me because I was
me,
” she said, “not because I was carrying your child.”

He nodded, reaching a tentative hand out to touch her belly. She gritted her teeth, turning her head away from him so she would not have to see the emotion in his face.

“Annie made a fool of me,” he said.

She snapped her head back to him, brushing his hand away. “You made a fool of yourself.”

“All right,” he conceded, “all right.” He sat back in the chair. “Is there any way we can work things out?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we try, for the sake of our son if for no other reason? You know as well as I do that we had something genuinely good for a long time.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “It’s over, Paul. I don’t want you anymore. That’s the bottom line.”

He looked out at the sound, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “But what about the baby? I want to be involved in his life.”

“Well, perhaps you should speak to that lawyer of yours about your options.”

He winced, his eyes reddening behind his glasses. Then he stood up, very slowly, as if some invisible force was holding him down. She said nothing to stop him as he walked across the deck to the house. In another moment, she heard the front door open, then close.

Out on the sound, the windsurfer skimmed gracefully across the surface of the water. Olivia watched him as she lowered her hands to her lap, as she pulled the ring from her finger, slipped it into her pocket. She watched him until it was time to leave for work.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-
T
HREE

Alec dug out the old box of photographs from the closet in the den and sat down on the living room sofa to sift through them. He had not looked at these old pictures in years, and he had intentionally avoided them since Annie’s death. The box was full of her. Looking through the pictures now, he could actually see in the lines of her face, or in the uncertainty of her smile, when she was going under, when she was giving in to her dark side. All those times she’d slipped into those seemingly inexplicable periods of withdrawal made sense to him now.
I’m going to die as punishment for all the bad things I’ve done.

Two abortions. All the nights she’d visited Mary. Alec had been grateful to the old woman for the company she’d given Annie on those nights he’d had to work on the mainland.

Fishermen. Tourists. She would take them into that little bedroom, the one that would fill every few seconds with the light he had thought of as his and Annie’s.

Alec heard the back door slam. Lacey was home.
Damn.
He’d wanted this time for himself. He
needed
it. In a moment she appeared at the door of the living room.

“I’m home,” she said, proudly, “and it’s only nine-fifteen.” She looked at the box next to him on the sofa. “Why do you have those old pictures out?”

He stared at the girl who, quite suddenly, was not his daughter. “I just felt like looking at them,” he said.

To his dismay, she came into the room and plunked herself down next to him. She smelled of tobacco. She smelled, he thought, a little like Tom Nestor.

“I really like this one,” she said, reaching across him to pluck a photograph from the box. It was of her and Annie sitting side by side on the beach, taken just last summer. “Mom looks so happy,” she said.

I’ve never been happier than I’ve been this last year.

Alec started to cry. He turned his head away from Lacey, but it was no use trying to hide the tears. He wouldn’t be able to this time. They were going to take over. He would never be able to stop them.

“Please don’t cry,” Lacey said, alarm in her voice. “I can’t
stand
it, Daddy,
please.
” She stood up. “Do you want me to put these away?” She reached for the box, and he caught her hands.

“No,” he said. “I want to look through them.”

She frowned down at him. “Why are you doing it? It just gets you upset.”

He struggled to smile. “I’m all right, Lacey.”

She shoved her hands in the pockets of her shorts and stared at him, unconvinced. “Do you want me to look through them with you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not tonight.”

She left the room, reluctantly, and Alec dug through the pictures until he found the few he had taken of Annie when she was pregnant with Lacey. She’d been constantly sick during that pregnancy. She could keep almost nothing down, and she put on so little weight that her obstetrician came close to hospitalizing her. She’d had weird pains, which a slew of doctors were unable to diagnose, and she’d spent most of those nine months in bed, while Nola helped Alec take care of Clay.

Annie’s labor with Lacey had been frightening. Neverending. Alec stayed with her, holding her hand and helping her breathe, until he thought his own body would give out. He didn’t know how one woman—how one
human being
—could tolerate so much pain.

Just before Lacey was born, just in those few minutes when Annie must have felt the baby’s head crowning, she began screaming for Alec to leave the delivery room. At first he thought he’d misunderstood her. She was hysterical, and he tried to pretend she did not actually say what he thought she was saying. But the doctor understood her words, and the nurses looked at each other, perplexed.

“You’d better leave, Dr. O’Neill,” one of them said. “She’s so distraught. She’s not going to be able to concentrate on what she has to do unless you go.”

He left the room, enormously hurt. He stood in the hallway of the obstetric unit rather than go to the waiting room, where Nola and Tom and a few other friends had gathered. He wouldn’t have known how to explain his presence to them.

Later, he asked Annie why she had made him go, and she wept and apologized and told him she’d been confused, she didn’t know what she was saying.

How scared she must have been to have sent him away when she needed him most. How terrified that, somehow, with just one look at that newborn baby, he would know. Had she watched him carefully after that, studying
his
face every time he studied his daughter’s? Had she looked for his suspicions? Had she tried to tell him the truth once or twice or dozens of times? Or did she know that never, never would he have believed her capable of anything less than complete fidelity?

He stayed up until nearly midnight, tormenting himself with picture after picture, until he was so drained he could barely climb the stairs to his room. Still, he couldn’t sleep. Too many memories. Too many clues he’d missed. They’d argued about sterilization. She’d insisted she have her tubes tied rather than Alec have a vasectomy because, she said, she couldn’t bear to have him go through the pain and discomfort. Coming from Annie, that explanation had sounded perfectly rational. And what about all those times she’d tried to keep Tom Nestor sober and closedmouthed around him? And all the times he’d catch her crying for no apparent reason?
Oh, Annie.

His mind was churning. There was a coiled tightness in his muscles he had not felt in months. He needed to
do
something.
Go
somewhere. He needed to see the ligthhouse.

He got up long before sunrise and left a note for Lacey on the kitchen table. Then he drove through the dense, early-morning fog to Kiss River.

He was nearly to the lighthouse when he spotted the horses at the side of the road, and he pulled over to watch them. They looked ethereal in the fog—clearly visible one minute, mere shadows the next. He could make out the colt who had been hit by the Mercedes. He was grazing close to the side of the road; apparently he had learned nothing from his experience. Alec could see the faint scar on the colt’s hindquarters where he had stitched the wound closed. With Paul’s help.
The cloisonné horse. She’d treasured it.
Had she?

Alec growled at himself. He wished he could turn his thinking off. Shut it down.

He drove on to the lighthouse. The white brick blended into the fog and he could barely see it from the parking lot. He let himself in and began climbing the steel steps of the eerie, echoey tower, and he didn’t stop until he reached the top. He stepped out onto the gallery. He was above the fog here, and the lantern must have shut off only minutes earlier in anticipation of daylight. The sun was rising over the sea, a breathtaking spectacle of pink and gold, lighting up the sky and spilling into the water.

Alec walked around to the other side of the gallery and looked toward the keeper’s house. Through the fog, he could just make out a second bulldozer and a backhoe tucked into the bushes near the side of the house.

He sat down on the cool iron floor of the gallery, facing the ocean and the sunrise. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the black gallery wall, waiting for the lighthouse to work its usual magic on his nerves.

Had she come up here with any of them? Did she ever make love with them up here? On the beach below?

Stop it!

He opened his eyes again, drumming his fingers next to him on the floor of the gallery. He sat forward and peered over the edge of the gallery. Below him, the ocean crept ever closer to the base of the lighthouse. Through the thinning fog, he could see the white-tipped waves nibbling at the few feet of sand remaining between the water and the brick. Damn, it was close.

…we should just let it go.

Alec sat back again, slowly, a small smile on his lips. For the first time, Annie’s words elicited no fear in him. None at all.

He left Kiss River and drove down the island. No one would ever guess it had been foggy an hour or so earlier. The sun was already blazing across the Banks, and as Alec drove over the bridge into Manteo, it lit up the boats on the sound.

He parked in front of the retirement home, but that was not his destination. Instead, he walked across the street to the quaint little gray and white antique store, frowning when he noticed the
closed
sign in the front window. It had not occurred to him that it was too early for the shop to be open.

There was a car in the driveway, though. He peered through the front door and could see light coming from a room at the back of the shop. He knocked, and in a moment a woman came to the door.

She opened it a few inches. “Can I help you?” she asked. She was sixty or so, Alec guessed. Gray-haired and grandmotherly.

“I know you’re not open yet, but this is important,” he said. “I’m looking for an antique doll for my daughter. I think my wife used to buy them here for her.”

“Annie O’Neill?”

“That’s right.”

She opened the door wide. “You must be Alec.” She smiled. “Come in, dear. I’m Helen.”

He shook the hand she offered.

“I’m so pleased to meet you,” she said. “Annie bought the dolls for her daughter’s birthday, right?”

“That’s right. I’m a little late with it this year.”

“Better late than never.” Helen leaned against a glass counter filled with old jewelry. “Annie was such a good customer. Such a lovely person. She gave me that.” She pointed to a stained glass panel hanging in the front window. The little gray antique shop stood against a background of grass and trees. Yet another creation of Annie’s he had never seen.

“It’s nice,” he said.

“I was so sorry to hear about…everything,” Helen said, as she led him into a small back room, where dolls sat here and there on pieces of antique furniture. One of them—an imp with red hair—caught his eye immediately.

“Oh, that one.” He pointed toward the doll. “Without a doubt.”

“I had a feeling you’d pick her. It’s the first one with red hair I’ve seen, and when I got it in a month or so ago, I thought to myself, wouldn’t Saint Anne have loved this one? Her face is a very high-quality pearly bisque, and she has her original human hair. That all makes her quite expensive, though.” A small white tag was attached to the doll’s arm, and Helen turned it over so Alec could see the price written on it.

“Wow.” He smiled. “Doesn’t matter.”

Helen picked up the doll and carried it to the front of the store. She stuffed some tissue paper into the bottom of a large box and placed the doll inside. “Annie used to like to wrap them up herself,” she said. “I think she made the paper. But I suppose…would you like me to wrap it for you?”