Keeper of the Light

“Hi,” she said quietly. She took off her coat and hung it in the closet by the front door.

Paul slouched in his chair and let his scowl speak for him, not liking himself much at that moment.

“Why don’t you have the lights on?” Olivia asked. She hit the wall switch and Annie’s angel sprang to life, the silvery robe seeming to swirl in the glass.

He didn’t answer, and Olivia moved to the table and sat down across from him. Sylvie, their gray Persian cat, leaped softly to her lap. “I’m sorry to be so late,” Olivia said, her white hands absently stroking Sylvie’s back. “We had a terrible case come in.”

“Everything’s cold.”

She glanced at the food, then back at him. Her eyes were beautiful. Green. Dark-lashed. A striking contrast to her white skin. “Paul,” she said, “the case that came in—it was Annie O’Neill.”

He drew himself up straight in the chair. “What?” he said. “Why?”

“She was working at the women’s shelter in Manteo tonight and she got in the middle of some gunfire.” “Is she all right?”

Olivia shook her head. “I’m sorry, Paul. She died.”

He stood up so quickly she jumped, and the silverware shivered on the table. “Is this some kind of sick joke?” he asked, although he knew Olivia was not the type for jokes, sick or otherwise.

“The bullet went straight through her heart.”

The glowing angel taunted him from high above Olivia’s head. “Please tell me you’re lying. Please, Olivia.”

“I’m sorry.”

She was so calm. So cool. He hated her just then. “Excuse me,” he said. He turned and started up the stairs, Olivia close on his heels. He pulled his suitcase from the hall closet and carried it into their bedroom, where he tossed it on the bed. Olivia hung back in the doorway as he pulled some of the neatly pressed clothes from his closet and threw them into the suitcase still on their hangers.

“What are you doing?” Olivia asked.

“I have to get out of here.” He felt trapped by her voice, by her presence. She could never understand.

“Paul.” She took a step toward him and then seemed to think better of it, retreating once more to the doorway, gripping the jamb with her fingers. “This is crazy, Paul. You barely knew her. You were infatuated with her. That was your own word, remember? You said it was one-sided, that she was happily married. I met her husband tonight. I had to tell him …”

Paul leaned toward her. “Shut up,” he said. She took a step back into the hall and he knew he had scared her. He was scaring himself. This was a new and alien Paul Macelli, not the person he’d been for the past thirty-nine years.

Olivia clasped her hands in front of her, the fingers of her right hand playing with the diamond-studded wedding ring on her left. When she spoke this time, her voice was small. “You can talk about her if you like. I know I said I didn’t want to hear it anymore, but this is different. I’ll listen. Just please don’t leave, Paul. Please.” Her voice cracked and he winced. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to shut her out.

He stepped into the bathroom and gathered up his toothbrush, his razor, the case for his eyeglasses. He walked back into the bedroom and dumped them on top of the clothes in the suitcase and zipped it closed. Then he looked up at Olivia. Her lips and cheeks were still red from the cold, her eyes blurry behind tears he had no desire to watch her spill. He looked past her, into the hall where he could see the faint light from the tree downstairs.

“I’m sorry, Olivia.” He pushed past her, moving as quickly as he could, letting his shoes pound the hardwood stairs so he would not be able to hear her if she cried.

He was usually cautious on the road, but tonight he drove recklessly. The few other cars on the long wide highway that ran the length of the Outer Banks crept along the slick road, but he bore down on the gas pedal of the gray Honda, feeling the car slip out of his control over and over again and not caring. He didn’t even slow down when he passed Annie’s studio in Kill Devil Hills, although he did look over. Sometimes the lights inside the studio would be on at night, creating a vivid montage of stained glass in the front windows. Tonight, though, the glass walls in the front of the building were black and opaque-looking, like pieces of slate.

The snow silently battered his windshield, and he nearly missed the turn into the parking lot of the Beach Gazette. There was one other car—a blue station wagon—in the lot, and he wasn’t surprised to see it. Gabe Forrester, the Gazette’s police reporter, was already here, probably delighted to have a meaty story to liven up his job.

Paul didn’t bother to stop in his own office before knocking on Gabe’s door. Gabe was just getting off the phone. “Macelli!” he said. “You look like hell, fella. What are you doing here this time of night?”

“I heard about that murder over in Manteo and thought maybe I could help you out. Do a color piece on her.” He tensed, hoping that Gabe would look puzzled and tell him he had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe Olivia had made it up after all.

“Yeah, a big one.” Gabe leaned back in his chair, his broad, square face sober. “Annie O’Neill. You probably don’t know her, being new here and all.”

“I did a story on her in Seascape.”

“That’s right. Well, you’re the perfect fella for the color stuff then, I guess.” He shook his head with a rueful smile. “She was one of a kind, I’ll say that. I have to call my wife to tell her and I keep putting it off. There’ll be one of the biggest funerals you’ve ever seen around here.” Gabe looked out the window. The snow was slowing down, the flakes small specks of glitter beneath the streetlight. “I don’t know how I’m gonna break it to my kids,” Gabe continued. “She was Jane’s softball coach last year and Jimmy’s den mother years ago. Crazy lady. Good heart, but a little wacky.” He pursed his thin lips, flattened his palms on the top of his desk. “Poor Alec. Do you know her husband, the vet over at the animal hospital in Kill Devil Hills?”

Paul shook his head and sat down across the desk from Gabe because his knees were giving out. He rested his hands on his lap. “How did it happen?” he asked.

Gabe sighed. “She was serving food to the women and kids over at that Battered Women’s Shelter in Manteo when this guy—” Gabe lifted a notepad from his desk and read the name “—Zachary Pointer, came in and started threatening his wife. He had a gun and he was aiming it at her, talking about how it was Christmas, how could she keep the kids from him on Christmas, et cetera, et cetera. Annie stepped between them to protect the wife. She talked to the guy, you know, trying to reason with him, and the bastard fired. That was Annie for you. It happened just that fast.” Gabe snapped his fingers. “Pointer’s in custody. Hope they fry him.”

Paul shivered inside his coat. He worked at keeping his face calm and unreadable. “I’d better get started on the article,” he said, standing up. At Gabe’s door, he turned back. “Uh, are you going to be talking to the family?”

“I was planning on it. You want that part?”

“No, no. I was going to say, it’s probably best if just one of us does it. You know, not make them go through it twice. So I’ll let you handle that, okay?” There was no way he could talk to Alec O’Neill. He’d never met him, never wanted to meet the man Annie slept with night after night, although he had seen him a few times. The last time had been at Annie’s studio. Paul had pretended to be absorbed in the stained glass when Alec walked in for a word with his wife. There was a mirror in the piece Paul was looking at, and in it he watched Annie and Alec speak to one another, their backs to Paul, their voices soft, intent, their heads together. As Alec started to leave, Annie slipped her hand to the seat of his jeans, and Alec kissed her temple. Paul had shut his eyes, trying to block that display of intimacy from his mind. No, he could not talk with Alec O’Neill.

He stopped in the file room and pulled the thick folder on Annie. He was familiar with it, having looked through it numerous times while he was writing the freelance article about her for Seascape. He carried the folder into his office and settled down at his desk, not bothering to take off his coat.

There were dozens of articles. Annie as community leader. Annie as stained glass artist. As photographer. As president of the Animal Welfare League. Many of the articles referred to her as Saint Anne, a nickname that had made her giggle. The oldest article, nearly brown with age, was from 1975. The headline read: Artist Heads Fight to Save Keeper from Eviction. Ah, yes. Annie’s first claim to fame in the Outer Banks. Paul spread the article flat on his desk and scanned it. In 1975, the Park Service had planned to take over operation of the Kiss River Lighthouse site. They wanted to use half of the keeper’s house as their headquarters, the other half as a museum of sorts for the tourists. Annie had met old Mary Poor, the keeper who was then in her seventies and who had lived in the house most of her life. Annie thought the eviction was an incredible injustice. She gathered public support for Mary’s cause and the Park Service relented, allowing the old woman to retain one half of the large keeper’s house for her own use.

There was a picture of Annie with the article that, for a moment, made the muscles in Paul’s chest contract to the point of pain. He stared hard at the picture, then closed his eyes. An infatuation. Go to hell, Olivia.

He’d been told by the editor of the Gazette that he wrote in an “overly emotional” style, a complaint he’d also heard during his years on the Washington Post. How he would avoid that in writing Annie’s color piece, he didn’t know. “You could romanticize a flu epidemic,” the Post editor once told him. “Forget you’re a poet when you walk through your office door.”

Paul spent the next hour putting together the bare bones of the article on Annie and then made a list of who he would interview in the morning. Tom Nestor, of course, and the director of the Battered Women’s Shelter. He jotted down a few more names. He had time. The Gazette was only published three times a week. This issue wouldn’t be out until the day after tomorrow.

He left his office and got back in his car. The suitcase taunted him from the back seat. So, where are we going now, huh, Paul? He knew a few places he could find a room, but that could wait. He pulled onto Croatan Highway again and started driving north, turning off after a couple of miles into the parking lot near Jockey’s Ridge. He got out of his car and began walking through the sand toward the enormous dunes. The snow had stopped while he’d been in his office, and now the sky was cloudless and alive with stars. The dunes quickly surrounded him on all sides, like an eerie moonscape, and he relished the quiet, the solitude. His heavy breathing was the only sound as he hiked up the slope of the largest, snow-dusted dune, swinging his arms back and forth to stay warm.

His breath fogged up his glasses, and he took them off to finish the climb.

The muscles in his thighs were stiff by the time he reached the summit. He slipped his glasses back on and turned to face north. A bitter cold wind blew stinging particles of sand against his cheeks, and he rammed his ungloved hands deep into his coat pockets. He was above everything here. He studied the horizon, waiting.

Yes. There it was. The pinpoint of light. It disappeared, and he counted. One, one-hundred, two, one-hundred, three, one-hundred, four, one-hundred. There it was again. The Kiss River Lighthouse. He watched the light glow and vanish in the distance, setting its languorous, hypnotic pace. A clear white light. Annie had told him during one of the interviews that she saw no point to clear, uncolored glass. “It’s like being alive without being in love,” she’d said, and then she’d told him about her fantasy of putting stained glass in the windows of the Kiss River Lighthouse.

“Women,” she’d said, “in long, flowing gowns. Roses, mauves. Icy blues.”

He hadn’t written any of that in the Seascape article. There were many things she’d said to him that he’d kept entirely for himself.

A gust of cold air tore through his coat and stung his eyes. Annie.

An infatuation. One-sided.

Paul sat down on the cold sand and buried his head in his arms, finally allowing himself to cry, for what he’d lost, for what he’d never had.

CHAPTER THREE

June 1991

Alec O’Neill’s favorite memory of Annie was also his first. He had been standing right where he stood now, on this same beach, and it was as moonless a night then as it was now, the night air black and sticky like tar. The lighthouse high above him flashed one long glare every four and a half seconds. The wait between those light flashes seemed an eternity in the darkness, and in one of those blasts of light he saw a young woman walking toward him. At first he thought she was a figment of his imagination. It did something to your head, standing out here alone, waiting for the beacon to swing around again and ignite the sand. But it was a woman. In the next flash of light, he saw her long, wild red hair, a yellow knapsack slung over her right shoulder. She was probably a year or two younger than him, twenty or so. She started speaking as she drew near him, while he stood mesmerized. Her name was Annie Chase, she said, her husky voice a surprise. She was hitchhiking down the coast, from Massachusetts to Florida, staying close to the water all the way.

She wanted to touch the ocean in every state. She wanted to feel the water grow warmer as she moved south. He was intrigued. Speechless. In the beacon of light he watched her pull a Mexican serape from her knapsack and spread it on the ground.

“I haven’t made love in days,” she said, taking his hand in the darkness. He let her pull him down to the blanket and fought a sudden prudishness as she reached for the snap on his jeans. It was, after all, 1971, and he was twenty-two and five years beyond his first time. Still, she was a complete stranger.

He could barely concentrate on the sensations in his own body, he was so enchanted by hers. The beacon teased him with glimpses of it, delivered in four-and-one-half second intervals. In the tarry blackness between light flashes, he would never have known she was there except for the feel of her beneath his hands. It threw off their rhythm, those lambent pulses of light, made them giggle at first, then groan with the effort of matching his pace to hers, hers to his.

He took her back to the cottage he shared with three friends from Virginia Tech. They had just graduated and were spending the summer working for a construction company on the Outer Banks before going on to graduate school. For the past couple of weeks, they’d been painting the Kiss River Lighthouse and doing some repair work on the old keeper’s house. Usually they spent the evenings drinking too much and looking for women, but tonight the four of them and Annie sat together in the small, sandy living room, eating the pomegranates she had produced from her knapsack and playing games she seemed to have invented on the spot.

“Sentence completion,” she announced in her alien-sounding Boston accent, and she immediately had their attention. “I treasure …” She looked encouragingly at Roger Tucker.

“My surfboard,” Roger said, honestly. “My Harley,” said Roger’s brother, Jim. “My cock,” said Bill Larkin, with a laugh. Annie rolled her eyes in mock disgust and turned to Alec. “I treasure …”

“Tonight,” he said. “Tonight,” she agreed, smiling.

He watched her as she plucked another red kernel from her pomegranate and slipped it into her mouth. She set the next kernel in her outstretched palm, and she continued to eat that way as they played—one kernel in her mouth, the next in her palm—until her hand had filled with the juicy red fruit. Once the shell of her pomegranate lay empty on her plate, she held her handful of kernels up to the light, admiring them as if they were a pile of rubies.

He was amazed that his friends were sitting here, stone cold sober, playing her games, but he understood. They were under her spell. She had instantly become the red-hot core of the cottage. Of the universe. “I need …” Annie said. “A woman.” Roger groaned. “A beer,” said Jim. “To get laid,” said Bill, predictably. “You,” Alec said, surprising himself. Annie took a bloodred ruby from the pile in her hand and leaned forward to slip it into Alec’s mouth. “I need to be held,” she said, and there was a question in her eyes. Are you up to it? her eyes asked him. Because it’s not a need to be taken lightly.

In his bed later that night he understood what she meant. She could not seem to get close enough to him. “I could love a man who had no legs, or no brain, or no heart,” she said. “But I could never love a man who had no arms.”

She moved in with him, abandoning her idea of hitchhiking down the coast. It was as though she had found him and fully expected to be with him forever, no discussion needed. She loved that he was studying to be a veterinarian and she would bring him injured animals to heal. Seagulls with broken wings, underfed cats with abscessed paws or torn ears. In the course of a week, Annie came across as many hurt animals as the average person encountered in a lifetime. She did not actively seek them out, yet they found her. He understood later that they were drawn to her because she was one of them. Her injuries were not physical. No, physically she was perfect. Her pain was hidden, and over the course of that summer he realized she had given him the task of making her whole.

He stood now in the thick black air, a prickly tension in him as he waited out the seconds between the light. Twenty years had passed since that first night. Twenty excellent years, until this last one. Until Christmas night, a little more than five months ago. He still came out here three, maybe four nights a week because more than any other place, it reminded him of Annie. Was it peace he felt here? Not exactly. Just close to her. As close as he could …

There was a rustling sound behind him. Alec turned his head, listening. Maybe it was one of the wild mustangs that roamed Kiss River? No. He could hear the steady footsteps of someone coming through the field of sea oats, up from the road. He stared in their direction, waiting for the light.

“Dad?”

The beacon caught his son’s black hair, red T-shirt. Clay must have followed him. He walked through the sand to stand at his father’s side. He was seventeen, and this past year had grown to Alec’s height. Alec still had not adjusted to standing eye-to-eye with his son.

“What are you doing out here?” Clay asked. “Just watching the light.”

Clay didn’t respond, and the beacon swung around once, then twice, before he spoke again. “Is this where you come at night?” he asked, his voice hushed. Both he and Lacey had taken on this careful tone when they spoke to him.

“Reminds me of your mother out here,” Alec said.

Clay was quiet for another minute. “Why don’t you come home? We can rent a movie or something.”

It was Saturday night and Clay was two weeks away from his high school graduation. Surely he had things he’d rather do than spend the night watching movies with his father. In the next flash of light Alec thought he saw fear in Clay’s blue eyes. He rested his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“I’m all right, Clay. Go on now. You must have plans for tonight.”

Clay hesitated. “Well, I’ll be over at Terri’s.” “Fine.”

Alec listened to the sound of Clay’s footsteps retreat across the field. He listened until he could hear nothing other than the waves breaking against the shore. Then he sat down on the beach, his elbows resting on bent knees, and stared out at a small yellow light on the black horizon.

“Remember, Annie, the night we saw the boat on fire?” He spoke out loud, but his voice was a whisper. So long ago—a decade, maybe more. They’d been sitting right where he sat now and probably they had made love, or were about to, when they spotted the ball of gold light on the horizon, shooting yellow tendrils into the sky and spreading shimmery waves of liquid gold into the water. The keeper’s house was locked tight and dark, Mary Poor asleep for the night, so Alec had driven out to the road to call the Coast Guard from a pay phone. They were already on the scene, he was told. Everyone was off the boat and safe. But by the time he’d returned to Annie she was weeping, having created her own scenario. There were children on board, she told him, old people too feeble to save themselves. He comforted her with the truth, but it was many minutes before she could let go of her own catastrophic vision. They watched the fire burn itself out, until the black smudge of smoke against the night sky was all that remained.

They’d made love on this beach as recently as last summer. The park was closed at dusk, but over the years they had never felt the chain across the road was meant for them. No one had ever disturbed them, not once, although until two years ago they’d known that Mary was sleeping close by.

They’d swim at night, too, when the water was calm enough. Alec was always first back to the beach because he liked to watch her lift up from the black water, a glittering specter in the stark white bursts of light. Her hair was darkened and tamed by the water, sleek and shiny over her shoulders and breasts. Once last year she’d stood in the water, wringing it from her hair and looking up at the beacon. She said something about the lighthouse, about its being as much a comfort to those on land as on sea. “It’s a touchstone,” she said. “It keeps you safe the same time it helps you chart your course.” He’d felt a lump in his throat, as though he knew what lay ahead, what he was going to lose. He’d thought it would be the lighthouse. He hadn’t known it would be Annie.

The lighthouse had been the only real source of friction between them. It stood close to the water, unlike its neighboring lighthouses at Currituck Beach to the north and Bodie Island to the south, which sat, secure, farther inland. Each year the ocean crept closer to the foundation of the Kiss River Light, and Alec joined the desperate battle for its preservation, while Annie distanced herself from that work.

“If it’s time for the sea to take it, we should just let it go.” Every time she’d say those words Alec would picture the graceful white brick lighthouse crumbling into the ocean and feel nearly overwhelmed with sadness.

He closed his eyes now as he sat on the beach, waiting for the next blast of light to shine red through his eyelids. If you stayed with the lighthouse long enough, your heartbeat slowed almost to the rhythm of the light, until it barely seemed to beat at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

Olivia was obsessed with Annie Chase O’Neill. It was getting worse instead of better, and now as she sat in her living room watching Paul and the tanned young boy he’d hired carry boxes and furniture out to the rented U-Haul, she felt the obsession crystallize inside her.

She hadn’t wanted to be here when Paul moved his things out. She hadn’t expected him to do it this soon, this abruptly, but he’d called early this morning to say he had the truck, did she mind? She said no, because she wanted to see him. She would take any opportunity to see him, even though every meeting left her bruised. A little more than five months had passed since he walked out, yet she still ached at the sight of him. Even now that he’d met with a lawyer and signed a long-term lease on a cottage in South Nags Head, she still clung to the hope that he would take a good look at her and realize his mistake.

He stopped now in the arched doorway between the living room and dining room, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his khaki shorts to wipe his forehead.