The Night Mark

“Someone I loved died,” Faye said. “I went to a pier like the one in your painting to spread his ashes. It was cold, and I had on a gray coat. And I walked to the end of the pier holding the urn in my hands. The girl in the painting looks like she’s holding something. And there was this white bird on the pier when I was there. It was just like your painting. All of it. Minus the lighthouse, I mean. God, that does sound crazy.” Faye rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Anyone would be a little spooked to see a scene from their own life on canvas.”

“And that’s only half of it,” Faye said, laughing at herself.

“Well, let’s go over to the dock and talk about it. I want to hear the other half.”

Faye helped him gather his tools, and she slung her camera over her shoulder. They walked across the lawn in silence to the dock. Faye’s wedges sounded loud and hollow on the faded wood boards as they walked to the end and looked out onto the water. They were silent for a long moment. Faye sensed Pat sizing her up.

“So talk to me, Miss Faye. What are you not telling me?” Pat asked as they stood side by side, elbows resting on the dock’s wooden rail.

“Did you know that lighthouse keeper?” she asked.

“I knew him, yes. Long, long time ago.”

“Can I show you something?” she asked.

“Go right ahead.”

Faye took a printed piece of paper out of her bag and showed it to Pat. “Do you know who this man is?”

“He was much older when I knew him, but I’d know that face anywhere,” Pat said. “That’s Carrick Morgan.”

“Is it? Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

Faye went silent a moment. His certainty had scared her.

“Faye?”

“Sorry. Can you maybe tell me more about him?”

“Carrick?” He shrugged. “When I knew him he was retired and living off his navy pension.”

“Interesting name. Irish?”

Pat nodded. “Son of Irish immigrants, named for the village they’d come from.”

“How’d he get the job as lighthouse keeper? I thought the Irish had trouble getting good work.”

“He’d been working at the Boston Light after the war. Carrick was brought down as an assistant keeper, took over as principle keeper when the previous family got transferred.”

“You said his daughter moved in with him,” Faye said. “What about his wife?”

Pat shook his head. “He said he was a widower.”

“But he had a daughter?” Faye asked. Interesting Carrick Morgan “said” he was a widower. Did that mean he wasn’t? Was his daughter illegitimate? That sort of thing didn’t fly back in the 1920s like it did now. Faye could easily imagine a man in a government job trying to protect his daughter from the stain of scandal by lying about his past.

“Where did you find this picture?” Pat asked. He hadn’t stopped staring at the picture since she’d handed it to him. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“I took that picture,” Faye said.

Pat’s brow furrowed. “Not possible. Carrick was dead long before you were born. Died in ’65.”

“It is possible, Pat, because this isn’t Carrick Morgan. This man’s name is Will Fielding.”

“Who?”

“My husband, Pat. My husband, who’s been dead four years.”

“My God...” Pat breathed. His shock was palpable. Faye felt it, too. “They’re twins.”

“Twins born a hundred years apart?”

Pat shook his head in obvious disbelief.

“Pat?”

“I’m sorry,” Pat said. “It’s just...strange. Very strange.”

“Imagine how I feel,” Faye said. “First I see a picture online last night of a man who looks like my dead husband. This morning I see a painting of a woman who looks like me the morning I scattered his ashes. And now I find out they were father and daughter? Oh, and that damn bird is back.” Faye looked up at the overcast sky and shook her head. “I am going crazy.”

“No, you are not, Miss Faye.”

“You sound pretty sure of that,” she said. “Wish I could be.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and faced him.

“Why did you paint her on the pier like that? You wouldn’t have been alive when she died.”

Pat turned and leaned back against the railing of the dock, putting the Marshlands before him and the lighthouse behind him.

“Retirement age for a priest is seventy. Did you know that?” he asked. It wasn’t what she expected him to say, but she trusted he had a reason.

“No. I’m not Catholic.”

“I retired from the Church when I was sixty-four. I should have hung on for six more years, but I couldn’t do it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve painted all my life. It’s my second religion. A few years ago my hands started shaking when I held anything heavier than five pounds. Then it was four pounds. Three pounds. A priest isn’t supposed to drop the communion wine. I had to take early retirement.”

“I wondered about your painting style. Kind of impressionistic, like Degas.”

“Degas was almost blind at the end. And I can’t hold a pen without it shaking like a leaf. I used to paint in a more realistic style. Impressionism was all that was left to me after the tremor started.”

“Your work is lovely.”

“It wasn’t, in the beginning. It was just awful, embarrassing. Whatever technique I’d developed over the years was gone. I painted like a child. Imagine if someone took your camera from you.”

“They can pry my camera out of my cold dead hands.”

“That’s what I always said about my brushes. But no one had to pry them out of my hands. They fell out.”

“I’m so sorry,” Faye said.

“It was hard to keep my faith after the tremor took the priesthood away from me, took painting away from me. My only two loves. So I went out to the lighthouse with a heavy heart. I had lied to Ms. Shelby, telling her I wanted to paint the lighthouse. But that wasn’t the real plan.”

Faye heard a note of shame in his voice, embarrassment maybe. She pictured herself curled up on the floor of the bathroom, the pill bottle in her hand while she worked up the courage to take off the lid. That was how Hagen had found her. The real plan, Pat had said. Yes, she knew exactly what the real plan had been.

“That would be quite a fall from the top of the lighthouse, wouldn’t it?”

“And onto rocks,” he said. “When the tide’s out, it’s nothing but rocks. A quick drop to a certain death.”

“I’ve been there,” Faye said.

He nodded. “I imagine a widow would know that place all too well.”

“What changed your mind?” she asked.

“The lighthouse. I won’t pretend a miracle happened. No angel stayed my hand. No voice from heaven. The lighthouse has always been a beacon of hope. That’s why you see it so often in Christian art. ‘A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all...’”

“Very pretty.”

“Matthew 5:15. I suppose it’s a cliché to say I saw the light. But there was a moment, an instant where I thought I saw the lighthouse lamp burning again. Just the sunlight tricking my eyes, I know. But it... I don’t know, it made me feel something I hadn’t felt in years.”

“Hope?”

He nodded. “Hope. Something told me to paint the lighthouse. And when I did paint it, I painted it well. Not like my old style, but not bad. And I painted it again. Eventually I wanted to paint it more than I wanted to throw myself off the top of it.”

“And the lady in the painting? The Lady of the Light? Why did you paint her?”

“Carrick never got over losing Faith. Maybe I just wanted to bring her back to life. The lighthouse gave me my life back. I guess I wanted to return the favor.”

“Pat,” Faye said. “I need to get out to that lighthouse.”

“Bad idea.”

“Why?” she asked.

“That lighthouse is dangerous.”

“You said it saved your life.”

“It could have taken it, too. It’s not safe out there. Some kids went out there a few years ago, got drunk on the beach and drowned when they went for a midnight swim. The lighthouse was there for a reason. There’s the sandbar and one hell of a riptide, too. We already have one Lady of the Light. We don’t need another.”

“How did she get that nickname?”

“People swear they see her sometimes. But lighthouses are notorious for having ghost stories attached to them. Parents use her as a warning, a scare story to keep their kids from breaking into the lighthouse or swimming near that corner of the island. The real story is much sadder. Faith hadn’t been at the lighthouse long. Just a few days. Nobody knows why she went out on the pier at night, but she did. A wave hit hard and high, and she fell into the water.”

“How old was she?”

“I can’t say for sure. A young woman.”

“Where was she before? In school or something?”

“She was with other family members,” Pat said.

“And why did she come down here?”

“A love affair gone wrong,” Pat said. “She was a beauty, they say. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Stop it.”

“I’d love to paint you. I’d have to get the right purple paint for your eyes. Elizabeth Taylor eyes.”

“Got them from my grandmother. I swear, I think her proudest achievement in life was passing her eye color on to me. She wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor when she was a girl. Even did her hair like hers. Black bouffant even in her sixties.”

“I might have had to go to confession after seeing Father of the Bride as a boy.”

“You know, I can tell when someone is changing the subject. Why don’t you want to talk about Faith Morgan?”

“It’s...” He waved his hand dismissively. “Some things just don’t make sense to me. Priests want things to make sense. She came down here to start a new life. Instead she died. And Carrick never recovered from losing her.”

“Ah,” Faye said, nodding. “Carrick and I have something in common then.”

Pat crossed his arms over his chest. He would have to be seventy-six or seventy-seven if he was twenty-seven in 1965. He didn’t look much over sixty to her. But now he did look older, just for a moment. Faye saw his hands tremble slightly. He clenched his fists, released them, and the tremor was gone.

“Poor girl,” he said. “Had it been today she might have been fine. She had a dress on, a heavy dress, heavy shoes. And she couldn’t swim.”

“A lighthouse keeper’s daughter who couldn’t swim?”

“Women didn’t do a lot of swimming back then. Carrick tried to save her and couldn’t. Jumped in the water, swam after her... Waves got her. Haunted him the rest of his life.”

“It wasn’t his fault.”

“Ah, but Carrick was a lighthouse keeper, a man whose job was keeping people safe. To lose her like that, on his watch...and then to find her body days later.”

Faye held up her hand to stem the tide of his words. She didn’t want to hear any more. She’d been spared seeing Will’s body until they’d cleaned him up at the hospital. And that had been bad enough, the sickening indentation in the side of his forehead, the shaved patch of hair, the crude stitches, the blue-gray pallor of his cold skin, the sheet pulled up to his neck hiding his otherwise perfect corpse from her. But to find the body of your own child...bloated, battered by the current...

“It was the beginning of the end of the lighthouse when Faith died,” Pat said. “Carrick couldn’t keep the light anymore. They merged the Bride Island station with the Hunting Island station and automated the light in 1925, which was a tragedy of its own.”

“How so?”

“Lighthouse keepers did more than just keep the lighthouse. They watched the coast, too, gave aid when necessary, rescued people in distress when called for. In the fall of ’26, a fishing boat broke apart right off Bride Island’s north shore during a storm and all fourteen souls aboard died. If the lighthouse had been manned at the time, those men might have lived. The world needed Carrick’s light but losing Faith... That snuffed it right out.”

Pat took off his glasses, wiping them with the only clean corner of his T-shirt.

“Carrick moved down to Savannah after leaving Charleston. He worked for a shipping company and then the Georgia Port Authority. By his own account it was a long and hard and very lonely life. He came back to Beaufort after he retired just like I did. He said it was the last place he was ever happy.”

“Was he a good man?”

“Too good,” he said. “Too good for this world anyway.”

“Funny,” Faye said, although it wasn’t.

“What is?”

“Today I said exactly the same thing about Will.”

6

Faye sat in the living room of Father Pat’s little Duke Street cottage, a pretty fern-green one-story nothing-special sort of house. Nothing special on the outside, but the inside was an art gallery, a Pantone dream. He’d painted every room a different hue—sunflower gold for the kitchen, cornflower blue living room, lagoon-green bathroom. And every wall boasted watercolor paintings of the sea and the sun; every horizontal surface held books on paintings, on how to paint watercolors, on the history of painting. She expected something in the house to give a sign that it belonged to a priest, but there was nothing, not a cross in sight.

Pat got her settled on his sofa and gave her iced tea in a Pilsner glass.

“I’d never guess you were a priest,” she said. “By your house or anything really.”

“Ah, that’s the point. Now show me your husband. You have me intrigued to the point of day drinking.”

Faye opened her laptop and showed Pat both pictures side by side as he sipped at his beer and she her tea. She’d taken an old picture of Will and run it through Photoshop, aging the background, changing the colors. But she hadn’t touched his face, hadn’t changed the way he looked at all. Pat stared at them a long time before closing the lid of her laptop and passing it back to her.

“Okay,” he said. “So I told you about Carrick and Faith. Now you tell me about Will and Faye.”

“I’m a baseball widow. Ever heard of us?”

“I’ve heard of you. Women who say goodbye to their husbands in April and don’t see them again until October?”

“I’m a real baseball widow. My husband was a professional baseball player.”

“What team?”

“When we met Will was playing on a Triple-A team in Rhode Island. I was the local paper’s photographer. One game I took a good picture of him making a double play. You should have seen it. This huge guy barreling toward second base, starting a hard slide, and Will tagging him, one arm in the air for balance and his glove just brushing the guy’s back, inches from the bag.” Faye mimed the move, the image burned into her brain. She’d been a baseball fan all her life and had never seen anything so athletic, so elegant as Will Fielding spinning like a bullfighter to get the out. “The picture ran in the paper with the caption, ‘Olé!’ I didn’t think anything of it other than it was a good shot with lucky timing. But the very next game after the photo ran, Mr. Olé came up to me and thanked me. His teammates had given him the nickname ‘The Matador’ after that. He’d always wanted a good baseball nickname. Hank Aaron was ‘Hammer’ and Ruth was the ‘Sultan of Swat.’ Now he was Will ‘The Matador’ Fielding. He said I’d made his dream come true with that picture. I was supposed to say something to that like, ‘No problem’ or ‘Just doing my job.’ But here was this big, tall wall of pure American maleness. Handsome and brown-eyed and grinning at me, and I ended up saying something like, ‘I will take pictures of anything and everything you want me to.’ And only after the words came out did I realize it sounded like I’d just offered to take naked pics for him. I probably would have had he asked.”

“That handsome?”

“Took my breath away,” Faye said. “But he was a good guy and didn’t ask for naked pics. Instead, he asked me about my work. When the game started he said he’d love to keep talking to me later. That night was our first date. Before Will I dated coffee-shop guys. You know, the skinny intellectuals with the earbuds and the Macs who drink expensive coffee and write thinkpieces for their incredibly boring blogs and magazines? Those guys. Never dated a guy who drank gas-station coffee before, who didn’t own a Mac but did own a grill and a drill. We met in July, got engaged in September and got married the next spring. Sometimes you just know. And we just knew.”

“I’ve known many a couple who just knew. A priest has to believe in love. It’s part of our job.”

“The day after Will asked me to marry him, he hit two home runs. He said I must be his good-luck charm, and who needed a rabbit’s foot when he had me? He called me Bunny sometimes, and you better believe he was the one man on earth who could call me Bunny and live to tell the tale.”

“I can tell you loved him,” Pat said.

“God, I loved him.” She blinked back her tears. “Will was one of the last good guys. The really good guys. Good inside and out. His dad worked at Jiffy Lube and his mother was a hospice nurse so...definitely not the most exalted of origin stories. But it was meant to be. You don’t grow up with the name Will Fielding without being destined to be a baseball player. And even when he was in the minors making less than minimum wage and living in cramped buses and roach motels, four players to a room, he felt like the luckiest man on earth. I can hear him in my head right now. ‘Babe, think about it—who gets to do what I do? Play baseball for a job? What’s next? Pay me to eat candy and sleep with you?’ He’d say that all the time with this look on his face like, ‘Really? Me?’ He never once thought he deserved it. He was just happy to be there. And he made me so happy.”

“I bet you made him happy, too.”

“I tried. And you know what? I did. I did make him happy. And it was my pleasure to do it. I hate sports puns, but Will was out of my league. I was as happy to be his wife as he was happy to be a ballplayer.”

“You’re the prettiest lady I’ve set eyes on in a long time. You aren’t out of any man’s league.”

“You’re sweet to say that, but it’s not what I meant. I don’t mean looks. I mean...before Will I was self-centered. Not in any way that anyone else isn’t self-centered. When you’re single, you don’t have to think about anyone else, and I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was broke, in student loan debt, worked constantly. But then Will came along, and I watched him spending his very few days off at children’s hospitals visiting sick kids and helping out underprivileged Little League teams. That was Will. You have any idea how grueling life is in the minors? He never once complained. He said a ballplayer complaining about road trips and sore shoulders was like a rich man complaining he had to hire an accountant to count all his money. I’ve been a feminist my whole life, independent. I went to an Ivy League school. I paid my own bills. I knew even if we had kids I’d never quit my working to be a stay-at-home mom. And you know what?”

“Tell me,” Pat said, looking her straight in the eyes.

“I’d give up the right to vote just to do one more load of Will’s dirty laundry.”

She laughed at herself—better to laugh than to cry again.

“I promise I won’t tell Gloria Steinem on you,” Pat said with a wink.

Faye laughed even harder at that.

“Will had these baseball T-shirts,” she said, trying to compose herself. “So many baseball T-shirts. Every team you could think of. Two weeks after he died I found a Bronx Bombers shirt in a bag under the bed. Can you imagine? A kid who grew up on the Sox with a Yankees shirt? Goddamn it, Will.”

Those stupid baseball T-shirts, they were all he wore when he wasn’t naked or in his uniform. The single time she’d seen him in a suit was at their wedding. Those shirts... He had so many of them she’d wash them all in one load. Laundry was sorted into whites, darks, towels and baseball shirts. She’d given the shirts away after he died to relatives and close friends who needed something of his. She’d kept one for herself—the soft heather-gray one with the big red B on the front that Will had worn on their first date. That was the one she’d always slept in when he was on his road trips. She didn’t sleep in it anymore. Crying oneself to sleep only worked in the movies.

Pat handed her a handkerchief and pressed it to her burning cheeks.

“Sorry about the ‘goddamn it.’ I shouldn’t swear in front of a priest.”

“You must not know any priests. You can say whatever the hell you want. Trust me—I’ve heard worse. Said worse, too.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, slowly bringing herself back under control. “Will really looked good in his T-shirts. Had the arms for them. Gotta say, there are a lot of perks to being married to an athlete. Having the sexiest husband at the beach was one of them, and I’m shallow enough to admit that.” She laughed again, remembering...remembering... “Will had this great baseball player walk. It wasn’t like a strut, more like an amble. This loose-in-the-hips amble. When he was leaving the house to go on a road trip, I’d always tell him, ‘I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you walk away.’ I didn’t know the last time I watched him walk away would be, you know, the last time I watched him walk away. If I’d known, I would have stared at his ass longer.”

Faye laughed again and cried again. Her body ached for Will. She could talk about his T-shirts but what she really missed was his body. The way he smelled after a game—sweat and leather. The way he picked her up and threw her into bed like a rag doll just because he could. The way he made love to her. He was twenty-three when they met and had just broken up with his high school sweetheart, the only girl he’d been with before her. But during sex he made her feel like she was the only woman in the world, and he was the lucky schmuck who got to have her. For a long time she had to think of Will to orgasm during sex with Hagen. That wasn’t something she had told anyone. Widows might as well be nuns for the careful way people treated them. What would people think if they knew what she missed most about her late husband was the sex? The hard-core full-body, full-soul, all-in, nothing-held-back sort of sex you could have with someone who knew everything about you. Will filled her up and emptied her out and gave her what she needed. And what she needed was him, just him, but all of him.

“I should be ashamed of myself for how much I miss having sex with him. Kind of shallow, I guess.”

“Taking pleasure in your own husband doesn’t make you shallow. I know a lot of husbands who wish their wives saw them like that.”

“Will was one of those guys born for heavy lifting and getting stuff off the top shelf. He made me feel small, and he made me feel safe, and it takes a special kind of man to make a woman feel both at the same time. One day I teased him that I heard ‘Like a Rock’ by Bob Seger automatically start playing when he walked into a room, and at the very next game, they played that as his walk-up song.” Faye laughed. Will had always looked for a way to make her smile. Even now, even through the tears, here she was smiling because of him.

“He sounds like one in a million.”

“He was. And we were so happy it doesn’t even seem real now. As good as it was, it somehow managed to get even better. I found out I was pregnant the same week Will got called up to the majors. Which meant, of course, I got called up, too. I was officially a WAG.”

“WAG? What on earth?”

“WAGs. Wives and Girlfriends of pro athletes,” Faye said.

“I see,” Pat said. “We don’t get to have those in the priesthood. At least, we’re not supposed to.”

Faye grinned as she wiped her face. “Probably for the best,” she said. “A couple days after Will went to Boston, I got invited to a WAG party at the house of one of the pitcher’s wives. Nice women, but every last one of them warned me my life was about to change, and not for the better. So many women told me about the jobs they’d had to quit, the dreams they’d had to give up for their husbands’ careers. And if I wanted to keep doing my little photography thing, they said, I should probably save it for the off-season, treat it like a hobby. I thought they’d be happy when I told them I was expecting. I just got this look like...”