Inside once more, Mary brewed herself a pot of tea and set about preparing for what she knew was coming. Caleb had taught her what to do, just as he’d taught her how to read the wind and the water. Mary filled the lanterns with kerosene and set them on the kitchen table. She took three jugs from the cupboard and carried them upstairs, where she filled them with water and left them on the dresser in her bedroom. Then she placed the old rubber stopper in the drain of the clawfoot bathtub and turned on the faucet, all the while thinking of Annie. When she woke up this morning and opened her bedroom window, she knew the storm was well on its way, and she’d called to warn her.
“Don’t go today, Annie,” she’d said. “The storm will hit while you’re driving back.”
“They’re saying it’ll miss us.” Annie’s voice was soft, a little frightened, although Mary knew it wasn’t the storm she feared. “I have to go while I’ve got my courage up,” she said.
Mary offered to go with her, but Annie laughed at the suggestion. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’ll be fine.” Mary could just imagine the burden a seventy-seven-yearold woman would have been on her today, but every time she thought of Annie trying to drive home in the state she’d be in, she wished anew that she’d refused to take no for an answer.
The rain started around four that afternoon, while Mary was struggling to board up windows. She had done it by herself all the years since Caleb’s death, but she was not as strong as she used to be, and she had only enough plywood for those downstairs windows that faced the ocean. That would have to do, she thought, exhausted from the work. She brought the hanging plants in from the porch and carried her old photograph albums up to the second floor. She checked all the windows, cracking a few, remembering Caleb’s voice as she did so: “Houses can explode during a hurricane,” he had said to her that first year they were married, and he’d gone on to tell her stories of houses that had done exactly that.
Mary made one last tour of the yard for anything she might have neglected to batten down before returning to the house, securing the front door behind her. Then she sat down in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace to wait.
She turned the radio on after a while, smiling ruefully as the meteorologist admitted his error and once again advised his listeners to evacuate, but her smile faded as she thought of Annie. Where was she now? Perhaps she’d heard the new warnings and would find someplace on the mainland to spend the night. Mary hoped so. She had suggested Annie take a room so she wouldn’t have to drive home, but Annie’d refused to even consider the idea. “I’ll be too anxious to get home to Alec and Clay,” she’d said. Mary didn’t see how she would be able to face her husband and child tonight. “I can do it,” Annie reassured her. “I’ll just say I have a bellyache and take to my bed for a day or two. Women do this all the time.”
She knew Annie, though. She knew it was not the physical pain that would crush her spirit.
The wind picked up suddenly. It whistled through the upstairs, and rain began to spike against the plywood on her windows. The lights inside the house flickered but stayed on. Mary stood in front of the window next to the fireplace and watched the world darken in a few seconds’ time, dark enough to trick the lighthouse into thinking it was dusk, and the beacon suddenly flashed to life. She could make out the frothy whitecaps of the ocean, swelling ever nearer to the lighthouse, licking hungrily at the dunes.
Then she saw the headlights of a car bouncing through the rain and darkness toward the house. The car pulled up within a few feet of the front porch, and only then could she make out that it was Annie’s. She grabbed her slicker from the coat rack and struggled to push open the front door. The wind ripped it from her hands and flung it against the house with a
Annie was crying as Mary pulled the car door open. She managed to wrap the slicker around the younger woman’s shoulders and pull the hood up over her head as they ran from the car to the house. Mary tugged the front door shut, breathless from the effort. When she turned around, Annie was already sitting on the couch, hunched over, clutching the wet slicker around her. She was sobbing, her face buried in her hands. Mary left her alone as she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on once more. She took two cups out of the cupboard just as the lights went out, leaving the house as dark as the world outside.
“Mary?” Annie called from the living room. She sounded like a child.
“I’m lighting the lanterns,” Mary called back, fumbling on the kitchen table for the matches. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
She left one lantern glowing in the kitchen and carried the other into the living room. She looked out the window, but all she could see was blackness. Even the beacon could not tell her how close the water was, how soon they should move upstairs.
“I couldn’t go home,” Annie said. Her face was gray in the lantern light and her teeth chattered as Mary helped her take off the slicker. “I just couldn’t face Alec.”
“I should call him to let him know you’re all right,” Mary said.
Annie looked at the phone on the desk in the corner. “Maybe I’d better,” she said. “He’d think it’s weird if I don’t talk to him.”
Mary moved the phone to the sofa so Annie didn’t have to get up. She had to dial the number for her, Annie’s hands were trembling so fiercely.
“Alec?” Annie said. “I stopped by to make sure Mary was all right, but it’s gotten so nasty that I think I’d better just stay put.”
Mary watched Annie’s face. Her voice would not give her away, but if Alec could take one look at the pain in her eyes, he would know instantly what she had done. It was good she had not gone home.
“Can I speak to Clay?” Annie asked. “Oh. Well, that’s good. Maybe he’ll sleep through the whole thing… Yeah, we’re fine, just sitting here, drinking tea.” She laughed, but tears were streaming down her cheeks and she wiped at them ineffectually with the back of her hand. Mary felt the threat of her own tears, and she breathed deeply to hold them back. “Alec?” Annie said, twisting the phone cord around her fingers. “I love you so much.”
Annie hung up the phone and curled herself into a ball in one corner of the couch. She was shivering convulsively. Mary found a wool blanket in the chest in the downstairs bedroom and wrapped it around her. She brought Annie the tea, holding the cup while she sipped. Then Annie looked up at her.
“Oh, God, Mary,” she said. “What have I done?”
Mary sat down next to her. “Maybe there’s a lesson in this,” she said. “For you and me both. I’ve made it too easy for you. I’ve let you live out my own dreams, which were never meant to see the light of day. I’m just as guilty
