Keeper of the Light

“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 cloisonne 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