Keeper of the Light

she felt as though she was all stomach, the rest of her body small and inconsequential.

“It scares me to love you,” she said.

“Why?”

“I just finished loving a man who wished I was Annie. I’m afraid that loving you might end up being the same thing.”

He shook his head against the pillow. “I want you, Olivia,” he said, his hands tightening on her thighs. “I want you just the way you are, with your organized mind, and your craving for structure, and your driving ambition, and your ability to put yourself first.” He touched her lightly where her body was joined to his, and she shivered. “And with your genuine, and thoroughly unsubtle, carnal needs.”

“And with my pregnancy?”

He slid his hands to the firm golden orb of her belly. “I’ve already raised and loved another man’s child,” he said. “I can do it again.”

CHAPTER FIFTY- FIVE

September 1991

The electricity went out in the Manteo Retirement Home at about eight-thirty in the evening, and the portable radio grew scratchy and unintelligible. The residents, along with some of the staff, huddled together in the candlelit living room, taking turns playing with the knobs on the radio, fighting the dying batteries.

Mary sat off in a corner, the folded newspaper with its finished crossword puzzle resting on her knee. She didn’t need the radio to know what was happening outside. She could feel the devastation in her bones.

She’d opened the window in her room a few hours earlier and let the air blow over her skin. She’d sniffed it, tasted it, and she knew the storm was very close. It’s time, she thought. For days she’d had a feeling about this one. Even before the residents of the Outer Banks were told to evacuate, she knew this storm would be like no other. It would hit head-on, with a sudden punch at the defenseless coastline, the mere preamble to a beating that would last hours.

Trudy tried to talk her into joining a game of canasta.

“If anyone should be used to storms, it’d be you, Mary,” she said when Mary declined. “Look at you, sitting there like a scared little girl.”

She wasn’t scared, but she didn’t bother to defend herself to Trudy. She wasn’t afraid at all.

She went to bed far later than usual, but still she could not sleep. The wind was ferocious. It howled eerily through the big house, and every once in a while she could hear the crackling sound of a tree snapping in two. One of the windows in Jane’s room blew out during the night, and her screams brought everyone out into the hall. Jane spent the rest of the night on the pull-out sofa in the living room.

Mary finally slept a little toward morning. When she woke up, the sky was overcast and foggy, and the little circle of stained glass hanging in her window cast weak, muted colors on the walls of her room.

She joined the others downstairs in the dining room, but she couldn’t eat. After breakfast, when everyone else went out on the porch to look at the downed trees and the broken windows in the neighboring houses, Mary walked into the kitchen, where Gale and Sandy, the only two members of staff who had made it in this morning, were loading the dishwasher. They looked up at her when she walked into the room.

“What is it, Mary?” Gale asked.

“I need one of you to take me to Kiss River,” she said.

Sandy laughed. “You’re nuts, Mary. The Outer Banks flooded last night and they said on the radio a lot of the roads are still under water. We probably couldn’t get there if we wanted to.”

“Please,” she said. She hated this. She hated having to beg, having to depend on these young girls for everything. “I’ll pay you.”

Gale laughed. “With what, honey? Do you have some money tucked away we don’t know about?”

Mary leaned heavily on her cane. Her hip was throbbing this morning. “If you don’t take me, I’ll find another way to get there.”

Sandy and Gale looked at each other, finally taking her seriously. A few weeks ago, someone had gotten to Mary’s puzzle before she did, and when they refused to drive her to the store for another paper, she’d walked the mile there and back herself.

Sandy slipped a plate into the dishwasher and wiped her hands on a paper towel. “All right, Mary,” she said. “I’ll take you. But don’t expect us to get very far.”

Mary rode in the front seat of the van, while Sandy drove. Sandy tried to get her to talk, but finally gave up. Mary had little to say today. She tapped her finger on the top of her cane, straining her eyes through the milky fog, trying to make out where they were.

The main road up the island was clear of water, but the storm had taken its toll on the buildings. Each time the fog thinned, just for a second or two, Mary could see glassless windows in the houses, boards and brush littering the sand. The street was peppered with shingles blown off the roofs.

They turned onto the road that ran through Southern Shores and she wondered how Annie’s family had fared. Had they evacuated? Had Olivia gone with them or stayed here to doctor anyone hurt in the storm? She was head of that emergency room now. Most likely she had to stay.

Alec had invited Mary to dinner last week, and she had been surprised by the invitation, surprised that Alec held no grudge against her for her role in Annie’s betrayal. Olivia had been there—obviously pregnant, a complication Mary had not even guessed at—and she and Lacey and Alec cooked while Mary sat at the kitchen table, observing the outcome of her revelations in the keeper’s house. They were happy people, those three. Survivors of her last, and most likely final, rescue.

Paul Macelli had moved back to Washington, they told her, where he was working once again for the Post and writing poetry, reading it on the weekends to his faithful covey of followers.

“Here we go,” Sandy said, as the van approached a long stretch of road that was under water. Gamely, she put the van into four-wheel drive and plunged in, and in a few minutes they were on dry road again. Sandy patted the