Keeper of the Light

the dark lines between the segments of blue glass. “This is lead, right?”

Tom sat down behind the work table. “No, actually that’s copper foil covered with solder. Come over here.”

She sat down on the chair next to him. He was working on a panel of white irises against a blue and black background. For the next ten minutes, she watched in fascination as he melted ropes of silvery solder onto the copper-wrapped edges of the glass, while the colors from the panels in the windows played on his hands, his cheeks, his pale blond eyelashes.

“Do you give lessons?” she asked, surprising Tom no more than herself.

“Not usually.” He looked up at her and grinned. “You interested?”

“Well, yes, I’d like to try. I’m not very creative, though.”

She had never done anything like this. She’d never had the time, never taken the time, to learn a skill so thoroughly unrelated to her profession.

“You might surprise yourself,” Tom said. He named a price and she agreed; she would have agreed to any amount.

Tom glanced down at her sandaled feet. “Wear closed-toed shoes,” he said. “And you’ll need safety glasses, but I think I’ve got an old pair of Annie’s somewhere around here. You can use them.”

Before she left she bought a small, oval-shaped panel Annie had made—the delicate, iridescent detail of a peacock feather. She was leaving the studio when she nearly tripped over a stack of magazines piled close to the door.

Tom sighed. “I’ve got to do something about this mess.” He waved a hand toward the magazines and a few piles of paperback books stacked next to them. “People have been bringing in their books and magazines for years. Annie would take them to the old folks’ home in Manteo. I haven’t wanted to tell people to stop, ’cause Annie would have had my head, but I just don’t feel like driving over there.”

“I can take them sometime,” Olivia said. When? she wondered. Her impulsivity was beginning to worry her.

“Hey, would you? That’d be great. You just tell me when you’re headed out that way and I’ll load you up.”

She arrived at the studio at exactly eleven the following Saturday. Tom fitted her with Annie’s green safety glasses, Annie’s old green apron. He drew a pattern of squares and rectangles on a sheet of graph paper, laid a piece of clear glass over it, and showed her how to use the glass cutter to score the glass. Her first cut was perfect, he said, as were her second and third.

“You have a natural feel for this.”

She smiled, pleased. She had a steady hand; she was used to a scalpel. She only needed to adjust her pressure to the fragile glass.

Her head was bowed low over her work when she heard someone enter the studio.

“Morning, Tom.”

She looked up to see Alec O’Neill, and her hand froze above the glass.

“Howdy, Alec,” Tom said.

Alec barely seemed to notice her. He was carrying a camera case, and he stepped through a side door in the studio, closing it behind him.

“What’s in there?” Olivia asked.

“Darkroom,” said Tom. “That’s Annie’s husband, Alec. He comes in a couple of times a week to develop film or make prints or whatever.”

She glanced at the closed darkroom door, and returned her attention to her work. Her next cut splintered a little, and she jerked her hands quickly away from the glass. “Shouldn’t I be wearing some sort of gloves?”

“No.” Tom looked offended. “You want to feel what you’re doing.”

She worked a while longer, glancing at her watch from time to time, hoping she would be finished before Alec O’Neill came out of the darkroom. Her next cut was crooked. This was not as easy as she’d thought. She had hung the peacock feather in her kitchen window, and now that she had a better sense of the work that had gone into it, she was anxious to see it again, to study it from a new perspective.

She was using pliers to break apart a scored piece of glass when the darkroom door squeaked open, and she kept her eyes riveted on her work as Alec O’Neill walked back into the studio.

“I left the negatives in there,” he said to Tom.

“Those closeups you made of the brick came out good,” Tom said.

Alec didn’t respond, and she felt his eyes on her. She lifted her face, slipped off the glasses.

“This is Olivia Simon,” Tom said. “Olivia, Alec O’Neill.”

Olivia nodded, and Alec frowned. “I’ve met you some where.”

She set down the pliers and lowered her hands to her lap. “Yes, you have,” she said, “but not under very good circumstances, I’m afraid. I was the physician on duty the night your wife was brought to the emergency room.”

“Oh.” Alec nodded slightly. “Yes.”

“You were what?” Tom leaned back to look at her.

“I stopped in to take a look at your wife’s work, and I liked it so much that I asked Tom to give me lessons.”