Mary climbed down the stairs and walked out to the beach.
“Hello, there!” she called as she neared the girl, and Annie turned, shading her eyes with her hand and smiling broadly.
“Hi!” she said, her voice surprising Mary with its huskiness. So deep for such a young girl. Then she asked, as though Mary were the interloper here, “Who are you?”
“The keeper,” Mary replied. “I live here.”
“The
Mary had smiled herself then, because that was exactly how she felt.
“I wanted to come out here by the lighthouse.” Annie looked down at the sand beneath her bare feet. “I met the man I married right here on this spot.”
“Here?” Mary asked, incredulous. “There’s never anyone around here.”
“He was painting and doing some repair work on the house.”
Ah, yes. Mary remembered. A few summers ago the place had swarmed with young men, half-naked and bronzed and beautiful, scarves tied around their foreheads to keep the sweat from their eyes. She must mean one of them.
“It was nighttime when I met Alec, though. It was very dark, but every time the lighthouse flashed I could see him. He was standing right here, just enjoying the evening. The closer I got, the better he looked.” She smiled, blushing, and turned her face back to the water. Her hair blew in long tufts up and around her head, and she lifted her hands to draw it back to her shoulders.
“Well.” Mary was startled to know this had gone on within a short distance of her home. “So this spot’s special for you.”
“Uh-huh. Now we’ve got a little boy. We’ve been living in Atlanta while Alec finished his training—he’s a veterinarian—but all the while we knew this was where we wanted to settle down. So, now we’re finally here.” She looked puzzled and glanced up at the lighthouse. “You’re the keeper?” she asked. “I didn’t think they still had keepers. Aren’t all the lighthouses run by electricity now?”
Mary nodded. “Yes, and this one’s had electricity since 1939. Most of them are maintained by the Coast Guard these days. My husband was the last keeper on the North Carolina coast, and when he died, I took over.” She studied Annie, who was shading her eyes to stare up at the tower. “Would you like to go up?” she asked, surprising herself with the question. She never invited anyone up with her. The tower had been closed to the public for many years.
Annie clapped her hands together. “Oh, I’d
They walked toward the door in the lighthouse, Mary stopping for the bucket of wild blackberries she’d picked earlier that morning.
She could still climb to the top of the tower with only one or two stops along the way to catch her breath and rest her legs. Annie had to stop too, or maybe she just pretended she needed to so Mary didn’t feel too old. Mary led her right up to the lantern room, where the enormous honeycomb lens took up so much space there was barely room to walk around it.
“Oh, my God,” Annie said, awestruck. “I’ve never seen so much glass in one place in my entire life.” She looked at Mary. “I love glass,” she said. “This is fantastic.”
Mary let her slip inside the lens, through the opening made when one segment of glass had to be removed a few years earlier after being damaged in a storm. Annie turned slowly in a circle, taking in all of the landscape, which Mary knew would appear upside down to her through the curved glass of the lens.
It took her a while to lure Annie away from the lens and down to the next level, where they stepped out onto the gallery. They sat on the warm iron floor, and Mary pointed out landmarks in the distance. Annie was quiet at first, overwhelmed, it seemed, and Mary watched her eyes fill with tears at the beauty spread out below them. She learned right then that nearly everything made this girl cry.
They spent a good two hours up there, eating berries and talking, the windows Mary had been cleaning in the lantern room forgotten.
Mary told her a little about Caleb, how she used to love to sit up here with him, how after decades of living at Kiss River they had never tired of the view. Caleb had been dead ten long years then, and having Annie to talk with, having someone listen to her so attentively, made her depressingly aware of how few friends she’d been able to make over the years, how hungry she was for companionship. For some reason, she told Annie about Elizabeth. “She hated living in such an isolated place, and she resented her father and me for making her live here. She just took off when she was fifteen years old. Quit school and married a man from Charlotte who was ten years older than her. She moved there and never sent us her address. I went there once to try to find her but without any luck.” Mary looked out at the blue horizon. “That child broke our hearts.” Why was she telling all this to a stranger? She no longer discussed these things even with herself. “She’d be forty-five now, Elizabeth.” Mary shook her head. “It’s hard for me to believe I’ve got a daughter who’s forty-five years old.”
“Maybe it’s not too late to make things right with her,” Annie said. “Do you know where she is now?”
She nodded. “I have an address I got from a friend of hers. I heard her husband died a few years back, so she must be living alone now. I write her letters a couple times a year, but I’ve never once heard back from her.”
Annie frowned. “She doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a mother who cares about her. Who loves her,” she said. “She doesn’t know what she’s thrown away.”
Mary felt a little choked up. She took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her brown work pants, pulled one out and lit it in her cupped hand, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. It had been a long, long time since she’d let herself think about Elizabeth, and she could not bear how much it hurt, so she changed the topic to the young woman sharing her balcony. Annie’s hands and lips were stained with the juice of the berries, the color clashing wildly with the red of her hair.
“Where are you from?” Mary asked. “Where did you pick up that accent?”
“Boston.” Annie smiled.
