Keeper of the Light

“I’ll give you two,” he said, certain then that it was a promise he would have no trouble at all keeping.

She felt better in the morning, a cheery optimism replacing her maudlin mood. Alec, however, felt worse, as though she had transferred her fear to him. By the time they boarded the plane for Chicago on Tuesday, he was sick with nervousness. He sat with his head flat against the seatback, trying to ignore the nausea pressing in on him, while Annie held his hand and rested her head on his shoulder. She read him the article she’d torn from the Beach Gazette that morning, the article describing her trip to Chicago, yet another one of Annie O’Neill’s saintly deeds.

She had to stay in the hospital the night before the surgery and Alec took a room in the hotel across the street. He watched television the entire night. If he fell asleep he might miss the alarm, and Annie would be taken into the OR before he’d have a chance to see her.

He walked over to the hospital before dawn and went into her room as soon as they would let him. She looked beautiful, her hair falling around her shoulders, a smile of contentment on her face.

“Oh, Alec.” She reached for his hand. “You didn’t sleep.”

“Yes, I did,” he lied.

She shook her head. “You have circles under your eyes. You look awful.”

He tried to smile. “Thanks.”

The nurse came in, telling them it was time for Annie to be wheeled to the operating room. Alec leaned over to kiss her, leaving his lips on hers for a long time. When he pulled away she whispered, “Don’t be scared.” They wheeled her out of the room and he struggled to keep his tears and his terror in check as he watched her disappear down the hall.

The surgery went smoothly, and Annie was practically euphoric by the time he saw her back in her room.

“My first thought when I came out of the anesthetic was, ‘I’m alive!’” she told him with a tired smile. “I was sick as a dog. It was wonderful.”

Sitting on the plane was not easy for her. She fidgeted, adjusting her seat belt in an effort to get comfortable, but she didn’t utter a word of complaint.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, when they were somewhere over Virginia. “There are some changes I want to make about us.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“We need more time together.”

“Fine,” he said.

“I propose that we meet for lunch one day a week.”

“Okay.”

“A two-hour lunch,” she said. “In a motel.”

He laughed. “I see.”

“I really need this, Alec.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “We never get time away together, without the kids around. It’s so important. It’s more important than you know, than I can possibly explain to you.”

They met on Fridays, from twelve to two, in any motel that would take them. In the winter it was easy to find a room, but during the summer, they paid an exorbitant price for the privilege of two hours in a prime-season motel. By that time, though, Alec knew those couple of hours were worth any amount of money. The intimacy they shared in the motel rooms spilled over to the other days of the week, and he saw a change in Annie. Her occasional moodiness, her periods of withdrawal, completely disappeared. Amazing that two hours a week could change so much.

“I’ve never been happier in my entire life than I’ve been this past year,” she told him. They’d been meeting for well over a year by then, and her contentment was so complete that when the depression took hold of her late in the fall, it was impossible to miss. She grew nervous. Jumpy. She was tearful when they made love on those afternoons in the motel room, quiet as they ate the lunch she’d brought. She avoided his eyes when she spoke to him. Sometimes she’d cry for no reason at all. He’d find her weeping in the bathroom as she soaked in the tub, or he’d wake up in the middle of the night to hear her crying softly into her pillow. It seemed far worse than the other times, or maybe it was just that it had been so long since he’d seen that misery in her.

“Let me in, Annie,” he’d say to her. “Let me help.” But she seemed no more aware of the reason for her distress than he was, and so he settled for holding her close to him, for trying to still her trembling with his arms.

Then suddenly, she was gone. In the hospital that Christmas night, he’d remembered his promise to her and it had seemed ludicrous to him that she’d asked him to grieve for only one year. He couldn’t imagine ever being interested in another woman. A year seemed no longer than one rotation of the lighthouse beacon.

Until he met Olivia, a woman as unlike Annie as a woman could be. She’s a friend, he told himself now as he coasted gently on the glider. She’s married to another man and carrying that man’s child.

Maybe he should call her earlier in the evening, before he got into bed, the bed that still seemed filled with Annie’s presence. Maybe he shouldn’t call her at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tom Nestor helped Olivia load the bags of magazines and paperbacks into the trunk of her car after her lesson that Saturday. The Manteo Retirement Home wasn’t far from the Battered Women’s Shelter, and since she was volunteering there tonight, she thought it was about time she made good on her promise to get the magazines out of the studio.

“Thanks for doing this,” Tom said.

“I meant to take them long before now,” Olivia said as she got in behind the steering wheel.

“Hey, Olivia,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze through the window. “The panel’s a real peach.”

She smiled at him and then glanced down at the panel she’d finally completed that morning, a geometric blend