Keeper of the Light

They had an early dinner, then started the drive back to her car at Rio Beach. They were quiet. Content, he thought. A little tired.

“When are you going back to work, Alec?” Olivia asked when they were a block from the beach.

“Not you, too,” he said.

“Well, it doesn’t seem healthy to take so much time off.”

“That’s because you’re a workaholic.”

“And I need the income.”

He pulled into the little parking lot and turned off the ignition. “Annie had a life insurance policy.” He looked over at her. “It was ridiculous. Three hundred thousand dollars on a woman who earned about fifteen thousand a year and gave most of it away. Or,” he laughed, “spent most of it on insurance premiums, I guess. It was a shock to me. Tom found it when he was cleaning up her stuff at the studio.”

“Why did she do it?”

Alec watched the windsurfers on the sound. “I have two theories,” he said. “Either she knew I’d be so devastated if she died that I wouldn’t be able to work for a long time. Or else, some insurance salesman got to her and she just wanted to make his day. She needed people to like her.” He shook his head. “I think that was why she gave so much of her work away. She never lost that insecurity. She never thought people would care about her just for herself.”

“Well, money’s not the only reason for working,” Olivia said. “You loved treating that horse last night, Alec. You lit up when you were talking about it. Why don’t you go back a day or two a week?”

He hesitated. “It scares me. I’m not in such great shape, though I’m a lot better than I was before you told me about that night in the ER.” He looked at her. Her cheeks were red. The zinc oxide had faded from her nose. She would be hurting tonight. “But it gets stressful at the animal hospital, especially in the summer,” he continued. “Lots of emergencies— Well, look who I’m talking to about emergencies, and I’m just talking about dogs and cats.”

“Yes, but they still suffer. And so do the owners.”

“Right. It never used to bother me, but since Annie…”

“It’s like getting back on a horse, though,” Olivia interrupted him. “You’ve got to do it, and the longer you wait the harder it becomes. After something terrible happens, I sometimes force myself to go into work the next day even if I’m not scheduled. I went in the day after Annie died, even though I didn’t have to.”

He stared at her. “You push yourself too hard, Olivia.”

“Don’t change the subject,” she said. “Just one day a week, okay?”

He smiled. “If you’ll call Paul and try to see him this weekend.”

Paul thought he’d made a mistake in leaving her.

Olivia drove from Rio Beach to the little shop across the parking lot from Annie’s studio, where she bought the Jenny Lind crib she’d had her eye on for weeks. The sales clerk helped her load the box into the trunk of the Volvo, and she drove home with a long-forgotten sense of hope and well-being—and the beginning sting of a fierce sunburn.

She lugged the box into the house and rolled it on its sides through the hall until she reached the little room she would make into a nursery. There, she rested it against the wall, stopping short of taking it apart and setting up the crib. She wouldn’t tempt fate by being overly optimistic.

She would call Paul tonight, ask to see him, talk to him. She was rehearsing the conversation in her mind as she walked out to the mailbox to pick up her mail, and it was there she found the note, scribbled on the back of a used envelope.

“Stopped by on my way to Washington,” Paul had written. “I’ll be up there for a week or so working on a story about oil drilling off the Outer Banks. Call you when I get back.”

She stared at the envelope, at the familiar handwriting. She turned it over, peered inside. Then she balled it up in her fist, crushed it between her palms. She wanted to track him down, call him at his hotel, scream at him. “Didn’t you just tell Alec O’Neill you’d made a mistake?”

But she knew she would do no such thing. Instead, she walked back into the house, where she soaked a few teabags to nurse her burn. Then she called Alec to tell him she’d be happy to accompany him to Norfolk on Saturday.

CHAPTER TWENTY- SIX

Wednesday was Jonathan Cramer’s birthday, and Olivia agreed to take his night shift, hoping it would keep her mind off the amniocentesis scheduled for the following morning. Around six, Alec dropped off a blue folder filled with lighthouse in formation she would need to know for the radio interview on Saturday. The waiting room had been full then, and there was little time to talk as he handed her the folder across the reception desk.

“What time are you done here?” he asked.

“Midnight.” She returned his look of disappointment. They would not be able to talk on the phone tonight.

It was close to eleven when a teenage boy was brought in by his friends. Olivia heard him before she saw him.

“I’m gonna have a fucking heart attack,” he screamed, as Kathy and Lynn wheeled him into one of the treatment rooms. Olivia joined them and began questioning the boy—a good-looking kid with sun-streaked blond hair. He was seventeen, he said, and he had been at a party, drinking a little, when his heart started racing, beating so loudly he couldn’t hear anything else. He reeked of alcohol. His blue eyes were glassy, frightened.

“Start a monitor,” she said to Kathy. Then to the boy, “What did you have besides alcohol?”

“Nothing. Just a couple of beers.”

He was lying. He was too agitated, too wired, his palpitations too wild. “I know you had something else. I need