Keeper of the Light

“Except,” she said, “there’s really nothing to celebrate yet.” Mike had warned her not to get her hopes up, and already she was picturing taking his place.

“Sure there is.” Alec sounded unusually cheerful. “More than you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

He picked her up at the emergency room after her shift and drove her to a small restaurant she’d never even noticed before. It was tucked between a few acres of amusement park rides on one side and a trailer park on the other, but inside it was cozy and dark. The candlelit tables were draped in mauve tablecloths, and the waiter laid her napkin across her lap as she sat down. The setting was undeniably romantic.

They ordered their meals, Alec turning down wine out of obvious deference to her condition. Olivia looked at him across the table as the waiter walked away. “So,” she said, “what did you mean there’s more to celebrate than I know about?”

He lowered his own napkin to his lap. “I went in to work today,” he said, grinning.

“Oh, Alec, really? How was it?”

“It was great till the animals started showing up.”

She gave him a sympathetic smile before she realized he was joking.

“It was actually painless,” he said. “Thanks for persuading me. I’m going to work three days a week for now.”

“You look as though it agrees with you,” she said. He had not stopped smiling since they sat down, and she could barely remember the haggard look he’d worn that first day she’d met him in the studio.

They filled their plates at the salad bar. “You must have had a sonogram with the amnio yesterday, huh?” Alec asked as they walked back to their table.

“Right.”

“No twins?”

She took her seat again. “Just one unbelievably tiny fetus,” she said. “Sex indeterminate.”

“What was it like being a twin?” Alec cut a cherry tomato neatly in half. “You must have been very close to your brother.”

“When we were kids, yes, we were close, but probably not the way you would imagine.” She sipped her water, set the glass down again. “I was born first, but my mother’d had no prenatal care and the midwife wasn’t prepared for twins. The cord was wrapped around Clint’s neck for quite a while before she even realized he was there. He suffered some brain damage.”

“Oh, no.”

“It wasn’t severe. He was mildly retarded, but he also had a wealth of physical problems.” She pictured her brother as a child, his skin so white, so translucent that the veins were clearly visible at his temples. “He was always small for his age and he was asthmatic. Quite frail. So I didn’t have the usual twin experience. I had to look out for him.”

She had sat up with Clint during his middle-of-the-night asthma attacks. She’d beaten up kids who made fun of him. She’d even done his homework for him, until one of her teachers told her she couldn’t protect Clint from everything. You have to look out for yourself, Livvie, she’d said, and Olivia had finally done exactly that. Once she left home, she neatly, permanently cut Clint out of her life. In the early years of her marriage, Paul had encouraged her to get in touch with Clint, but even with Paul’s support she had not been able to make the phone call or write the letter that would have brought her brother back into her world.

“How did he die?” Alec asked.

“Respiratory problems and something with his liver. My mother died a few years after I moved out, and Clint and my older brother, Avery, stayed on in the house in the Pine Barrens.” Clint had idolized Avery, but Avery had been a dangerous boy to look up to.

The waiter set their meals in front of them, and Olivia took a bite of tender, perfectly cooked salmon.

“Was it growing up with Clint that made you want to be a doctor?” Alec asked.

Olivia shook her head. “I wasn’t even a pre-med major when I started college. I was going to Penn State, and I was living with a woman who was a doctor. She was the sister of…” How much should she say? “This is confusing. She was the sister of a teacher I had in high school, the teacher I moved in with after I left home.” She took another bite of her salmon, chewing slowly, before she continued. “I’ve always had a tendency to be very influenced by the women around me. My mother wasn’t much of a role model, so I grew up a little unsure of myself as a female. My brothers were my strongest influence when I was young. I could beat up nearly anyone on the playground by the time I was twelve.” She smiled. “But when I became a teenager I realized that wasn’t appropriate behavior for a girl, so I started looking to my teacher for clues to how a woman should act. I started to…emulate her, and it became a pattern. When I lived with her sister while I was at college, I began modeling myself after her. That’s why medicine started to look so appealing.”

“Good thing she wasn’t a trash collector.”

Olivia laughed.

They ate in a comfortable silence for a few minutes before Alec began talking about Lacey and Clay. Olivia thought of Lacey’s tough-looking appearance in the emergency room a few nights earlier. Alec had his hands full with her.

“Do they have grandparents?” she asked suddenly, wondering if he was getting any help from the rest of his family. “Are your parents still alive?”

“No. They died a long time ago, before the kids were born.”