Keeper of the Light

same stories to Annie.

She’d known Annie for only a few months then, but already she’d felt a comfort with her young friend she’d never known with another soul, woman or man. She had never had the luxury of a close woman friend, and despite the difference in their ages, she knew she could confide in Annie. She could tell Annie the truth.

It was on a cold evening in January, one of many evenings Annie had spent with her back then. Alec was struggling to make a go of a veterinary practice, but the Outer Banks were so sparsely populated that he spent most of his time treating farm animals on the mainland. He was gone often in the evenings, pulling calves, or tending to colicky horses, leaving Annie with entirely too much time on her hands.

She had Clay with her, as she often did, on that night in January. Clay would totter around the keeper’s house, talking gibberish and getting into things. Finally, Annie would lay him down in the small upstairs bedroom, setting pillows at the edge of the bed so he couldn’t roll out. She’d sing to him in that soft, dusky voice that made Mary’s heart ache as she listened to her from the chair by the fire. She could picture the room—the room that had been Caleb’s as a child—filling with light every few seconds. Annie might pull the shades and draw the curtains, but the light would still find cracks to pass through, and Clay would slip under its hypnotic spell. He would be asleep quickly, more quickly than he ever fell asleep at home.

After a bit, Annie would come downstairs, where Mary had the fire raging and the brandy poured. For the first time in a decade, she had a bond with another human being.

Most nights were filled with Annie’s chatter, and Mary loved listening to her, to the way she mangled words with her accent. She spoke about Alec, whom she adored, or about Clay, or the stained glass. Sometimes she spoke of her parents, whom she had not seen since meeting her husband. Her phone calls to them were not returned, she said; the letters she wrote them were sent back unopened. Once, she and the baby flew to Boston, thinking her parents surely wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to see their only grandchild. But she was turned away at their front door by a maid who told her she was no longer welcome in her parents’ home.

She worried about Alec, driving so much in foul weather, working outdoors with huge animals. His hands were chapped and raw most of the time, she said, and once his arm had been broken by the ferocious contractions of a cow in labor. She’d gone with him a few times, but he’d said it was no place for her—and certainly no place for Clay—out in the middle of nowhere with the wind tearing at their clothes and stinging their eyes. So she ended up with Mary at the keeper’s house more often than not.

As Mary felt the brandy warm her on this particular night in January, it was her voice, not Annie’s, that echoed softly in the living room of the house. The fire crackled and spit, and the ocean roared not far from where they sat, but Mary’s voice was calm and steady. She could not have said why she poured it all out to Annie that night, that secret side of her self she had never bared to a soul, except that with Annie’s silence, her loving gaze, she spurred her on.

Mary told her the same tales she’d told Paul Macelli—how she had come to be known as the Angel of the Light through her acts of kindness and caring.

“You remind me of myself in that way, Annie,” she said. “You have such a good heart. You go out of your way for folks, with never a thought for yourself.” She sipped her brandy, feeding herself courage. “But that’s where the comparison ends. You’re really a far better person than I ever was. A far better woman.”

Annie looked over at Mary, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the fire. “Why do you say that?”

Mary shrugged as though what she had to say next was easy for her. Insignificant. “I had another side of me,” she said, “a side I never let anyone see.” She looked hard into Annie’s eyes. “You see, my husband was the best husband a woman could ask for. Patient and kind and strong. But it never felt like enough for me. Maybe it was the isolation. I don’t know. But I wanted to…” She pursed her lips, staring into the orange flames in the fireplace. “I wanted to have other men,” she finished.

“Oh,” said Annie. “And so…did you?”

“Only in my imagination.” Mary shut her eyes. “It was the strongest feeling. The strongest yearning. I’m ashamed to talk about it.”

“You don’t need to be ashamed. Lots of women think about…”

Mary brushed away whatever Annie was about to say with a wave of her hand. “Not the way I did. I’d lie awake at night, imagining being with other men I knew. I’d be with Caleb…lying with Caleb…and I’d imagine he was someone else. Sometimes I couldn’t do my work. I’d go up in the tower to polish the lens, and instead I’d sit on the gallery and daydream. I’d wave to the sailors and imagine them returning at night, coming up on the beach to look for me. I used to think about hanging a red cloth from the gallery to let them know when Caleb was gone, when I would be…available. Once I went so far as to buy the cloth.”

Mary felt the color in her cheeks. How foolish she must seem, a seventy-three-year-old woman talking this way.

“But you never hung the cloth?” Annie prodded.

“No.”

“It must have hurt,” Annie said, “wanting to do something so badly, but thinking that you couldn’t.”

Mary smiled. Annie did understand. “That was the real reason I wanted to work with the Life Saving crew,” she said, “so I could be around the men, so I could feel the excitement of what might happen. But I’d come to my senses every time I came close to going through with it. What right did I have to be so dissatisfied, I’d ask myself? To want more than I had?”

Mary tapped her fingertips against the glass. She would have liked a cigarette, but she knew it distressed Annie when she smoked.

“Sometimes I’d force myself to stop thinking about other men, but it felt like I was cutting off a leg or an arm, it was so much a part of me. We’d go to church and even there I couldn’t stop myself from imagining. People would say that Caleb wasn’t good enough for me. Some of them would ask me what I saw in him, me being such a fine woman—so they thought—and Caleb just a plain man, solid and steady.” She shook her head. “He was a thousand times better than I was.”

Annie leaned forward in her chair, the fire throwing gold light into her long red hair. “You are far too hard on your self, Mary.”

Mary took a full swallow of the brandy, thick as honey as it warmed her throat. She looked up at Annie. “It was my nonsense that killed Caleb,” she said.