Keeper of the Light (12 page)

“All right. Thank you.”

She hesitated a moment before saying good-bye. Once she’d hung up, he squeezed his face into a grimace.
Damn.
What was he supposed to say? She kept setting herself up to be hurt again.

He thought of telling her the truth. It would upset her at first, but then she’d understand. She’d know that what he’d felt for Annie had been no infatuation. It burned him every time he thought of that word coming out of Olivia’s mouth, although it was hardly her fault for thinking that. He had let her believe it.

He had done countless interviews with Annie, dragging them out, putting off the inevitable writing of the article when he would no longer have any legitimate reason to see her. Those interviews had been torture for him. He’d had to keep his distance from her, hanging on every word across the vast plane of a restaurant table, when what he longed to do was touch her cheek or curl a strand of her phenomenal hair around his finger. He knew better than to try to get that close. He could tell by the little light of warning in her eyes to deal with her in a businesslike manner.

He’d taped the interviews, despite her reluctance.
“Promise you’ll interview me as though we’ve never met before, Paul. As though we’re total strangers to each other,”
she’d pleaded, and he had done his utmost to comply. He was afraid to listen to those tapes now, to actually hear her husky voice and her Boston accent and her crazy giggle.

She’d filled the tapes with talk about Alec. Paul hated listening to her talk about him, always with warmth, always a softening in her tone when she mentioned his name. He didn’t need to hear about Alec, he told her. Her husband was not a necessary part of the article. She persisted, though, stubbornly reciting anecdotes of her marriage, drawing the words around herself like armor. He allowed her the armor, the distance. Until the night he could allow it no longer.

On that bitter cold night, five days before Christmas, he drove to her studio. He had not planned it, not in any conscious way, but he knew exactly what he would do. He parked in the little lot and looked up at the studio windows. The lights were on inside, and the colors of the stained glass in the windows were vibrant. He approached the front door, dizzy from the array of multihued designs mapped out on either side of him. Or perhaps from nerves.

Through the front door, he could see Annie leaning over the worktable, her hand moving slowly above a stained glass lampshade. The door was unlocked, and she looked up as he stepped inside. Her mouth was open, her eyes surprised and, he knew, a little frightened. She was alone, at night, in the cozy, colorful warmth of her studio. There was no safe restaurant table here, and she must have known he would not allow her to weave little stories about Alec and her marriage to deter him. He understood the fear in her eyes. He was just not certain if it was him she was afraid of or herself.

“Paul.” She leaned back in her chair, making an effort to smile.

“Keep working,” he said. “I just want to watch.”

She made no move to lift the ball of cotton she was holding. He pulled a second chair close to the end of the table and sat down.

“Go on,” he said.

She dipped the cotton into a bowl of black liquid. Then she carefully smoothed it over the lead veins in the stained glass lampshade. She was wearing green corduroy pants and a heavy, off-white fisherman knit sweater. Her hair fell over her arm, spilling onto the table, onto the glass.

He watched her work for several minutes before he spoke again.

“I love you, Annie,” he said, the words crackling in the silence. She looked up, brushing her hair back over her shoulder. “I know,” she said. She returned to her work but within a minute or two raised her head again. “Maybe you should go, Paul.”

“Do you really want me to?”

She dropped her eyes quickly to the lampshade. Then she set down the ball of cotton and knotted her fingers together on the table. “Paul,” she said, “
please
don’t make this so hard.”

“If you can honestly tell me you want me to go, I will.”

She shut her eyes and he reached over to rest his hand on hers. Her fingers were cold and stiff. “Annie,” he said.

She looked over at him. “I was so grateful to you for the way you handled the interviews,” she said. “For not bringing up the past, for not trying to…take advantage of the situation when I knew that was what you really wanted to do.”

“It was so hard to be with you and not…”

“But you
made
it,” she interrupted, leaning toward him.

“We both did. So why come here now and undo three months of willpower?”

“Because I’m going crazy, Annie,” he said. “You’re all I think about.”

She withdrew her hand from his and lowered it to her lap. “You have a wife to think about,” she said. “And I have a husband.”

Paul shook his head. “I’ve treated Olivia terribly since we’ve been here.”

“You need to put your energy into
her,
not me. Here.” She pulled open a drawer in the worktable and took out a rubber band, which she slipped onto his wrist. “Every time you think of me, do this.” She pulled back hard on the elastic and let it snap against the inside of his wrist. He actually winced at the sting. “You’ll forget about me in no time,” she said.

He smiled at her. “It’s that simple, huh?” He looked down at his wrist, running his fingers over the reddened skin. “Will you wear one too?”

“I don’t have to,” she said. “When I think of you, I remind myself about Alec. My marriage comes first. I’m nearly forty now and my priorities are very clear in my mind. Forget about me, Paul. Walk out that door and forget I exist.”

He stood up. “I won’t ever be able to forget you,” he said. He took off the rubber band and set it on the work table. “And I don’t need this. Thinking about you is already painful enough. But I’ll leave. The last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you.”

He bent over to kiss the top of her head, her hair soft beneath his lips. Then he walked slowly to the door, determined that he would leave without taking one last look at her.

“Paul?”

He turned around. She had stood up. She folded her arms stiffly, tightly, beneath her breasts, and he could almost see the battle going on inside her. “I don’t want you to go,” she said. “Could you just…hold me?”

He walked back to her and pulled her gently into his arms. She fit snugly against him, her hair smelling like sunshine. She sighed, letting her arms circle his back, and he felt a shiver run through her body.

“Oh, God, Paul.”

He raised his hand to her throat. Her pulse was warm and rapid beneath his fingers. “I want to make love to you,” he said.

She drew her head back to look at him, a crease between her brows. “This is a dangerous place to make love,” she said. “There’s glass everywhere. It gets into the carpet. It…”

“Shhh.” He pressed his finger to her lips. “I don’t care.” He leaned forward to kiss her, and he was not surprised when she tipped her head back and opened her mouth for him.

She stepped away from him and reached for the wall switch to turn out the light, but he caught her hand.

“Leave it on,” he said. “I want to see you.”

“This is a glass house, Paul.” She extracted her hand from his.

She was right, of course. On either side of them the glass walls were filled with the black night outside, but everything that went on in here would be visible from the parking lot, filtered through the multicolored images in the glass.

Annie hit the switch and took his hand, suddenly the leader. “Come with me,” she said.

She led him to the far end of the studio, where photographs were displayed on a maze of white walls. She walked among the pictures, turning on the little light above each one to create a soft white glow around herself and Paul. Then she sat down on the floor, her back against the wall.

He was about to drop down beside her when he glanced at the photograph closest to his head and found himself looking directly into the unsmiling eyes of Alec O’Neill. A chill ran up his spine, and he was a bit shaken as he lowered himself next to Annie. But she pulled him toward her, and his anxiety disappeared.

He watched her face as he undressed her. There was a need in her eyes, a need she had masked during the interviews that was open in her now. “I just want you to hold me,” she said, but she did not try to stop him as he unfastened her bra. She rose to her knees to unzip her corduroy pants, and he helped her take them off. There was a softness, a fullness to her body he had not expected, a fullness he wanted to drown in.

He laid her back on the carpet and kissed her again before lowering his head to her breast. She caught his chin, drawing his face up until their eyes met. “Couldn’t you be satisfied just lying here with me?” she asked.

He shook his head slowly, and as he touched her, as he moved his hands over her body, her resistance fell away.

He felt a sort of joy when it was over, when he lay holding her close to him and felt their hearts pounding in harmony. It seemed that they had lain that way for a very long time before he realized she was crying.

“What is it?” he asked, kissing her eyes.

She pulled away from him abruptly, covering her face with her hands. “I’m such a fool,” she said.

“No, Annie, don’t say that. Don’t think it.”

She sat up and drew herself into a corner, grabbing her clothes and holding them in a bundle against her breasts. She sobbed, her face lowered into her sweater, her shoulders tightening up when he tried to touch her. In the white light he could see silver in her hair, dozens of pale strands battling with the red, making her seem even more vulnerable.

He smoothed his hand over her hair. He didn’t know what to say, other than that he loved her, and he said that over and over again while she wept, her face buried in her arms.

“Annie, talk to me,” he pleaded. “Tell me you’re angry with me. Tell me
anything.
”

She didn’t respond, and after a few minutes he began to dress. He stood up, switching off the light above Alec’s picture before lowering himself to her side again. Her crying had stopped, but she didn’t raise her head and an occasional tremor still shook her shoulders.

“Let me help you get dressed,” he said.

She shook her head. “No. Please just go home.”

“I don’t want to leave you like this.”

“Please.”

He stood again and reluctantly walked to the door.

“Paul?”

He looked back at her. She had raised her head and in the dim light he could see the terrible glistening red of her cheeks.

“Can you leave the Outer Banks?” she asked. “Can you move away? Please, Paul, I’m begging you.”

The desperation in her voice made him cringe. He walked back to the maze of pictures and knelt down in front of her, resting his hands on her bare knees. It suddenly felt very cold in the studio, and she didn’t try to stop him as he pulled the fisherman knit sweater from the bundle in her shivering arms. He fit it over her head, and she put her hands into the sleeves he held out for her. Then he lifted her thick hair out of the collar and leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “I would do anything I could for you, Annie,” he said. “But I can’t move away. This is my home too, now.”

Olivia was asleep when he arrived home. He had called her to say he’d be late, not to wait up. He showered in the downstairs bathroom so he wouldn’t wake her, and it was then that he found the slivers of glass. In his knee. His shoulder. His palm.

He went upstairs to the bathroom they shared and picked quietly through Olivia’s side of the medicine cabinet for her tweezers. He sat down on the edge of the tub, struggling to remove the crystal thorns in the waxy light of the bathroom. The shard in his palm came out easily; the one in his knee slightly less so, and the cut bled each time he bent his leg. He would have to bandage it or there would be blood to explain on the sheets in the morning.

The glass in his shoulder was the most difficult to remove, the hardest to reach with the tweezers. When he was finished and in bed, when he was thinking back to the night, he wondered if Annie had them too, those slivers of glass. He hoped not. He could not bear to think of her in pain, or to remember her tears.

What if Alec was still awake when she got home? Maybe he would question her lateness, or catch her struggling to remove bits of glass from her shoulders. What would she tell him? What words would she use to explain away the evidence of her deception?

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

The young man was nervous, as well he should be. Mary could see it in his cautious smile, in the way his eyes refused to rest on her face. He wore round wire-rimmed glasses, and the glass looked very thin, almost as though it offered no correction. As though he wore them for show, to make himself look smarter than he actually was. He tapped the tip of his pen against his briefcase as he launched into an elaborate explanation of what he wanted, and Mary assumed the watery-eyed blank look of the elderly to make him wonder just how much she was following, to make him talk more, to watch him squirm.

She had not immediately known who he was. People change, yes. Plus he mumbled when he introduced himself.
Pawmasell,
he’d said. But now Mary knew. Now she had it all figured out.

“So we want to put together an educational brochure with anecdotes from your years in the lighthouse. You know, how the keeper would spend the day, or anything unusual that might have happened back then.” He looked directly at Mary for the first time. “Does this make sense to you?”

“Yes, Mr. Macelli,” Mary said, clearly startling him.

“Uh.” A grin came quickly to his lips. “I guess you remember me,” he said. “It’s been so long, I figured…”

“I don’t forget people.”

“Well.” He fumbled with the latch on his briefcase. “Do you mind if I record our conversation?” He pulled a notepad and a small black tape recorder from the briefcase. Apparently he did not want to talk about the past, which was fine with Mary.