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?



CHAPTER TWELVE


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.

“Not at all, not at all,” she said. She had developed this habit of repeating things, which seemed to irritate no one more than it did herself.

Paul set the recorder on the broad flat arm of Mary’s rocker, and his fingers shook as he turned it on. “Just begin anywhere,” he said.

Mary rested her hands in the lap of her cotton dress and crossed her sneakered feet one over the other. She looked toward the waterfront, where the boats glistened in the sun. How Caleb would have loved this—this invitation to speak for as long as he chose about Kiss River! He would have known right where to begin his story. But Mary had some uncertainty these days about what came when, what was truth and what was legend. It didn’t matter, though. No one would know.

She leaned back in the rocker and closed her eyes for a few seconds, listening to the faint hum of the recorder as it took in her silence. Then she opened her eyes and began to speak.

“The Kiss River Lighthouse was illuminated for the first time the night my husband Caleb’s father was born,” she said. “He came into the world in the downstairs bedroom of the keeper’s house. Caleb’s grandfather was the first keeper, and he and his wife had been in the house just a week when my father-in-law made his appearance—several weeks early, I should add. Everybody said it was the light that did it, that brought on his mother’s labor. The midwife timed her contractions by the rotation of the beacon. That was September thirtieth, 1874. Twenty-seven years later, in 1901, Caleb himself was born in the very same room, right about the same time of night, brought into the world by the same midwife, who they say was old as the stars by then.”

Mary was quiet for a moment. She looked toward the waterfront again and suddenly felt the limitations of the view, as she had when she first moved here. She missed the panorama from the tower and the endless expanse of sea rolled out beneath her.

“It’s inborn, Caleb used to say.” Mary nodded to herself. “All of it. Inborn.”

“What is?” Paul asked.

Mary looked at him. His pupils were mere specks in the center of his dust-colored eyes. “When you’re born under the light, you’re born with a need to protect people from the sea and the storms. From their own mistakes in navigation. Your first breath is filled with the sea; your first vision is a pure white light. And you know right from the start what your life work is—no one has to tell you. That light must never go out and so everything you do, day and night, is toward that end.” Mary paused a minute, cleared her throat. “It’s the same when you marry into it,” she said. “I knew from the day I first set foot in Kiss River that I would be Caleb’s partner in that task.

“You can’t grow up the son and grandson of a lighthouse keeper and not respect the sea, Caleb used to say. It’s beautiful and it’s dangerous, all at once, like some women.” Mary looked again at Paul Macelli, who began writing feverishly on his notepad even though the recorder was picking up every word. His fingers were white from squeezing the pen, and in spite of herself, she felt some sympathy for him.

She continued quickly. “There was supposed to be a minimum of two keepers at Kiss River. The assistant keepers came and went, but Caleb’s family never left. It was home to all of us.”

She talked about what it had been like for Caleb growing up at Kiss River, how his mother had carried him across the sound in a boat every morning so he would attend school in Deweytown. “That’s where Caleb and I met,” Mary said. “We were married in 1923, and that’s when I became the assistant keeper. But I’m getting ahead of myself, here.”

Her mouth was dry. She would have liked something to drink. A beer would be just right, but alcohol was taboo here at the home. She sighed, drawing her mind back to her visitor.

“So how did the keeper spend the day, you ask? Climbing stairs, that’s how.” Mary smiled to herself. “I still climb those steps in my sleep, all two hundred and seventy of them, and when I wake up in the morning my legs ache and I could swear the smell of kerosene is on my pillow. I guess you could say it was a monotonous life, but looking back it was anything but. It’s the adventures that stand out. The storms. The wrecks that washed up on the beach. How about the night the mosquitoes put the light out? Would you like to hear about that?”

“I’d like to hear anything you’re willing to tell me.”

“You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?”

“Uh, no.” He looked surprised. “Sorry.”

Mary shook her head in disappointment and then told him about the summer after she and Caleb were married, how the mosquitoes were as big as mayflies and how they were drawn to the light to such an extent that it could barely be seen from the sea. She told him about the time when Caleb was just ten years old and the clockworks that turned the lens failed. His father had broken his leg and couldn’t climb the steps to the lantern room, and they were between assistant keepers, so Caleb and his mother took turns for two entire nights, cranking the lens at the proper speed so that ships out at sea would know which light they were seeing and would not be driven off course. Mary could still remember worrying when Caleb did not show up for school those few days. When he finally made it in, he could hardly move from the stiffness in his arms, and he said his mother cried all night long from the pain in her shoulders. It was only the physical labor that was difficult, he claimed in later years. The timing of the rotations had posed no challenge, because their bodies had long existed in perfect harmony with the rhythm of the light.

Mary told him about the first wreck Caleb ever remembered being witness to. She could tell the story easily, she’d heard it so often from her husband. The wreck occurred one morning in 1907 when the four-masted schooner, the Agnes Lowrie, stranded on a bar off the coast of Kiss River. “She’d been sitting there quite a while by the time Caleb and his father got to her, along with the men from the lifesaving station,” Mary said. “They could see the people on the deck, waving at them, thinking they were finally about to be rescued. But everything went wrong.” She described the futile attempts to reach the schooner with the breeches buoy, dragging the story out, enjoying herself. “As she broke apart, people started jumping in the water, swimming toward the beach for all they were worth, but they didn’t know how mean the sea could be. By the time they got close to Caleb and the others, they were floating dead men.” Mary shuddered, remembering how Caleb’s voice had grown hushed when he recounted that tale.

Someone inside the retirement home turned on the television. It blasted loudly onto the porch for a few seconds before someone else turned it down.

“Well,” Mary said, “Caleb’s father died right before we got married, and seeing as how Caleb had plenty of experience, he was made the new keeper. He had to apply for it. They didn’t just pass the job on down, father to son, but it was no problem for him to get it. He was without an assistant for a few weeks before we got married, so it was just him and his crippled mother at the station one night when he was struck by a bolt of lightning.”