“So,” he said. “Tell me how you came to be known as the Angel of the Light.”

“Well.” Mary looked out at the street. “I guess you could say I had a way with people, and living out at Kiss River, you got real hungry for company. So any time I’d hear someone in the village was sick, I’d take them food and make sure they had whatever it was they needed. Sometimes I’d carry them across the sound to the doctor in Deweytown in our little boat. I guess I just got a reputation for helping people out.”

Mary shifted in the rocker. It had bothered her that people thought she was so good. They hadn’t known her, really.

“Caleb and I made a good team,” she continued, looking once again at Paul. “We were both hard workers, and we both loved the lighthouse. Anytime I’d see a ship, I’d go out on the gallery and wave. So I guess I got myself a reputation that way, too. Sailors would ask each other who that lady on the lighthouse was, and they’d say, why, that’s Mary Poor, who’s always friendly, always doing a good turn for someone. Sailors watched for me then, hoping I’d be out waving when they went by.”

She looked toward the harbor and closed her eyes to block out the view of the boats, imagining in their place the towering white spire of the lighthouse.

“I could cook, too.” She opened her eyes again and smiled. “I was a bit famous for my persimmon cakes and puddings. I believe you’ve had a taste of one of my persimmon cakes, haven’t you?”

“Uh.” Paul dropped his pen, bent over to pick it up. “I don’t recall,” he said, straightening up again.

“Too bad I couldn’t make one right now,” Mary said, “but they don’t allow us to cook. Or drink. Or smoke. You have a cigarette with you today?”

“Sorry, no. I don’t smoke.” He shifted in the rocker and pushed the recorder a little closer to Mary. “Tell me about the work you did with the Life Saving Service.”

Mary felt herself color and hoped that Paul Macelli did not notice. “Well, I guess that’s another reason they got to calling me the Angel. A more important reason, really.” She sat up taller in the chair, straightening her spine. “I was very strong, you see. I could swim better than most men. I’d be out in the ocean nearly every day, swimming back and forth, back and forth. My arms were solid as brick, and my legs too, from climbing up to the top of the tower.” Mary smiled to herself. “I had a dream of working with the Life Saving Service, you see. We knew a lot of the men who worked over at the station and I’d ask to go out with them when they were rescuing someone. Of course they just laughed at me. But in 1927, I finally got my chance. Caleb and I were down a mile or so on the beach because we heard there was a boat stranded on the bar. When we got there, the boys from the Life Saving Station had just sent out their power boat to try to save the crew. It was real squally that day, and the power boat got hit straight on by a big breaker and started going to pieces. There were just a few of the men left on the beach with their old surfboat. They quick got in and headed out to sea, and I saw my chance.” Mary smiled to herself. “I just jumped in with them, in my skirt and all. They were too shorthanded and too shocked to stop and tell me to get out. I’ll tell you, those oars felt right natural to me, and we managed to load the fellas from the power boat into the surfboat without a hitch. I was stiff in the shoulders for a few days, but I didn’t care. After that, the Life Saving crew sometimes called on me—unofficially, of course—when they needed an extra pair of hands.”

Mary rested her head against the back of the rocker. All this talking was wearing on her.

“Would you like to stop for today?” Paul asked.

Mary shook her head. “I’m not finished just yet,” she said. There was one last story she needed to tell—and a story it was, more fiction than fact. She’d told it this way for so long now, she could hardly remember the truth anymore. “You see, in the end it was my courage—or maybe my foolhardiness—that cost me my husband. In July of 1964, I was up in the tower when I spotted a man swimming off Kiss River and it looked like he was in trouble. I ran down to the beach and went in after him. He was unconscious when I got to him and he was just too heavy for me and I started getting crampy and going under. Caleb somehow caught sight of us and he came out to the beach and jumped in after the both of us. He managed to get us out, too, but it was all too much for him. He was sixty-four years old. His heart stopped right there and he fell out on the sand.”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. “That’s a tragic way to lose someone.”

Mary stared into space for a moment. “Yes, it was,” she said finally. She raised her hands and dropped them on her thighs. “Well, that’s all for today, I think.”

“Of course.” Paul turned off his recorder and stood up. “Thanks again for your help,” he said.

Mary watched him walk down the sidewalk to his car. The stories had tired her, made her remember things about herself she did not like to remember. And they made her remember a night long ago when she’d told those 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.

“What do you mean?”

Mary shook her head. “Even at sixty-three, my head was still full of that schoolgirl silliness. No one knows this—the truth of how Caleb died, I mean. Can you keep it here in this room?”

Annie nodded.

“Well, there was a fisherman who’d taken a shine to me when I was in my thirties, and we talked off and on over the years, teasing each other about how one day we’d do more than just talk. Finally he persuaded me. He told me I wasn’t getting any younger, and I thought to myself. He’s right. It’s got to be now or never. We planned to meet one evening when Caleb was away for the night. Only Caleb didn’t go. So when I went out to the beach, it was to tell Chester it was off for that night. He didn’t believe me, I guess. Thought I was weaseling out of it. So he started kissing me right there on the beach, and I was fighting him, afraid Caleb might be up in the tower. And that’s just where he was. He saw it all and thought Chester was attacking me. He flew down those stairs and out to the beach and started sparring with Chester. Two gray-haired old men.” She shook her head. “They ran into the water, pounding each other in the waves. Caleb was just too old for that. They both were really, two old coots going at it like a couple of wild Indians. By the time Caleb drug himself out of the water, he couldn’t get his breath and he just fell dead at my feet.” Mary winced, recalling her initial disbelief that Caleb was dead, and, later, her self-loathing.