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CHAPTER FOUR

Olivia was obsessed with Annie Chase O’Neill. It was getting worse instead of better, and now as she sat in her living room watching Paul and the tanned young boy he’d hired carry boxes and furniture out to the rented U-Haul, she felt the obsession crystallize inside her.

She hadn’t wanted to be here when Paul moved his things out. She hadn’t expected him to do it this soon, this abruptly, but he’d called early this morning to say he had the truck, did she mind? She said no, because she wanted to see him. She would take any opportunity to see him, even though every meeting left her bruised. A little more than five months had passed since he walked out, yet she still ached at the sight of him. Even now that he’d met with a lawyer and signed a long-term lease on a cottage in South Nags Head, she still clung to the hope that he would take a good look at her and realize his mistake.

He stopped now in the arched doorway between the living room and dining room, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his khaki shorts to wipe his forehead.

“Are you sure about the dining room set?” he asked.

He’d taken his shirt off sometime in the last hour and his skin glistened. His dark blond hair was damp and pushed back from his forehead, and his glasses caught the light from the windows behind her head. She felt a futile wave of desire, and looked past him into the dining room.

“It’s yours,” she said, holding a finger to mark her place in the journal on her lap. “It’s been in your family for years.”

“But I know you love it.”

He was not without guilt, she thought.

“It should stay in your family.”

He looked at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry, Liv.”

She’d heard those words from him so often these past few months they no longer had any meaning. She watched him lift the two chairs from one side of the table and head toward the door.

She sat glued to the sofa, afraid to see the rest of the house and the gaps he had left her. Once he and the boy were gone she would brace herself and walk through. Slowly. It would be good for her. Maybe reality would sink in. Maybe she would stop hoping.

Paul walked back into the house, into the dining room. Olivia rose and stood in the arched doorway as he and the boy turned the table upside down and unbolted the legs. When the last screw was removed, Paul stood up to look at her. He adjusted his gold wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and gave her a quick grin that meant nothing. A nervous gesture. He still had that slightly gawky, appealingly academic look that had attracted her ten years earlier, when he worked at the Washington Post and she was a resident at Washington General. She thought now of how quickly she could change this scene. With just a few words she could have him back. She let the fantasy unfold in her mind. “I’m pregnant,” she would say, and he’d drop the table leg and stare at her. “My God, Liv, why didn’t you tell me?” Maybe the news would snap him out of the crazy stupor he’d been mired in all these months. But she would say nothing. She didn’t want the baby to be his reason for coming home. If he came back to her it would have to be because he still loved her. She could accept nothing less.

She poured herself a glass of ginger ale and took her seat again in the living room while they carried the table out to the truck. She listened to Paul’s voice rising up from the driveway and through the open front door as he told the boy to get himself some lunch. “I’ll meet you at the new house at two,” Paul said. Then he came back into the house, walking slowly through the kitchen, the study, the bedrooms, to see if there was anything else he could take from her. When he was finished, he sat down in the rattan chair on the opposite side of the living room from Olivia. He was holding Sweet Arrival, the slim volume of poetry he’d published a few years earlier, and one of the copies of the book they’d written together, The Wreck of the Eastern Spirit, and he rested them in his lap.

“So,” he said. “How have you been?”

She sipped her ginger ale. “Busy.”

“What else is new?” His voice bit her with its sarcasm, but then he softened. “That’s good, though, I guess. Good to keep yourself occupied.”

“I’ve started doing some volunteer work at the Battered Women’s Shelter.” She watched his face closely. The change in his features was abrupt. The color left his cheeks and his eyes widened behind his glasses. He leaned forward.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “To fill the time. I work there a couple of evenings a week. They really need the help. Infections pass like wildfire through a place like that.” It had been hard at first, working there. Everyone spoke of Annie in the same reverent tone Paul had used. Her photographs adorned the walls, and her stained glass seemed to fill every window, bathing the broken women and restless children with color. “It’s a rough place, Liv.”

She laughed. “I used to work in D.C., remember?” “You can’t predict what’ll happen in a place like that.” “It’s fine.”

He sat back, letting out a sigh. Olivia knew he had spent the last few weeks covering Zachary Pointer’s trial. She had not read the articles he’d written. She didn’t want to know how he would allude to Annie, didn’t want to read of his delight in seeing Pointer locked up for life.

“Look,” Paul said to her now. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time. Don’t get mad, okay? I mean, whatever your answer is, I won’t hold it against you. I know you’re human.” That quick, nervous grin again. He fanned absently through the pages of Sweet Arrival, while she waited for him to speak again. “When you realized it was Annie in the emergency room that night—did that affect how you treated her?” he asked. “I mean, did you try as hard to save her as you would have if she were just some …” He must have seen the look on her face, because the words froze on his lips.

Olivia tightened her fingers around the glass of ginger ale. She stood up. “You bastard.”

He set the books on the end table and walked toward her, rested his hand on her elbow. “I’m sorry, Liv. That was out of line. It’s just that … I’ve always wondered. I mean, if it had been me in your position, I don’t know if I could have … “

She jerked her arm away from him. “You’d better go, Paul.”

He walked back to the end table, not looking at her, not speaking to her, and she watched as he gathered his things together and left the house. When he was gone, she sat down again, her legs too weak to carry her through the house. How far they were from a reconciliation if he could think that of her. Hadn’t she wondered about it herself, though? In her bleakest moments, hadn’t she asked herself the same question? She knew the answer. She had tried—with every ounce of strength in her—to save Annie O’Neill’s life. That night had been the hardest she’d ever endured in an emergency room and she was certain she had done her best, although the irony of the situation had not been lost on her for a moment. She had, quite literally, held the life of the woman her husband loved in her hands.

Paul had not hidden his infatuation with Annie from her, and at first that had made Olivia feel safe. If Annie had been a threat, she thought, he would never have been so open about his feelings. It started with the spread he did on her in Seascape. He spoke admiringly of her, but the admiration quickly turned to adulation. It was like a sickness in him. It was one-sided, he assured her—Annie barely knew he was alive. Yet he could speak of nothing else. Olivia heard lengthy descriptions of Annie’s physical beauty, limitless generosity, charming quirkiness, boundless energy and extraordinary artistic talent. She listened, feigned interest. It was a phase, she told herself. It would pass. When it didn’t, she carefully, tactfully suggested he was going a little overboard. No, he said. She didn’t understand.

It wasn’t until Paul mentioned Annie’s two children that Olivia began to feel truly threatened. Paul was one of six children in a closely knit family. He was hungry for a family of his own, and all the medical tests had pointed the finger at Olivia as the reason they had none. She’d finally had surgery this past fall to improve her chance of conceiving, but by then it was too late. Even at the hospital, while holding Olivia’s hand after the operation, Paul spoke of Annie. She had once donated her bone marrow, Paul said. “Can you imagine that? Undergoing surgery to save the life of a total stranger?”

“Yes, Paul, you’ve convinced me.” Olivia spoke in anger for the first time. “She’s a saint.”

After that, he stopped talking to her about Annie, which worried Olivia even more because she knew by his brooding silence that Annie was still much on his mind. He was restless in his sleep. Losing weight. At the breakfast table he pushed his food from one side of the plate to the other. He lost track of their conversations, misplaced his car keys, his wallet. When they made love—their futile attempts at conception—his fingertips felt as dry as ash on her skin, and no matter how close their bodies were she felt the gulf between them that she couldn’t narrow with her words or her touch.

She had asked him outright if he and Annie were lovers, and he hadn’t bothered to mask his disappointment when he told her they were not. “She’s completely in love with her husband and committed to her marriage,” he’d said gloomily, in a way that let Olivia know he no longer felt any such commitment himself. Obviously, the platonic nature of his relationship with Annie had been dictated by Annie herself and not by Paul.

After walking out on her the night Annie died, Paul had taken an apartment close to his office. He’d written her a long letter, filled with his apology and confusion. He knew he couldn’t possibly have Annie now, he wrote, but knowing her made him realize what he was missing with Olivia. Olivia’s self-esteem, which had taken a lifetime to construct from the scrappiest raw materials, disintegrated in the few minutes it took her to read his words.

She saw him from time to time over the next few months when he needed things from the house. Clothes. Tools. The computer. She watched his hands as he folded, lifted, packed. She missed his touch—she’d started getting massages once a week just to feel another human being’s hands on her skin. Paul was no longer cool when he spoke to her, and there was occasionally a smile in his eyes when he saw her. She clung to the hope that the smile meant there was something left between them, something she could build on, but he never gave her the chance. He never stayed in the house longer than he had to, except for that one night in April when she’d shamelessly begged him to stay and he relented, only to kill her with the regret she saw later in his eyes.

What had become of the man she’d married, the man who had written an entire volume of poetry about her, who had helped her put her past aside and made her feel safe for the first time in her life? Who made love to her as though she were the only woman he could ever imagine loving? The man who had not yet met Annie O’Neill. She wanted him back. She needed him back. Olivia stood now at her living room window, the room behind her taunting her with new empty spaces to fill, as she watched the U-Haul disappear behind a dune. Out of the hundreds of times they’d made love, why had the forces of nature picked that particular night to leave her pregnant?

She felt a sudden determination replace her dejection. Like the room behind her, she had empty places to fill, and she would fill them with the qualities that had drawn her husband to Annie. But first she would need to learn what they were, and as her impulsive decision to work at the shelter had shown her, she would do whatever it took to find out. She had to admit the truth to herself: Paul’s obsession with Annie had become her own.

CHAPTER FIVE

Alec woke up with Annie’s old green sweatshirt beneath his cheek. He’d taken to sleeping with it, a practice which seemed absurd to him during daylight hours but to which he surrendered at night. The sweatshirt was little more than a rag Annie used to throw on for her early morning runs. When he’d come home from the emergency room that Christmas night, he’d found it lying on her side of the four-poster bed, a crumpled patch of green on the old, faded double wedding ring quilt. He’d slept with it that night, except that, of course, he hadn’t slept at all.

He’d given all her other clothes away after offering them to Lacey, who’d cringed at the thought of wearing them. The sweatshirt, though, he couldn’t part with. He hadn’t washed it and surely after all these months it had taken on more his scent than hers, but it comforted him all the same.

He had a Save the Lighthouse Committee meeting this morning, and he shaved for the occasion, quickly, avoiding a long look in the bathroom mirror. He did not like to see the toll these last few months had taken on his face.

Clay and Lacey were already at the breakfast table when he came downstairs. They were arguing, which was typical of them lately, but they fell silent when he walked into the room.

“Morning,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“Morning, Dad,” Clay said, while Lacey mumbled something under her breath.

Tripod walked over to Alec with his jaunty, three-legged gait, and Alec bent low to scratch the German shepherd’s head. “Anybody feed the animals?” he asked.

“Mmm,” Lacey said, and he took her reply to mean yes.

Alec poured himself a bowl of raisin bran, picked up a stack of photographs from the counter, and took his seat at the table. He looked through the pictures while he ate, holding them in one of the few patches of clear light that flowed through the kitchen windows. Annie’s stained glass colored nearly all the light in the room, splashing greens and blues and reds against the white cupboards and countertops.

Alec studied the photograph he’d taken from the base of the lighthouse, looking up at the black iron gallery. “Your pictures are getting stranger and stranger, Alec,” Tom Nestor had told him when Alec stopped by Annie’s old studio to use the darkroom. Alec propped the picture up against his coffee cup as he dipped his spoon into the raisin bran. It was a weird picture. He liked it.

“Dad?” Lacey asked.

“Hmm?” He turned the photograph on its side to see how it looked from that angle.

“Miss Green is going to call you this morning.”

“Who’s Miss Green?” He raised his head to look at his daughter and she quickly dropped her gaze to her cereal bowl. Why did she do that? “Lace? Look at me.”

She raised her eyes, dark blue and wide like her mother’s, and he had to struggle not to look away himself.

“Who’s Miss Green?” he repeated his question.

“My counselor at school.”

He frowned. “Are you having problems?”

Lacey shrugged and looked down at her bowl again. She played with her spoon, her fingertips stubby and sore-looking. She’d always bitten her nails, but this raw look, this biting them down to the quick, was new. “She’s on my case about my grades.”

Clay laughed. “What do you expect, O’Neill? You haven’t opened a book all semester.”

Alec set a quieting hand on Clay’s arm. “I thought you were getting all A’s, Lace.”

“Not this year.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner so I could have helped you?”

She shrugged again, a little spasm of her slender shoulders. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Bother me.” He felt his face cloud over. “You’re my daughter, Lacey.”

The phone rang on the wall behind him.

“That’s probably her,” Lacey said. Her face had gone white beneath her freckles.

“You’re in deep shit now, O’Neill,” Clay said as Alec stood up to answer the phone.

“Dr. O’Neill?” the woman said, her tone formal, removed.

“Yes.”

“This is Janet Green, Lacey’s counselor.”

He had an immediate image of her: dark hair sprayed into place, too-pink lipstick, a smile wide and false. Someone too cold, too rigid to be working with teenagers.

“Lacey mentioned you’d be calling.” Lacey had certainly waited until the last minute. He watched his daughter pick at her raisin bran, her head bowed, her long red hair falling like curtains on either side of the bowl.

“I live near you,” Janet Green continued. “I’d like to stop by this afternoon and talk with you about Lacey. Save you a trip in.”

Alec looked around him. Last night’s dishes, streaked red with tomato sauce, cluttered the counter next to the sink. The spaghetti pot was still on the stove, one long strand of spaghetti stuck to its side in the shape of a question mark. Pieces of mail and old newspapers littered the countertops, and his pictures of the lighthouse were strewn everywhere. “Let’s just talk on the phone,” he said. “Well, did she tell you why I want to see you?” “She said her grades aren’t very good.” “No, they’re not. She’s really plummeted, I’m afraid. She has nothing above a C and she’s failing biology and algebra.”

“Failing?” He shot Lacey a look. She leaped from her chair as though he’d touched her with a live wire, swung her book bag from the counter to her shoulder, and flew out the door. He lowered the receiver to his chest. “Lace!” he called after her, but he saw the red blur of her hair as she ran past the kitchen window and out to the street. Alec lifted the phone back to his ear. “She took off,” he said.

“Well, I know she’s upset. She’ll have to take biology and algebra in summer school if she wants to pass the year.”

Alec shook his head. “I don’t get it. She’s always been a straight-A student. Shouldn’t I have known about this sooner? What about her last report card? I would have noticed if she was slipping.” “Straight C’s.”

He frowned into the phone. “She must not have shown it to me. That’s so unlike her.” He’d never seen a C out of either of his children. For that matter, he’d never seen a B.

“Your son’s kept up with things quite well despite losing his mother, hasn’t he? I hear he’s going to be class valedictorian.”

“Yes.” Alec sat down again at the table, suddenly exhausted. If it were not for the lighthouse meeting, he would go back to bed.

“And he’s going to Duke next year?”

“Yes.” He watched his son get up from the table. Clay took a peach from the fruit bowl and waved as he walked out the door.

“I think Lacey’s a little concerned about what that’ll be like, having her brother gone, just the two of you in the house.”

Alec frowned again. “Did she say that?”

“It’s just a feeling I got. She seems to have had a very difficult time adjusting to her mother’s death.”

“I—well, I guess if her grades are down …” She was failing. He’d had no idea. “I haven’t picked up on anything unusual.” He hadn’t looked for anything. He’d let his children fend for themselves these past few months.

“You’re a veterinarian, right, Dr. O’Neill?”

“Yes.”

“Lacey said you’re not working right now.”

He wanted to tell her it was none of her business, but he held his tongue for Lacey’s sake. “I’ve taken some time off.” He’d thought he’d take a few weeks off after Annie died. The weeks turned into months, the months accumulated at breakneck speed, and he still had no intention of returning to work.

“I see,” Janet Green said, her voice dropping a degree or two to the level of pure condescension. “By the way, are you aware Lacey’s had two detentions in the last few months for smoking on school grounds?”

He started to tell her that Lacey didn’t smoke, but obviously this woman knew his daughter better than he did. “No, I didn’t know that,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”

He got off the phone and sat down at the table again, drained. This weariness was new for him. He was known for his energy, for his inability to sit idly for more than a minute or two. Now he was too tired to wash the spaghetti pot.

They ate spaghetti a few times a week. It was easy. Boil water, open a jar of sauce. Every once in a while one of the kids would cook, but they were not much more inventive than he was.

Annie used to make everything from scratch. Even bread. Two loaves of honey whole wheat every Saturday. The house would fill with the smell. This kitchen had been alive back then. She’d leave certain items on the countertops—a row of fruit along the backsplash, or colorful packages of exotic teas on the windowsills—so she could admire them while she worked.

Back in those days, Annie would usually get home ahead of him and create something wonderful in the kitchen, and often—in his memory, it was every other day or so—he’d come home and invite her into the bedroom and she would hand the spoon over to one of the kids, who would groan and resign themselves to another late dinner. Annie, the flush of longing already burning in her cheeks, would tell them, “Remember, loves, it’s elegant to dine late.”

That was the way this house operated back then. Annie had been a firm believer in spontaneity. “This is a house without rules,” she’d say. “We have to trust ourselves and our bodies to tell us when to sleep, to eat, to get up in the morning. To make love.”

It had only been in the last couple of years that the kids realized there were plenty of rules in this house—they were just not the same rules their friends lived by, but rather the peculiar rules of Annie’s creation. She allowed no clocks in the house, although Alec always wore a watch. Lacey and Clay were free to make their own decisions in the matter, both of them following their mother’s example until last year, when Clay began wearing a watch identical to Alec’s. Before that, Clay and Lacey were often late for the school bus, or on a few bizarre occasions, extremely early. They had never had a curfew, which made them the envy of their friends. Even when they were small, they were allowed to go to bed anytime they pleased. They regulated themselves quite well, actually, which probably had something to do with the fact that the O’Neills did not own a TV.

Lacey and Clay were never punished for their few misdeeds, but were rewarded frequently, just for existing. When they were young, Alec had often felt like a spectator in all of this, Annie setting the tone for the way they were raised. He caught on quickly, though, discovering that if you treated kids with respect they behaved responsibly. Lacey and Clay had always been a testimony to their methods. “The most important thing is that you’re having fun and you’re safe,” Alec would tell them before they went out. He took delight in that, in trusting them when the parents of their friends weighed their kids down with warnings, threats, and reprimands.

On a whim, Alec got up from the table and went upstairs to Lacey’s room. He opened the door and shook his head with a smile. The room was a wreck, the bed unmade, clothes heaped everywhere, the hamper in her corner overflowing. Her desk was stacked with books and tapes and papers, and the walls were covered with posters of decadent, noxious-looking musicians. On the shelf that ran around three sides of her room, at the level of his shoulders, sat her antique dolls, providing a weird contrast to the depraved young men. There were thirteen of the dolls, neatly spaced on the shelves he’d built five years ago. Annie had given her a doll for each birthday. Right now they looked out at Alec with placid smiles on their haunting, small-toothed mouths.

She’s smoking, damn it. Should he talk to her about it? What would Annie have done? An open discussion at the dinner table, most likely, with no accusations, no expectations, no demands. Alec let out a long sigh. He wasn’t up to it.

Tripod hobbled into the doorway and leaned heavily against Alec’s leg. Alec gave the dog a perfunctory scratch behind one ear as they stared together into the disaster that was Lacey’s room. Annie had been no sterling housekeeper—she was notoriously disorganized—but she’d been a master at cramming things into closets and cupboards, and the house always had the appearance of neatness. Lacey’s room had certainly never looked like this when Annie was alive, but Alec could hardly hold his daughter responsible for the mess in this room when it only reflected what was going on in every other room in the house.

He leaned against the door jamb and shut his eyes to block out the reproachful, saucer-eyed stares of the dolls. “I’m screwing up, Annie,” he said, and he felt Tripod turn his head to look up at him at the defeated tone of his voice.

At ten-twenty that morning, Alec pulled into the parking lot of the Sea Tern and slipped into the space between Nola Dillard’s BMW and Brian Cass’s old station wagon. He was late again, but he was loaded with excuses this time. First the call from Lacey’s counselor, which admittedly had not taken that long but which had forced him to spend a good hour thinking about his life. Then there was the call from Randi, begging him to come back to work. She was handling just about everything since he’d left, and she’d been tolerant at first. Very understanding—a quality of Randi’s he had always criticized her for. She let people walk on her, and now he was doing the walking. Well, she was starting to fight back. This was the third phone call this week, but he wasn’t about to bend. He told her once again he wasn’t ready to return to work. He wasn’t sure he would ever be ready.

“Here he is.” Nola Dillard stepped toward him as he walked into the meeting room at the back of the restaurant. Her jaw had a peculiar set to it. She clutched his arm, her heavy, flowery perfume filling the air between them, and whispered close to his ear. “We’ve got problems, hon.”

“Thought you got lost, Alec.” Walter Liscott stood up and pulled out the chair at the head of the table for him.

“Sorry I’m late.” He took the seat Walter offered him.

The entire Save the Lighthouse Committee was assembled in front of him. Two men in addition to himself and two women, already well into their coffee and doughnuts. They had undoubtedly grown accustomed to his tardiness by now. Sondra Carter, the second woman on the committee and the owner of a small boutique in Duck, had suggested it was his little tribute to Annie, who had never been on time for anything in her life.

The waitress appeared in the room and poured Alec a cup of coffee. “Help yourself to a doughnut, Dr. O’Neill,” she said.

Alec nodded and set his notebook on the table. He looked at Nola, wondering what she had been trying to tell him.

“Okay,” he said. “This morning we’re brainstorming fund-raising ideas.”

Walter ran his hand over his thinning gray hair. He cleared his throat and began speaking in a deep, syrupy voice. “We were talking before you came in, Alec. And the truth is, we’re not altogether in agreement on something.”

Alec tensed. “What are you saying, Walter?” he asked. He would have to come on time from now on. Didn’t want to invite a mutiny.

“Well …” Walter cleared his throat again and glanced at the others. He’d obviously been selected as their spokesperson. “While we’re all in agreement on the goal of this committee—raising funds to save the lighthouse—we’re not in agreement on how the lighthouse ought to be saved. Me for one, I don’t want to bust my tail raising money and then have them screw the whole thing up by trying to move the damn thing and topple it over in the process.”

“I agree,” Sondra said. “Either our money goes to building a sea wall around the lighthouse, or they get none of it.”

“Hold it.” Alec raised his hand. “You all know the choice on how the lighthouse is saved is not ours to make.”

“That’s right,” Nola said. Her white-blond hair was pinned up as usual and she wore her gray power suit this morning, a blue Dorsett Realty pin attached to the lapel. She pointed a long red fingernail at Walter. “The Park Service wants to save the lighthouse as much as we do, Walter. They won’t agree to something they’re not absolutely certain will work. Come on, folks,” she pleaded. “We’ve worked so hard and the money’s starting to come in. Now that it’s getting close, y’all are chickening out.”

“I’m just afraid they’ll make the wrong choice.”

Walter sounded close to tears, and Alec understood his concern. Everyone in this room loved the Kiss River Lighthouse and understood its fragility. Up until a few weeks ago, the plan had been to build a sea wall around it. Within a few years, the lighthouse would be on its own small island in the sea. An aesthetically appealing solution. Now, quite suddenly, the Park Service had changed its mind and was speaking very seriously about moving it—building a track, lifting it up, and sliding it 600 yards inland, all at the cost of several million dollars. It was a frightening and impossible concept to comprehend. Not only did he understand Walter’s fears; he shared them.

“Nola’s right,” Alec said. “We have to trust the engineers to come up with the best solution. We can’t second-guess them.”

Nola winked at him. “I move we get on with the meeting.”

“I second the motion,” Brian said.

There was some grumbling, but no one left the table, and Alec led them through an hour of ideas. A silent auction. An educational brochure to generate interest. More talk shows and speaking engagements. It wasn’t until he was driving home that he let his own fears surface. Engineers were human. Fallible. What if they destroyed the lighthouse by trying to save it?

He was at his desk in the den when Lacey got home from school. He spotted her through the window. She was out on the sidewalk talking to Jessica Dillard, Nola’s daughter and Lacey’s best friend. Jessica was grinning, but there was a meanness in the grin, an ugly superior quality that surprised him and made his heart ache for his daughter. Jessica stood with one hand on her hip. Her sleek blond hair rested on her shoulders and she had a cigarette elegantly balanced between her fingers. She looked very much like her mother.