Diane Chamberlain - Keeper of the Light

The question seemed so ludicrous she laughed. “ No, I don’t want to go out to lunch.”

He set Sylvie on the floor and stood up. “Well.” He looked unsure of his next move. “Is it all right if I use your bathroom before I go?”

“Of course.”

He left the room, and it was a full minute before she realized he had to pass the nursery to reach the bathroom. She went rigid on the couch, listening, trying to remember if she had left the nursery door open or closed. She stood up slowly and walked into the hall, where she could clearly see that the door was wide open. She steeled herself and walked into the room.

Paul stood next to the crib, his hands on the rail. He looked over at her when she stepped into the room, and dropped his eyes to her stomach.

“Are you…?”

“Yes.”

“Is it mine?”

“Of course,” she said. “That night you stopped by in April. That night you pretended I was Annie.”

“Oh, my God.” He turned away from her, leaning heavily on the crib.

She didn’t want to watch him wallow in his guilt. She walked through the house and out to the back deck, intentionally sitting in one of the chairs rather than on the settee so he would not be able to sit next to her if he came out. She watched a windsurfer gliding across the sound. He was blond. Tan. She could not guess his age from this distance, but he was good. Maybe as good as Alec.

It was a while before Paul joined her on the deck. He turned one of the chairs around so he was facing her, and very close.

“You’re nearly five months?”

“Twenty-one weeks, yes.”

“How are you feeling? Is everything going all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m healthy. I had an amniocentesis done, and it’s a boy.”

“A boy.” He smiled, and she wished she’d kept that fact from him. She was irritated by the pleasure on his face.

“You should have told me,” he chided. “It would have made a difference. It would have brought me back to reality.”

“I wanted you to want me because I was me, ” she said, “not because I was carrying your child.”

He nodded, reaching a tentative hand out to touch her belly. She gritted her teeth, turning her head away from him so she would not have to see the emotion in his face.

“Annie made a fool of me,” he said.

She snapped her head back to him, brushing his hand away. “You made a fool of yourself.”

“All right,” he conceded, “all right.” He sat back in the chair. “Is there any way we can work things out?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we try, for the sake of our son if for no other reason? You know as well as I do that we had something genuinely good for a long time.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “It’s over, Paul. I don’t want you anymore. That’s the bottom line.”

He looked out at the sound, and when he spoke again, his voice was thick. “But what about the baby? I want to be involved in his life.”

“Well, perhaps you should speak to that lawyer of yours about your options.”

He winced, his eyes reddening behind his glasses. Then he stood up, very slowly, as if some invisible force was holding him down. She said nothing to stop him as he walked across the deck to the house. In another moment, she heard the front door open, then close.

Out on the sound, the windsurfer skimmed gracefully across the surface of the water. Olivia watched him as she lowered her hands to her lap, as she pulled the ring from her finger, slipped it into her pocket. She watched him until it was time to leave for work.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Alec dug out the old box of photographs from the closet in the den and sat down on the living room sofa to sift through them. He had not looked at these old pictures in years, and he had intentionally avoided them since Annie’s death. The box was full of her. Looking through the pictures now, he could actually see in the lines of her face, or in the uncertainty of her smile, when she was going under, when she was giving in to her dark side. All those times she’d slipped into those seemingly inexplicable periods of withdrawal made sense to him now. I’m going to die as punishment for all the bad things I’ve done.

Two abortions. All the nights she’d visited Mary. Alec had been grateful to the old woman for the company she’d given Annie on those nights he’d had to work on the mainland.

Fishermen. Tourists. She would take them into that little bedroom, the one that would fill every few seconds with the light he had thought of as his and Annie’s.

Alec heard the back door slam. Lacey was home. Damn. He’d wanted this time for himself. He needed it. In a moment she appeared at the door of the living room.

“I’m home,” she said, proudly, “and it’s only nine-fifteen.” She looked at the box next to him on the sofa. “Why do you have those old pictures out?”

He stared at the girl who, quite suddenly, was not his daughter. “I just felt like looking at them,” he said.

To his dismay, she came into the room and plunked herself down next to him. She smelled of tobacco. She smelled, he thought, a little like Tom Nestor.

“I really like this one,” she said, reaching across him to pluck a photograph from the box. It was of her and Annie sitting side by side on the beach, taken just last summer. “Mom looks so happy,” she said.

I’ve never been happier than I’ve been this last year.

Alec started to cry. He turned his head away from Lacey, but it was no use trying to hide the tears. He wouldn’t be able to this time. They were going to take over. He would never be able to stop them.

“Please don’t cry,” Lacey said, alarm in her voice. “I can’t stand it, Daddy, please. ” She stood up. “Do you want me to put these away?” She reached for the box, and he caught her hands.

“No,” he said. “I want to look through them.”

She frowned down at him. “Why are you doing it? It just gets you upset.”

He struggled to smile. “I’m all right, Lacey.”

She shoved her hands in the pockets of her shorts and stared at him, unconvinced. “Do you want me to look through them with you?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not tonight.”

She left the room, reluctantly, and Alec dug through the pictures until he found the few he had taken of Annie when she was pregnant with Lacey. She’d been constantly sick during that pregnancy. She could keep almost nothing down, and she put on so little weight that her obstetrician came close to hospitalizing her. She’d had weird pains, which a slew of doctors were unable to diagnose, and she’d spent most of those nine months in bed, while Nola helped Alec take care of Clay.

Annie’s labor with Lacey had been frightening. Neverending. Alec stayed with her, holding her hand and helping her breathe, until he thought his own body would give out. He didn’t know how one woman—how one human being —could tolerate so much pain.

Just before Lacey was born, just in those few minutes when Annie must have felt the baby’s head crowning, she began screaming for Alec to leave the delivery room. At first he thought he’d misunderstood her. She was hysterical, and he tried to pretend she did not actually say what he thought she was saying. But the doctor understood her words, and the nurses looked at each other, perplexed.

“You’d better leave, Dr. O’Neill,” one of them said. “She’s so distraught. She’s not going to be able to concentrate on what she has to do unless you go.”

He left the room, enormously hurt. He stood in the hallway of the obstetric unit rather than go to the waiting room, where Nola and Tom and a few other friends had gathered. He wouldn’t have known how to explain his presence to them.